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Lisa Siraganian, "The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations, and Robots" (Verso, 2026)
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Lisa Saganian
I was groomed to become one of his wives.
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Disorder Podcast Host
This week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her.
- [00:13]
Lisa Saganian
I want to see action, and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk. You need to start walking the walk now.
- [00:20]
Disorder Podcast Host
It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now.
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Disorder Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
Hello everybody, and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Tim Wyman McCarthy, a host of the Channel and a lecturer at Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights. Today we'll be talking to Lisa Saganian about her new book, the Problem of Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations, and Robots, published by Verso in 2026. Lisa is the JR Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her first book was Modernism's Other the Art Objects, Political Life, and her second, which I imagine bears some relation to this new project, was Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons. She is also currently president of the Johns Hopkins University Chapter of the American association of University Professors. Lisa, welcome to the show.
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Lisa Saganian
Thank you so much, Tim, of course.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
And thank you so much for writing this really provocative study of what happens when personhood expands beyond the human and why we should maybe be worried about that. I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit about yourself and how you came to write this book and what you hope to accomplish in it.
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Lisa Saganian
Terrific. Thank you. And thanks for having me on this podcast. I've listened to them, and it's such a great opportunity. Right. So I am a literary scholar by training, but before I started writing the second book on corporate personhood that you were mentioning, I actually decided that I needed to know more about the law. And so I went and very slowly got my J.D. during the process of writing that second book. So. So you, as Richa said, say a little bit about me. That. I think that is sort of an important, like, background for this current book. Because part of what I was really trying to do is do a little bit of, like, what I learned to do while I was in law school, which was, okay, I am a scholar in one field, but I'm trying to learn this other field, and I'm trying to make sense of it, you know, to scholars everywhere, like, scholars in humanities everywhere. So in part, with this new book on personhood. So I finished this previous book on corporate personhood, and that was really about the first half of the 20th century, when all sorts of different people, lawyers, artists, philosophers, were trying to think about how to conceptualize these human, like, entities who didn't really act like humans. But I had also noticed that, and after I finished the book, that things had started to change, like around the 1970s in this whole discourse about corporate personhood. And I thought we didn't really have a great understanding of what had happened. So I, you know, I noticed that there wasn't really, like, a good popular or scholarly account that explained why personhood had become a kind of common language for all these cultural and legal political debates. You know, there had been discussion about them and, like, maybe one or two disciplines, but there was something kind of more comprehensive about what was happening. So in this new book, I'm really looking at this moment from the 1970s forward, which has really gotten going now, how all these controversies over personhood for other entities, including fetuses, rivers, animals, trees, robots, and so on, has followed the model not of rights for human beings and their status, but of legal corporate personhood. And that is. That's sort of the core of what I was observing and what I really wanted to warn people about as well. Because I think although the aims of some of these attempts at personhood, let's say for rivers, I think are laudatory or for non human animals. My concern is that the repercussions of the trend are ultimately damaging and will have far reaching consequences, which is something I imagine we might want to talk about more.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, the title of the book is the Problem with Personhood. And I will fully admit, you know, when I in the first few pages got the premise, it did take me aback where I thought, okay, based on my own reading and politics and position, the Citizens United case, fetal personhood, I think, okay, problem. But then of course, I think rights for nature, all of these social movements that are picking up on personhood, I think, okay, I'm aligned with that. So it really does present, you know, well, how do we think of these together, right. And the kind of problem it poses to our politics or movements. So maybe we could get a little bit further into it, like what is the problem that we're talking about? So the book makes this argument that the expansion of personhood to all these entities doesn't actually protect them so much as it turns people into things. And I think this is kind of core to the critique part of this project. So in other words, expanding personhood requires or kind of comes along with an impoverished notion of what it means to be a person or empties the person. That substance, I think you say several times. So I imagine this could be counterintuitive to listeners who might take the expansion of rights be a key way to protect the person, the human dignity in this kind of classic liberal recognition politics idea. Could you walk us through just why you think that this is a problem? Right. A little bit deeper into that piece of it.
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Lisa Saganian
Great, thank you. Yeah. And I will admit, I think like you, I think, you know, when I initially started the book and the project in part, I was trying to think about whether the more progressive uses of expansive personhood could be justified and salvaged from despite the problems I was noticing with the corporate personhood form. So I think you're totally right to have that intuition. I mean, to back up maybe a little bit know, I should just acknowledge we use person in a lot of different ways today and many are totally ordinary and unproblematic. The problem is really focused on what I'm calling expansive legal personhood. And I do want to be clear about that because there's another way we could think about this in terms of moral personhood that, you know, really is obviously related to legal personhood, but is, you know, I think of them as Venn diagrams that you don't always overlap. So I want to be clear about that. So just to go back to what exactly you were talking about when the U.S. supreme Court ruled in Citizens United 2010 that corporate money was a kind of free speech. What they were doing was creating a new alarming aspect of legal personhood for businesses. And on some level, that is, they were, they were, let me back up. They were suggesting that corporate persons had this, what had previously been thought of as a civil right, right, free speech. And now saying that in fact corporations could have this civil right, which is one of our human rights. Legal personhood just means that, or legal, artificial personhood, that corporations are treated as if they have certain rights. And there are all sorts of ways in which, you know, for capitalism to run smoothly, you need that right or you need something like that. Corporations are permitted to sign contracts, sue in court, so on. And it is a useful fiction, which is why then activists have tried to claim, with various degrees of success, that fetuses, dolphins, lakes and robots should be protected as legal persons too. But so what I'm, what I'm suggesting and what I was really focusing on is that the, the notion of personhood as it's, as it's developing, the expansive personhood, is relying on the corporate personhood model, essentially, because there is no other way to do it.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
And that model is quite a bit older. Right. I mean, this was something that I learned about that I didn't know was just how much, you know, how you have to date that to sort of ask when capitalism itself was starting to figure out these problems of the law in terms of ships being these entities. So sorry to interrupt, but maybe you can give us just a little bit of that backstory. Cause it seems really crucial here.
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Lisa Saganian
Yeah. Again, something that people often aren't aware of. It seems as if it started with Citizens United in 2010. But in fact, it's a much older story. You know, really you get what is essentially the modern version of corporate personhood in the late 19th century as industrial capitalism is starting. But there's already versions of it far earlier. You know, really it comes out of like thinking about the university, you know, in, in the late, middle, late modern period as a, as a corporation. Some of the early ones are really what to do with churches and you know, when the pastor dies. Right. They're trying to think about how to deal with the problem. So a really old structure, but it really isn't until the Industrial Revolution. And you see large scale investment and concerns about protecting large scale investment, you know, in a Kind of more risk free way that you see this model of corporate personhood develop, with the key attributes, probably one of the most important ones being limited liability, which simply means you can't lose more than what you put in when you're investing.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
Right, right. And this was protecting shareholders. Right. From. Was basically separating shareholders from liability from the corporate entity. Right. Okay.
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Lisa Saganian
Right. So that's the older history that I think. And I go about, I go through that a little bit in the book, particularly how the very earlier version of artificial legal personhood, which essentially is what corporate personhood is, often also dealt with states. So the state, like a nation, was considered an artificial person. And there's very interesting work done on the US colonies, which were often structured essentially as corporations. But over time, that nation state sort of idea of the corporation kind of dropped out. And really the only kind of artificial person we have left in law that is not us, not individual, is the corporation. And that's been pretty standard for at least, let's say, 150, 30, 40 years.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
Right. And so this idea, this useful legal fiction was basically on offer. Right. It was what was available when these other kinds of, you know, movements seeking or turned to expansive personhood to try to meet various goals using the law. And so is this, I take it, a historical argument in the book? Right. In other words, that you are in fact tracing where this idea comes from and how it enters into these other discourses. It's not merely analogous.
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Lisa Saganian
That's right. I think, I mean, it is a historical argument insofar as, you know, law still has to rely on precedent, or at least supposedly is supposed to rely on precedent. So you have to use the arguments that have gone before. You have to use the, the kinds of analogies and debates that have gone before. And so when you're trying to make an argument, let's say that as Christopher stone does in 1973, I believe, and he says we should. Why not give trees the standing to sue? And he says explicitly, because we've done that with corporations and ships and churches. Why not trees as well? And he's a legal scholar. It's very clear to him that that's a kind of legal argument and trajectory that you can make that one could make in 1973. And just in that case, he does convince the Supreme Court judge to cite his larvae article in a dissent.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
Right, In a dissent. But I get the appeal. I mean, there's a kind of affect, at least I have a sort of. My impulse is to say, well, of course, if corporations have this I want to wag my finger at corporations all the time, and I want nature to be protected. So there's a sort of injustice to corporations getting this precious legal something and these other entities not getting them. So I can sort of see why there's this citational practice of invoking it. Right. Both rhetorically, but even, you know, in the law legally. So you have four chapters, one focusing on fetal persons, one on animals as persons, one on the environment, and one on AI. And I thought to sort of understand what is the actual problem, what happens when corporate personhood or the model of corporate personhood is transported into these other realms, what sort of effects that has? I thought we can maybe look at two or so of these examples, starting with fetal personhood. So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about how it is that this sort of impoverishment of the person or hollowing out of the person occurs in sort of multiple steps in the process of making fetuses into persons in the right to life movement.
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Lisa Saganian
Right, yeah, and that's a great question. So, as you're pointing out, one of the key points I make in the book is that this notion of expansive personhood as it's developing, as it's expanded to non humans like fetuses, really shears away the notion of the collective and the social, as well as sometimes the moral. And I think to see why. And I think actually the field personhood arguments are useful in this regard. I think you have to think about what is what goes in or what can go in to what we think of as a person. And the philosopher that's useful for me is in this regard is Antonio Lordo, who surveys the entire field and says, okay, it looks like if you look at the history of personhood, and she's thinking about this in terms of just moral personhood, it seems like there are essentially five potential characteristics that you could choose from. And you don't have to have all of them, but you have to have at least some of them. And the five she looks at are you have to be a unique individual, have a role, have moral significance, have rationality, and have something like reflective selfhood. And what you see happening with the expansive person to expand a person beyond the human being, is that you essentially keep two of them. You keep two of those. Those potential five, and the two over and over again are the same. You have to be a unique individual or entity with moral significance, just those two. And I think I'm giving that little backstory because I think the idea of an embryo with DNA, you know, with a particular unique genetic code is the perfect model of that. Right? That's how you can imagine fetal personhood. One embryo with DNA, with unique DNA that you think of as having moral significance. And, but that also helps us think about what you have abandoned along the way, right? You've abandoned individuals, social situatedness. You've abandoned the roles they could perform with a will and intention. You've also given up the idea that they have duties or public responsibilities in the world. Also that their ability to think about themselves and others and that they have the capacity to reflect about, about themselves and others. Right. All of those things are lost once you have just those two. And I think also without all of that, you know, the social and the collective and public capacity, you also have persons that have a lot of the physical qualities of property. Right? So you are. Once you've lost a lot of the, the other aspects of what it means to be a person, then the, the physical property aspect is going to sort of rise in stature. Right. Just almost because there's nothing else there. And so I think really then what we're losing here ultimately is the sense that what it means to be a person is also constituted by our obligations. And that really is something that keeps dropping out and has dropped out in the, in the fetal personhood example. I mean that's a little bit of a, maybe an abstract way of thinking about fetal personhood and the debates about it. We can get into more of the details, but I think it's helpful. Yeah.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
Yeah, and you also show, right. In that chapter that there's multiple sort of rhetorical or representational moves that are designed to diminish or disappear the personhood of the birthing person, sort of in order to allow the fetal person, who, as you point out, is an impoverished version of personhood, to be able to almost stand in parody. So you show how the pregnancy container metaphor or the way that the placenta is just not represent. It was such an interesting insight. It's just nowhere in how we see births on TV or in literature or whatever. But these are all ways in which the fetal person is, in fact, part of the person of the individual giving birth.
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Lisa Saganian
Exactly. Yeah. I think that chapter, I think, is subtitled something like Fetal Containers or Women Containers. And I think the container analogy for pregnant persons, pregnant women and pregnant persons is so hard to escape from. And I think that, I mean, that is also really telling. It's because we, we once. We have an idea that it's just a kind of singular entity that is a kind of, you know, perfect individual with moral significance, then whatever is housing it is just the kind of container for that. And I think then you see something like the placenta being a real problem. The placenta, of course, I'm sure, you know, but, you know, for those of us who are not, like, up on it, the placenta is this, this organ that is really, you know, jointly created by both the. The pregnant person, the mother and the fetus. And it's actually embedded in the uterus. It's quite large, right? It's like the size of a Frisbee. And it, you know, it's an organ that really doesn't work with our sense of there just being like, let's say, two individual persons when a person is pregnant. And as I point out in the chapter, you really never see representations of the placenta. And I talk a little bit about this Damien Hirst public sculpture where you can explicitly see it described and represented instead as a kind of decorative halo.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
Right, right. And it just, it appears and disappears in different sculptures in the series in a way that's like totally divorced from, you know, what's going on. And as you also point out, you know, the placenta is part of, you know, the birth process doesn't end when the baby appears. Right. There's also, you know, it's been called different things, but after birth, with, you know, the placenta and that, we just never see this. Right. So there's this, you know, it's part of this quite complex choreography of the visible and what's invisible. And what also really struck me in that chapter is the way in which these rhetorical moves and these representational moves are in part about asserting the public presence of the fetal person, but without the kind of publicness. Right. The intersubjective, the, you know, those other things that we might think about a self reflecting person who is part of a public. And I thought that was quite an interesting thing. And maybe you can just say a word about how we see this also in the question about environmental persons. Right. Because they're, you know, in that chapter you talk about how, you know, these. Basically we try to make trees speak in a certain way, but it's basically by reducing them to these biochemical properties, processes, another reduction or hollowing out of the expanded person.
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Lisa Saganian
Right. I think, yeah, Vanoa, that's exactly right. I'm trying to think of a good example from the environmental personhood, one where you can really see it sort of like the fetus, but probably. I don't know if there's. I. Well, let me. Here's what I could maybe say about that, which is, you know, if you think about why the original example was a tree. Right, right. In Christopher Stone's account. So this is, you know, in some ways he is writing around the same time that Dr. Seuss's the Lorax was published. And of course, the Lorax says, you know, I speak for the trees. The trees had no tongues. And he was literally like popping up from a tree when he says this. And I think there's a way in which you Know, the tree was a really important metaphor for both Theodore Geisel and for Christopher Stone because there is. Because it feels very singular in our imagination. It looks. It like literally looks singular. Right. I mean, it's a way in which you've got a kind of bought trunk. Right. We use some same language as we do for.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
I'm picturing those posters that say like, individuality and there's like a tree, you know, on a. On a long plane or something. Yeah, right.
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Lisa Saganian
You know, of course, in all sorts of ways, completely false when thinking about. Not only thinking about ourselves as individuals, but thinking about trees as well. You know, more and more how much they are so, you know, deeply imprecated in their environment, underground, overground, in all sorts of ways. So I think the. I think that's part of why it was such a powerful kind of argument. But you have to really contort yourselves, contort yourself to, you know, imagine that a tree is person. And you know, invariably what you then have are various individuals, individual human beings ventriloquizing trees, you know, or ventriloquizing natural entities, which is not to say they can't do it very well. Right. But, but. And maybe for good, good reasons. We should be clear about what's happening here. Somebody is making. A human being is making an argument on behalf of. Of something, a value that they want, which might be very good value, but it is not about the tree as a person.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
Right. And as you say in the. I think it's the animal chapter, but you could correct me if I'm wrong. You cite the great Mary Midgley, who's basically saying we should think about these entities with reference to our humanity rather than theirs, which can still be an ethical judgment. Right. But doesn't have that ventriloquizing. That said, so your final chapter is about AI, which in some ways you don't have to contort yourself as much, potentially. Right. To see a kind of cognitive or communicative, at the very least, entity. Right. So I can look at a tree and go, wow, you really have to be an acrobat, mental acrobat, too. Convince me in some ways that this tree could be in accord speaking, but it's much easier in some respects to see that for AI. So what then is the real problem with a conversation that I think we're increasingly having about AI personhood? Right. We learn every day that people have romantic relationships and they have all kind of seemingly social orientations, maybe to. To AI.
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Lisa Saganian
Yeah. In some ways it's almost the opposite problem. Right. Where it is, it. It's an imitation that is so good we're getting tricked all the time by it. I mean, just to back up so people know, like, this is actually really a conversation people are happening, having, that AI should potentially have legal personhood. You know, it. It sort of came to light really around 2017 when the EU started debating it. Their hope was that maybe if they gave what they were calling then autonomous E persons, something like legal personhood, then maybe they could be held responsible for things that they were doing. And immediately there was huge pushback about this from scholars, a lot of whom were saying some version of, wait a minute, what are we thinking about in terms of autonomy of these, of these entities? Obviously this is like moving so fast in terms of what, let's say LLMs are doing and other kind of quote unquote, a gentle AI. But one of the things that I was really focusing on in that chapter was that we are still really struggling to accurately describe what is going on with AI. And I think even when we use terms like, let's say that, you know, chat. GPT, GPT, bullshit, just use one that's been talked about a lot, or that it, you know, hallucinates. Right. Or that it argues. Right. All of those phrases are actually deeply misleading insofar as they are assuming a kind of agency. They're also assuming a self right there. So if you can hallucinate. Right. There's like to hallucinate, you have to imagine that you can see without hallucinating. Right.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
It's a basic personification. Right. I mean, this is like, like literature 100 course.
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Lisa Saganian
100%. 100%. And it is so ubiquitous. You see it absolutely everywhere. And it's. It's essentially like on some level the problems are happening like too early in the conversations about AI or about personhood. The other thing I look at in the book or in that chapter is how much the narratives are really replaying a lot of the science fiction tropes, which, you know, in some ways you could say, well, what else can they do? But I think in part what you're really seeing is that there's a very lively. It's a utopian fantasy happening with. With AI that is really distracting us from the reality of the exploitation and that is happening in order to manufacture, you know, these increasingly destructive AIs. And that's the part I really worry about.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
Yeah, well, it was really striking. There was the robot, which was. Was it Sophie? Sophie. Sophia.
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Lisa Saganian
Yeah, Sophia. That has robotics one. Right.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
That was sort of. Was that the One that was given citizenship in, I believe, Saudi Arabia. Right. Which is, you know, a very striking juxtaposition, as you point out, that there's actually a low percentage of individuals living in that country who have citizenship because of foreign worker relations. And all of these ways that capitalism moves folks about without actually according them legal personhood. And so it was just a very stark reminder of what are we not talking about when we spend all this mental energy asking, you know, are robots some people or deserve legal personhood?
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Lisa Saganian
Right. Should ChatGPT have rights?
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
Exactly, exactly. And this really animates my students anytime I bring this up, but with a real skepticism. I think there's something about it that, at least in my perception, there seems to be a line there or a suspicion of what this is actually doing to our own personhood. So maybe we can speak for a minute about what sort of. What are other ways to think about personhood that might push back against this hollowed out version that comes from the lineage of, of corporate personhood, because it seems like there's some kind of a normative idea of the person or multiple ones that we could put forward instead, or an ontology of personhood. What are some of the kind of ideas in that constellation that you sort of briefly, towards the end of the book and here and there throughout it invoke that counter some of these trends.
- [36:09]
Lisa Saganian
I mean, I think the easiest way to think about it, or the most straightforward way is to think back to those, you know, those five characteristics we were talking about before, and think about what is being left out. And, you know, as I was mentioning then, you know, everything having to do with responsibilities and duties are essentially the parts that are getting left out. Um, and I, you know, one of the things I also have been thinking a lot about is if you look at the original justification and reasons for corporate personhood, like, you know, go all the way back and, and think about, let's say, you know, why in the 1600s, they felt the need, you know, community felt the need to create a corporate person in order to build a bridge across the Charles river. Just to take one of the kind of classic examples. And what was the point of that? The point of that was that the community decided this was something that would be useful to all of them, that would, Would be a really collective of, of collective benefit, and it would be a temporary fiction that the state that you would allow. So it was like a political, it was a political decision to do it very explicitly. Like corporations had to be granted their personal status by the state. Very explicitly to help everyone. Right. So, I mean, I think if you even think about that, the original idea, that's fine. That's fine. Right. And so I think, you know, imagining what, what's still in even that version of expansive personhood even helps us out. But I mean, another way just to answer your question is to say, you know, I don't think, I don't think we can do away with personhood. I mean, I don't think it's something that we should be talking about giving up. But I do think that this version of expansive legal personhood is damaging and it's doing the work of distorting ourselves and our, our culture histories. And also it is a kind of veil for what is really in front of us. Right. It's not allowing us to see the way human beings and their experiences are, are in, in jeopardy in all sorts of ways. So in, in part, I, I think I, I, I want to hold on to some aspect, you know, of personhood because I think it is an important tool, but it is, it's not the tool that is going to save us from everything.
- [38:58]
Tim Wyman McCarthy
Right. And, and what you really convinced me of is that, is that that specific subset of personhood, expansive legal personhood, does have this kind of depoliticizing effect where we are moving to find technical legal answers to what are fundamentally political questions about government, power, capital, how we want to arrange society, et cetera, et cetera. And so the kind of invocation towards the end of, if you're thinking about, think about labor unions or think about, you know, women's rights that already exist, these are existing political discourses that might do the work of protecting the entities that we care about more effectively than actually expanding legal personhood, which, as you point out, doesn't actually bring home the receipts like it does.
- [40:00]
Lisa Saganian
No, I know. That is also the sad part. I use the example of Ecuador that, you know, Ecuador put in the right to nature and their constitution under the name of this indigenous term, Pachamama, and with the hope that people would then be able to sue on behalf of nature and it would protect the devastation. And in the meantime, the damage from petrochemical development in that country has only gotten worse. It has had zero effect. And it really, you know, the receipts are not good. Like, as I point out in every way, the only one where you can sort of make an argument for it, I guess it's fetal personhood, but.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
Exactly.
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Lisa Saganian
Yeah.
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Tim Wyman McCarthy
But it might not be the argument that, you know, we want which is
- [40:47]
Lisa Saganian
better for, I mean, that's Even if you, if you want to make the argument that that's better for persons, I mean, it is not better for pregnant persons. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [40:58]
Tim Wyman McCarthy
So I guess part of what I took away as part of the task towards in the last chapter is thinking about ideas, rhetorics, discourses that have within them that kind of reintroduce these ideas of obligation, of publicness. You know, so you mentioned, I think, solidarity, you mentioned comradeship, you know, invoking Jody Dean. There's the idea of home. So these are, you know, they're not sort of developed necessarily systematically, but they're sort of left there as, you know, there are other things on the table that we could pick up and have their own lengthy histories of organizing action.
- [41:37]
Lisa Saganian
Well said. I think that's a nice way of putting it. And I will say maybe just one thing I can say kind of tie that in. I mean, if you think about the fact that all of, all of these kinds of expansive personhood really started getting going in the 70s, and I mentioned this earlier, you know, with in 73, you have environmental personhood. Two years later, Peter Singer publishes Animal Liberation, which is basically arguing that speciesism is a kind of moral wrong along the lines of racism and sexism. I mean, I, I think there is a reason why we're seeing it at that moment. And I mean, I think this does tie in with someone like, you know, Samuel Moyn's arguments about the last utopia and about the kind of envisioning of human rights when all the other kinds of political, you know, hopes have failed. And I think expansive personhood is really part of that same trajectory.
- [42:39]
Tim Wyman McCarthy
Yeah, that's a really helpful historicization of sort of why then why were we looking around and oh, look, noticed corporate personhood. And maybe this rights imaginary will solve some of these seemingly exhausted political movements. Well, Lisa, I've taken up a lot of your time before we, and this has been fabulously interesting. Before we close out, I'm wondering whether you can share what you're working on now or if you have any other concluding thoughts for our listeners.
- [43:15]
Lisa Saganian
Yeah, great. No, thank you. I am working on a book with two of my co authors, Walter Van Michaels and Todd Cronin, on intention actually, and we're finishing that book up for Chicago, so related to things here because of course, one of the important qualities of being a person is the capacity to express an intention. Following on the work of Elizabeth Anscombe. And I'm also actually finishing a co edited book on legal fictions of which of course personhood is one of so Those are the. The two sort of things I'm working on right now. And I will also say, because you mentioned it, that a lot of my work right now has been with organizing with the AUP chapter at Hopkins and trying to put some of these arguments into practice, which is that if we are actually. If we want, you know, a better country and if we want our. Our higher education, well, we have to fight for it, and we have to organize to fight for it. So that's, to be honest, a lot of what I'm doing right now.
- [44:29]
Tim Wyman McCarthy
Yeah, well, it's. I mean, it's. It's. It feels very much in the spirit of the. The conclusion of the book. Right. Which is what. How do we actually build, you know, momentum towards some of these things that we see as valuable to us? Well, that's. That's wonderful. I am waiting with bated breath for all of. All of this to come. Thank you again so much for. For joining us, and. Yeah, take care.
- [44:56]
Lisa Saganian
Thank you so much for having me. This has been really fun.
- [44:59]
Tim Wyman McCarthy
Okay, bye. Bye.