Throughout my time at McGill—with the help of generous mentors, professors, friends, and family, and rather haphazardly—I have nurtured an ethic of care toward the body. As we move forward in the world, we must exercise kindness and care for our shells. The body—that thing that holds your mind, that you adorn with trending clothes, that you identify with or wholeheartedly disavow—is worthy of care.
In “I Want You to Love Me,” singer Fiona Apple insists on the intricate connection between body and mind through desire, wherein our physical needs become a material hunger for affection: “And while I'm in this body… I want what I want and I want.” Apple’s causal mechanism is unidirectional: this body determines those desires. The body holds a kind of causal primacy over the mind; our needs, wants, and desires emerge downstream. Beginning my journey at McGill in the sciences (and as a Fiona Apple fan), this was the sort of philosophy I endorsed. In CÉGEP, I decided I would study the body because we are functions of our bodies. In reductionist terms, the mind is no greater than the sum of its parts—it just is its parts.
In pursuing a BSc., however, I became curious about the limits of this logic. My feminist commitments left me frustrated with the subordination of the subjective world of affect, mind, and perception to the objective materiality of physiology. I decided to switch into a B.A. in Political Science, Gender Studies, and Philosophy. And there was no better person to introduce me to the power of the mind, abstraction, and political theory than Prof. William Clare Roberts. “If divine law ruled the world, what consequences would ensue for human governance?” he asked us. I gleefully leaned into treating argumentation, logical coherence, qualitative analysis, and rational consistency as methodological virtues. An entire world of knowledge opened before me as I entered the world of conceptualization, thought, and imagination—and this brain, my brain, felt remarkably autonomous.
Over my four years at McGill, professors, friends, and student groups helped develop my thinking, speaking, and conceptual capacities. They made me feel that our cognitive powers are not mere functions of physical determinants, but capacities that must be cultivated to be exercised. As a fellow with the Research Group on Constitutional Studies, I learned that intellectual community is essential to this sort of capacitation. I will be forever grateful to my friends and mentors in the group who showed me that: Profs. Levy, Roberts, and Winter; Amy, Fion, Arwen, Natalie, David, Flo, Ava, Jordan, Luc, and Petros, among others. Likewise, thanks to wonderful professors and TAs, I learned that political theorizing is fundamentally a creative endeavor—and that creativity need not come at the expense of rigor. To Molly, Luc, Jordan, and Profs. Levy, Islas Weinstein,Roberts, Deslauriers, Stoljar, Ketchum, Benedicto, Sharp, Howard, Winter, Janzwood and Lewis, among many others: thank you. Student programming through the PSSA, PSA, GSFSSA, and the Arts Internship Office also provided rich opportunities to put theory into practice.
Yet this logic of the autonomous mind, while empowering, has its flaws. When you live in the world of intellectual abstraction, it becomes easy to neglect the body. As feminists have long argued, the body is political and worthy of theorization. Jasbir Puar, for example, argues that the maiming and disabling of Palestinian bodies functions as a biopolitical strategy to undermine Palestinian self-determination. Audra Simpson writes about state-sanctioned sexual violence against Indigenous women as a mechanism through which Canadian sovereignty is secured.
At the level of the individual, our bodies exist in a complicated—and likely reciprocal—relationship with our minds. By U3, I was forced to confront this reality through disability: I developed epilepsy. As my neurologist put it, stress causes seizures and seizures cause stress. When you maim the body, you maim the mind. Living with the unpredictability of a cognitive disability, my capacity to expend mental energy became severely limited. It was only with the help of loved ones—friends, family, my partner, and academic mentors at
McGill—that I learned how to care for both my body and mind in a genuinely empowering way. To my mom, Avery, Meg, Laura, Billy, Fion, Amy, Lucy, Arwen, Gabe, Maya, Taylor, Simon, Ella, Zainah, and Elias, and the Office for Students with Disabilities, the Office of the Dean of Students, and the countless professors who supported me through this degree, and mercifully granted extensions: thank you.
Graduates, our bodies and minds are strong and resilient, but they require constant compassion, care, and maintenance. And a commitment to the supremacy of neither. As we enter the world, political, economic, and social forces will seek to discipline our minds and bodies into conformity, encouraging us to support oppressive systems and neglect our own needs and limitations. Let's build communities that insist upon treating all bodies and minds with kindness. My wager is that, in doing so, we build more empathetic, resilient, and capacitated societies.
Congratulations, Class of 2026!