Jada Wiggleton-Little joined our department in autumn 2024 as Assistant Professor of Philosophy.
Jada received her PhD in philosophy from the University of California San Diego. She recently completed a Neuroethics Fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic and has been a visiting scholar with the Program for Neuroethics and Clinical Consciousness at the John J. Lynch, MD Center for Ethics at MedStar Washington Hospital.
Her work focuses on pain communication, epistemic injustice, and racial and gender disparities in healthcare. She has written on the nature of pain utterances and has proposed that pain utterances express both a speaker’s belief about a pain experience, i.e., a pain’s location, intensity, etc., and expresses the imperatival, pain state itself. In other works, she has argued that the systemic dismissal of menstrual pain can be considered a pain-related motivational deficit. According to Wiggleton-Little, a pain-related motivational deficit occurs when there is proper uptake of the epistemic contributions of a pain utterance, but due to the masking effect of ideology, there is an improper uptake of the pain utterance’s motivational contributions.
Currently Jada is working on co-editing a special issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal on chronic pain and social justice. She is also working on a book manuscript, Taking Pain Dismissal Seriously. The manuscript will provide an interdisciplinary perspective on pain dismissal while analyzing the various cultural barriers that prevent a patients’ pain from being believed, responded to with alarm, or both.