About Me

My name is Kimberly Vargas Barreto, and I am currently a Sawyier Fellow at the Illinois Institute of Technology. I graduated from Loyola University Chicago on May 2024, after defending my dissertation, “Liberating Bioethics Through Agape: A Feminist Perspective from the Periphery.” My dissertation was a decolonial project in which I engaged in the creation of a moral framework for clinical ethics, free from the normativity of whiteness inherent to mainstream accounts. I worked with philosophies from Latin America and feminist scholarship to develop the Agapean framework.

My research interests include applied ethics, bioethics and healthcare ethics, non-Western accounts of philosophy, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of technology and AI ethics.

I have taught a diverse number of philosophy courses, with many having a strong normative focus. I taught ethics courses ranging from Healthcare Ethics to Environmental Ethics. Through them, I center critical thinking and diversity, choosing to teach non-Western thinkers in addition to “classical” philosophers.