About Me

My name is Kimberly Vargas Barreto, and I am currently a Clinical Ethicist Fellow at Providence Center for Health Care Ethics. My professional goals are to continue practicing clinical ethics in the healthcare setting after finishing the fellowship, and thus pursue my passion for applied ethics and the protection of vulnerable populations.

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 centered critical thinking and diversity, choosing to teach non-Western thinkers in addition to “classical” philosophers.