Rate My Professor Shelley Park

Dr. Shelley Park is a Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida, where she teaches in the Philosophy and Humanities & Cultural Studies programs and serves as affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies and Texts and Technologies. Holding a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Duke University (1990), M.A. from the University of Calgary (1984), and B.A. (Honors Philosophy) from the same (1982), she has been recognized for 35 years of service in the 2025 UCF Founders' Day honorees. Park's research focuses on feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, motherhood studies, and science and technology studies, emphasizing queer and technologically mediated forms of care, critical kinship studies on non-normative mothering, precarity and care under technocapitalism, and decolonial analyses of U.S. institutional cultures.

She authored Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood: Resisting Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended and Polygamous Families (SUNY Press, 2013) and co-edited the Hypatia special issue Contested Terrains: Women of Color, Third World Women, Feminisms and Geopolitics (Vol. 32:3, 2017). Key publications include “E-Carity: The Entanglement of Care and Precarity under Technocapitalism” (Azimuth, 2024), “Uncomfortably Close to Human: Robots and the Neocolonial Politics of Care” (Feminist Philosophical Quarterly, 2022), “Unsettling Feminist Philosophy: An Encounter with Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries” (Hypatia, 2020), “Normativity and Belonging: Reflections about Critical Adoption Studies” (Adoption & Culture, 2021), and “More than Skin Deep: A Response to ‘The Whiteness of AI’” (Philosophy & Technology, 2021). Park has earned multiple UCF Teaching Incentive Program Awards (2007, 2012, 2017, 2022), a Research Incentive Award (2018), competitive Research Sabbaticals (2010, 2017, 2023-24), Scroll and Quill Society Inductee (2019), and UCF Women’s Research Center Award (2009). She contributes as an editorial board member for Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture and advisory board member for the Revaluing Care in the Global Economy network, advancing interdisciplinary scholarship on kinship, care, and academic freedom.