About

Ellyn Kaschak, Ph.D. is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning psychologist, author and teacher. She is well-known as a speaker, workshop leader, human rights advocate and a public intellectual.

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Select Works

Sight Unseen
Gender and Race Through Blind Eyes

Sight Unseen reveals the cultural and biological realities of race, gender, and sexual orientation from the perspective of the blind. Through ten case studies and dozens of interviews, Ellyn Kaschak taps directly into the phenomenology of race, gender, and sexual orientation among blind individuals, along with the everyday epistemology of vision.

Order the Book

Engendered Lives: A New Psychology of Women’s Experience

Global Border Crossings: Feminist Activists and Peace Workers Collaborating Across Cultures

Minding the Body: Psychotherapy in Cases of Chronic and Life-Threatening Illness

In the media

Seeing Is Believing or Is Believing Seeing | Ellyn Kaschak ’65 | TEDxBinghamtonUniversity

I will describe my intensive 10 years of work with individuals who are all blind since birth. Since they have had no opportunity to visually observe the cues the sighted use to code gender, race and sexual orientation, their ideas and the ways they learned them reveal how these constructs are just that and are not based in biology at all. Instead, they are constructed by and for the sighted. Using many examples, I will show unerringly the blindness of the sighted.

Latest Articles

September 12, 2022 in Articles

What is mental health and what is not

Mental health and illness in traumatic times More and more, the popular media are often transforming societal issues and wounds into individual problems. Every time someone shoots up a school, threatens or attacks a public figure, the public voices shout,…
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August 10, 2022 in Articles

When ideas become God and science is heresy

The struggles of our times: women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights, and even the danger to free speech and thought Most of us are familiar, if only from early school days, with the historic clash between the Church and Science, the Pope…
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July 11, 2022 in Articles

Women and children last

Women’s rights are human rights Dare we even raise the issue of women’s rights today? Both the political left and right answer with a resounding “No.” Are their reasons for this response so different from each other? I answer this…
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June 14, 2022 in Articles

How to think, not what to think

Say the wrong word and you are vanished For thirty-five years, I was professor of Psychology at a large, public university. I taught generations of students, worked with scores of academic colleagues and was deeply committed to the mission of…
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