Discrimination and Disadvantage

Prestige Bias in Canadian Philosophy Departments

 

Discussions about underrepresentation and diversity in philosophy tend to cover over how the factors that influence the demographics of the profession at large can vary, in some cases quite dramatically, from one geopolitical arena to another.

In previous posts (for example, here), I have drawn attention to how underrepresentation of certain constituencies is produced in Canadian philosophy departments, in part because many philosophers (including many Canadian philosophers) seem to take for granted that the situation of groups underrepresented in U.S. philosophy departments and the strategies developed to ameliorate this state of affairs in the American context can be straightforwardly implemented as a template for diversity work in the philosophical communities of other countries.  

In a provocative post, Helen De Cruz demonstrated that prestige bias largely determines hiring decisions in U.S. philosophy departments at present, pointing out (among other things) how this bias exacerbates the biases that members of certain underrepresented constituencies in philosophy already confront.

Prestige bias also significantly influences hiring decisions in Canadian philosophy departments: most of the philosophers hired in Canadian philosophy departments got their degrees from universities in the U.S. In other words, Canadian philosophy departments do not hire philosophers with degrees from most Canadian universities, an important determinant in the homogeneous composition of Canadian philosophy departments.

Philosophers employed full-time in philosophy departments in Canada do what they can to avoid discussion of this way in which prestige bias manifests and is reproduced in the context of Canadian philosophy departments. Understandably so: most of them took their degrees from American universities, Oxford, or Cambridge.

Nevertheless, one Canadian feminist philosopher, Christine Daigle, has repeatedly drawn attention to the ways in which this production and reproduction of prestige bias disadvantages Canadian graduates. In a recent University Affairs article entitled “The Value of Where You Earned Your PhD,” Daigle writes:

 

In my experience in the humanities, hiring committees are consistently wowed by American degrees, degrees from our own Canadian big-league universities or from some prestigious European universities. I assume that this is how applicants with extremely strong CVs, but from institutions that don’t count as big league, get passed over in favour of candidates from prestigious schools who have much less to boast of in terms of publications or teaching experience.

The assumption that someone with a PhD from a big-name university is a better candidate regardless of their accomplishments begs the question of how we value the PhDs we award at other Canadian universities. I understand how members of hiring committees who have degrees from big-name schools would tend to favour such degrees. They may be attached to their alma mater and overvalue its worth. However, that hiring committees composed of folks with PhDs mostly from non-big-league schools would consistently favour candidates from the big-league schools is mind-boggling to me. Why would they discriminate against their own graduates or graduates from similar schools? What does this say about what they think of their own degrees?

 

Listen to/read the entire article by Daigle here.

 

posted by Shelley

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Damion Kareem Scott Redux

 

For this forty-fifth installment of the series, I have reposted the fascinating interview that I conducted with Damion Kareem Scott in December 2015. I know that readers and listeners of the series will be delighted to revisit this interview with Damion. The original post of the interview and comments to it are here.

I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. I offer these interviews with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.

____________________________________________

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the ninth installment of Dialogues on Disability, a series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

My guest today is Damion Kareem Scott. Damion is an adjunct professor in Philosophy and Africana Studies at the City University of New York, a M.A. student in African American Studies at Columbia University, and a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at Stony Brook University. Damion is passionate about music and dance, though he doesn’t dance as much as he once did. Damion enjoys traveling and looks for ways to do so on the cheap. He also enjoys interacting with non-human animals, listening to music, and watching films and loves table tennis.

  

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Damion! You have lived in various parts of the world and you speak multiple languages. So, why don’t we start this interview with your personal history? Please tell us about your background and what it is that brought you to Africana Studies and philosophy.

Sure. I was born in the Bronx, New York City, in the early 1970s. Both of my birth parents are Jamaican nationals who became naturalized U.S. citizens. My early years were characterized by a certain amount of trauma, deprivation, and violence, about which I won’t go into detail. In the mid-1970s, after my parents split up, my father moved back to Jamaica and took me with him. At that time, political violence and gang-related homicides were endemic in Jamaica. My family returned to the U.S. in the early 1980s, first migrating to Chapel Hill and, subsequently, to Dallas. I spent my Christmases and summers in Brooklyn and Miami. My exposure to a lot of difference conditioned some of my values.

These various geographies are crucially different in a number of ways. For instance, the American South was, and continues to be, a region rife with explicit and overt Anti-Black/White Supremacist racism. Dallas lacks population density. Due to these sharp differences of culture and demographics, my family and I experienced direct and targeted racial animosity and violence. This direct and overt racism is, of course, fully compatible with the “institutional” and “structural” manifestations of anti-Black, anti-minority racism in the northern U.S. that have become all-too-familiar aspects of much of contemporary North American culture; that is, one form of this racism reinforces the other form.

I became conscious of America’s racist/racialist obsessions as I started to come into my own as a person. In order to develop my self-identity, I had to deal with instances of violence. I was forced to learn how to defend myself and my sisters, both mentally and physically. That I had to think through, and against, issues of violence at a young age led me to develop a sharper, quicker, and more creative perspective, namely, a philosophical perspective. I would come home and ask how I should respond when some white kid called me a “nigger,” or a “Yankee” or a “foreigner with a funny accent.” I learned how to deal with things in a non-violent way. I fought physically only after all rational (albeit youthful) attempts at persuasion had failed.

Sadly, tragically, there were guns. As a teenager, I witnessed America’s culture of guns all around me, including the phenomenon of young people who came to glorify firearms through family traditions handed down to them, traditions that were anathema to my own familial and cultural values. Despite my loving, caring parents and siblings who had joined the ranks of the “diverse” suburban American middle-class, both nonracial and racially-charged instances of crime and violence happened all around us, as well as to us. I have repeatedly been the target of racial profiling by the police. On a number of occasions, police officers have trained their guns on me. Because of these combined circumstances, I started to think broadly about philosophical notions of personal identity and political solidarity, as well as about issues of race, ethnicity, and inclusive humanity. Little did I know that this thinking would develop into committed projects in academic philosophy and Africana Studies.

As I got older, I began to stand out in school academically. I went to a public high school, although it was a new “magnet” school staffed with caring and well-intentioned teachers. Eventually, I became a National Achievement/National Merit Scholar, winning several academic accolades. I matriculated at New York University in the early/mid-1990s, using a college scholarship (and some student loans!) as the ticket back to my my wider family here in New York. I intended to study physics, musical journalism, or dramatic writing; but I took a philosophy class in my first year and got hooked. I had read a few classics of African-American political and liberational thought in high school—The Prince, Soul on Ice, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X—but not really any other kind of philosophy. I enrolled in an Introduction to Ancient Civilization general studies class that had a large component on Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius gave me a lot to think about, a lot to which I could relate. Although I declared as a dramatic writing and philosophy major, I dropped the dramatic writing double major as a junior and became a physics minor and philosophy major. I had become enthralled with analytical metaphysics at the juncture of philosophy of science.

As an undergraduate, I began my continuing engagement with a certain type of “Continental” philosophy, that is, logical reconstructive type of approaches to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and existential phenomenology, as well as Deleuze, Derrida, and post-structuralist interventions in language and ontology. Professor John Richardson at NYU helped me to formulate my thoughts coherently through engagement with historical figures in post-Kantian Continental Philosophy—especially Nietzsche and Heidegger—in relation to my prior, nascent phenomenology and conceptualizations of difference and deviance. Richardson really encouraged and motivated me to pursue an advanced degree in philosophy. Professors Ed Stein, Paul Boghossian, Marya Schechtman, Sigrun Svavarsdottir, Mary Mothersill, and Galen Strawson also made big impressions on me as an undergraduate. Thomas Nagel was a big influence on the shape of my developing philosophical ideas. He was an incredible teacher. From Nagel’s work and classes, I acquired a broad sense of analytical philosophy. His work seemed more far-ranging than most of the analytic philosophy that I had encountered, instilling in me a sense of how very unorthodox and minority positions could be clearly, yet rigorously, articulated, especially in the philosophy of mind.

My fortunate selection for, and attendance at, two Rutgers Summer Institutes for Underrepresented Groups in Philosophy during the 1990s—first as a student mentee and subsequently as a graduate student mentor—also greatly influenced my philosophical development. The institutes enabled me to learn about the specifically academic aspects of the burgeoning field of Africana Philosophy that I now love. I had returned to academia after roughly a decade away from it because of a shift in my lifestyle due to both the onset of degenerative joint disease and economic hardship. Since my return, I have had the pleasure to work with such fine scholars as Professors Ann O’Byrne, Megan Craig, Ed Casey, Peter Carevetta, Marcellus Blount, Stephen Gregory, Harvey Cormier, and Robert-Gooding Williams.

APA Symposium on Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability

 

The draft program for the upcoming Pacific APA meeting in Vancouver (April 17th-20th, 2019) went online last week. The symposium on Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability is scheduled for Thursday, April 18th, 1-4 p.m. The symposium is co-sponsored by the APA Committee on the Status of Women in Philosophy and the Society for Philosophy and Disability.

To increase the accessibility of the session, we (i.e., the participants in the session) have decided upon the following: We will use CART (communication access real-time translation) throughout the presentations and question-and-answer/discussion portion of the session. (Learn more about CART here.) Our session will also include an intermission. Most of the last hour of the symposium will be devoted to the Q&A/discussion. The symposium will be published in a forthcoming issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly which we hope will go online relatively soon after the conference.

 

The roster and timetable for the symposium are as follows:

Chair's introduction and overview: Melinda Hall (15 minutes) 

Speakers' commentaries: Devonya Havis, Jesse Prinz, Chloë Taylor (25 minutes each)

Intermission (10 minutes)

Author/Respondent's remarks: Shelley Tremain (30 minutes)

Q&A/Discussion: Open to all in attendance (50 minutes)

 

We hope that you will join us in April!

 

posted by Shelley

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Gen Eickers

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the forty-fourth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy. 

I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. I offer these interviews with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.

My guest today is Gen Eickers. Gen is currently finishing their Ph.D. at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and Freie Universitaet Berlin. Their research concentrates on social interaction and emotional display, developing an account of social interaction in their dissertation that focuses on contextual aspects of it. While Gen has been preoccupied with work on their dissertation in the last couple of months, with little time for anything else, they actually enjoy solitary activities like reading (they are currently catching up on LGBTQ history) and engaging in art in all kinds of ways. In the last three years, they have organized three art events.

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Gen! You grew up in a small town in southern Germany and initially studied to become a high school teacher. Please tell us about your background and how you found your way to a Ph.D. program in philosophy.

Thank you for having me, Shelley!

Yes, I grew up in a small village in southern Germany, which has a population of 2,500. Southern Germany is quite Catholic and ninety-nine percent white. The area in which I grew up is very conservative. In addition to this already conservative environment, in the few last years, right-wing attitudes have come to the surface again, perhaps even increased. In the 2017 election, fifteen percent of voters in the area in which I grew up voted for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the right-wing political party in Germany. Around thirty-eight percent voted for the Christian party, whose values are far from trans-friendly, queer-friendly, immigrant-friendly, or disability-friendly.

These election results put this region above the national averages with respect to the votes that right-wing parties received. What is important to add here, of course, is that in Berlin, my chosen home, around twelve percent of voters voted for the AfD. The difference between fifteen percent and twelve percent may not seem that big when we look at the number in isolation. But it’s significant when we consider that far fewer people in Berlin voted for the Christian party, and far more people voted for the left party. Most importantly, the queer community, the queer scene in Berlin is big, supportive, and good at resistance. No such thing existed in the area in which I grew up. None of this means that twelve percent of voters is not already bad enough though.

My grandparents used to have a farm, and I spent some of my childhood sitting on a tractor with my grandfather. I value these memories. At the same time, though, due to the conservative environment of southern Germany, life felt repressed and depressing there. Feelings, social issues, gender, disability were just not topics to be discussed. Everything that seemed to be remotely odd or that departed from accepted norms was ignored or simply not talked about—but, in an effortless kind of way; I think people just had no language for, nor idea of how to deal with, anything other than what is taken as normal.

When my parents got divorced, people talked badly about them and they lost friends. In high school, I knew only one other person who had divorced parents. When I was in high school, there were rumors that two of our male teachers were gay and that one of my male classmates was gay. Nothing was overt, but the things said about the teachers and the classmate were awful and, now that I have come to realize my own trans gay identity, are painful for me to think back on.

Gender was simply not a thing—it still isn’t there, I think. It was so not on the table ever that I am not sure how to express the non-existence of thoughts or conversations about gender. I think Germans, in general, are not the best when it comes to emotion work or communicating their problems, feelings, and needs, which even manifests in how language is used: where Americans would say “amazing!!!”, my relatives would say “not too bad.”

For historical and cultural reasons, rural areas in Germany, in my experience, revolve a lot around survival, work, everyday lives. That is to say that there has not been any room in these regions to openly talk about or even allow oneself to think about aspects of identity, such as gender, sexuality, disability, and race. Everything that goes beyond work and survival appears to be a luxury. But we need to learn that living one’s identity is not a luxury, but rather a necessity.

The conflict between the idea that thinking about identity is a luxury and the idea that thinking about identity is a necessity manifested, for me, in conflicting feelings and values which, I think, have made it difficult, if not impossible, for me to look for support, to ask for help, to come out as trans, to talk about my mental health. Until recently, I despised my background—perhaps for these very reasons and especially due to social pressure—but I have learned to embrace parts of it. I think my background has also equipped me with tools that people from more privileged backgrounds—such as people from academic families—do not have. For example, I can absolutely imagine myself working low-paying jobs and can imagine life not as a fancy university professor.

When I graduated from high school at eighteen, my plan was to study art in order to become an art teacher. I applied to art school, but I was rejected. That was a bummer, but it hasn’t prevented me from continuing to make art and be engaged in art projects. I have curated three exhibitions so far, and I am currently working on a fourth. Two of the exhibitions were art and science collaborations: Embodiments, which took place in 2016 at the Whiteconcepts Gallery in Berlin, and an exhibition for the Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC) in 2017. Both collaborations have led to interesting conversations between artists and scientists/researchers.

 

[Description of image below:  A group of spectators sits on the floor of the Whiteconcepts Gallery. They are looking up at something out of the view of the shot. Artwork is displayed on the walls of the room, including a large fabric installation on the wall behind the viewers.]

 

[Description of image below: A shirtless person stands in the Whiteconcepts Gallery holding a phone to their chest, their hands cradling and framing the screen of the phone on which a video of a beating heart during an open-heart surgery is displayed. The displayed heart is the estimated size of the heart of the person holding the phone. Other pieces of art can be seen in the background of the shot.]

 

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews C Dalrymple-Fraser

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the forty-third installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I’m conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. I offer these interviews with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.

My guest today is C Dalrymple-Fraser. C is currently a Ph.D. candidate and Vanier Scholar in the Department of Philosophy and Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto. Their primary research interests include practical ethics (especially bioethics), social epistemology, and philosophy of disability, usually in combination, and not always in that order. C’s dissertation will explore the roles of different kinds of “silences” and exclusions in health practices, with a focus on disabled and queer communities. In their spare time, C can be found resting or resisting with friends, visiting other people’s pets, taking selfies with bees, and occasionally misplacing puzzle pieces and library books.  

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, C! Many graduate students in philosophy are concerned that their projects are not socially relevant, not philosophically important, or do not have practical implications. At least once in your studies, you considered dropping out because you felt that your work would not have an impact. Please explain why you felt conflicted about your position in philosophy and why you decided to continue in the field. Other students who are grappling with these issues might recognize aspects of their own situations in your response.

Thank you for the invitation to participate in this series, Shelley! I’ve learned a lot from the past interviews published in the series and I’m grateful for a chance to join the conversation.

I suppose that I’m often questioning my position in philosophy, but it was toward the end of my first degree that I most strongly considered leaving the field and academia in general. I’ll just mention two reasons here.

First, I was addressing the consequences of my failure to accountably seek support and accommodation for my mental health and health more generally. I struggled to accomplish even mundane tasks, let alone academic work, and developed bad coping mechanisms. Meanwhile, most of the representations of disorder, disability, and illness that I encountered in course readings were medically uninformed at best, stigmatizing on average, and largely raised only as limit cases or thought experiments about the boundaries of personhood or autonomy. This state of affairs didn’t help matters for my health or sense of belonging.

Second, a sudden wave of tragedies in my social groups and close communities, including several preventable deaths, made it much harder to go to school and think about, say, the compatibility of externalism about mental content with privileged access, the unity of the proposition, or other questions in which I was interested. It’s definitely a privilege to have been insulated enough from other goings-on in the world that it both took that long for me to feel this way and that I’ve never had to fight to “belong” in philosophy; but, it became difficult for me to justify my own position in philosophy when I could have been working in other spaces that I perceived to have more demonstrable or direct impacts on communities and peoples. Since the world keeps spinning, this is a challenge that I regularly confront.

I don’t want to suggest that people can’t do that work separate from their research, nor do I want to necessarily value some kinds of research over other kinds. I also want to resist the idea that research must be “impactful” in any specified way, because many norms around how we understand “impact” have been used to discredit different kinds of work and research and leisure that don’t fit our disciplinary ideals. But I couldn’t divorce my research and studies from the rest of the world in the ways that I would need to continue doing them as I had been.

Just as several reasons made me question my position or ability to continue in philosophy, many things played roles in continuing. For one, I was invited to a few volunteer opportunities that disrupted the boundaries between the university and the community in which it is located. Engaging in this volunteer work showed me additional ways that philosophy can be relevant to, or enriched by, issues and perspectives outside the discipline and academia.

Around the same time, I learned more about my family history of Alzheimer’s and redirected my remaining studies toward bioethics. At bioethics conferences and events, I have been able to talk directly with patients and professionals in ways that are often unavailable to people who are not in academic or health professions. This has allowed me to raise or translate concerns from groups to which I belong or to which I have proximity, and which are not often addressed in academic or professional contexts. I have friends in other graduate programs who were encouraged to switch schools or programs because their work was turning “more practical than philosophical,” so I can’t understate my fortune to have had these opportunities and the ongoing support of my mentors, peers, and friends. In short, institutional philosophy and bioethics have been spaces in which I could ask the kinds of questions important to the people around me and take up a certain kind of advocacy in research and teaching.

 

[Description of image below: C, a white person with facial hair, is sitting in a brightly lit office, facing the camera and faintly smiling. They are wearing round glasses with a golden glasses-chain, a vertically striped, button-down shirt, and a jacket with a floral design. Books on bookshelves fill the background of the shot.]

Your motivations to stay in philosophy were informed by a philosophy discussion group that you facilitated at a youth shelter. Tell us how your thinking and research have been transformed by your experiences with that group.

Unfortunately, our group ran for only a few months because of some disruptions to the shelter’s funding and ability to organize volunteer programming. Still, it was an amazing experience while it lasted. It’s difficult to put a lot of it into words, in part because I’m still learning from and reflecting on those experiences and also because many of the stories and knowledge circulated aren’t mine to share. There are a few things I have permission to discuss.

The experience made me reflect more on teaching practices and wider interpretations of accessibility. For example, we agreed on discussion topics collectively and did not assign materials. We wanted to acknowledge differences in interests, abilities, access to language and jargon, etc. and, because we were a drop-in group with a constantly changing membership, we didn’t want to discourage turnout.

Reflecting on the successes and failures in these strategies has directed me to stories and scholarship on why and when texts are necessary, who they centre or exclude, what the academic emphasis on written texts and documents over, say, oral traditions means for access—both in terms of who can read them and who can produce them—the price of textbooks, and so on.

Our discussions on my role in these conversations and spaces as a multiply privileged white academic also challenged me to listen and learn more about anti-oppressive research and teaching, and about relational accounts of knowing. Research as Resistance, edited by Susan Strega and Leslie Brown, and works by Margaret Kovach, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and Shawn Wilson have been great entry points here, though I came to them quite late.

After one discussion, a regular member of the group commented that they liked the group because they felt heard, that although the care workers in the shelter were helpful and had good intentions, these workers tended to listen, as part of their jobs, with an agenda of identifying if anything was wrong. When the speech of the members of the group was regularly monitored for problems, they had a harder time being heard on their own terms.

I was glad that they experienced the space in that way, but I don’t think that I was a good listener. I had an agenda while facilitating the discussion, and that agenda was informed by the academic norms that I accepted and internalized. While it may be difficult or impossible to listen without some agenda, we can often be more critically attentive and accountable to our agendas. So, the comment was an encouragement to think about my failures to listen to others, on their terms, and to learn about how we can create and reproduce different kinds of “silences” as listeners in how we choose to be an audience. bell hooks’s Talking Back and Adrienne Rich’s poem “Cartographies of Silence” were important for thinking about these issues, in addition to everything that Kristie Dotson has written.

New Books Interview about Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (note appended Sept. 13)

 

In a recent post, I indicated that Dave O'Brien of the New Books Network would soon interview me about Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. The interview is now posted online. I haven't listened to it yet, but I hope you like it! Here is the link to the interview's page:

https://newbooksnetwork.com/shelley-tremain-foucault-and-feminist-philosophy-of-disability-u-michigan-press-2017/

As I indicated in my earlier post, no transcript has been made available for the interview. However, I would be happy to compose a transcript for individuals (not institutions with their own resources).

 

Note: The roster of the 2019 Pacific APA symposium on the book has changed: Melinda Hall will replace Jennifer Scuro as the chair of the symposium. The speakers in the symposium will be: Devonya Havis, Jesse Prinz, Chloë Taylor, and me. The APA symposium (with additional contributions) will be published in a forthcoming issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. 

 

posted by Shelley

Ten Questions About What It Would Be Like

 

1. What would it be like if nondisabled philosophers didn’t determine the questions that get asked about disability and how they will be answered, didn’t determine whose answers will count and why?
2. What would it be like if nondisabled feminist philosophers genuinely paid attention to what disabled feminist philosophers say about ableism rather than reconfigure our assertions in order to retain positions of privilege and dominance over us?
3. What would it be like if the pervasive, complex, and complicated apparatuses of disability and ableism were not reduced to the notions of “accessibility” and “accommodation” for the convenience and comfort that policy offers?
4. What would it be like if nondisabled philosophers no longer appealed to elaborate ethical principles in order to justify their casual mistreatment of us?
5. What would it be like if nondisabled philosophers acknowledged that their award-winning scholarship on (say) the Gettier problem, gender bias in science, propositional knowledge, or vagueness does not, in and of itself, make them experts on disability?
6. What would it be like if feminist philosophers were to acknowledge that their almost exclusive focus on sexual harassment has to some extent been self-serving, enabling them to conceal their own ableist and racist offences?
7. What would it be like if nondisabled feminist philosophers stopped using gender, race, and sexuality as a way to shut down discussions of ableism and preclude from consideration how mutually constitutive and reinforcing apparatuses of force relations shape those reactionary discursive practices themselves?
8. What would it be like if nondisabled feminist philosophers took it upon themselves to challenge, without coaxing, the ableism of philosophy, in particular, and of academia and society, more generally?
9. What would it be like if a nondisabled philosopher who consulted me about the exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession actually took on board what I said rather than regard it as “beyond the scope of the current project”?
10. What would it be like if every concession to justice didn’t come with some subtle reminder that it is indeed a concession?

 

posted by Shelley

Beyond “Squeezable Stress Stars”: Mental Health on University Campuses (guest post)

 

Beyond “Squeezable Stress Stars”:

Mental Health on University Campuses 

 

Guest Post

 

by

Jay T. Dolmage 

 

In Academic Ableism, I wrote about the connections between historically eugenic programs on college and university campuses—programs that focused on “hygiene”—and the current fad of “campus wellness.” We can draw a (rather straight) line from eugenic mental hygiene programs and physical fitness tests, to their existence as promotional programs, to family-life education programs, and on to wellness programs. At present, such programs off-load the responsibility for “wellness” onto individual students (and teachers): Eat better. Exercise more. Sleep well. (Maybe even wear this watch to track all this.) These programs often synch with “mental health awareness” on campuses—the programs that often refuse to address mental illness as a systemic issue, as something caused by higher education’s biases and regimes.

What these programs also do not even attempt to address is structural ableism and the educational construction of disability. They tend to be placed where psychologists can gather large amounts of data from a captive population—which is why so many wellness programs are helmed by psychologists or run out of psychology departments. Furthermore, the euphemism “wellness” works rhetorically to demand that we do not discuss disability, especially mental illness/mental disability/madness. We now have a growing industry of professionals working to minimize and hide disability on campuses. But the idea of wellness has also had an invasive effect, working its way into all aspects of university life.

The most recent evidence of this trend was a “wellness agreement” that a Canadian student had to sign. A Mount Saint Vincent University student was forced to sign an agreement “forbidding him to tell other students in residence that he was feeling suicidal” (Silva). The exact language of the agreement stated that the student “will not discuss or engage in conversations with residence students regarding personal issues, namely the student’s self-destructive thoughts” (Silva). The penalty for breaking this contract would have been expulsion from residence.

A university-wide program, harnessing the communications and PR power of the school, can be a particularly powerful, authoritative, legitimizing structure for controlling discourse around mental illness and disability. In the worst-case scenario, the focus on wellness might provide the rhetorical conditions in which eugenic ideas about who is and is not “fit” for college can germinate and grow.

As Catherine Gidney’s book Tending the Student Body points out, “by the 1930s and ‘40s, many universities provided some type of health service, and required physical examination and physical training...[E]ducators had come to perceive bodily health to be a crucial component in the role of the university in shaping students’ character....In other words, character would become writ on the body” (15, 76). Gidney goes on to note that “anxieties about women’s ability to combine intense study with good health in general, and reproductive health in particular [was] prominent within Canadian universities” (16). And, “in the late nineteenth century, some American universities, particularly elite ones, instituted compulsory medical examinations as part of their admission process in order to eliminate the unfit” (23). Unsurprisingly, “in obtaining funding for health services, physicians and administrators also relied on the help of faculty whose research intersected with aspects of the student physical examinations....Physicians and scientists, and even the occasional entrepreneur, quickly identified such programs as potential sources of captive research subjects. The provision of health services in the interests of students thus blurred with the use of students as research subjects” (32).

These programs are no longer explicitly mandatory, unless you are forced to sign an agreement. Yet, physicians and scientists on your campus likely study student wellness and publish on wellness without ever asking for student consent. Consider that all students at Oral Roberts University are required to wear Fitbit watches to track their weight, sleep, and exercise, as well as that many university employees can earn insurance discounts by submitting to wellness checks, using wellness apps, or wearing smart watches to track themselves. In short, “wellness” is a theme that pervades the university through awareness days, exercise-a-thons, special yoga classes, the use of university-wide health statistics by researchers, and so on. In the sickness model, we are unsure of exactly to what degree the university might be disabling, but the blame and the impact almost always falls on individuals to shoulder. In the wellness model, we are sure we should all be physically improving on campus, not talking about disability, and the burden is on the individual student to never be unwell.

Revisiting Accessibility Statements (Again): What Are They For and What Do They Do?

 

August is the time when many philosophers put the finishing touches on syllabi for the coming year. An accessibility statement ought to be regarded as a vital component of these course outlines. In this vein, I have copied below an updated version of a post that first appeared on the blog in August 2015. A very fruitful discussion ensued in the comments on the initial post, which can be found here. The example of an accessibility statement offered below has been adopted and adapted by philosophers and others around the world!

 

What Are Accessibility Statements For and What Do They Do?

 

Most universities and colleges require that instructors include an accessibility statement on the various course syllabi that they make available to their students in hard copy or on course websites and eLearning sites. In some jurisdictions, these statements are legally required.

The central purpose of these statements is to draw attention to the services and provisions available across campuses that enable disabled students to (for instance) attend lectures and seminars, acquire course materials in formats useable to them (say, on audiotape), effectively produce evaluated work (with extended time for term papers and exams), and so on. Some university and college administrations even provide a ready-made statement that faculty are instructed to use on their syllabi. Many faculty, busy as they are at the start of the semester, uncritically reproduce these prepared statements on their course outlines, neglecting to consider what sort of message a given accessibility statement may convey to disabled students.

I want to emphasize, however, that accessibility statements (like education policies in general) rely upon assumptions about, for example, how pedagogy should be organized and transmitted, how learning happens, who is a student, and what the roles and responsibilities of teachers should be. Faculty who are genuinely concerned to create an inclusive learning environment should pause to consider whether the accessibility statement that they currently use is counterproductive to this aim, as well as reflect upon how they use the statement. Among the questions that faculty who want to increase the learning possibilities for disabled students might ask themselves are these:

 

• Does my accessibility statement presume that, in the context of my lecture or seminar, the responsibility for inclusion lies with individual disabled students who have “special needs” that should be accommodated?
• Or does the statement that I currently use convey the message that equal treatment of disabled people in academia demands accessible learning environments, the creation of which should be regarded as a shared responsibility, encompassing my own pedagogical practice?
• Does the statement on my syllabi move in the direction of the principles of universal design?
• Does the statement assume that provision of services to disabled students is a response to a medical problem, or does it, instead, assume that such provision is a response to a matter of social justice?
• Do I quickly pass over the accessibility statement that I have added to my syllabus, treating it as a matter of preliminary course administration?
• Or do I take time in class to discuss the statement and its implications for my pedagogy, recognizing that such discussion offers an ideal opportunity to convey to disabled students in my courses that I uphold their entitlement to an equal education and value their presence in my classes?

 

Most universities and colleges require that instructors include an accessibility statement on the various course syllabi that they make available to their students in hard copy or on course websites and eLearning sites. In some jurisdictions, these statements are legally required.

The central purpose of these statements is to draw attention to the services and provisions available across campuses that enable disabled students to (for instance) attend lectures and seminars, acquire course materials in formats useable to them (say, on audiotape), effectively produce evaluated work (with extended time for term papers and exams), and so on. Some university and college administrations even provide a ready-made statement that faculty are instructed to use on their syllabi. Many faculty, busy as they are at the start of the semester, uncritically reproduce these prepared statements on their course outlines, neglecting to consider what sort of message a given accessibility statement may convey to disabled students.

I want to emphasize, however, that accessibility statements (like education policies in general) rely upon assumptions about, for example, how pedagogy should be organized and transmitted, how learning happens, who is a student, and what the roles and responsibilities of teachers should be. Faculty who are genuinely concerned to create an inclusive learning environment should pause to consider whether the accessibility statement that they currently use is counterproductive to this aim, as well as reflect upon how they use the statement. Among the questions that faculty who want to increase the learning possibilities for disabled students might ask themselves are these:

 

• Does my accessibility statement presume that, in the context of my lecture or seminar, the responsibility for inclusion lies with individual disabled students who have “special needs” that should be accommodated?
• Or does the statement that I currently use convey the message that equal treatment of disabled people in academia demands accessible learning environments, the creation of which should be regarded as a shared responsibility, encompassing my own pedagogical practice?
• Does the statement on my syllabi move in the direction of the principles of universal design?
• Does the statement assume that provision of services to disabled students is a response to a medical problem, or does it, instead, assume that such provision is a response to a matter of social justice?
• Do I quickly pass over the accessibility statement that I have added to my syllabus, treating it as a matter of preliminary course administration?
• Or do I take time in class to discuss the statement and its implications for my pedagogy, recognizing that such discussion offers an ideal opportunity to convey to disabled students in my courses that I uphold their entitlement to an equal education and value their presence in my classes?

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Stephen Yablo

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the forty-first installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I’m conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. I offer these interviews with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.

My guest today is Stephen Yablo. Stephen works in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is interested in metaphysics, mind, language, and logic, especially paradox, causation, ontology, metaphor, and subject matter. Aboutness is the answer to everything, in Stephen’s view. Stephen cooks everything in an Instant Pot and will pick up the guitar again any day now. Meanwhile, he plays with genealogy and two dogs and watches Nordic noir from the back of an exercise bike.

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Stephen! You first recognized a philosophical problem when you were in Hebrew School and went on to begin your formal philosophy education in the undergraduate program in philosophy at the University of Toronto. Please fill us in on the details of your upbringing and background and why you decided to pursue a career in philosophy.

I had a typical conservative Jewish upbringing in the northwest suburbs of Toronto. My parents had moved there in the late 1950s with the idea that their kids, my brother Paul and me, would attend York University, which was then under construction a mile or two away. We never did, though I worked at the bookstore there for a while.

Saul Yablo, my father, had come to Toronto in 1933 from Lomza, Poland.  My mother, Gloria Yablo, née Herman, was born in Toronto, but her parents were recent arrivals from Romania. I went to a regular day school, but also attended Hebrew School three times a week. Many of the teachers there were Holocaust survivors. So, we heard a lot about the Nazis and I remember being confused about how Hitler chose his victims. What was the common thread that supposedly ran through Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and disabled people? It was mentioned that Goebbels was not persecuted for his “deformed” foot, as if to say that the Nazis were hypocrites on top of everything else.

I think the "philosophical problem" that you're alluding to might be this: On the one hand, it was stressed that God was unknowable. Speculation was natural, but futile. Somehow, though, my own speculations could be seen, through this otherwise impenetrable veil of ignorance, to be definitely mistaken. I found it a bit suspicious that the known facts about God included mainly the negations of all my hunches. At the same time, I really liked the idea that one shouldn't hope to understand everything, that some notions went too deep to achieve a proper perspective on. You just had to go along with them if you wanted to get out of bed in the morning. 

I started college in 1975 expecting to go into English or psychology. This is strange as I'd been reading a lot of philosophy. A counsellor lent me Martin Buber and Santayana at summer camp and, at the end of an appointment, my Cuba-loving communist uncle, who was also a doctor, handed over a book about Nietzsche. I read this stuff without, I guess, knowing that philosophy was its own thing. When eventually the light dawned, I wound up taking jillions of courses in the area.

At the time, the University of Toronto had the biggest English-speaking philosophy department outside of Oxford, maybe still does. My parents wanted me to take something with Emil Fackenheim, a rabbinical Hegel scholar who would turn up every now and then at synagogue, not that I was still attending. He opposed intermarriage partly on the grounds that it would be giving a posthumous victory to Hitler—though, it turned out, he himself had intermarried. The two philosophy courses that I best remember from my time in the department at Toronto are The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell with John Slater and The Inexpressible with Hans Herzberger. The latter went back and forth between Teresa of Avila's mystical writings and Tarski on the inexpressibility of truth. That's where I first learned of Kripke's theory of truth, which became an obsession with me for some years.

After graduation, came a year in India at the University of Pune. Hans Herzberger was in south India that year, where his wife Radhika taught at a Krishnamurti school. I was lucky enough to be able to stay with them for a few weeks and, with his help, made a start on my first published work in philosophy, "Grounding, Dependence, and Paradox." I don't know if you've heard of the once-famous "love guru" Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who previously had been a philosophy professor. Rajneesh was in Pune when I arrived in 1979, but he left in 1980 to form an ashram in Antelope, Oregon. It's an amazing story involving drugs, guns, local politics, Rolls-Royces, and, ultimately, murder. They tell it in the recent Netflix documentary "Wild, Wild Country."

There then followed five or six years in the Philosophy Department at UC Berkeley, where I got my Ph.D., working with George Myro and Donald Davidson. In 1986, I started a job in the Philosophy Department at the University of Michigan. In 1998, I moved with Sally Haslanger to MIT. We'd been friends at Berkeley; but didn't pair up until the late 1980s.

 

[Description of coloured photo below: Stephen, a white man with a beard, tousled hair, and glasses, is looking to his left at us, somewhat bashfully, and faintly smiling. He is sitting on his scooter in a brightly-lit room, with his right arm outstretched to his right.]