Discrimination and Disadvantage

Ring In The New Year With BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY!

 

I would like to wish all the wonderful readers and listeners of the Discrimination and Disadvantage blog a Very Happy New Year!

I sincerely hope that the New Year will provide all of you with adequate food, shelter, clothing, love, and friendship, abundant philosophical mentoring and inspiration, as well as renewed determination for resistance and rebellion.

I would also like to thank Thomas Nadelhoffer and Kevin Timpe who, in January 2015, invited me to contribute to Discrimination and Disadvantage, a blog that they planned to initiate.

My experience as a contributor to and coordinator of Discrimination and Disadvantage has been immensely rewarding personally, offering an immediate public outlet for my philosophical views on disability and other apparatuses, motivating my commentary on the profession, and enabling me to remain connected to the philosophical community throughout precarious times.

I believe, furthermore, that my writing at Discrimination and Disadvantage has provided an important professional service, exploring previously unexamined lines of inquiry in philosophy, shining a spotlight on disabled and other marginalized philosophers, and drawing attention to structural inequalities within philosophy that have been obscured and neglected.

Now, on the eve of 2019, I am thrilled to announce that in early January Melinda Hall and I will launch an exciting new blog called BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

 

BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY will aim to:

• provide up-to-date information and cutting-edge critical analysis of biopolitical asymmetries and other mechanisms and effects of power in philosophy and beyond, especially with respect to (the apparatus of) disability and racism against the abnormal;
• showcase the insights of members of underrepresented constituencies in philosophy and the work of marginalized areas of specialization in the discipline;
• advertise CFPs and other notices about publications, conferences, workshops, institutes, and other projects pertinent to underrepresented philosophers and subordinated areas of philosophical inquiry;
• offer a venue for disabled and other underrepresented and marginalized philosophers to gain the experience and skills required to both engage in philosophical discussion and contribute to the profession of philosophy more generally.

 

Beginning in January, BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY will be the new home of Dialogues on Disability, the acclaimed series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers. I have a fabulous line-up of interviewees for the months ahead.

Melinda and I hope that you will join us at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY to forge an innovative path of philosophical critique, resistance, and insurrection.

 

Until then, Happy New Year!  

Shelley Tremain

 

 

CFP: Decolonisation: Shaping and Re-shaping Reality, King's College London, Mar. 9-10, 2019 (deadline: Dec. 15, 2018*)

 

Call for Papers

Decolonisation: Shaping and Re-shaping Reality 

KCL Minorities and Philosophy Conference,
King's College London,

March 9-10, 2019
Deadline: December 15, 2018*

 

KCL Minorities and Philosophy welcomes submissions of abstracts for its conference in March 2019.

We invite undergraduate and postgraduate students from UK universities to submit abstracts on subjects related to the theme of  "Decolonisation – Shaping and Re-shaping Reality." Submissions from international students are also welcomed, however, we will not be
able to fund international travel.

This conference aims to open up questions and provide a platform for critical analysis concerning the underlying assumptions, ideologies,
narratives, social structures etc. that are rooted in white colonialism, which have shaped (and continue to shape) reality for a multitude of people. The aim is to re-tell stories where white heterosexual upper-class men are no longer the protagonists, and to think critically about ways to re-shape our present reality in efforts towards decolonisation.

Possible areas include (but are not limited to):
- Metaphysics
- Epistemology
- Philosophy of Race
- Political Philosophy
- History of Philosophy
- Continental Philosophy
- Philosophy of Language
- Philosophy of Science

We accept submissions from students in a wide-range of disciplines, such as history, geography, anthropology, languages, as well as medicine and the nature sciences.

Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words.
Please submit abstracts in PDF format by 15th December 2018 to: 
[email protected]

Please include a separate document in your email with your name and institutional affiliation. We invite you to include any information you would like us to know about yourself, e.g. age, gender, ethnicity, disability, etc.

Conference website:
https://www.facebook.com/kclmap/

*Note: the official conference poster on the Facebook page for the conference indicates that December 20, 2018 is the deadline for submission. 

 

posted by Shelley

A Gimlet Eye: The Journal of Controversial Ideas and Jonathan Anomaly’s “Defending Eugenics” (guest post)

 

A Gimlet Eye: The Journal of Controversial Ideas

and Jonathan Anomaly’s “Defending Eugenics” 

 

Guest post

 

by

Alison Reiheld*

 

On November 12, a slew of articles hit the internet announcing the formation of Journal of Controversial Ideas, a future journal that will be dedicated to, well, publishing cross-disciplinary controversial ideas and specifically ideas too controversial to be published elsewhere or which, if published elsewhere, would subject the author to threats. That authors might be threatened because of the content of their articles led the editors of the prospective journal (including Peter Singer) to explicitly decide in advance to allow pseudonymous publication.

While philosophers who pay attention to the blogosphere and social media have good reason to worry about the viciousness enabled by anonymity and a total lack of accountability (see Twitter, the metablog, the metametablogs, etc.), anonymity can also protect serious and careful valuable contributions to the profession, as with the “What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy?” blog and countless other instances. Perhaps the editors, if acting in good faith, hope that peer review and editorial oversight will provide accountability and ensure that the abuses of pseudonymity are curtailed while the benefits of it are in full effect.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Tom Bartlett warned of a coming backlash to the journal itself and not just to the kind of content that it wishes to print (“Cue the Outcry”).  Why might there be such a backlash? And would it be justified? The tone of “Cue the Outcry” implies that it would not. Whether it would, depends on the new JCI’s editorial procedures, which ideas they find “controversial” enough to merit publication in their journal, whether these ideas include both conservative and liberal ideas, and a whole host of other factors.

My concerns about the journal stem from the kinds of work that authors elsewhere have painted as persecuted. As soon as I heard of the announcement of the journal, I thought in particular of the work of philosopher Jonathan Anomaly, who often says that it is unjust for his talks to be protested, that he receives hate mail in response to his publications, and that the American Academy is badly broken because of the way people respond to his work and the work of others who advance controversial ideas.

I want to propose in this post that some claims are indeed deeply problematic by their nature; thus, it is right and proper to subject them to greater scrutiny than other claims and perhaps to hold them to a higher standard. This discrepancy would make it appear that the former claims are being unjustly discriminated against, when in fact this is not the case. One such claim is that colonialism was morally good and is justified, a claim made in an article published in Third World Quarterly in 2017. Another claim is that we ought to have formal eugenics programs. This latter assertion is one of several interlocking claims advanced by Anomaly.

 

ZOOMING IN ON A CONTROVERSIAL IDEA

 

...our imaginative visions are central to our understanding of the world. They are not a distraction from our serious thinking but a necessary part of it. And—what is perhaps more surprising—many of the visions that now dominate our controversies are ones which look as if they were based on science, but are really fed by fantasy… many of the favourite fairy-tales of our age—the myths that actually shape our thoughts and actions—are ones which owe their force to having appeared in scientific dress. —Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By, xii-xiii

 

In 2018, Monash Bioethics Review published an article by Anomaly called “Defending Eugenics: From Cryptic Choice to Conscious Selection.” The article is part of a thematically unified research program that Anomaly has developed over the years in which he treats procreation/reproduction as a public good, considering group traits and individual traits as relevant to who should have children. This research program includes, but is not limited to, his 2017 article “Race Research and the Ethics of Belief” in Journal of Bioethical Inquiry and his 2014 “Public Goods and Procreation,” also in Monash Bioethics Review. Related articles include Anomaly’s 2018 “Public Goods and Education” forthcoming in a Rowman & Littlefield anthology on Philosophy and Public Policy. Anomaly develops an interlocking set of claims across this research program which, I believe, I have roughly described as he himself would say is correct. The following are my summaries of the claims made in each of these four articles:  

CLAIM (1) FROM “PUBLIC GOODS AND EDUCATION”: While education is a public good, social intervention in public education and intellectual development is often pernicious and government involvement in social factors affecting intelligence is thus often ill-advised, even in the form of public funding for education, vouchers, and especially stipulation of what should be learned.

CLAIM (2) FROM “RACE RESEARCH AND THE ETHICS OF BELIEF”: We rightly worry that any legitimation of claims that certain racial groups are better or worse at certain tasks due to physiology will lead to bias and oppression that can cause harm. But the harm principle is a bad reason not to believe something to be true if there is evidence that it is, and it is an especially bad reason to refrain from looking for any such evidence. “[I]f we allow ourselves to believe a proposition that is contrary to the available evidence, we may end up acting in ways that harm other people as well as ourselves” (Anomaly 2018, 293). Racial groups are genetically real, not just socially constructed, and research into race and shared racial traits should not be inhibited. What’s more, doing such research could help to explain racial prejudice. For instance, Anomaly argues that Ashkenazi Jews simply are, based on scientific evidence, smart and have heritably high IQ scores. Perhaps, Anomaly proposes, the best explanation for how Jewish folks became targeted for their success is that such success is indeed biologically group-based. Acknowledging racial differences as biological and real and heritable, rather than socially constructed, could serve to undermine racial bias, as well as lead to benefits in the treatment of health conditions that occur in some groups more than in others.

CLAIM (3) FROM “PUBLIC GOODS AND PROCREATION”: Economists are wrong when they view children as private goods that parents create for fun, companionship, help in old age, etc. Rather, children are public goods because “they can have far-reaching effects on the genetic composition, cultural trajectory, and general welfare of future people.” (172) Because the benefits of public goods are consumed in common and widely dispersed, and procreation and parenthood are public goods, we are justified in influencing reproductive behavior. While there should be a presumption in favor of procreative liberty, “nearly all of us would prefer—to the extent that it is possible—to create a world in which future people flourish. This will apparently involve preserving (or increasing) the prevalence of traits that can be thought of as public goods.” (179) We should at least use social norms to nudge people to make eugenic reproductive choices. The state could even provide free or reduced cost fetal or parental genetic screening and, with caution, even some restrictive interventions into reproductive choice such as parental licensing and, in some cases, temporary sterilization for the very unfit—”especially if their pathological behavior has a strong genetic component” (184)—which can be reversed in case of a mistaken judgment of lack of fitness. We would be “preventing probabilistic rather than actual harms.” (ibid.) Social efforts to influence reproduction should extend from genetically bad traits, to poor parenting by extremely irresponsible people, to people who might turn out to be poor parents (thus the word probabilistic). We also ought to think of future people as doing probabilistic harm, of “risks that prospective children post to other people.” (ibid.) Anomaly says that this is fairly extreme and that these options should be preserved, but that we should be wary of using coercive state intervention to achieve collective goals. Thus, the “most promising and least intrusive way of preserving the genetic basis of valuable traits may be genetic counseling and—once our understanding of genetics improves—subsidies for those who wish to use embryo selection or, under certain conditions, genetic engineering to enhance their children.” (185) This kind of “voluntary” eugenics should be supported.

CLAIM 4) FROM “DEFENDING EUGENICS…”: Anomaly begins his article by explicitly stating that he wishes to “reclaim the spirit of authors like Francis Galton and Charles Darwin,” and that his defense of eugenics will not commit us to endorsing state-sponsored coercion nor to genetic determinism. He argues, furthermore, that “virtually every trait that influences our personality and our likelihood of living a good life—including intelligence, health, empathy, and impulse control—has a substantial genetic component.” Reacting to the history of Nazis and the Holocaust, and American eugenics, by rejecting the genetic basis of race and other groupings of traits is, he notes, an “understandable over-reaction” to the cruel and racist policies of early and mid-twentieth century eugenicists. One of the problems facing societies is that people who have higher IQs, more education, and higher income have fewer children later in life, especially in developed countries with social supports and opportunities for ambitious and intelligent women. (The trend of successful career women having pets instead of children or adopting children is bad for the gene pool in the long run, and a form of pathological altruism, one example that Anomaly gives of “dysgenic trends in developed countries.”) Anomaly proceeds to defend a series of “plausible” moral principles laid out in the famous case of Buck v. Bell, including preventing the harm that future children of certain people might do to others and society. If we are cautious of state authority and more concerned with individual liberty, we can use these principles as the basis of a “liberal eugenics.” He defends access to contraception (on the grounds that it allows women to choose more carefully who fathers their children), access to genetic education, and genetic counseling through public financing of independent providers in a competitive market, access to genetic engineering as enhancements come on board, and a system of incentives and penalties including parental licensing. He also defends parental licensing on the grounds that traits like impulse control, health, intelligence and empathy have significant genetic components and so unrestricted reproduction entails many “parents who are unwilling or unable to take care of their children” and who “[pass] along an undesirable genetic endowment.” A fair parental licensing scheme would involve criteria that “are effective at screening out only parents who impose significant risks of harm on their children or (through their children) on other people.” If informal sanctions work, they are preferable to coercive laws, but they often fail to work well. While public policies cannot create a genetic utopia, changing reproductive norms can go some way towards making us better at choosing whether to have children and which kinds of children to have. After Anomaly advances this long argument in which he advocates numerous policies and endorses specific views about which traits are desirable, he closes with the following claim: “I concede that I may be wrong about any of the measures I’ve considered. Sometimes the best policy is not to have one."  

What shall we make of these claims? At first glance, it might seem that claim (1) is entirely distinct from claims (2), (3), and (4). After all, taken together, the latter set of claims clearly pertains to genetic traits of groups, judging groups’ merits based on their genetics, and intervening in reproductive choice based on genetic merits. Let us take some basic background from disability studies.

Is Eugenics Too Controversial for Mainstream Bioethics Journals?

 

In my previous post, I asserted that the impetus and rationale for the prospective Journal of Controversial Ideas are the production and publication of eugenic discourse. I also asserted that the biopolitics and governmentality of extant bioethics journals and the subfield of bioethics itself have paved the way for the unfettered production and publication of eugenic discourse in the future journal. 

I suspect that my claims in this regard met with considerable skepticism in some corners of philosophy. Thus, I want to suggest that skeptical readers and listeners consider the following. 

Recently, the Monash Bioethics Review published an article authored by Jonathan Anomaly entitled "Defending Eugenics." The claims that Anomaly makes in the article are as pernicious as the title of the article suggests, targetting disabled people, nondisabled people of colour, nondisabled poor people, nondisabled Indigenous people, and nondisabled Jewish people, among others, promoting the ideas of eugenic selection, procreative beneficence, and so on. 

Anomaly reportedly had a difficult time getting the article published. Nevertheless, the article found a home at the Monash Bioethics Review, on whose editorial board Peter Singer and Julian Savulescu serve, along with other bioethicists who espouse claims that have direct or indirect eugenicist implications. Singer has of course a long affiliation with bioethics at Monash University and Savulescu works at the Uheiro Centre at Oxford University that I mentioned in yesterday's post. I implore skeptics of yesterday's post to put together the pieces of this situation.

The claims that Anomaly makes in the article have not gone unnoticed. I have copied below the text of a letter that The Australian Critical Race & Whiteness Studies Association has initiated in response to the publication of the article. The letter is posted to google docs here where you can add your signature: 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejAtoxqUzYPpzofNoabxPIW_bit78cV7FiYPeHmlpLhy8HdQ/viewform?fbclid=IwAR1sL3A-D_g69gLRDiZf9lo2jCBPXk4ch34IQEvX_L9UkHFamd4bAUe-bUc

_______________________________________________________________

 

The Australian Critical Race & Whiteness Studies is asking our members and supporters to sign the letter below to the editors of the Monash Bioethics Review on the publication of an article entitled 'Defending Eugenics'. Signatures may be added at the bottom of the letter.

Jonathan Oakley and Michael Selgelid
Editors in Chief, Monash Bioethics Review
Monash Bioethics Centre
Menzies Building
20 Chancellors Walk
Clayton Campus
Monash University
VIC 3800

Sydney, 14 November 2018

Dear Professors Oakley and Selgelid,

We are writing to you as the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association to express concern about the publication in the Monash Bioethics Review of an article entitled ‘Defending Eugenics’ by Jonathan Anomaly.

In our view, this article normalizes a practice that has been, and continues to be, associated with the discipline and punishment of racialised people since the 19th century when it was first suggested by Francis Galton, a ‘race scientist’ whose ‘spirit’ the author wishes to ‘reclaim’ in the interests of reducing the ‘consequences of people reproducing at random.’

The author attempts to avoid the charge of racism by arguing that the virtues of eugenics should not be tempered by the ends to which these ideas were put by the Nazis during the Holocaust. There are a number of problems with this proposition which we would like to outline:

1. It is impossible to dissociate an idea from the context in which it emerged and the practices which it led to. The very idea of manipulating the population in order to attempt to facilitate a ‘eugenic utopia’ comes to fruition within the context of European colonialism, and the increased power of European states to quantify and manage populations. The main targets were the poor, the disabled and those considered racially ‘inferior’.

2. Anomaly’s discussion of the Holocaust attempts to avoid racism by making the argument that it was ‘dysgenic’ to eliminate the Jews as ‘arguably among the most intelligent and productive people of the twentieth century.’ Such an argument, while attempting to avoid racism, still operates with racially essentialist terms by generalizing about all Jews; it is notable too that Jews of colour are omitted from Anomaly’s claims.

3. Anomaly clearly believes in race differences, arguing that it was only the ‘the racist direction the eugenics movement took in the United States and Germany’ that led scientists to ‘deny that races exist.’ It is our contention that it is impossible to disentangle the belief that the human population can be divided into so-called races from the injustices that continue to be associated with that belief. And in the specific case of the article, it is impossible, to argue that races exist while claiming that one’s proposal to introduce eugenics into policy making is not racist.

4. Eugenic practices of the type discussed by Anomaly in the paper, are still in practice. The author believes that the language of eugenics was merely used to mask the ‘morally abhorrent policies and pseudo-scientific claims’ of the Nazis. However, eugenics principles were applied much more widely than that. In our context here in Australia, the Eugenics Society of Victoria was in operation until 1961 (https://theconversation.com/eugenics-in-australia-the-secre…). The practice of removal of Aboriginal children, which is still ongoing, reaching unprecedented levels today, has its roots in eugenics as its ultimate aim was the control of the Aboriginal population (https://www.theguardian.com/…/australia-fails-to-curb-child…). The practices of forced sterilisation are still in use against Indigenous women in Canada for example (https://www.cbc.ca/…/pol…/sterilization-indigenous-1.4902303). Dorothy Roberts has documented the extent to which the US welfare system has been restructured to inhibit the reproductive freedoms of poor Black women (https://penntoday.upenn.edu/…/revisiting-killing-the-black-…). Therefore, the policy proposals, presented by Anomaly, to improve what he calls the troubling ‘current demographics of Western countries’ are not mere hypotheticals.

5. In fact, Anomaly makes clear what troubles him when he remarks that pronatalist policies put in place by the Swedish state have resulted in higher births among those of Somali origin rather than ‘native-born Swedes.’ He also makes reference to ‘impulse control’ as hereditary, an argument also made by the conservative US publication, The National Review, which argued that Black children had less impulse control than white children, thus justifying their exclusion from school (https://www.nationalreview.com/…/more-distortion-ed-depart…/). Therefore he cannot claim that racism does not motivate his argument.

At a time when so-called ‘race realism’ is booming, despite being thoroughly debunked by the great majority of scientists (https://www.theguardian.com/…/the-unwelcome-revival-of-race…), the scholarly community must take responsibility for the ideas it endorses. There are serious questions to be answered about how an article that proposes that ‘future people would be better off if people with heritable traits that we value had a greater proportion of children’ passed peer review. It is our view that there is absolutely no way of separating the notion of there being ‘more valuable heritable traits’ from the fact that modern western societies have associated value with whiteness, abled-bodiedness and prosperity to the detriment of racialised people, the disabled and the poor.

We seem to have entered a phase in academia and public life where debate for its own sake has trumped any commitment to the principle of protecting those most vulnerable and creating the conditions for a more just society for all. As critical race scholars who are only too painfully aware of the practices to which ideas of race have been put, we suggest that it is never the time for an article that defends eugenics to be published in a reputable international scientific journal.

We hope that you will consider this letter and take the necessary steps to address the processes of peer review that led to this misguided decision.

Yours sincerely on behalf of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association

Alana Lentin
Associate Professor, Western Sydney University and ACRAWSA President (2017-19).

 

 

posted by Shelley

Repression and Controversial Ideas

 

In The History of Sexuality, Volume One, Foucault writes that, for a long time, Western societies (so the story goes) supported a Victorian regime, one that continues to restrain sexuality in the present. Whereas at the turn of the seventeenth century sexuality was (the story goes) treated with candor and sexual practices enjoyed a certain familiarity, the nineteenth century (the story goes) ushered in a confinement of sexuality to the conjugal home and reproductive function. In the terms of this historical narrative, Foucault wrote, “Nothing that was not ordered in terms of generation or transfigured by it could expect sanction or protection. Nor did it merit a hearing” (4). If sexuality was compelled to make itself visible, it would be designated in terms of abnormality and perversion and hence treated accordingly. Sexuality (or so the story goes) was repressed by power and access to the truth of one’s sexuality required that one free oneself from this repression, even at considerable cost: laws must be transgressed, prohibitions must be lifted, and pleasures reinstated.

Foucault referred to the thesis that underpins the aforementioned historical narrative as the “repressive hypothesis,” explaining that from the eighteenth century onward, there has in fact been a veritable discursive explosion around and apropos sex, a proliferation of discourses about sex in the field of the exercise of power itself rather than repression of sex: “an institutional incitement to speak about [sex], and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail” (18). The compulsion to speak of sex, to categorize it, analyze it, legitimize it, liberate it, and redeem it was tied to, the product of, and generated in accordance with, force relations.

As Foucault argued, therefore, saying “yes” to sex does not amount to saying “no” to power.  On the contrary, sex (and sexuality) has always been implicated in power. Indeed, from the eighteenth century sex became something to be administered and managed, became an urgent economic and political concern: “it was necessary to analyze the birthrate, the age of marriage, the legitimate and illegitimate births, the precocity and frequency of sexual relations, the ways of making fertile or sterile, the effects of unmarried life or of the prohibitions, [and] the impact of contraceptive practices” (26).

I want to argue that the justifications for the Journal of Controversial Ideas that Peter Singer, Jeff McMahan, and Francesca Minerva have advanced replicate the assumptions of the repressive hypothesis. As with the liberating release of our allegedly repressed sexuality, so too with a journal that enables the unfettered publication of certain controversial views: Our freedom and, ultimately, our truth are in the balance.

Insofar as Singer, McMahan, and Minerva—all of whom hold “controversial” positions in bioethical discourse—have initiated this project, we can reasonably infer that they aim to convince us that the expression and development of their positions and the putative  truths and putative potential truths that they could comprise are threatened, if not already suppressed, by relations of power in philosophy.

These authors want us to believe that they are up against power, not situated otherwise within it, generating it. In particular, the pronouncements of these prominent philosophers are designed to make us believe that only if a venue is provided that distinctly publicizes and protects their views and the views of other academics whose intellectual freedom is similarly threatened with suppression, will we arrive at the truth on “controversial” matters. These authors (and the prospective journal), we are led to believe, will speak back to power rather than circulate and extend it. In other words, although Singer, McMahan, Minerva, and like-minded academics actually enjoy very public (and prestigious) platforms in which to advance their arguments, that is, although their views proliferate in books, articles, lectures, videos, and so on throughout the discipline and profession, the journal that the former philosophers have initiated is crucially needed because controversial views like their own are somehow repressed and stifled or at least threatened, not given the appropriate discursive space in which to be adequately considered and debated.  

As Foucault was concerned to point out, truth can never be freed from power; indeed, there is no truth apart from power, for power is immanent in and productive of the objects that it affects rather than merely repressive of them: it produces candidates for true and false, as well as objects, states of affairs, identities, and so on. Thus, we might ask: About what can we expect the new Journal of Controversial Ideas to produce truth? Insofar as editors to a large extent influence the shape, scope, and contents of the publications that they edit, I think we can reasonably expect the new journal to produce the sort of eugenic discourses on which McMahan and his colleagues at the Uheiro Centre at Oxford collaborate and for which Singer is well known.

Indeed, I want to suggest that the publication of eugenic discourse is the rationale for this journal, notwithstanding any journal mission statement or public pronouncement to the contrary. Furthermore, I want to suggest that the biopolitical character and governmental tenor of both extant bioethics journals and the subfield of bioethics itself are mechanisms of the apparatus of disability that have already enabled the inauguration of future discourse on eugenics in the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

 

posted by Shelley

My Journey In Our Struggle (guest post)

 

My Journey In Our Struggle* 

 

Guest Post

 

by  

 

Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, Ph.D.**

 

 

It began, for me, in an inpatient psychiatric unit. I had been sectioned.

 

Why do I begin narrating my journey at this milestone?

•    I survived. Not all of us do. I live and work "In The Wake," to borrow an idea from Professor Christina Sharpe, of those persons racialised as black, so often mentally ill, who come into contact or into the custody of the state and die.

•    I had nothing to lose. I no longer feared, nor even gave a fuck, as throughout my life till that point I had, about wealthy white men’s expectations of me. Compared with depths of despair I had seen, they paled into insignificance.

•    We need to destigmatise disablement—by acknowledging it in our society and by acknowledging the factors that determine it. We speak about the social determinants of good health, but not the colonial determinants of ill health. So, in one way, this is a story about how my participation in the decolonial social movement brought me back to health. In another way, it is a story about how my participation made my health much worse. There are decolonial determinants of ill health. A lesson I want you to take from my testimony is that our social movements, if they are to be decolonial, need to be the sort of spaces that we don’t have to take a break from, because they make us ill and, indeed oppress us, but rather the sort of spaces in which we dwell and grow. I’m calling, as Patrisse Cullors Khan has, recently, not for each of us to take on the unilateral burden of self-care, but rather for us all, in our shared struggle, to share the responsibility of collective care.

After a period of time, I was permitted to leave the unit, only on the condition that I went straight back to Britain. The instructions of the consultants struck me like the words of the Go To Jail card in the board game Monopoly: “Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.”

Why did my release from detention and my return to Britain feel like I was going to jail? When, back in 2007, I left Britain, for what I thought was for good, I knew then that I didn’t or, better yet, could never comfortably, belong in Britain. I knew then I had involuntarily to make my life in another country. How, then, do you then rebuild a life where you’ve been continually told you don’t belong?

Well, I did this through my participation in our struggle. Allow me, therefore, to mention three moments in my participation in the student-led social movements of the second decade of the twenty-first century. I’ll give each moment a name:

     1        Getting Inside

     2        Dismantling His House

     3        Bringing It Home

I’d like to mention how and why I got into each and some successes and some roadblocks that each has presented.

1  Getting Inside: Building an Ebony Tower in Britain & Why Isn’t my Professor Black?

Born, as I was, in the summer uprisings of 1981, seemingly nothing had changed, when I turned thirty, during the summer uprisings of 2011. I came of age, while witnessing my country repeating its racialised history. Witnessing this, of course, from afar, from America, from the Academy. What frustrated me was that the most public and repeated explanation of this repetition, coming from British academia, was that, supposedly, “The whites have become black.” I wanted more and I wanted better from the British academy, and I supposed that this would be got if we built the sort of cadre of Black public intellectuals who had been my mentors and sponsors in the USA.

To this end, I convened Building an Ebony Tower in Britain, one hundred academics in online conversation and a meeting of 30 Black academics, in July 2012, in Birmingham. This was the background to our campaign, two years later, in March 2014, asking "Why Isn't My Professor Black?"—A question framed by capitalising upon the neoliberal distortion of public education that makes the consumer king, and turning that on its head. Six academics: three persons racialised and gendered as black women, Professor Shirley Tate, Dr. Lisa Palmer, and Dr. Deborah Gabriel, and three persons racialised and gendered as black men, Dr. William Ackah, Nathan Edward Richards and myself, spoke in a sold-out, live-streamed, virally shared panel encouraging, exhorting, and empowering our students to pose this question to the people in power and equipping our students with critical explanations to answer it.

It was phenomenally successful, but, in retrospect, it was a false friend. The reasons to avoid constructing our campaign in terms of the #blackprofessor are threefold and this challenge had a direct implication for how we decided to revise our approach.

• first, persons racialised as neither black nor white (for example persons racialised as Chinese) tended not to buy into it. In this way, #blackprofessor consisted in survivors of euro-imperialism dividing themselves, on white hegemony's behalf, so that, thereafter, white hegemony might more easily rule over them all. We should, instead, be seeking a solidarity of the Global Majority.

• second, black inadequacy has long been under the white academic microscope and the discourse of #blackprofessor did not adequately free itself from, or depart from, that. On the contrary, it elicited and encouraged explanations that placed the emphasis on black lack of required desire, black lack of required cultural capital, and black lack of required intellectual capital. “Lack of black” was explained as “black lack."

• third, the colonial white power structure, as Kwame Turé/Stokley Carmichael and Charles V Hamilton argued, on the one hand, tends to welcome individualising analyses of racism, whilst, on the other, tends to shut down analyses that are institutional. Individual is to Professor as Institutional is to Curriculum.

Most of all, I think the problem with the framing of these two social movements is that their demand could be satisfied merely by getting (some or more of) us inside The Master’s House. Our ultimate goal should not be to get inside The Master’s House—still less should our ultimate goal be to occupy a turret of that house, to lock ourselves aloft and aloof from our communities of origin, like some Black Rapunzel. Our goal should be to Dismantle it.

 

2 Dismantling His House: Why Is My Curriculum White? & Rhodes Must Fall (in Oxford) 

This was a shift from faces to voices.

From demanding Black faces in high places, to exhuming voices from hidden histories.

We had exposed the who of the Curriculum: who, in it, produces and teaches knowledge. This is not just the professors, but the students, the tutors, and the epistemic authorities on the programme—all of whom are predominantly

•    Anglican

•    Anglophone

•    Enabled by society

•    Wealthy

•    Gender-conforming men

•    Racialised as white.

But that's just one aspect of the curriculum.

At UCL, we further exposed the what and the how of the curriculum: what gets to be produced and taught as knowledge and how that teaching and learning is conducted and assessed. This is both the choice of topics, resources, examples, or case studies, and the teaching methods and learning activities.

At Oxford, we took this to another level by exposing the where of the curriculum: the campus environment in which this activity of producing, teaching, and learning knowledge is expected to take place. This is the rooms and buildings, the signs and statues, and the local area, taking into consideration the accessibility of these spaces, both physically and socially.

At each institution, I harnessed the fact that I was employed by the institution and had somewhat more access to institutional resources to make these resources available to activists among the students and in our communities.

I conceived the question "Why Is My Curriculum White?" in summer 2014 as a correlative, as a corrective, as an antidote, to the question I thought such a false friend, yet keeping the twist on the idea that the consumer is king. With cash from UCL, I tasked a group of student activists, who had emerged during the previous campaign, with designing a video to explain and answer this new question.

That video went viral.

However, whereas the video was deeply decolonial, many of the responses to it have not been! The new question has been approached as if the answer were not obvious. Your curriculum is white because it is the product of colonialism. Yet we still see efforts to “diversify” the curriculum and plug a Black gap in attainment. We need, as Kavita Bhanot has argued, in "Media Diversified,” to "Decolonise, Not Diversify." And this gap is not a gap in attainment, but a gap in belonging—who gets to belong in colonial space.

I drew upon the lessons I had been learning, outside and alongside the university, in co-productive conversations in communities of practice in Brixton and in Tottenham, and I convened a meeting of student activists in Oxford, in May 2015, where I argued that, given our location, we have a special responsibility for stoking from the metropolitan centre the flames of revolution at the colonial periphery.

The statue of Cecil Rhodes had just fallen, or rather, been dismantled, at the University of Cape Town. This had inaugurated a wider conversation about the who, the what, the how, and the where of the colonial curriculum. There was a statue of Rhodes in Oxford. Yet, there was no wider conversation about the colonial curriculum. We had an opportunity to amplify the voices of our siblings in South Africa by bringing their struggle—our struggle—into the belly of the beast.

During that academic year, I navigated several opportunistic infections, some of which required surgeries. In 2016, having survived four, month-long pneumonias, I was diagnosed with AIDS. My time since has primarily been spent convalescing from illness and adapting to disablement, which I was required to do, by, yet again, returning home. Why did Birmingham, a place, a shit-hole, the arse-end of nowhere, from which I had run all my life, keep pulling me back home?

Burning Out: Resisting Resilience and Self-Care Narratives (guest post)

 

Burning Out: Resisting Resilience and Self-Care Narratives

 

Guest Post

 

by 

Suze Berkhout, M.D., Ph.D.*

 

As a psychiatry resident, the recent CBC and Toronto Star headlines proclaiming high rates of burnout, depression, and suicidal ideation in the Canadian medical profession came as no surprise to me. Even less surprising was the finding that these numbers were vastly higher amongst medical residents in Canada. Increasing demands and expectations, overloaded schedules, decreasing ability to make effective changes within the Canadian medical system, and conflicting values—humanistic approaches versus cost containment, for instance—are rampant. In addition, larger workplace cultures frequently value competitiveness, perfectionism, and certainty over admission and acknowledgement of flaws, limitations, and doubt. For residents and medical students, add in debt, a pervasive hierarchy, and even less control, and you’ve got a perfect storm.

Burnout—the combination of physical and emotional exhaustion, feelings of ineffectiveness or lack of accomplishment, and experiences of cynicism and detachment—are surely a logical conclusion to these structures and environments, not a personal tragedy.

This critical state of affairs is not just an issue for physicians, or even health professions more generally. Academia is rife with these same structures and their consequences. Not surprisingly, burnout is increasingly an issue discussed in higher education. And the impacts of structural inequities on women academics, academics who are members of racialized and other minority groups, and disabled academics are profound. We are the ones least likely to be on a tenure track and more frequently in precarious forms of employment; we are the ones most often tasked with unrecognized and unremunerated emotional labour; we are more likely to face biases in the practices of peer review, impacting publication opportunities, grant acquisition, and promotions. Yet our assertions around issues of equity and justice are more likely to be met with scepticism at best, hostility and retribution at worst.

The testimonial and hermeneutical injustices faced by individuals “othered” along various intersectional identities must also be understood as part of the burnout picture. Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker is deemed to lack credibility due to prejudicial beliefs by the listener—typically these beliefs relate to some aspect of the speaker’s cognition, formed in a way that is resistant to counter-evidence; moreover, these prejudicial beliefs reference sociohistorically extended patterns of oppression beyond a given interaction (Wanderer 2017). Hermeneutical injustice is the systematic constraining or undermining of communicators’ intelligibility which leads certain groups to be at a disadvantage with respect to making sense of their social experience. Injustices of these types radically curtail one’s voice, one’s interpretive capacities, and one’s ability to participate in meaning-making (Medina 2017). The wrongs relating to these forms of injustice are numerous, not the least of which is the way in which they maintain asymmetric and problematic relations of power.

The exhaustion, ineffectiveness, and detachment that signify burnout are surely linked, at least for members of certain groups, to the processes of epistemic subordination and exclusion, as well as a diminished ability to make sense of the position in which one finds oneself. Yet, if one were to look at the popular literature around the subject of burnout (here and here, for instance), it would seem that a combination of time management, gratitude journals, and yoga are all that it takes to combat the pervasive sense of helplessness and ineffectiveness that comes with the burnout territory. Emphasis in the literature has also been placed on how individuals make choices related to their professional life, including whether these choices align with their skills, temperament, and values. Even if these recommendations and other information are (to some degree) helpful, they individualize and privatize what is clearly an issue with deep structural and historical roots. They do nothing to contend with either structural inequalities or the forms of epistemic injustice described above.

Will improving your vinyasa fundamentally shift the relations of power that limit the agency of certain groups, systemically suppress their epistemic standpoint, and discount their assertions? I like endorphins as much as the next person, but surely scheduling in more self-care isn’t the answer. Or, it is an answer, but one that leaves unchallenged larger forces that underpin burnout. Individualizing and privatizing solutions to burnout displaces the responsibility for its “cure” onto the very people who have limited access to the mechanisms and privileges that enable systemic change, while absolving the very people who benefit from current structures of accountability.

Happily, I’m not the first person to notice this. In a recent Doximity blog post, Dr. Pooja Lakshmin also raises ire with the resilience refrain that has become so popular in medical culture, pointedly articulating that resilience and (what she rightly terms) “faux self-care” puts the burden of change on the individual while exonerating the system. I only worry that Dr. Lakshmin’s discussion of setting work-related boundaries—knowing your own limits, tolerating others’ disappointment that you are not placing their needs first, and not internalizing these as moral failings—is a strategy primarily available to people whose labour is both well-remunerated and falls outside the scope of precarity. One needs to have attained a certain level of social capital in one’s work to be able to avoid the negative repercussions that often accompany not being seen as a “team” player. Sessional and contract workers in academia, as well as early-career individuals (particularly women and members of racialized groups) don’t often have the luxury of turning down tasks that are presented to them as “opportunities,” either because of financial need or because of the optics and biases that come with pushing back.

Reviewing the Reviewer

 

My book, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), was published on November 22 of last year. Yet the book has not been reviewed in The Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPR). Nor has Jennifer Scuro’s book, Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions Via Disability Studies (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), been reviewed in NDPR, despite the fact that it was published in October of last year. Nor, furthermore, has Melinda Hall’s book, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), published in November of 2016, been reviewed in NDPR.

As one of the most prominent online publishing venues in philosophy, NDPR does not, it seems, feel compelled to solicit reviews of books that are authored by disabled philosophers or that address philosophy of disability. Indeed, NDPR seems to do an inadequate job of publishing timely reviews of books by members of underrepresented groups in philosophy, of soliciting reviews from members of underrepresented groups in philosophy, and of soliciting reviews on books that consider marginalized areas of philosophy.

Although neither my book, nor Jen’s book, nor Melinda’s book has (yet?) been reviewed in NDPR, over the course of the summer I began to see NDPR reviews online of books by male colleagues that were published only a few months ago.

So, I decided to take a quick look at whose books are reviewed in NDPR, who acts as a reviewer for NDPR, which publishers’ books get reviewed in NDPR, and what areas of philosophy the books that are reviewed in NDPR cover.

A quick look at NDPR reviews for the past 2 months suggests that roughly 3 times more books authored by men are reviewed in this prominent online publication than are books authored by women. In addition, roughly 3.5 times more male philosophers act as reviewers of books for NDPR than do women philosophers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, furthermore, a preponderance of the books reviewed in NDPR in the last 2 months were published by either Oxford University Press or Cambridge University Press.

Yesterday, I posted the results of this quick review of NDPR on my Facebook page and in the blog’s Facebook group, indicating that I intend to do a more careful and systematic examination of the NDPR in the coming weeks, an examination that scrutinizes whose books get reviewed in NDPR, who serve as reviewers for NDPR, which areas of the field NDPR reviews tend to cover, and how long it takes for some books to be reviewed in NDPR.

I will report the results of this study on the blog in due course.

 

posted by Shelley

Is Jason Stanley a Foucaultian?

 

Jason Stanley is well known in philosophy for his work in analytic philosophy of language and epistemology. In recent years, Stanley has migrated to more politicized practice of philosophy, producing books on propaganda and fascism, books that have gained popularity and readership across the academy, in the popular press, in leftist and mainstream media, on the progressive conference circuit, and so on.

I have not read Stanley’s (2018) book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. (I requested a review copy from Random House Press in order to write a review of the book for the blog; however, Random House ignored my request.) Nevertheless, I have read a number of Stanley’s recent op-eds and articles that draw on the content of the book, in addition to watching various online interviews with Stanley in which he discusses the motivation for the book, outlines the main arguments of the book, including what he calls the “ten pillars of fascism,” explains how claims in the book relate to the present situation across the world, the Trump phenomenon, and so on. Thus, I thought that I had a good general picture of the book, even if I lacked a more certain familiarity with the particular brushstrokes that it comprises.

Then I watched Stanley’s recent interview on Democracy Now in which he talked about the normalization of fascism. The NORMALIZATION of fascism. That had to be a first. I’m certain that I had neither read nor heard Stanley refer to the encroachment of fascism in that decidedly FOUCAULTIAN way. Yet I have noticed that in all the op-eds, reviews, or videos that I have read or seen since the Democracy Now interview, Stanley refers to “normalizing fascism” or “the normalization of fascism.”

Has Jason Stanley become a Foucaultian? I needed to find out.

So, I went to the Amazon.ca website and typed “How Fascism Works” into the search window. When I reached the book’s page, I clicked on the Search Inside option and typed in “normalization.” Sure enough, I was taken to p. 188 of the book where Stanley, in response to possible objections to his arguments, introduces the idea that the threat of the normalization of fascist myths is real, not far-fetched, as some might claim. He then cites a 2017 article by Adam Bear and Joshua Knobe to support his claim that “normal” is not always a benign designation. As Stanley puts it, “both history and psychology show that our judgments about normality can’t always be trusted” (emphasis in Stanley).

Although I want to note that Stanley’s remarks in this context suggest that he thinks there exists some prediscursive domain of normality (in the mythic past?) that could be instantiated and accurately represented, I am more concerned to underscore the significant influence of Foucault in Stanley and in this general discussion of the normalization of fascism.

Knobe has of course been inspired by Foucault, as well as by Ian Hacking (see Knobe 2017), who himself acknowledges how Foucault shaped his thinking. Indeed, in the course of an argument about the relation between the constitutive effects of language and human action that I advance in the second chapter of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, I (2017, 121) briefly discuss Knobe’s work on the relation between ideas about normality and human conduct, that is, on how understandings of what counts as normal can constrain the possibilities of action that people believe are open to them. The second chapter of my book is in fact entitled “Power and Normalization”.

CFP; Ableism in the Academy: A Series About Disability Oppression and Resistance in Higher Education (deadline: Dec. 10, 2018)

 

Special Series

Call for Manuscripts

Critical Education

 

Ableism in the Academy: A Series about Disability Oppression and Resistance in Higher Education

 

Editors:

Steve Singer, The College of New Jersey
Jessica Bacon, Montclair State University

 

An early expression of interest and a 250-500 word abstract December 10, 2018. Please address correspondence to [email protected] and [email protected] including "Critical Education" in the subject line.

 

Manuscripts due dates: Due to the nature of a special series, we will be accepting and reviewing manuscripts on a rolling basis until April 10, 2019 with the potential of extending the CFP.

 

Ableism is a pervasive problem in the academy despite the protections put in place by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, theoretically guaranteeing disabled students access to educational experiences free from access barriers or discrimination. Generally, ableism is defined as the persistent devaluing of disability, or the belief that disability is an inherently negative state of existence and able-bodiedness is a preferred way of being (Campbell, 2009). The academy and all its parts (e.g. faculty, administration, student body, and staff) often view disabled people as burdens and not as scholars (See Dolmage, 2017; Kimball and colleagues, 2016). Unsurprisingly, there is scant scholarship that focuses of ableism in graduate degree programs, because disabled students are not offered admission to these programs, or there is a high attrition rate for this population. Only 5% of disabled students earn advanced degrees, which is roughly one-third of their able-bodied counterparts (Ryan & Bauman, 2016).

This special series examines all levels of ableism in the academy, with a special focus on graduate degree programs and structures in higher education that marginalize disabled students or limit the access to graduate degree programs. These levels of ableism include: cultural, institutional, interactional, and personal strata.

Ableism manifests in four ways: overt, covert, aversive, and laissez-faire (Keller & Galgay, 2010). Overt ableism is easily recognizable and generally accepted or goes without notice because of its ubiquity. Covert ableism describes ableism which is hidden intentionally or unintentionally or is that which is rationalized. Aversive ableism describes ambivalence, reductiveness, avoidance, or a general denial of ableism. Finally, laissez-faire ableism describes a notion that any disparities between disabled people and able-bodied people or extant barriers are the result of disabled people’s own actions.

We welcome a wide range of methodological, empirical, theoretical, and narrative manuscripts for this issue. We particularly encourage scholarship which prioritizes the voices, contributions, values, and needs of disabled people. Additionally, we are interested in intersectional analyses of the experience of ableism alongside other marginalized groups who additionally confront, for instance racism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, etc. The series is also open to stories of activism or resistance against ableist practice in higher education.

We invite the submission of shorter, personal narratives to further contextualize and partner with empirical or theoretical manuscripts. These narratives will be reviewed based on their relevance and contribution to the series theme, and we are open to a range of styles of writing. The four expressions and four levels of ableism described above should be used as a guide for potential foci of submitted manuscripts, though papers need not explicitly name these.

Potential topics of study of ableism in higher education and graduate degree programs at cultural and institutional levels could include but are not limited to the following topics: Admissions processes, evidencing competency, policies, facilities, administration and faculty acting as agents of the institution, degree requirements, “tradition” and “rigor,” performance, assessments, coursework, campus climate (e.g. pity, pathology), status quo, campus organizations/support, intersectional oppression, reinforcement of ableist norms, inadequate disabled population/peerage, academic or social resources, or accommodations.

Potential topics of study of ableism in higher education and graduate degree programs at interactional or personal levels in graduate degree programs, could include but are not limited to the following topics: Attitudes or actions of faculty or staff, attitudes or actions of peers, socialization/campus involvement, observed and inferred ableism by individuals, personal beliefs about disability, learned behaviors, internalized oppression, intersectional oppression, disability identity formation or change, advocacy, or activism.

 

Word limits:

1. Methodological, empirical, and theoretical papers should be between 4,000 and 8,000 words in length.
2. Personal narratives should not exceed 1,750 words.

For details on manuscript submission see: CE Information for Authors

 

References

Campbell, F. K. (2009). Contours of ableism. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dolmage, J. (2017). Academic ableism. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Kimball, E., Moore, A., Vaccaro, A., Troiano, P., & Newman, B. (2016). College Students with Disabilities Redefine Activism: Self-Advocacy, Storytelling, and Collective Action. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 9(3), 245-260.

Keller,  R.  M.,  and  Galgay,  C.  E.  (2010).  Microaggressive  experiences  of  people  with  disabili-ties. Microaggressions and marginality: Manifestation, dynamics, and impact, 241-268.

Ryan, C. L., & Bauman, K. (2016). U.S. Census: Educational attainment in the United States: 2015. Retrieved from https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/83682/EducationalAttainment2015US.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

 

posted by Shelley