Discrimination and Disadvantage

Draft Introduction to Microaggressions and the Apparatus of Disability

 

Friends of the blog might be interested in listening to/reading the introduction to a draft chapter that I have written on disability and microaggressions. The chapter is forthcoming in a Routledge collection on microaggressions and philosophy. 

 

Microaggressions and the Apparatus of Disability

 

by

Shelley Tremain

 

Introduction

Any given position on microaggressions relies upon certain assumptions about power, including assumptions about what power is, the scope of it, and how it operates. Indeed, presuppositions about power condition any given understanding of the epistemological and ontological status of microaggressions, that is, condition understandings about what microaggressions are, how they can be identified, how inquiry into them should proceed, and the nature of their relation to other more encompassing forms of power. Insofar as philosophical investigations into microaggressions involve these sorts of analyses of power, such inquiries run counter to the theoretical endeavors and dominant self-representations of the tradition of Western European philosophy, a philosophical tradition that continues to function largely under the guise of objectivity, disinterested rationality, and neutrality. Philosophers who aim to challenge the allegedly objective, disinterested, and value-neutral character of (Eurocentric) philosophy take relations of power as the very starting point of inquiry, investigating the ways that power relations have contributed to the constitution of Western European philosophy, that is, have contributed to the constitution of the questions posed within this tradition of philosophy, by whom they have been posed and how, as well as whose responses to the questions posed are seriously entertained and why (see Mills 1997; Harding 2015; Whyte 2016; Dotson 2012; Haslanger 2012; Tremain 2015, 2019).

Critical inquiry with respect to disability has made significant inroads into every discipline of the humanities and social sciences except philosophy, where such inquiry remains severely marginalized, a state of affairs that should be attributed to a complicated set of interrelated factors, including the historical composition and demographics of professional philosophy itself; the narrowing concentration of the prevailing subject matter and techniques of philosophy; the increasingly close association between philosophy and the sciences; and the otherwise limited theoretical, discursive, and political focus of much philosophy. The assumption that disability is most appropriately and adequately addressed in the domains of medicine, the life sciences, and related fields has shaped philosophy departments, influencing hiring practices and decisions, as well as course curricula, conference lineups, involvement in professional networks, membership on editorial boards, the contents of edited collections, and so on (see Tremain, 2017; also see Tremain, 2013, 2014, 2015). Thus, the assumption that disability is a philosophically uninteresting human characteristic and the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers and continued marginalization of philosophy of disability are mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing, entangled and entwined.

The aforementioned institutional and structural mechanisms and material effects reproduce and are made possible by the microaggressions and other forms of injustice that disabled philosophers confront in philosophy, marginalizing them within it or excluding them from it entirely. Nevertheless, the distinct mechanisms and techniques that variously produce the exclusion of disabled philosophers (however gendered and racialized) from the profession continue to be largely ignored in discussions about the demographics of the profession, factors such as the segregating conceptual and built environments—including inaccessible conferences, classrooms, lectures, course materials, and workshops—in which the very practice of philosophy takes place, as well as research agendas, arguments, instruments, databases, and influences that revolve around an array of notions that operate to subjugate disabled people, including “normality,” “quality of life,” “well-being,” “natural disadvantage,” “suffering,” "disorder," “death with dignity,” “compensation,” “defect,” “cure,” “pathology,” and “risk.” Insofar as claims according to which disabled people are (for example) “abnormal,” “defective,” “worse off,” “permanently dependent,” and “losers in the natural lottery” continue to be both articulated and taken seriously as candidates for theoretical endorsement within a variety of subfields of philosophy, it is unsurprising that disabled people are not regarded as viable colleagues in the profession, nor considered worthy of the role of “professional philosopher,” as the low representation of disabled philosophers in the profession vividly demonstrates (see Tremain 2017, 2014). To put it directly, much of the very subject matter of philosophy is incompatible with efforts to increase the representation of disabled people in the profession. A philosopher of disability who examines the production of microaggressions in philosophy must take account of this state of affairs.

Not Really Just Words

 

“The community of philosophers, including feminist philosophers, needs to take responsibility for the ableism of philosophical practice.”

 

Over the course of the past weekend, a discussion about ableist language took place on my Facebook page. In the original post on which the discussion ensued, I indicated that I have felt increasingly compelled to respond somehow to the ableism that a number of nondisabled philosophers are producing in their work, especially given that some of this work gets a lot of attention from other (non-mainstream) philosophers, is taught to students, and has to some extent set parameters of discussion about diversity in certain venues.

During the past week in particular, as I explained in the Facebook post, I have wrestled with myself about the appropriate mode in which to broach the matter: Should I write a blog post on the subject? Should I put a post about the situation on Facebook? Should I write a journal article about it? Should I try (again) to contact some of the philosophers in question by email?

Several disabled and nondisabled philosophers on my Facebook page took part in the discussion, though I think that, algorithms notwithstanding, many philosophers (and others) on my Facebook page read the discussion as it unfolded. A few nondisabled philosophers encouraged me to write a blog post that provides specific details about ableist language, what it is, its constitutive effects, and so on.

In one comment on the post, Ray Aldred, a disabled philosopher and contributor to Discrimination and Disadvantage, underscored that ableism is ubiquitous in philosophy and that disabled philosophers who aim to resist and undermine it must choose when and where to put their efforts, with the knowledge that most of their attempts to counter ableism and educate other philosophers about how it is reproduced, the forms that it takes, and what can be done to counter it will generally meet resistance of another kind, resistance of an unflinching kind, a resolute, unapologetic, and unaccountable resistance.

Jen Scuro suggested that I take Sara Ahmed’s remarks about “complaint” as a springboard from which to approach the matter, drawing out the burdens that accrue to the complainant in situations in which asymmetrical relations crystallize and have been contested, as well as how distinct institutional and systemic mechanisms reconfigure challenges to accepted practices as complaints, that is, as complaints of a certain kind, namely, as shrill, as idiosyncratic, as illegitimate, negligible.

In another comment on the post, Sally Haslanger offered to contact the philosophers whose work concerned me, to “call in” to these philosophers, to broach the subject with them, pointing out that often the message of allies can be received less defensively than protestations from an aggrieved party.

I considered the comments by Ray, Jen, and Sally, as well as other engaged comments made on the post and additional options suggested in messages sent privately. At the end of the day, however, I felt compelled to write this blog post because I believe that the production of particular instances of ableism in philosophy should be understood as I identify them in the sentence at the top of this post (which, incidentally, ended one of my Facebook comments), namely, as outcomes of the ableism of the wider philosophical community, something for which the community at large should be accountable in some way. For community-wide or, if you prefer, profession-wide, mechanisms that the apparatus of disability has produced and continues to reproduce are constitutive of the violence of ableism and ableist language in philosophy.

Despite the activism and writing about ableist language in philosophy (and ableism in philosophy more generally) that I have done over the course of many years (and that philosophers of disability such as Jen and Melinda Hall do now), two of the philosophers whose work troubles me use very explicit forms of ableist language in very public forums.

How is this (re)production of ableist language possible? Or to put it more directly, how has the philosophical community made possible these very public productions of ableist language?

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

Citation Practices: More About Power Than You Think They Are

 

The number of citations that a philosopher's work gets is taken into account in the hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions of many philosophy departments. In addition, repeated citation of a given article can establish a new direction in the discipline, a new style of doing philosophy, or some other novel trend in philosophy. Furthermore, frequent citation of a certain philosopher’s work can elevate the professional status of the given philosopher and the area of study in which the philosopher works. In other words, the citation practices in which individual philosophers engage can, and usually do, have cumulative effects. To put it another way, citation practices on the micro-level produce systemic and profession-wide effects, many of which have significant and lasting consequences.

Some of the most significant and enduring systemic effects of citation practices comprise the reproduction, in various forms, of the status quo in philosophy with respect to the exclusion or marginalization of some philosophers, including disabled philosophers, and the exclusion or marginalization of certain areas of inquiry in philosophy, including philosophy of disability. Thus, marginalized philosophers and privileged philosophers who aim to eliminate the current asymmetries in the profession increasingly scrutinize citation practices in the profession: Who gets cited? Where do they get cited? By whom do they cited? Who hasn’t been cited? Which body of work has been obscured, ignored, and disregarded?

In short, a growing number of philosophers have become cognizant of the political character of citation practices, asking, among other questions, whether philosophers who have engaged in sexual misconduct, or make racist and antisemitic claims, or endorse policies that violate the civil rights of LGBTQ people, should be promoted through the citation and use of their work.

To date, most of the inquiries into citation practices have been concerned with the gendered nature of current citation practices in philosophy, demonstrating  the ways in which epistemic authority and professional recognition more often accrue to (white) male philosophers than to women philosophers and how the conferral of this epistemic authority and esteem affects hiring and promotion practices, reproduces biases in the profession, and even ultimately encourages women to leave the profession.

Although these critical inquiries into citation practices have helped to throw into relief the irreducibly political character of epistemic authority and esteem in philosophy, I want to argue nevertheless that critical inquiries about citation practices need to go beyond their current focus on who gets cited, how often they get cited, and in what venues, in order to examine how citation takes place, how it is done, and why a certain philosopher gets cited. For I maintain that even seemingly ameliorative citations can reinstate asymmetrical relations of power if they are done in careless or inappropriate ways.

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.

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.

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

Philosophy and Decolonization in South Africa

 

In an earlier post, I drew attention to conflicts within the Philosophy Society of South Africa (PSSA) that have arisen due to efforts on the part of philosophy students and faculty in South Africa to decolonize philosophy curricula and increase the number of black faculty and students in philosophy departments, as well as to improve leadership representation within the PSSA itself.

In the Discrimination and Disadvantage Facebook group today, Daniel Brunson posted an article from Quartz that provides updated, more comprehensive, information about the struggles within philosophy in South Africa. Entitled "Philosophy is the New Battleground in South Africa's Fight Against Colonialism," the article by Olivia Goldhill focuses in particular on Tony Shabangu, a black lecturer and Ph.D. student in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg, and David Benatar, a white professor and the chair of philosophy at the University of Cape Town, the latter of which has, in many respects, been at the centre of these uprisings.

Here is an excerpt from the Quartz article: