Discrimination and Disadvantage

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.

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

 

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

 

What Are Accessibility Statements For and What Do They Do?

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Stephen Yablo

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

Tommy Curry Wins American Book Award

 

Many congratulations to Tommy Curry who is the recipient of a 2018 American Book Award for The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press, 2017). Here is the press release for the awards, with full list of award recipients (including Sunaura Taylor!). 

 

August 13, 2018
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contact: Justin Desmangles, 916-425-7916

The Before Columbus Foundation announces the
Winners of the Thirty-Ninth Annual
AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS
Ceremonies, October 28, 2018, 12:00–2:30 p.m.

Oakland, CA—The Before Columbus Foundation announces the Winners of the Thirty-Ninth Annual AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS. The 2018 American Book Award winners will be formally recognized on Sunday, October 28, from 12:00-2:30 p.m. at the SF Jazz Center, Joe Henderson Lab, 201 Franklin Street (at Fell), San Francisco, CA. This event is open to the public. The American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to recognize literary excellence without limitations or restrictions. There are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers. The award winners range from well-known and established writers to under-recognized authors and first works. There are no quotas for diversity, the winners list simply reflects it as a natural process. The Before Columbus Foundation views American culture as inclusive and has always considered the term “multicultural” to be not a description of various categories, groups, or “special interests,” but rather as the definition of all of American literature. The Awards are not bestowed by an industry organization, but rather are a writers’ award given by other writers. 

 

The 2018 American Book Award Winners are:

Thi Bui, The Best That We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (Harry N. Abrams)

Rachelle Cruz, God’s Will for Monsters (Inlandia Books)

Tommy Curry, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press) 

Tongo Eisen-Martin, Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights)

Dana Naone Hall, Life of the Land: Articulations of a Native Writer (University of Hawaii)

Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 (University of North Carolina)

Victor Lavalle, The Changeling: A Novel (Spiegel & Grau)

Bojan Louis, Currents (BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City)

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House)

Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson and B. V. Olguín, Altermundos Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press)

Tiya Miles, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (The New Press)

Tommy Pico, Nature Poem (Tin House Books)

Rena Priest, Patriarchy Blues (MoonPath Press)

Joseph Rios, Shadowboxing: poems & impersonations (Omnidawn)

Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press)

Lifetime Achievement
Sequoyah Guess

Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award
Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Duke University)

Editor/Publisher Award
Charles F. Harris

Anti-Censorship Award
Rob Rogers

Oral Literature Award
Heroes Are Gang Leaders

 

posted by Shelley

CFP: Connecting the Struggles (Canisius College, Buffalo, Sept. 21-23, 2018; deadline: Aug. 30, 2018)

 

Connecting the Struggles: 

Call for Presentations for the Prison Abolition

Western New York Conference

 

We invite you to join us for the first-ever Prison Abolition Western New York (PAWNY) Conference. The conference will be a regional gathering of people working on issues related to prison abolition and mass incarceration. Our theme is “Connecting the Struggles.” As our theme suggests, the conference will be an opportunity for individuals and organizations to meet up and develop ideas and strategies to build a world beyond prisons.

The conference will bring together activists, organizers, academics, and members of the public who are working on issues related to prison abolition to discuss how we may connect our struggles and develop strategy to create a world beyond prisons. We also hope to highlight the voices of those who are at the frontlines of the struggle against the many facets of the carceral states in which we live and die today, for our lives are built upon the resistance of our ancestors and are haunted by the unchanging root sources of colonial power: the militarized occupation of stolen lands and the racialized labor that was forced to work them. Contributions may take the form of workshops, presentation, or artworks and performances.

We strongly encourage contributions from artists, particularly those currently or formerly imprisoned and those whose lives have been affected by the carceral state, and artwork that expresses experiences of and interactions with the penal system and its effects. We encourage artists to use any medium of their choosing - visual arts, applied design, music, performance, poetry or any form of writing, and more. There will be a gallery show and performance space is available for theater, dance, or other kinds of performance.

 

Possible topics for presentation include:

Abolition vs. Reform
The School-to-Prison Pipeline
ICE and Immigration
Jails and Bail
Disability and Mental Health
Gender and Sexuality
The Prison-Industrial Complex
Solitary Confinement
Parole
Political Prisoners
Restorative and Transformative Justice
Indigenous Peoples and Incarceration
Abolition Lawyering
Policing
Incarceration and Intersectionality

 

CFP: Answering the Call: Philosophies Born of Struggle in the Twenty-First Century (Hamilton College, Nov. 2-3, 2018; deadline: Aug. 18, 2018)

 

Philosophy Born of Struggle XXIV

2018 Call for Papers

Answering the Call:

Philosophies Born of Struggle in the Twenty-First Century

November 2–3, 2018

Hamilton College, Clinton, New York

 

Keynote Speaker:

Charles W. Mills

Distinguished Professor of Philosophy

The Graduate Center, CUNY

 

Philosophy Born of Struggle asks for papers or panel proposals that address what it means for a philosophy to be a “philosophy born of struggle” in the twenty-first century.

We welcome submissions inspired by the conference theme. We especially welcome submissions on one or more of the following topics:

• The way or ways that philosophy can be in service of social movements.
• The meaning of struggle in our present social, political, cultural, and economic context.
• The role that philosophy can play in the development of effective transnational communication methods for people engaging in struggles in different parts of the world.
• The role that struggles play in the formation and maintenance of communities.
• The resources that theories constructed by Africana thinkers can provide to scholars and activists as they confront present-day ethno-nationalism throughout the globe, particularly in the Americas and in Africa.

In the spirit of answering the call, we welcome anyone who would like to participate in a planning session on November 3rd to help us chart the future of Philosophy Born of Struggle. 

The Philosophy Born of Struggle (PBS) conference was first organized in 1993 by J. Everet Green at Rockland Community College, and officially took on the name Philosophy Born of Struggle several years later to continue the study and traditions announced by Leonard Harris’s anthology Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy from 1917. Every year PBS enjoys being hosted by universities, colleges, and community colleges throughout the country. For over two decades, PBS has remained a traveling conference dedicated to bringing Africana philosophy to various communities, be they academic or not, in the United States. Over the last several years, PBS has sought to be a home to voices that hear and speak to new, historically excluded, immigrant, déclassé, discriminated against, gendered and non-gender conforming philosophers.

CFP: Black Male Studies

 

Temple University Press seeks book proposals for

 

Black Male Studies

A Series Exploring the Paradoxes of Racially Subjugated Males

 

TOMMY J. CURRY, editor,
Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at Texas A&M

 

Black male studies is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to exploring the various developmental trajectories and the vulnerabilities (racial, sexual, economic) of Black men and boys in the United States and abroad. Building from established post-intersectional frameworks (e.g. social dominance theory, global South masculinities), this series looks to fill the gaps in the existing masculinities literatures that often assign the peculiar sexual violence and particular lethal oppression racially subjugated men have suffered throughout history to our more generic understanding of racism. Books published in this series would strive to create empirically informed theories of Black men and boys that can motivate our understanding of Black males beyond problem and pathology. Black Male Studies also welcomes innovative comparative and international projects drawing parallels between Black males and the experiences of other racialized males affected by deportation, genocide, poverty, and regional conflict and war.

Submissions to the series are welcome.

Contact: Tommy Curry, Series Editor ([email protected])

or Temple University Press ([email protected])

 

posted by Shelley

Emancipation and Debt (May 27, 2018)

 

 

Emancipation and Debt

 

by 

 

Isabell Lorey

 

Presented in the session "Power and Domination,"

Emancipation Conference,

Technical University Berlin, May 27, 2018  

 

1. In the modern age, emancipation means the liberation from relations of power and domination and hence from dependencies. The task is to become a free subject independent from others that is capable of governing itself. This bourgeois idea of emancipation is—not only Foucault made this clear with his theory of governmentality—the basis of a masculinist form of liberal-capitalistic and democratic governing since the 18^th century. The free subject governs itself in a way that simultaneously makes it governable in the frame of biopolitical governmentality. This free subject is male, owns property and is white. Emancipation means in this instance to become a subject within the scope of this norm.

Proceeding from movements and struggles of the 1960s and 70s, Foucault explicates in his text “The subject and power” that what we have to liberate ourselves from is exactly this form of emancipation. A current practice of liberation needs “a critical analysis of our world,”[i] a critical analysis of the present, according to Foucault. As is known, he is not concerned with emancipation from all power relations–—as if this were possible. A critical analysis of the present means to understand, in which relations of power and domination, who can become a subject, who may not, and how we are bound, in both cases, to an allegedly own original “identity,” which either ties us together in groups and discriminates us and/or individualizes and separates us, and makes us (self-)governable. An emancipation from such identity politics does not lie “at a future date,” not in the promise of “liberations, revolutions, end of class struggle”[ii]. Instead, we need “to refuse what we are” and what we are now forced to be, in the present. According to Foucault, we have “to liberate us both from the state and the type of individualization which is linked to the state,”[iii] and search for new forms of subjectivation.

2. In the etymology of the Latin word emancipatio, emancipation cannot be separated from patriarchal domination of ownership. Mancipatio means­­­—by the laying on of the hand (manus)—to take a thing in one’s possession. In Roman antiquity, those who did not have any, or no entire, law of a person were also treated as thing—first and foremost slaves. E-mancipatio then meant the liberation from the domination of ownership. In the strict sense of the law, emancipatio means various things: to release the son from patriarchal power into independence, to release the daughter into the hands of another man or to liberate a slave from the ownership of his master. The pater familias hands over his former property. The dominating subject is the one who releases and liberates.

3. In 1968, the mythical year of the student movement, and at the end of the decade of independence of most African states from colonial domination, in this year of 1968, Stokely Carmichael made clear at the likewise legendary London “Dialectic of Liberation Congress” that, even in the second half of the 20^th century, a white practice of domination is often hidden within emancipation. Carmichael, who later became a central figure of the Black Panthers, was chairman of one of the most important Civil Rights Movements in 1968, the SNCC, and author of the book “Black Power.”[iv] In London he said: „I’m amazed when I pick up the paper and read that ‘England today decided to give independence to the West Indies.’ Who the hell is England to give me my independence? All they can do is stop oppressing me, get off my back. [...] So that you cannot grant anybody independence, they just take it. And that is what white America is going to learn. They cannot give us anything. No white liberal can give me anything. The only thing a white liberal can do for me is to help civilize other whites, because they need to be civilized.“[v]

Independence is not a gift, not a mercy of the (white) West. Those who enslave cannot bestow independence. But they can stop to oppress, to dominate and to enslave, and can contribute to “civilizing” other white people. The ruling must emancipate themselves. They have to reject to become a superior subject and therewith becoming an autonomous and sovereign subject. 

4. Emancipation is a promise for a future liberation. Instead of being a practice in the here and now, a matter of breaches in the linear construction of time, it belongs to the time of the victors, the time of the ruling, the time of domination over ecology, over the “surround”[vi]. Progress and growth are grounded in increasing inequalities and economies of superiority and in the wealth of a few. “Progress for whom?”[vii], asks Carmichael in 1968. „We will have to tell you when progress is being made. You cannot tell us when progress is being made, because progress for us means getting you off our backs [...].“[viii]

5. Saidiya Hartman has reminded us that the freedom given from whites counted as a kind of present to the enslaved, as a gift for which they had to prove themselves thankful and worthy, and which put them in debt and made them guilty. This gift of debt binds the “freed persons” to the past with an inverse responsibility and lends duration to the debt up to the present day: for in the logic of debt only the indebted individual is responsible for the doings of the past.[ix] This displacement of responsibility onto the individualized debt of the freed erases history, the history of slavery. Enduring black debt serves the linear historiography of the white victors.[x] Even long after the end of slavery the debt relation inscribes itself onto an enduring, indebted servitude-at-work in the context of freedom, individualization, and self responsibility, through which, in the logic of debt, black emancipation remains bound in an asymmetric relation to the white “benefactors,” Hartman argues in the chapter “The Debt of Emancipation” in Scenes of Subjection.

Neoliberalism, Bioethics, and the Apparatus of Disability in a German Context (May 27, 2018)

 

Neoliberalism, Bioethics, and the Apparatus of Disability

in a German Context

 

by

 

Shelley L. Tremain

 

Presented in the session “Power and Domination,”

Emancipation Conference,

Technical University Berlin, May 27, 2018

 

[I’d like my presentation to be as accessible as possible. So, I’ve now posted it to Discrimination and Disadvantage, the philosophy blog that I coordinate which focuses especially on underrepresentation and discrimination in philosophy and in academia more generally. To read my presentation on your device as I read aloud, type “Discrimination and Disadvantage blog” into your browser and follow the link to the blog.

Before I begin, I'd like to convey my sincere thanks to the conference organizers for generously inviting me to participate in this outstanding event. I'd especially like to thank Kristina Lepold, Carolin Botos, and Maria Ebert for the attention that they paid to my inclusion in the conference.]

 

Section One: An Introduction

Most philosophers don't consider disability to be pertinent subject matter for their philosophical analyses of power and domination, but rather believe that disability is a prediscursive and politically neutral human characteristic, a natural disadvantage and personal misfortune that is adequately and appropriately addressed in the domains of medicine, science, and bioethics, not social and political philosophy and critical theory. As I argue in my recent book, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, the prevalence in philosophy of this individualized and medicalized understanding of disability is inextricably entwined with the exclusion of disabled philosophers, especially disabled philosophers of disability, from adequate employment in the profession of philosophy. In my philosophical work on disability, I aim to undermine this individualized and medicalized conception of disability by arguing that disability is an apparatus of power that political philosophers and social critics must no longer ignore.  

Michel Foucault introduced the term apparatus to refer to a heterogeneous and interconnected ensemble of discourses, institutions, scientific statements, administrative measures, and philosophical propositions that responds to an “urgent need” in a given historical moment. An apparatus, in Foucault’s sense, is a historically specific and dispersed system of power that produces and configures practices toward certain strategic and political ends. To understand disability as an apparatus is to conceive of it as a historically contingent matrix of power that contributes to, is inseparable from, and reinforces other apparatuses of force relations, such as settler colonialism, white supremacy, gender, and class. The apparatus of disability constitutes and is constituted by and through a complex set of technologies, identities, institutions, and discursive practices that emerge from medical and scientific research, government policies and administrative decisions, academic initiatives, art and literature, popular culture, and so on.

In my presentation today, I want to advance an argument about the relationships between the apparatus of disability, the field of bioethics, and the productive character of neoliberalism. I shall begin my discussion with a brief genealogy of the disabled people’s movement in Germany.

 

Section Two: German Disabled People’s Resistance

In a history of the German disabled people’s movement, Swantje Köbsell (2006) writes that from its emergence in the 1970s, the activism of disabled people in Germany has aimed to de-medicalize disability, has demanded self-determination, the elimination of discrimination, and equalization, and has fought for disabled people’s right to life, integration into the community, and control of the services that they use. In the 1970s, the social barriers that disabled people in Germany confronted were endless: lack of accessibility to virtually all public buildings and to public transport, no accessible housing, and no personal assistant services, to name but a few. Many adult disabled people who required assistance on a regular basis were forced to live in institutions. Although, at the time, an individualized and medicalized understanding of disability was still widely assumed in Germany, more and more disabled people here began to recognize that the segregation that they experienced was due to the social production of disability rather than some natural defect inherent to them. Gusti Steiner, one of Germany’s earliest disabled activists, describes his politicization in this way:

I was denied access to buildings by steps and staircases which had been planned and built by others who were in power. I and other disabled people were denied access to public transport by the way in which busses and trains were planned, built and used. …We had to go to the places where these conflicts were evident. … [W]e had to use our creative energy to self-confidently draw attention to the problems and change the disabling situation. (Steiner 2003, in Kӧbsell 2006)

The German disabled people’s movement coalesced tangibly in February 1980, doing so in response to a court decision now known as the “Frankfort Judgment.” In this highly-debated decision, the Frankfort District Court reduced the travel expenses of a tourist who claimed to be aggrieved because she had been forced to endure the sight of disabled people while on her vacation (Klee 1980, in Kӧbsell 2006). Protests arose all around the country immediately after publication of the decision. In May of that year, an unprecedented nationwide demonstration against the decision brought together 5000 protestors from throughout West Germany. Although the court’s decision was not subsequently reversed, the demonstration served as a huge impetus for the fledgling movement and, for the first time in German history, the resistance of disabled people was covered by national news outlets and other media venues in Germany (Kӧbsell 2006).

Get Your Foot Off My Neck: On Knowledge of Oppression (May 26, 2018)

 

 

Get Your Foot Off My Neck: On Knowledge of Oppression 

 

by

 

Sally Haslanger

 

Presented in the session “Emancipatory Knowledge,”

Emancipation Conference,

Technical University Berlin, May 26, 2018

 

 

1. Introduction
Since 1968, there have been substantial gains in reducing repression in Europe and the United States. And yet, the threat of fascism is rising and the future looks grim. Neo-liberalism seems unstoppable; wealth is concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority; working conditions are deteriorating; housing is unaffordable; education is gutted. Racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, and anti-democratic social movements are gaining ground. Pernicious ideologies seem to have tightened their grip

I accept Stuart Hall’s suggestion that ideology “has especially to do with the concepts and the languages of practical thought which stabilize a particular form of power and domination; or which reconcile and accommodate the mass of the people to their subordinate place in the social formation” (Hall 1996/2006, 24-25). I use the term ‘ideology’ in the pejorative sense (the neutral term I use is cultural technē). Ideological oppression occurs as we enact structures of injustice, sometimes as agents of domination, sometimes as  subordinates. None of us stands outside of it. None of us is innocent. None of us is emancipated.

On my view, ideology is not, first and foremost, “in the head,” but consists of social meanings, norms, scripts, and default assumptions that are entrenched in material conditions. Ideology exists in McDonald’s uniforms and punching-in stations, advertisements for silky hair and beach bodies; stairways without handrails and sidewalks without curb cuts. It creates the conditions for our everyday lives. 

If ideology is not a set of false beliefs that can be “corrected,” but concerns the public sources of our practical consciousness, i.e., the guides for of our social fluency in unjust practices, then how should we think of ideology critique?

 

2. Knowledge of Justice
If we know what is just and unjust, then the proper target of ideology critique simply follows: we should disrupt the social meanings and material conditions that prevent us from valuing things aptly and those social structures that produce injustice. But in the tangle of social conditions, how should we proceed? And which of the many voices of complaint are reliable? We need an epistemology of social justice. This is especially pressing under conditions of ideological oppression: under the influence of ideology there will be disagreement about what, if anything, is oppressive. This is one thing that ideology – by its very nature – accomplishes.

Background considerations that shape my discussion:
Negative:
• An a priori “ideal theory” account of justice – drawing, say, on Rawls’ original position – is of limited use. We are embedded in societies where injustice is already rampant. Rectification is a priority. And ideology may prevent us from engaging in such reasoning effectively.
• An epistemology of justice is not simply an epistemology of what I ought to do, i.e., a moral epistemology, in the narrow sense; it concerns our collective social arrangements, how we should organize our lives together. Justice is about patterns and power. Injustice calls for collective action.

Constructive:
• Fortunately, we do not need to know what justice is or have a complete moral theory to engage in social critique. We can begin with knowledge of (an) injustice.
• Like other knowledge, moral knowledge is situated (Anderson 2015). A crucial commitment of critical theory is to listen to first person, and first-person plural, knowledge claims. This commitment is grounded, in part, in epistemic humility: we should listen to those directly affected by the practices in question because they are likely to have better access to morally relevant facts. However, sometimes it is a claim of epistemic entitlement by those who are members of such oppositional groups.
• Feminist inquiry has demonstrated that objective inquiry – even scientific inquiry – need not be “value free,” and may depend on emotion and other affective and conative states.

 

3. Second-Order Strategies
There are two pressing issues (Celikates 2016):
i) Normative: What makes an ideology problematic? On what basis does the critic claim that our values are better than yours.
ii) Methodological: from what standpoint does the critic speak? Traditionally critical theory is embedded in a social movement and aims to articulate the interests and demands of the oppressed (Fraser 1989, Haslanger 2012). But the oppressed do not speak with one voice.

Robin Celikates addresses these challenges by treating ideology critique as a second-order project. On his view, ideologies are those practices that “block the development and/or exercise of the reflexive and critical capacities” of the agents in question. He says:

Ideology critique can be understood as second-order critique:…the first aim of the critique of ideology has to be to identify these blockades of critique and to work towards their dissolution. In this respect, ideology critique can be seen as taking a procedural turn: …its task is to make it possible for agents to ask these questions and collectively look for answers to them themselves. (17)

Here Celikates responds to the normative challenge by claiming that the critic is not relying on or importing values other than the epistemic value of developing “reflexive and critical capacities” in a community. In response to the methodological challenge, Celikates argues that cultures are never fully hegemonic, but always include oppositional voices whose points of view offer resources to resist dominant practices. Because, on his view, critical theory needn’t take a stand on the substantive values at issue in the context, the critic’s primary goal should be to open space for resistant voices to be heard and let the community sort things out.

I am sympathetic Celikates’ point that social change is a process of contestation and debate that happens within a society, and that the process is messy and non-linear. In the context of non-ideal theory, the job is to contribute to this process, not to dictate its end points. I also agree that often we must begin with efforts to improve the epistemic conditions. However, I think that the critical theorist has resources to offer a more normatively substantive critique, especially if we take the critic to be allied with oppositional social movements. I am a critic embedded in my society. I have epistemic opportunities. What do I do next?