Discrimination and Disadvantage

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Damion Kareem Scott Redux

 

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

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

____________________________________________

 

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Call for Papers

Decolonisation: Shaping and Re-shaping Reality 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

posted by Shelley

Repression and Controversial Ideas

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

posted by Shelley

My Journey In Our Struggle (guest post)

 

My Journey In Our Struggle* 

 

Guest Post

 

by  

 

Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, Ph.D.**

 

 

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

 

Why do I begin narrating my journey at this milestone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

     1        Getting Inside

     2        Dismantling His House

     3        Bringing It Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

This was a shift from faces to voices.

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

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

•    Anglican

•    Anglophone

•    Enabled by society

•    Wealthy

•    Gender-conforming men

•    Racialised as white.

But that's just one aspect of the curriculum.

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

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

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

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

That video went viral.

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

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

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

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

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.

Critical Philosophy of Race and Education (special issue)

 

Earlier this year, Ethics and Education published a special issue (vol. 13, no. 1)  on Critical Philosophy of Race and Education. The issue is guest edited by Judith Suissa and Darren Chetty. Here is an excerpt from their editors' introduction to the issue: 

 

In the UK there is a long tradition of activist scholarship concerning the existence and effect of racism in the education system. Scholars such as C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, Ambalavar Sivanandan, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Barry Troyna, Heida Safia Mirza, Bernard Coard and Gus John have addressed and explored many of the themes found in this special issue –how underlying racialised relationships of domination in society have shaped and influenced educational policy and practice and the extent to which they continue to do. The black British intellectual tradition has often operated outside of ‘the ivory tower’ both out of commitment to community struggles and, at times, out of necessity. Indeed Paul Warmington notes ‘it might be argued that black British intellectual life and academia have intersected only fitfully’ (Warmington, P. 2014.) 

This volume is an attempt to build on and extend these intellectual conversations within the community of philosophy of education and philosophy more broadly, which, as Michael Peters put it in his recent Editorial for a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory, ‘of all disciplines, [] has seemed most resistant to taking race seriously’ (Peters, M. 2015). 

Likewise, while sounding a powerful warning of the very real dangers of contemporary racist currents in our educational institutions and in society more broadly, the contributors to this issue also recognise and celebrate the significant contributions and pedagogical interventions achieved by social movements such as Black Lives Matter, ‘Why is My Curriculum White?’, and ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ – whose voices form part of the critical discussion so necessary if we are to challenge the increasing resurgence of racist and xenophobic narratives about our past, our present, and our future.

In drawing together contributors from different cultural and disciplinary contexts, working within different intellectual traditions, we hope to show how philosophical conversations on race and racism, in dialogue with sociological research and historical enquiry, can inform and contribute to the endeavour to fight the structural racism that permeates the societies in which so many of us live, through an understanding of how it manifests itself in our pedagogical practices, curriculum, educational policy and institutions. The contributions range across the whole spectrum of educational practice. Winston Thompson, Kristie Dotson and Shirley Anne Tate and Damien Page all situate their discussions within the context of further or higher education, whether focused on issues of curriculum, institutional policy or pedagogy, and drawing on philosophical work on diversity, decolonisation, memory and knowledge. Sophie Rudolph, Jessica Gerrard and Arathi Sriprakash focus on the conceptualisation of knowledge and power that underlies so many debates about what and how to teach; Melissa Fitzpatrick and Amy Reed-Sandoval, Darren Chetty, Jack Bicker and Michalinos Zembylas all discuss particular aspects of classroom pedagogy, drawing on broader work to do with issues of identity, inclusion, dialogue, empowerment and affect.

The seminal work of Charles Mills informs many of these discussions. Zara Bain’s opening article offers, for readers perhaps less familiar with this work, a systematic account of some of Mills’ central ideas, and, for the first time, an explicit analysis of their relevance and implications for the British context. As Mills’ own work has demonstrated, and as reflected in the discussions by Sriprakash et al., Dotson, Bain and Chetty, understanding the history of our educational, philosophical and social ideas and practices is a crucial element in developing a critical perspective on current debates. Indeed, reflecting on the electoral victory of Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign, Stuart Jeffries, in a recent interview about the relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School theorists for our contemporary age, notes the ease with which populist leaders speak and lie to voters, pointing out that ‘this is a way of controlling people, especially people who don’t have a sense of history’ (Illing, S. 2017). 

 

The Table of Contents for the issue is here. 

 

posted by Shelley

A Tribute to Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 - June 25, 1984)

 

Michel Foucault died of AIDS thirty-four years ago today. With his body of work, Foucault left us bountiful gifts, most of which gifts have to date been largely ignored, dismissed, misunderstood, and ridiculed by mainstream philosophers and even some feminist philosophers.

Across a range of other academic disciplines and a variety of activist struggles, nevertheless, the richness and prescience of the work that Foucault did both within the academy and beyond it have long been recognized and put in the service of expanded ideas about social justice, increased representation of marginalized and vilified people, the insurrection of subjugated knowledges, and the validation and proliferation of diverse forms of human existence.

Perhaps the unfortunate way that many philosophers have hitherto regarded Foucault’s work is changing or will soon change. I would like to think that Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability and all my other writings that draw on Foucault’s claims will play a role in improving the way that philosophers understand his fascinating work.

Foucault’s final words in his lecture of March 28, 1984, the final lecture of the last course that he gave at the Collѐge de France, were themselves poignant, moving, generous, and prophetic:

 

There you are, listen, I had things to say to you about the general framework of these analyses. But, well, it is too late. So, thank you.

 

Thank you, Michel Foucault. We are indebted to you.

 

[Description of black and white photo below: in a darkened space, Foucault is leaning over a table on which a beaker of clear liquid sits. Light shines on the right side of his face and upper body. He is looking down at something, perhaps a piece of his writing, with concentration. His right hand is outstretched as if beholding wonder.]

 

posted by Shelley

Reining In Philosophy's Big Datty

 

Although the discipline of philosophy largely continues to operate under the guise of neutrality, rationality, and objectivity, the institutional structure of the discipline implicitly and explicitly promotes certain ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies as bona fide philosophy, while casting other ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies as mere simulacra of these allegedly fundamental ways of knowing and of doing philosophy. Many, if not most, philosophers think that a certain limited number of subfields of philosophy—metaphysics, ethics, logic, epistemology, and philosophy of language—are foundational to philosophy, uniquely distinguishing the discipline of philosophy from other disciplines of research and teaching and reaffirming philosophy’s self-ascribed status as “the queen of the sciences.”

Philosophers who hold this conventional view of philosophy maintain that the aforementioned subfields are the necessary, unchanging, and “core” elements of philosophy, while other subfields of philosophical inquiry—such as philosophy of race and feminist philosophy—are (mere) applications and contingent derivatives of these foundational subfields. That is, philosophers who understand the structure and practice of philosophy in this traditional way take for granted that the former subfields are ontologically and epistemologically prior to the latter subfields and, indeed, effectively render the latter subfields conceivable in the first place. For philosophers who distinguish in this way between “core” subfields of philosophy and “applied” subfields of philosophy, the questions and concerns that make up the former subfields are generally regarded as timeless, disinterested, and universal in character and, conversely, the questions and concerns that constitute the latter subfields are generally taken to be accidental, interested, and partial.

It is this conventional understanding of philosophy that conditions PhilPapers: Online Research in Philosophy, the original product of the PhilPapers Foundation, philosophy’s Big Datty, whose architecture is nevertheless purported to be value neutral and merely descriptive of philosophy’s authentic nature.

The database is organized into areas of specialization, subfields, and topics in philosophy that are hierarchically arranged in a descending order of importance in accordance with prevailing ideas in the Euro-American, Western philosophical tradition and discipline about which areas, subfields, and topics: (1) have the most/less philosophical import; (2) have the most/less explanatory power; and (3) should be endowed with the most/less authoritative status. The so-called core or fundamental areas of the discipline—Metaphysics and Epistemology; Value Theory; Science, Logic, and Mathematics; History of Western Philosophy; and Philosophical Traditions—are designated as the supreme categories on the database and, in turn, other areas of inquiry are designated as subcategories of these supreme categories, or subcategories of the subcategories of the supreme categories, or (“leaf”) subcategories of the subcategories of the subcategories of the supreme categories, where a category’s distance from the supreme categories is understood to be indicative of the allegedly diminished import and explanatory power that it holds, as well as the relative authority within philosophy of the areas of inquiry that it comprises.

As I argue in the preface to Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, however, the classification of subfields in philosophy, the relations between them, and the questions and concerns that they comprise is no mere value-neutral reportage or representation of objective differences, relations, and similarities that await discovery and recognition; rather, classification (and classification systems) in philosophy (as elsewhere) is performative insofar as it contributes to the constitution of the very value-laden resemblances, distinctions, associations, and relationships between phenomena that it puts into place.

Although many philosophers continue to represent philosophy as a value-neutral, detached, disinterested, and impartial enterprise, political, social, economic, cultural, and institutional mechanisms of force relations influence every aspect of the discipline (and profession) of philosophy. Every philosophical question and concern, as well as every subfield that these questions and concerns constitute, is a politically potent artifact of historically contingent and culturally specific discourse. As contingent artifacts of discourse, furthermore, every philosophical question, every philosophical subfield, and every specialization in philosophy has a history, a history that can be traced genealogically.

In the preface of my book, I was concerned to point out how the PhilPapers database assumes and reproduces an individualized and medicalized understanding of disability and marginalizes critical philosophical work on disability and feminist philosophical work on disability in particular. Given that the PhilPapers infrastructure has been transported to PhilJobs, the profession’s most widely used job board, I was thus also concerned to underscore how the PhilPapers Foundation shapes job searches and hiring in the profession in ways that disadvantage disabled philosophers of disability and disabled feminist philosophers of disability especially.