Discrimination and Disadvantage

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Gen Eickers

 

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

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

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

 

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

Thank you for having me, Shelley!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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?

How Diverse is Your Paper or Curriculum? Take the Test and Find Out! (guest post)

 

How Diverse is Your Paper or Curriculum? 

Take the Test and Find Out!

 

 

Guest Post

 

by 

Axel Arturo Barceló

Instructions:

Your diversity score should be calculated on the basis of only the texts you use that have been authored in the last century, including your own work (count authors of multiple works once for each referenced work). To calculate your diversity score, do the following:

1. Add 2 points for every author of color
1. Add an extra point if the text is not about the work of a white author
2. Add 2 points for every author who is not a cisgender man
1. Add an extra point if the text is not about the work of a cisgender man
3. Add 3 points for every text not originally written in English
1. Add an extra point if the text is not about a work written originally in English
2. Add an extra point if you are not quoting the English translation
3. Add an extra 20 points if you made the published translation yourself
4. Add 2 points for every disabled author
1. Add an extra point if the text is not about the work of a nondisabled author
5. Add 2 points for every author working at a third world department
1. Add an extra point if the text is not about work from a first-world department
6. Subtract 1 point for every author from your own department
7. Subtract 1 point for every author you have had a drink with—even if it was over a full meal, during a conference diner, etc
8. Substract 1 point for every author with seniority over you
9. Subtract 1 point for every author working at a better ranked department than your own
10. Substract 1 point for every author with a degree from a better ranked department than your own
11. Divide the total number of points from the total number of authors in your list of references, multiply this number by ten and this number is your final diversity score.

 

Assessment of your score:

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.

Disabled Students of Colour at Syracuse University Circulate Petition That Calls for Institutional Change

 

By now, readers and listeners of Discrimination and Disadvantage know about the recent events at Syracuse University. If not, here is a summary: a video surfaced in which members of the Syracuse chapter of the Theta Tau engineering fraternity used racist slurs and ableist, homophobic, and misogynistic tropes during its "new member process;" hence, Theta Tau was ultimately expelled from Syracuse University permanently. The Washington Post reports that a second video surfaced in which fraternity members of the Syracuse Theta Tau chapter appear to mimic the sexual assault of a disabled person. Apparently, in the second video, one fraternity member appears to force another member, who is wearing a helmet and sitting in a wheelchair, to perform mock oral sex. Other fraternity members are passive bystanders, even encouraging both of them.

Earlier this week, after the first video surfaced, Diane Wiener, Director of the Disability Cultural Center at Syracuse University, addressed the situation and climate on the Syracuse campus in this public announcement.

On Wednesday, a group of disabled students of colour at Syracuse circulated a petition of its own in response to the events. Although the petition unfortunately gives considerable weight to implicit bias training, it also calls upon the administration to initiate far-reaching, structural and institutional measures in light of the events. Administrators and faculty at other universities should seriously consider implementing many of these measures. Here is the text of the petition: 

Program for philoSOPHIA 2018: Biopower, Biologics, Biospheres (Richmond, VA, Mar. 22-24, 2018)

 

philoSOPHIA 2018 Program

March 22-24, 2018

University of Richmond

 

Thursday’s reception and Friday and Saturday sessions will be held at the UR Downtown campus of the University of Richmond, 626 East Broad Street, suite 100, Richmond, VA 23219 (one block east of the Marriott).

Room Designations:

            LL = Lower Level
            CL = Classroom
            CM = Community Room
            CF – Conference Room

 

Thursday, March 22  

Conference packets will be available at Thursday night’s events.

Thu. 6:15 – 7:00     CM: Mandatory Training for Moderators

Thu. 7:00 – 8:30     Gallery: Wine and Cheese Reception for all Attendees

 

Friday, March 23

Fri. 9:00 – 9:15      Coffee and Snacks – conference packets available.

 

Fri. 9:15 – 10:15

LL: Paper: “Foucault’s Vermin: From Extermination to Regulation of Pest Species,” Dayne B. Alexander, Emory University ***(projection equipment in use)***

CL: Paper: “A Critique of the Political Economy of Sex: Rubin, Butler and Marx,” Anne van Leeuwen, James Madison University 

CM: Paper: “Militarized Racism as an Ideological Formation,” Martin Armstrong, University of Chicago 

 

Fri 10:30-12:45

LL: Panel: Against Biopolitical Containment: Strategies of Trans World-Making 

“Turning the Tide: Trans Experience of Curiosity,” Perry Zurn, American University

“Erotic (Un)becomings: Phenomenologies of Transition and the Bioethics of Repair,” Tamsin Kimoto, Emory University

“Managing the Threat of Becoming: Trans Subjects, Medical Discourse and the Biopolitical Containment of Gender Possibilities,” James Zubka, University of Memphis

“Embodied Thresholds of Sanctuary: Abolitionism and Trans Worldmaking,” Andrea Pitts, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

 

CL: Panel: Affective Labor and Feminist Politics in a Biopolitical Economy. Moderated by Shiloh Whitney, Fordham University

“Affective Labor as Resistance in the Biopolitical Society,” Christopher R. Myers, Fordham University

“Returning to the Alienation Critique,” Gwen Daugs, Fordham University

"The Production of Death: Affective Labor, Affective Economy, and Capitalism,” Ela Tokay, Fordham University

 

CM: Book Panel: Jennifer Scuro’s Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions via Disability Studies (Lexington Books). Moderated by Joel Reynolds, The Hastings Center (see below for info)

Commentator: Maeve O’Donovan, Notre Dame of Maryland University

Commentator: Kelsey Borrowman, Villanova University

Commentator: Lydia X. Z. Brown, Northeastern University School of Law

Response: Jennifer Scuro, The College of New Rochelle

 

CF: Workshop (pre-registered participants only): Foucault and Wynter: A Philosophical Encounter with and Against the Human. Moderated by Lynne Huffer, Emory University, and Taryn Jordan, Emory University

 

Fri. 1:00 LUNCH

 

Fri. 2:15 – 4:30

LL: Panel: Genes, Parents, and Pregnant Women 

“Geontopower, Genomics, and the Dominion of Information,” Joel M. Reynolds, The Hastings Center ***(projection equipment in use)***

“’You’re Already Off the Clock’: Temporalizing the Pregnant Subject,” Jill Drouillard, Université Paris-Sorbonne IV ***(projection equipment in use)***

 

CL: Panel: Uses and Limits of Foucault’s ‘Biopower’ 

“Woman Becoming Man, Man Becoming Women: The Biopolitics of Friendship between the Sexes in ihn Arabi,” Ali Reza Pharaa, Stonybrook University

“Governance and the Formation of Objectivity: Expanding Our Understanding of the Biopolitical,” Theodra Bane, Villanova University

“Feminist Heterotopias,” Margaret McLaren, Rollins College

 

CM: Panel: Disrupting Colonizing Discourses 

“What Can a River Do? Spinoza, Immanent Ethics, and the Indigenous-Led Ecological Struggle Against DAPL,” Oli Stefano, Bard College

“Toward Planetary Taste,” Jana McAuliffe, University of Arkansas, Little Rock

“The Prison-House of Being: Fanon on Language and Colonial World-Collapse,” Katherine Ward, Georgetown University

 

Fri. 4:45 – 6:30     

LL: Keynote Plenary. Moderated by Ladelle McWhorter

"The Captive Maternal and Political Trauma: A Testimonial for Erica Garner (1990-2017)," Joy James, Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Humanities and Political Science, Williams College

 

Fri. 6:30 DINNER

 

Saturday, March 24

Room Designations:

            LL = Lower Level
            CL = Classroom
            CM = Community Room
            CF – Conference Room

Sat. 8:45 – 9:00      Coffee and Snacks

 

Sat. 9:00 – 10:30

LL: Panel: Breath, Race, and the Human 

“The Racialization of Breath,” Jack R. Leff, University of North Carolina at Charlotte ***(projection equipment in use)***

“Whiteness as the Gatekeeper of Being: Wynter, Biopower, and the Imperfect Application of the Designation ‘Human,’” Samantha Wrisley, Emory University

 

CL: Paper: “Hetero-next-uals: Rupturing Straight Time in Cringeworthy Phases of Sexual Experimentation,” Rachel McNealis, Marquette University 

 

CM: Panel: Feminist Biologics of Becoming through Raymond Ruyer

“Irigaray and Ruyer: The De-Specularization and De-Spatialization of Form,” Annu Dahiya, Duke University

“Embryogenesis, Firstness, and a Cosmologics of the Maternal,” Maryann D. Murtagh, Duke University

 

Sat. 10:45 – 12:30

LL: Panel: Grappling with Materialisms 

“Resonance as a Metaphor for Biopolitics: On Cavarero, Barad, and the Ontology of Frequency Ratios,” Robin James, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

“Feminism, Force, and Finitude: (Mis)understanding Elizabeth Grosz’s Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art,” Claus Halberg, University of Bergen, Norway

“God Particle: Sublimity, Physics, and Virtuality in Black Feminist Poetics,” Zakiyya Iman Jackson, University of Southern California

 

CL: Panel: Bodies of Knowledge 

“Eating and the Existential Phenomenology of Bodily Control,” Talia Welsh, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

“Sometimes Quiet is Violent: On Radical Reflection, Queer Phenomenology and Epistemic Violence,” Valérie Simon, University of Oregon

“Trans Identity and the Politics of Biology,” Sarah Hansen, California State University, Northridge

 

CM: Book Panel: Shelley Tremain’s Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (U of Michigan Press). Moderated by Melinda Hall, Stetson University (see below for info)

Commentator: Devonya Havis, Canisius College

Commentator: Lauren Guilmette, Florida Atlantic University

Response: Shelley Tremain, Independent scholar

 

CF: Workshop (pre-registered participants only): On Gender and Violence: Course Design and Pedagogy”.  Moderated by Erika Zimmerman Damer, Mariela Mendez, and Mari Lee Mifsud, University of Richmond

Last Chance to Buy Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability at a 30% Discount

 

A reminder to readers and listeners of this blog that until January 31st (a week tomorrow!) they can purchase my new book Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability at a 30% discount when they order it directly from University of Michigan Press and use the promo code UMFOUCAULT at the checkout.

Among other things, the book compellingly argues that the medicalized conception of disability that predominates in philosophy is inextricably entwined with the exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession of philosophy and the marginalization of philosophy of disability from the discipline.

To find out more about the book and to order it at the discount, go here.

 

posted by Shelley

Submit Your Cutting-Edge Work to Public Philosophy Journal (PPJ)

 

Public Philosophy Journal, of which I am very pleased to be an Editorial Advisory Board member, now accepts submissions of short philosophical essays intended for the general public, as well as submissions from activists interested in crafting their essays with philosophical peer review. The PPJ’s innovative Formative Peer Review process offers great opportunities for emerging authors to practice their public engagement skills and for more established authors to model these skills. Find out about PPJ’s Formative Peer Review process here.

The journal continues to grow in both scope and the nature of its activities, with possible future opportunities for classes to be involved in some of these activities. As an Editorial Advisory Board member of PPJ, I would be happy to answer questions about the journal  and communicate ideas to Andrea Walsh, Managing Community Director of PPJ, and Christopher Long, PPJ Project Director. Professor Long’s essay, “Practicing Public Scholarship,” offers insight into the mission and goals of PPJ and provides a good example of the appropriate length and preferred style of submissions to the journal. Read Long’s essay here.

Vol. 1, No. 1 of Public Philosophy Journal can be found here. The submission and style guidelines for Public Philosophy Journal are here.

The Current is PPJ’s constantly evolving stream of vital and informative curated material from across the web, an archive that I am delighted to say includes all of the interviews with disabled philosophers that I have conducted in the Dialogues on Disability series. Find the Current here.

For information about the members of Public Philosophy Journal’s Editorial Advisory Board, our role, and the purposes, goals, and activities of the Board, go here.

 

posted by Shelley

A New Year of Struggle and Resistance

 

As you know by now, the Discrimination and Disadvantage blog is your best source of righteous indignation about the asymmetrical relations of power that currently condition and reproduce the discipline and profession of philosophy and the neoliberal apparatus of academia more generally.

In 2018, we will continue to shine a spotlight on the stratification of philosophy, on the precarity of the ableist, racialized, and sexist university, and on the neoliberal mechanisms that currently govern society at large, as well as persistently validate the heterogenenous lives, philosophical work, and institutional and professional struggles of marginalized and excluded philosophers and academics in general.

Here’s some of what you can expect from Discrimination and Disadvantage in the coming months: a guest post about feminism across borders; a guest post about disability and prestige bias in philosophy; more posts by me, Utz Mcknight, Ray Aldred, Melinda Hall, and other regular contributors; and more monthly installments of Dialogues on Disability, the popular, provocative, and transformative series of interviews that I’m conducting with disabled philosophers, including the third anniversary installment in April when I will be joined by special guests to survey the insights and issues introduced in installments from the third year of the series.

You won’t want to miss out on any of it; so, come here often.

 

posted by Shelley

CFA: Irene H. Chayes New Voices Award, American Society of Aesthetics (deadline: Jan. 15, 2018)

 

The American Society of Aesthetics is pleased to invite applications for the Irene H. Chayes New Voices Award, approved by the ASA Board of Trustees at its meeting November 15, 2017.

 

Successful applications will demonstrate the following characteristics:

1. The author’s understanding of the barriers that lead to the underrepresentation of women, ethnic and racial minorities, non-gender-conforming individuals, persons with disabilities, persons from low-SES backgrounds, and other members of groups historically underrepresented in higher education careers.

Evidence of this understanding may be drawn from the author’s life experiences and educational background, and should be explained in a short personal statement. (The set of things that count as evidence includes but is not limited to the following: attendance or employment at a minority serving institution, ability to describe and explain the barriers leading to under-representation, and participation in higher education pipeline programs such as the McNair Scholars or diversity summer institutes. Applicants may cite this evidence in their personal statement.)

2. The author’s capacity to apply their understanding of the conditions of underrepresentation to their research. Applicants should demonstrate this critical perspective by, for example, proposing research topics that pertain in a substantial way to the artistic production or aesthetic experience of underrepresented groups.

Preference will be given to applicants who are students, faculty on fixed-term, non-tenure ­stream contracts, or not in academic employment.

Applicants may contact the ASA diversity committee chair (C. Thi Nguyen: [email protected]) with questions regarding eligibility.