Discrimination and Disadvantage

Draft Introduction to Microaggressions and the Apparatus of Disability

 

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

 

Microaggressions and the Apparatus of Disability

 

by

Shelley Tremain

 

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Reviewing the Reviewer

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

posted by Shelley

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.

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: 2nd Annual Critical Social Ontology Workshop (Oct. 13-14, 2018; deadline: Aug. 1, 2018)

 

2nd Annual Critical Social Ontology Workshop
St. Louis, MO, October 13-14, 2018

Call for Papers

 

The Critical Social Ontology Workshop (CSOW) is an interdisciplinary venue for radical thinking about the metaphysics of irreducibly social phenomena. Core members of the CSOW are Ruth Groff (Coordinator), Sally Haslanger, Tony Lawson, Doug Porpora, Vanessa Wills, and Charlotte Witt.

We invite paper proposals for the 2nd annual meeting of the Workshop, to be held at Saint Louis University. We will be interested in contributions the aim of which is to address fundamental issues of social ontology and/or foundational meta-theoretical issues that have implications for social ontology, and to do so in ways that shed light upon and/or offer alternatives to existing positivist; Humean; post-modern; or other orthodoxies in philosophy and social science.

The annual meetings of the Workshop are intended to be supportive, working conferences. Presenters will be asked to upload outlines of their papers in advance of the conference so as to maximize the opportunity for constructive conversation. We hope to eventually be able to publish some or all of the proceedings of the CSOW annual meetings in one way or another (we will keep you posted as we move forward with these plans). 

The Critical Social Ontology Workshop is unfunded. We will ask those participants who can afford to do so to contribute $30-$40 to help offset the basic costs of running the conference.

To submit a paper proposal, please send an e-mail to: [email protected].

Provide the following in the email: (1) a title; (2) a short abstract (200 words) that includes a clear statement of what the driving claim of the paper will be; (3) your contact information.

Please do be sure to include a clear statement of the thesis of the paper in your abstract (i.e., “I will argue that ... “).

Deadline: August 1, 2018.

 

posted by Shelley

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:

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain with Devonya Havis and Audrey Yap

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the third-anniversary 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; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

During the past year, for the third year in a row, I conducted landmark interviews with disabled philosophers who are variously situated with respect to disability, race, gender, institutional status, age, culture, nationality, and sexuality and whose philosophical work covers a wide range of specializations and research interests. This third-anniversary installment of the series highlights insights and lessons that these philosophers offered the philosophical community, reflecting upon the implications of the contributions to philosophy that their interviews have made.

I am delighted that Audrey Yap, whom I interviewed in July 2016, and Devonya Havis, whom I interviewed in June 2017, have returned to Dialogues on Disability to assist me with this celebratory anniversary installment of the series, bringing continuity to the series and expanding it in thought-provoking ways.

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. Audrey acknowledges that she lives and works on the traditional territory of the WSÁNEĆ, Lkwungen, and Esquimalt peoples. Audrey, Devonya, and I offer this anniversary installment of the Dialogues on Disability series with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.

 

Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, Audrey and Devonya! We are indebted to you for taking the time to produce this anniversary installment of Dialogues on Disability with me.

Devonya, in a moment, you and I will turn to reflect back on your interview from June of last year; first, however, I would like us to consider Quayshawn Spencer’s interview which led off the third year of the series.

Like many of my interviewees in the past three years, Quayshawn, although he was initially a student in the sciences, switched to a major in philosophy after a philosophy course made an indelible impression on him. Quayshawn has established himself as an authority in the philosophy and science of race. In his interview with me, I asked Quayshawn whether he was worried about how his work on race might be perceived. In one part of his answer to the question, Quayshawn said:

 

I don’t believe that the term race is anything like, say, tiger in American English. If you randomly grab a few hundred American English speakers, take them to China or India, and ask them to point out the tigers, there will be near unanimity on what they point out. You can also ask them what are the superficial properties that almost all tigers share, and you’ll get largely overlapping answers. However, there’s plenty of empirical work that’s been done that shows that American English speakers don’t share that sort of agreement about what “the races” are or what “the features” are that makes something a race …Of course, there are non-pluralist ways of dealing with these experimental results. …Sally Haslanger has argued, for instance, that we should ignore “the ordinary person’s ideas about race” because “the very social processes that create the divisions of privilege and advantage also obscure their workings.” However, I’m not convinced that experimental data about what ordinary people think about race is entirely worthless. Ordinary people should be reliable indicators of their own racial memberships. So, if racial self-reporting data are all over the place—which they are—then pluralism is a live option. Some other philosophers of race who have embraced racial pluralism, or something close to it, are Lionel McPherson and Michael Hardimon.

 

Given your own work on Black ancestral discourses, Devonya, what do you think about Quayshawn’s insights on the metaphysics of race?

[Description of image below: Coloured photo of Devonya, a Black woman, who stands at the front of a classroom, beside a media station on which an open Apple laptop sits. She is wearing glasses, a gold necklace, earrings, and ring, and a patterned, button-down shirt. Her left hand is in motion and she seems to be in full teaching or lecturing mode with people in the seats in front of her who are beyond the frame.]

 

Shelley, I very much like the idea of racial pluralism and agree that our seemingly “common sense” notions of race, at least in the North American context—especially in the United States—are not as fixed as one would think. Students often begin studying “race” with a sense that the boundaries are very clear. They soon discover that many of the traditional ways of ascribing race to persons and groups fray under closer scrutiny. Such fraying is not simply a matter of unsettling the biological essentialism that haunts us from the nineteenth century, but rather also involves understanding the inconsistencies associated with attempts to legally and socially fix racial categories.

Given this slippage, Shelley, it seems prudent to make room for the ways that racial identities and racial ascriptions are produced not only within larger systemic mechanisms but also through everyday encounters, that is, through the production, re-production, and performance of “race” in mundane situations. It also seems important to maintain some conception of racial pluralism to allow additional spaces for people to re-create racial meanings and to expand how one might conceive what have come to be described as particular races. So, I would agree that there are things to be learned from the racial claims made by “ordinary people”.

The deep work, however, concerns how we parse these claims in light of existing power relations. Despite the slippage across seeming racial categories, Shelley, it is critical to note that, historically, racial ascription and reporting have been externally conditioned for those who are marked as raced—complicating racial self-reporting. It, too, is the case that many also choose race as a form of empowerment that honors traditions of ancestral struggle and creation. The opening of these interviews, which evokes respect and the spirit of reconciliation, strikes me as an example of honoring such struggles and noting how creation happens even in the midst of challenge.

At one point in my interview, Shelley, I highlighted the ways that seemingly disempowered and powerless social groups have generated resources that disrupt injustices and how Foucault’s ideas can enable these interventions. I said:

 

When working through Foucault, I embrace his notion of subjugated knowledges to clear an academic space where I can lay claim to those traditions that fashioned me into the thinker I have become. ... I have deep concerns about social justice. Consequently, I have been increasingly convinced that the path to justice must be by way of theorizing injustice. It seems to me that such theorization is part of what is at stake when one undertakes genealogy. Interventions into injustice require strategies and tactics informed by history, context, and power dynamics. My reflections on parrhesia in “The Parrhesiastic Enterprise of Black Philosophy” were an effort to demonstrate some of the ways that Black people have generated resources for disrupting injustices despite occupying social/political positions that seemingly give them access to very little power. In this respect, the article blended Foucauldian insights about power with Black traditions that have exercised resistances in many creative ways.

 

Shelley, I am interested to know your thoughts on the use of Foucault’s ideas of subjugated knowledges and genealogy as forms of resistance to ableism and other injustices that disabled people confront.

As I indicate in my recent book, Devonya, I think that Foucault’s claims about subjugated knowledges and about genealogy as a method to uncover them have enormous subversive potential for disabled people and other social groups whose insights and perspectives are excluded from philosophical and other academic discourses, as your work on Black ancestral discourses vividly illustrates.

Unearthing subjugated knowledges about the apparatus of disability, especially with a genealogical method, can enable philosophers of disability and disability theorists to show the contingency and historically and culturally specific character of the medicalized conception of disability that prevails in both intellectual and everyday understandings of disability. In Melinda Hall’s interview with me, Devonya, Melinda talked about how she uses Foucault’s work to undermine prevailing arguments about disabled people that bioethicists in particular have advanced. As Melinda explained it:

Moving Together: Activism, Art and Education – A Week with Angela Davis (Amsterdam, May 12-17, 2018)

 

Moving Together: Activism, Art and Education – A Week with Angela Davis is a weeklong program taking place from 12-17 May at various arts, cultural, educational and heritage institutions, and community centers in Amsterdam. Together with esteemed guest Professor Angela Y. Davis, as well as artists, scholars, activists and audience members, we will look into questions of citizenship, communal knowledge sharing, intergenerational activism, and relevant artistic practices.

Artists, educators and activists have often been at the forefront of challenging social and cultural hierarchies within society. Events of the past decade have highlighted a noticeable increase in authoritarianism, racism, sexism, environmental disasters and economic hardship at local and global levels. This turbulent climate has prompted significant responses in the form of social movements calling for more inclusion, decolonization, and liberation within cultural and educational institutions.

In what ways are artists, educators and activists re-energizing cultural and knowledge production in the Netherlands? In what ways can institutions help mobilize these efforts towards creating a more just society for all?

Armed with thoughts, books, poetry and dance Moving Together: Activism, Art and Education aims to connect social, cultural, and educational institutions and initiatives in order to address themes of social justice, equality, artistic production and education, and share the emancipatory practices that emerge within these fields with a larger public.

This weeklong series celebrates the role and importance of black scholarship, cultural production, and activism within our contemporary polarized society. Central to the program is the work of Professor Angela Davis, whose life’s work exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary and intersectional practices of liberation.

Angela Davis’s work spans many decades. She is deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world through her activism and scholarship. Her work as an educator – both at the university and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender and sexual justice. Angela Davis is joined by her long-term collaborator Professor Gina Dent, whose work on prison abolition, feminism, social justice, and black literature and art contributes to the ongoing struggle for global social justice.

Moving Together aspires to amplify ongoing conversations on refugee, anti-racist, feminist, queer, trans*, anti-border, anti-nationalist, prison abolition, and environmental justice struggles through sharing knowledge and strengthening connections between arts, activism and education. 

Redefining “Borders” in “Feminism Across Borders”: Part 1 (guest post)

 

Guest Post

 

by

Tracy Isaacs*

 

I just got back from the “Feminist and Gender Studies in a Global Context: An International and Interdisciplinary Conference” that took place in Puducherry, India, hosted by the Namaste Educational Academy. What an amazing experience to connect with the strong community of feminist academics doing superb scholarship in South India.

Last term, I taught a third-year women’s studies course called “Feminism Across Borders.” My vision for and design of this course was the subject of the paper that I gave at the conference. In November, Shelley asked me to do a set of two posts for Discrimination and Disadvantage. In the first post, I would have discussed the course; and in the second post, I would have talked a bit about the conference. I dropped the ball on the first installment, which was scheduled for early January. So, I’m sending two installments now: this first installment provides an overview of the course, based on the paper I presented. Next week, I will post the second, shorter installment that will offer some observations about and reflections on the conference in Puducherry itself.

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Feminism Across Borders: The Course

 

The main questions at the heart of the course were: “Is an inclusive feminism possible?” “Is a feminism that transcends borders and embraces a broader, more global spectrum of feminist voices than ever before feasible?” When I think of an inclusive feminism, I think of it as having space for all, representing the interests of all, not promoting the interests of some women on the backs of or to the exclusion of others. It is a real question whether this is truly possible, and if so, how to implement it.

I created the “Feminism Across Borders” course twelve years ago because I felt that the feminist and gender studies department in which I teach should include a course that focuses on “global feminism.” As those of us who teach in feminist and gender studies and related areas are aware, the intellectual landscape of our scholarly conversations is prone to rapid shifts, twists, and turns.

And so, as I was developing my syllabus last summer, after a ten-year hiatus from the course, I knew that although I had originally conceived the course literally in terms of transnational or global feminism, it now needed a more expansive and figurative understanding of “borders.” Even though the primary subject matter of the course remained feminism in a global context, I wanted to examine other kinds of borders that feminist theorists need to care about: race, disability, class and economic status, age, and sexuality can all present as borders that challenge inclusive feminisms when inadequately navigated or underappreciated within feminist scholarship.

This understanding might sound a lot like intersectionality, and in lots of ways that’s right. Almost every course that I teach has intersectionality as a major theme, mostly because it’s a concept that students could stand to scrutinize a bit more closely. Intersectionality, as coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in her game-changing paper, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” (see here: Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6, July 1991:1241-1299), is the idea that different forms of oppression intersect to create unique forms of oppression that are not simply additive.

For example, being an Indigenous woman in Canada is not just a compound of being Indigenous and being a woman. It is its own unique social location. By using a case study of African-American women and anti-discrimination law in the U.S., Crenshaw showed that although African-American women face exclusion as African-American women, they are not served by U.S. anti-discrimination law because “African-American women” is not a recognized category under that law. As the Combahee River Collective says, “All the Blacks are men, all the women are white.” In Canada, Indigenous women suffer a similar kind of exclusion (see here). In short, failure to recognize intersectionality generates all manner of exclusion and caricatures oppression by making it seem one-dimensional.

I may be a seasoned feminist scholar, but I still find intersectionality to be logistically and conceptually confusing: how do we do it well? How do we (even the idea of “we” creates exclusions immediately) have a truly inclusive discourse that does not exclude? Is intersectionality a concept, a method, a theory, an approach, an ideal, an identity? These questions swirl in the background throughout the course and I confess that I don’t have a clear answer to them. We read the Shuddhabrata Sengupta piece, “I/Me/Mine—Intersectional Identities and Negotiated Minefields,” (see here: Signs, Vol. 31, No. 3 [Spring 2006]:629-239), in which he highlights how identities of privilege and oppression are not absolute or constant, but shifting and relative: