Discrimination and Disadvantage

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?

Burning Out: Resisting Resilience and Self-Care Narratives (guest post)

 

Burning Out: Resisting Resilience and Self-Care Narratives

 

Guest Post

 

by 

Suze Berkhout, M.D., Ph.D.*

 

As a psychiatry resident, the recent CBC and Toronto Star headlines proclaiming high rates of burnout, depression, and suicidal ideation in the Canadian medical profession came as no surprise to me. Even less surprising was the finding that these numbers were vastly higher amongst medical residents in Canada. Increasing demands and expectations, overloaded schedules, decreasing ability to make effective changes within the Canadian medical system, and conflicting values—humanistic approaches versus cost containment, for instance—are rampant. In addition, larger workplace cultures frequently value competitiveness, perfectionism, and certainty over admission and acknowledgement of flaws, limitations, and doubt. For residents and medical students, add in debt, a pervasive hierarchy, and even less control, and you’ve got a perfect storm.

Burnout—the combination of physical and emotional exhaustion, feelings of ineffectiveness or lack of accomplishment, and experiences of cynicism and detachment—are surely a logical conclusion to these structures and environments, not a personal tragedy.

This critical state of affairs is not just an issue for physicians, or even health professions more generally. Academia is rife with these same structures and their consequences. Not surprisingly, burnout is increasingly an issue discussed in higher education. And the impacts of structural inequities on women academics, academics who are members of racialized and other minority groups, and disabled academics are profound. We are the ones least likely to be on a tenure track and more frequently in precarious forms of employment; we are the ones most often tasked with unrecognized and unremunerated emotional labour; we are more likely to face biases in the practices of peer review, impacting publication opportunities, grant acquisition, and promotions. Yet our assertions around issues of equity and justice are more likely to be met with scepticism at best, hostility and retribution at worst.

The testimonial and hermeneutical injustices faced by individuals “othered” along various intersectional identities must also be understood as part of the burnout picture. Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker is deemed to lack credibility due to prejudicial beliefs by the listener—typically these beliefs relate to some aspect of the speaker’s cognition, formed in a way that is resistant to counter-evidence; moreover, these prejudicial beliefs reference sociohistorically extended patterns of oppression beyond a given interaction (Wanderer 2017). Hermeneutical injustice is the systematic constraining or undermining of communicators’ intelligibility which leads certain groups to be at a disadvantage with respect to making sense of their social experience. Injustices of these types radically curtail one’s voice, one’s interpretive capacities, and one’s ability to participate in meaning-making (Medina 2017). The wrongs relating to these forms of injustice are numerous, not the least of which is the way in which they maintain asymmetric and problematic relations of power.

The exhaustion, ineffectiveness, and detachment that signify burnout are surely linked, at least for members of certain groups, to the processes of epistemic subordination and exclusion, as well as a diminished ability to make sense of the position in which one finds oneself. Yet, if one were to look at the popular literature around the subject of burnout (here and here, for instance), it would seem that a combination of time management, gratitude journals, and yoga are all that it takes to combat the pervasive sense of helplessness and ineffectiveness that comes with the burnout territory. Emphasis in the literature has also been placed on how individuals make choices related to their professional life, including whether these choices align with their skills, temperament, and values. Even if these recommendations and other information are (to some degree) helpful, they individualize and privatize what is clearly an issue with deep structural and historical roots. They do nothing to contend with either structural inequalities or the forms of epistemic injustice described above.

Will improving your vinyasa fundamentally shift the relations of power that limit the agency of certain groups, systemically suppress their epistemic standpoint, and discount their assertions? I like endorphins as much as the next person, but surely scheduling in more self-care isn’t the answer. Or, it is an answer, but one that leaves unchallenged larger forces that underpin burnout. Individualizing and privatizing solutions to burnout displaces the responsibility for its “cure” onto the very people who have limited access to the mechanisms and privileges that enable systemic change, while absolving the very people who benefit from current structures of accountability.

Happily, I’m not the first person to notice this. In a recent Doximity blog post, Dr. Pooja Lakshmin also raises ire with the resilience refrain that has become so popular in medical culture, pointedly articulating that resilience and (what she rightly terms) “faux self-care” puts the burden of change on the individual while exonerating the system. I only worry that Dr. Lakshmin’s discussion of setting work-related boundaries—knowing your own limits, tolerating others’ disappointment that you are not placing their needs first, and not internalizing these as moral failings—is a strategy primarily available to people whose labour is both well-remunerated and falls outside the scope of precarity. One needs to have attained a certain level of social capital in one’s work to be able to avoid the negative repercussions that often accompany not being seen as a “team” player. Sessional and contract workers in academia, as well as early-career individuals (particularly women and members of racialized groups) don’t often have the luxury of turning down tasks that are presented to them as “opportunities,” either because of financial need or because of the optics and biases that come with pushing back.

Beyond “Squeezable Stress Stars”: Mental Health on University Campuses (guest post)

 

Beyond “Squeezable Stress Stars”:

Mental Health on University Campuses 

 

Guest Post

 

by

Jay T. Dolmage 

 

In Academic Ableism, I wrote about the connections between historically eugenic programs on college and university campuses—programs that focused on “hygiene”—and the current fad of “campus wellness.” We can draw a (rather straight) line from eugenic mental hygiene programs and physical fitness tests, to their existence as promotional programs, to family-life education programs, and on to wellness programs. At present, such programs off-load the responsibility for “wellness” onto individual students (and teachers): Eat better. Exercise more. Sleep well. (Maybe even wear this watch to track all this.) These programs often synch with “mental health awareness” on campuses—the programs that often refuse to address mental illness as a systemic issue, as something caused by higher education’s biases and regimes.

What these programs also do not even attempt to address is structural ableism and the educational construction of disability. They tend to be placed where psychologists can gather large amounts of data from a captive population—which is why so many wellness programs are helmed by psychologists or run out of psychology departments. Furthermore, the euphemism “wellness” works rhetorically to demand that we do not discuss disability, especially mental illness/mental disability/madness. We now have a growing industry of professionals working to minimize and hide disability on campuses. But the idea of wellness has also had an invasive effect, working its way into all aspects of university life.

The most recent evidence of this trend was a “wellness agreement” that a Canadian student had to sign. A Mount Saint Vincent University student was forced to sign an agreement “forbidding him to tell other students in residence that he was feeling suicidal” (Silva). The exact language of the agreement stated that the student “will not discuss or engage in conversations with residence students regarding personal issues, namely the student’s self-destructive thoughts” (Silva). The penalty for breaking this contract would have been expulsion from residence.

A university-wide program, harnessing the communications and PR power of the school, can be a particularly powerful, authoritative, legitimizing structure for controlling discourse around mental illness and disability. In the worst-case scenario, the focus on wellness might provide the rhetorical conditions in which eugenic ideas about who is and is not “fit” for college can germinate and grow.

As Catherine Gidney’s book Tending the Student Body points out, “by the 1930s and ‘40s, many universities provided some type of health service, and required physical examination and physical training...[E]ducators had come to perceive bodily health to be a crucial component in the role of the university in shaping students’ character....In other words, character would become writ on the body” (15, 76). Gidney goes on to note that “anxieties about women’s ability to combine intense study with good health in general, and reproductive health in particular [was] prominent within Canadian universities” (16). And, “in the late nineteenth century, some American universities, particularly elite ones, instituted compulsory medical examinations as part of their admission process in order to eliminate the unfit” (23). Unsurprisingly, “in obtaining funding for health services, physicians and administrators also relied on the help of faculty whose research intersected with aspects of the student physical examinations....Physicians and scientists, and even the occasional entrepreneur, quickly identified such programs as potential sources of captive research subjects. The provision of health services in the interests of students thus blurred with the use of students as research subjects” (32).

These programs are no longer explicitly mandatory, unless you are forced to sign an agreement. Yet, physicians and scientists on your campus likely study student wellness and publish on wellness without ever asking for student consent. Consider that all students at Oral Roberts University are required to wear Fitbit watches to track their weight, sleep, and exercise, as well as that many university employees can earn insurance discounts by submitting to wellness checks, using wellness apps, or wearing smart watches to track themselves. In short, “wellness” is a theme that pervades the university through awareness days, exercise-a-thons, special yoga classes, the use of university-wide health statistics by researchers, and so on. In the sickness model, we are unsure of exactly to what degree the university might be disabling, but the blame and the impact almost always falls on individuals to shoulder. In the wellness model, we are sure we should all be physically improving on campus, not talking about disability, and the burden is on the individual student to never be unwell.

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: Black Male Studies

 

Temple University Press seeks book proposals for

 

Black Male Studies

A Series Exploring the Paradoxes of Racially Subjugated Males

 

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

 

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

Submissions to the series are welcome.

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

or Temple University Press ([email protected])

 

posted by Shelley

Mental Distress, Neoliberalism, and the Academy (guest post)

 

Guest Post

 

By

Suze Berkhout*

 

How have we, as readers who encounter scientific images on a daily basis, come to see brain images as compelling facts about who we are? How have our notions of self, health, illness and human nature been shaped by our encounters with facts like these? In the 1990s, the Decade of the Brain, PET scan brain images attained a brand-like status, symbolizing science, progress, biological selves, digital imaging, and the technological powers of progress, all at once. But they also often signal human differences as well, dividing us and measuring our deviation from “normal.”

                                                                                                                                               Joseph Dumit, 2003

 

 

Mental health is a hot topic these days—newspaper articles, campus forums, corporate programs, government policies, strategic plans—it seems everyone is ready to call out the culture of silence and shame that has surrounded mental illness, drawing attention to conditions like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and post-traumatic stress (PTSD). Remarks that hold a diagnosis such as depression to be “just like” diabetes are oft cited: depression is now conceptualized as a biochemical state that is no more deserving of stigmatization than any physical ailment.

Within psychiatry, this rhetorical move is common—attempting to legitimize those experiences labelled as mental illnesses by comparing them to physical health conditions, which are seen to be more firmly entrenched in biology and therefore above reproach. Tying disorders of the mind to biochemical, genetic, and neuroscience origins is presumed to decrease negative perceptions attached to them. Not only can one not control their biology; as Joseph Dumit writes above, the technologies associated with the “decade of the brain” symbolize (for ‘psy’ disciplines especially) progress, digitization, technological power, and the status of science.

Although the connection between lessened stigmatization and entrenchment in biology is dubious at best (see here), the idea that the story of mental illness is a story of chemical imbalances and broken-down brain pathways remains popular in both biomedical and public discourse. Not only is there a fascination with offering the (i.e. singular) explanation of mental distress in terms of neurocircuitry; brain-related technologies are frequently touted as offering a “window” or a way to “read” what must be objectively present. The emphasis on having technologies to better “access” the brain/mind tacitly suggests that current methodologies and approaches in psychiatric medicine (i.e. a clinician’s interpretations of behaviours and symptoms) are subjective at best and mere divination strategies at worst.

Setting aside the fact that there are, of course, pertinent challenges to be raised to the diagnostic practices of psychiatry, we would do well to consider the limitations of a broken-brain narrative that is deeply enmeshed with what has been called the "technological paradigm" in psychiatry—the idea that all mental illnesses are a result of individual pathophysiology, that explanations of merit must be mechanisms modelled in causal terms, and that technological interventions and processes to understand these phenomena can be conceptualized free from relationships and values (Bracken 2012).

The historical context of the technological paradigm in psychiatry is worth considering. The rising pre-eminence of neo-Kraepelinism and biological psychiatry in the 1980s—chemical imbalance theories, the use of explicit diagnostic criteria in DSM-III onward, the introduction of neuroimaging technologies, as well as the focus on brain-specific changes as explanatory models—have been identified as a doubling down on biological reductionism as part of a renewed quest for scientific legitimacy. For historical, cultural, and intellectual events that preceded the emergence of this paradigm constituted a time of reckoning for psychiatry: the 1960s and 70s saw a rise of c/s/x (consumer/survivor/ex-patient) and anti-psychiatry activism from outside of the “psy” sciences; from within psychiatry, there was a wealth of critical responses, many following the footsteps of R.D. Laing and the Rosenhan study; simultaneously, funding for psychiatric research and treatment was decreasing, in part due to skepticism surrounding the validity of its practices.

Not simply reductive, the technological paradigm stems from a crisis in legitimacy. But moreover, it is steeped in the ideologies of neoliberalism.

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Jesse Prinz Redux

 

Instead of a new interview of Dialogues on Disability for February 2018, for this thirty-fifth installment of the series I have reposted the fascinating interview that I conducted with Jesse Prinz in February 2016. I know that readers and listeners of the series will be delighted to revisit this interview with Jesse. The original post of the interview and comments to it are here.

 

[Description of image below: A coloured photo of Jesse, who is staring directly at us. He is sitting with his elbows on a surface in front of him. His left hand is touching his forehead and his right hand appears open and expressive near his face. He is wearing a button-down shirt with the cuffs turned up, rings on all his fingers, and is positioned in front of a solid background.] 

 

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 eleventh 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; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

My guest today is Jesse Prinz. Jesse teaches at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, where he is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies. His research interests include emotions, moral psychology, social identity, classification, and aesthetics and emphasize the historical, social, and cultural factors that influence how we act and think. Jesse’s favorite recreational activities revolve around art, including watching films, going to galleries, writing an art blog, and studying art history. 

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Jesse! Let’s begin this interview with your remarkably interesting background and personal history. Your paternal grandfather had a Ph.D. in philosophy and he and other members of your family have played a significant role in the achievement of civil rights for black people in the U.S. Please describe your family’s history and activities, as well as how this history and involvement have shaped your philosophical and political interests.

Thanks, Shelley, and thanks for this outstanding series. I’ve learned so much from your past interviews and feel honored and lucky to join the conversation.

Both of my parents’ families were refugees. My mother’s parents grew up in villages in Poland near the Russian border, but fled from poverty and pogroms. My mother’s grandparents, their siblings, and all of her other relatives who stayed behind in Poland were killed by Hitler’s executioners. My father’s parents lived in Berlin. My paternal grandfather—a leading rabbi in Germany—was repeatedly arrested because he issued warnings to Jewish Germans about the dangers that Hitler and the Nazis posed.

Eventually, my grandfather Prinz was expelled from Germany because of this activism. He and my grandmother immigrated to the U.S., where he later joined the American Civil Rights Movement. He worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and was one of the organizers of and speakers at the historic March on Washington. My father, too, became involved in civil rights work, including the Community Action Movement in Newark, New York, which sought to empower ghettoized Americans by returning ownership and control of local businesses to members of the community. My mother was involved in the New York art scene, which, at the time, was working for broader inclusiveness in the art world. Women, for example, were still largely invisible in fine art. Both of my parents were, and remain, feminists.

Because I grew up in the midst of this family environment, and in New York, I took certain things for granted. For instance, I was not familiar with anyone who was on the right politically—or, at least, not to my knowledge; so, I internalized both the message that social justice requires constant vigilance and effort and the awareness that we are far from achieving it. When I finally left New York, spending some twenty years living elsewhere, I came to realize that my political orientation was not shared, which deepened my understanding of the way that values can be shaped by one’s environment. This kind of destabilization is important, I think. Moral confidence is dangerous. It is important to see that one’s own values—like the values of one’s political opponents—are constructed.

I also came to appreciate more deeply the way that ostensibly progressive cities like New York perpetuate various forms of injustice and oppression. One of the most obvious forms of structural inequality is the urban ghetto, referred to in the popular press with the damaging euphemism “inner city.” Major American cities, such as New York, remain segregated to an alarming degree. Segregation has profoundly negative effects: unequal housing, inequalities in schooling, in safety, and in cultural resources, unequal job opportunities, inequalities in health care, and an unequal distribution of social services, as well as isolation from social networks that allow for upward mobility. Ghettos exacerbate an “us-and-them” mentality, allowing abuses against certain sectors of the population to take place in a way that is invisible to the people who live in enclaves of privilege.

New York, like many other American cities, is undergoing rapid gentrification. The New York City in which I grew up—a city where artists and immigrants could afford to live and where many neighborhoods had a broad spectrum of residents, spanning wide income gaps, and reflecting multiple backgrounds—is gone. The city officials have “cleaned up” multiple neighborhoods, selling to developers, and permitting unchecked rent increases. Every month, more residents with lower incomes get forced out of neighborhoods. Homelessness is rising dramatically.

When I left New York, I lived in various other cities: Chicago, Washington D.C., St. Louis, Los Angeles, with brief stints in London and Paris. Many of these cities have the same problems. Urban centers remain divided. Prejudice is not just a state of mind; it is a state of place. Prejudice is built into the very physical structure of cities, with the inequalities therein inscribed into bodies: life expectancy, infant mortality rates, and general health are affected. Philosophers have started to think a great deal about implicit biases, that is, the forms of bigotry that persist in the beliefs of people who explicitly embrace equality; however, we must also think about structures. Cities are a microcosm of global issues. Differential outcomes vary far more dramatically as a function of place when we consider regional and national differences.

After city-hopping for some years, I ended up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Living in Chapel Hill was a rewarding experience in every way. One especially valuable outcome of my time in Chapel Hill is that I felt like an alien when I arrived there. I’d never lived in the American South or in a college town. Chapel Hill itself is very cosmopolitan; but, I still felt like the proverbial Other there—a displaced New Yorker, encountering people whose backgrounds differed dramatically from the lives of people whom I’d met elsewhere. These differences included some of the obvious things, such as different attitudes towards guns and God. However, there were also different attitudes towards community: many collective efforts, people dropped by just to say “hello,” and so on. Furthermore, there were different principles of social division: gaps in income, for example, were not as pronounced as they are elsewhere. Feeling like an Other helped me to realize that my political outlook must include self-critique. Many left-leaning urbanites have been isolated from political diversity, so they come to see their own values as manifestly true. Because I have lived in many different places, it has become clear to me that I, like everyone else, am a product of place.

These life lessons inform my philosophical work. My work is less overtly political than the work of some of the other philosophers who have contributed to this forum. I am a political philosopher only in the sense that everything is political. I am political between the lines, so to speak. I think that in this relatively limited way my political views are a guiding force for me. Almost everything that I do involves the idea that experience can transform human minds.  We are, by nature, unnatural. I am wary of biophilia—that is, of uncritical efforts to explain human universals and differences by appeal to fixed biological traits.

Experience shapes all of our beliefs, values, thinking styles, behavioral dispositions, ways of seeing, and ways of feeling. We share much as a species; however, our extraordinary malleability distinguishes us from each other and from other animals. No aspect of human activity remains untouched by enculturation and experience. The way that we sit, stand, walk, breath, the volume at which we speak, speech itself, the way that we dress and live, the foods that we crave, the arts that we love, and the structure of our relationships are learned scripts to some degree. It boggles the mind to think about that. Philosophers who emphasize biological contributors are neglecting our most important trait. Although finding biological universals is valuable, it is like studying bedrock instead of buildings.

 

You specialize in aesthetics and philosophy of art. You are also art trained. How do your art education and your family history influence your writing and teaching in aesthetics and philosophy of art?

In the oldest extant photo of me, I’m an infant strapped to my father’s back in an art museum. With a father who loves art and an artist mother, it was nearly inevitable that art would be important to me. By grammar school, I wanted to be an artist. I went to a public high school for the arts and, for the longest time, hoped to find a career in the arts. My older brother, who is immensely talented, had followed a similar path, pursuing music. He also produced a lot of visual art. He continues to work with video, robotics, and other media. Art seemed like my destiny.

But, of course, there is no such thing as destiny. For a variety of reasons, I left fine art behind as a professional vocation. I did some work in design and illustration after high school; but, I didn’t find the work rewarding, nor did I have the stomach and talent for a career as a gallery artist. By then, I had discovered the next best thing: philosophy. 

I was reading a lot of Nietzsche in high school, and, by good fortune, my mother had a philosopher as a neighbor, Sandy Kwinter, who had studied with Foucault. Sandy was one of the core forces behind Zone Books, the publisher that introduced many French authors to English-speaking audiences. Sandy turned me on to Deleuze, for example, which was a mind-blowing experience for a teenager. I’ve largely left Deleuze behind, despite his enduring popularity; however, Foucault remains a central figure for me.

Having passion for both art and philosophy made it inevitable that I would ultimately turn to aesthetics. Although aesthetics has been a serious interest from the start of my career, I’ve only recently transitioned from dabbling in the area to making it a major focus of research. My interest in aesthetics is clearly a consequence of my background. To this day, many of the people closest to me in life are artists.

I have tremendous respect for people who take time to make art and who, in a world that is hostile to artists, choose making art as a professional path. I think art attracts people who have difficulty fitting in to conventional life, which means that many of these people are interesting and inspiring.

Art training and marginalization also makes artists good observers. Many artists are economically challenged. They struggle and hustle to survive; yet, they manage to find energy to do their work. Since most artists do not have permanent employment and the cost of personal health insurance in the U.S. is prohibitive, I’m sure that very few artists in the U.S. have adequate health insurance. Some artists come from affluent backgrounds. Other artists find people who will help support them. Nevertheless, many artists really struggle. Even many artists who become well-known names to art-world insiders are living lives with great economic insecurity. Financial success comes to only a tiny handful. Many of the artists who choose this hard path do so because they can’t imagine doing anything else or can’t tolerate or manage more practical career paths. Such characteristics place these artists outside of prevailing standards of what it is to lead a useful, responsible, and valuable life. Unlike many people who fall outside of mainstream expectations, however, these artists are not silent. They make things; and, often what they make reflects what they have seen around them. Even art that is abstract or escapist reflects time and place. I think philosophers have a lot to learn from art and artists.

 

In your work, you give pride of place to the role that culture and social construction play in our cognition. This emphasis on plasticity and historicity in cognition sets you apart from most other philosophers who work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. How would you describe your work in this area, Jesse?

Thank you for this question. One of the things that I admire about your work is its emphasis on historicity and construction in conceptions of disability. I think that this orientation, which was so central to Foucault, gets far too little air-time in philosophy, especially in the analytic tradition. Almost all of my work concerns plasticity. My first book challenged the innateness of concepts. My second book argues that all emotions are culturally informed. My third book defends the Nietzschean view that morality is a product of history. My fourth book, Beyond Human Nature, was devoted to challenging biological explanations of behavior, including biological theories of racial differences in I.Q.; gender differences in aptitude for science; and medical models of mental illness. I am currently writing what I regard as a trilogy on social construction: a book about art, in which I argue that it is a cultural invention; a book about the construction of identity; and a book in which I argue that everything is socially constructed. So, yes, I think it’s fair to say that I’m obsessed with this topic.

Within philosophy of mind and cognitive science, there is a great deal of attention on, and emphasis paid to, the basic mechanisms of mentality. This orientation tends to promote a biological view, at least implicitly. I am guilty of this emphasis in my own early work on consciousness—the one place in my work where I have given little attention to plasticity. Of course, we can find exceptions. For example, there is wonderful work in cultural psychology and excellent work done from within science that challenges biological fixity.

History gets less attention. Nietzsche and Foucault helped promote a genealogical approach; however, there have been few contemporary practitioners of it. Your work stands out in this regard. I was also excited to see Anthony Appiah’s book, The Honor Code, which approaches moral values through historical change. Appiah’s narrative is a bit more vindicating than I tend to like—I am wary of progress narratives—nevertheless, it is a terrific read. I think that we need more work like this.

My forthcoming book on social identity includes a chapter in which I look genealogically and critically at three core concepts in Western morals: democracy, freedom, and human rights. The thesis of the book is that values are extremely important to personal identity and I approach values historically. In the spirit of self-critique, I suggest that some of the most deeply held convictions in contemporary Western society are problematic when viewed through the lens of history. I look, for example, at: the role of capitalism in the rise of constitutional democracy; the relationship between prevailing models of freedom and mass incarceration; and the use of human rights rhetoric in the reign of terror and the Napoleonic wars.

This kind of work is hard for philosophers because it requires a great deal of research into historical events, which training in philosophy usually does not include. Philosophers need more dialogue with historians. The structure of the modern university and its departmental divisions can be barriers to good work. I am, and will always be, a novice when it comes to history; but I think it’s important to make the effort. I’ve spent my career trying to bring psychology into philosophy, and, if we can do that, there is no reason why we can’t also use history as a source in our work.

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

My guest today is Jesse Prinz. Jesse teaches at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, where he is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies. His research interests include emotions, moral psychology, social identity, classification, and aesthetics and emphasize the historical, social, and cultural factors that influence how we act and think. Jesse’s favorite recreational activities revolve around art, including watching films, going to galleries, writing an art blog, and studying art history. 

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Jesse! Let’s begin this interview with your remarkably interesting background and personal history. Your paternal grandfather had a Ph.D. in philosophy and he and other members of your family have played a significant role in the achievement of civil rights for black people in the U.S. Please describe your family’s history and activities, as well as how this history and involvement have shaped your philosophical and political interests.

Thanks, Shelley, and thanks for this outstanding series. I’ve learned so much from your past interviews and feel honored and lucky to join the conversation.

Both of my parents’ families were refugees. My mother’s parents grew up in villages in Poland near the Russian border, but fled from poverty and pogroms. My mother’s grandparents, their siblings, and all of her other relatives who stayed behind in Poland were killed by Hitler’s executioners. My father’s parents lived in Berlin. My paternal grandfather—a leading rabbi in Germany—was repeatedly arrested because he issued warnings to Jewish Germans about the dangers that Hitler and the Nazis posed.

Eventually, my grandfather Prinz was expelled from Germany because of this activism. He and my grandmother immigrated to the U.S., where he later joined the American Civil Rights Movement. He worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and was one of the organizers of and speakers at the historic March on Washington. My father, too, became involved in civil rights work, including the Community Action Movement in Newark, New York, which sought to empower ghettoized Americans by returning ownership and control of local businesses to members of the community. My mother was involved in the New York art scene, which, at the time, was working for broader inclusiveness in the art world. Women, for example, were still largely invisible in fine art. Both of my parents were, and remain, feminists.

Because I grew up in the midst of this family environment, and in New York, I took certain things for granted. For instance, I was not familiar with anyone who was on the right politically—or, at least, not to my knowledge; so, I internalized both the message that social justice requires constant vigilance and effort and the awareness that we are far from achieving it. When I finally left New York, spending some twenty years living elsewhere, I came to realize that my political orientation was not shared, which deepened my understanding of the way that values can be shaped by one’s environment. This kind of destabilization is important, I think. Moral confidence is dangerous. It is important to see that one’s own values—like the values of one’s political opponents—are constructed.

I also came to appreciate more deeply the way that ostensibly progressive cities like New York perpetuate various forms of injustice and oppression. One of the most obvious forms of structural inequality is the urban ghetto, referred to in the popular press with the damaging euphemism “inner city.” Major American cities, such as New York, remain segregated to an alarming degree. Segregation has profoundly negative effects: unequal housing, inequalities in schooling, in safety, and in cultural resources, unequal job opportunities, inequalities in health care, and an unequal distribution of social services, as well as isolation from social networks that allow for upward mobility. Ghettos exacerbate an “us-and-them” mentality, allowing abuses against certain sectors of the population to take place in a way that is invisible to the people who live in enclaves of privilege.

New York, like many other American cities, is undergoing rapid gentrification. The New York City in which I grew up—a city where artists and immigrants could afford to live and where many neighborhoods had a broad spectrum of residents, spanning wide income gaps, and reflecting multiple backgrounds—is gone. The city officials have “cleaned up” multiple neighborhoods, selling to developers, and permitting unchecked rent increases. Every month, more residents with lower incomes get forced out of neighborhoods. Homelessness is rising dramatically.

When I left New York, I lived in various other cities: Chicago, Washington D.C., St. Louis, Los Angeles, with brief stints in London and Paris. Many of these cities have the same problems. Urban centers remain divided. Prejudice is not just a state of mind; it is a state of place. Prejudice is built into the very physical structure of cities, with the inequalities therein inscribed into bodies: life expectancy, infant mortality rates, and general health are affected. Philosophers have started to think a great deal about implicit biases, that is, the forms of bigotry that persist in the beliefs of people who explicitly embrace equality; however, we must also think about structures. Cities are a microcosm of global issues. Differential outcomes vary far more dramatically as a function of place when we consider regional and national differences.

After city-hopping for some years, I ended up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Living in Chapel Hill was a rewarding experience in every way. One especially valuable outcome of my time in Chapel Hill is that I felt like an alien when I arrived there. I’d never lived in the American South or in a college town. Chapel Hill itself is very cosmopolitan; but, I still felt like the proverbial Other there—a displaced New Yorker, encountering people whose backgrounds differed dramatically from the lives of people whom I’d met elsewhere. These differences included some of the obvious things, such as different attitudes towards guns and God. However, there were also different attitudes towards community: many collective efforts, people dropped by just to say “hello,” and so on. Furthermore, there were different principles of social division: gaps in income, for example, were not as pronounced as they are elsewhere. Feeling like an Other helped me to realize that my political outlook must include self-critique. Many left-leaning urbanites have been isolated from political diversity, so they come to see their own values as manifestly true. Because I have lived in many different places, it has become clear to me that I, like everyone else, am a product of place.

These life lessons inform my philosophical work. My work is less overtly political than the work of some of the other philosophers who have contributed to this forum. I am a political philosopher only in the sense that everything is political. I am political between the lines, so to speak. I think that in this relatively limited way my political views are a guiding force for me. Almost everything that I do involves the idea that experience can transform human minds.  We are, by nature, unnatural. I am wary of biophilia—that is, of uncritical efforts to explain human universals and differences by appeal to fixed biological traits.

Experience shapes all of our beliefs, values, thinking styles, behavioral dispositions, ways of seeing, and ways of feeling. We share much as a species; however, our extraordinary malleability distinguishes us from each other and from other animals. No aspect of human activity remains untouched by enculturation and experience. The way that we sit, stand, walk, breath, the volume at which we speak, speech itself, the way that we dress and live, the foods that we crave, the arts that we love, and the structure of our relationships are learned scripts to some degree. It boggles the mind to think about that. Philosophers who emphasize biological contributors are neglecting our most important trait. Although finding biological universals is valuable, it is like studying bedrock instead of buildings.

 

You specialize in aesthetics and philosophy of art. You are also art trained. How do your art education and your family history influence your writing and teaching in aesthetics and philosophy of art?

In the oldest extant photo of me, I’m an infant strapped to my father’s back in an art museum. With a father who loves art and an artist mother, it was nearly inevitable that art would be important to me. By grammar school, I wanted to be an artist. I went to a public high school for the arts and, for the longest time, hoped to find a career in the arts. My older brother, who is immensely talented, had followed a similar path, pursuing music. He also produced a lot of visual art. He continues to work with video, robotics, and other media. Art seemed like my destiny.

But, of course, there is no such thing as destiny. For a variety of reasons, I left fine art behind as a professional vocation. I did some work in design and illustration after high school; but, I didn’t find the work rewarding, nor did I have the stomach and talent for a career as a gallery artist. By then, I had discovered the next best thing: philosophy. 

I was reading a lot of Nietzsche in high school, and, by good fortune, my mother had a philosopher as a neighbor, Sandy Kwinter, who had studied with Foucault. Sandy was one of the core forces behind Zone Books, the publisher that introduced many French authors to English-speaking audiences. Sandy turned me on to Deleuze, for example, which was a mind-blowing experience for a teenager. I’ve largely left Deleuze behind, despite his enduring popularity; however, Foucault remains a central figure for me.

Having passion for both art and philosophy made it inevitable that I would ultimately turn to aesthetics. Although aesthetics has been a serious interest from the start of my career, I’ve only recently transitioned from dabbling in the area to making it a major focus of research. My interest in aesthetics is clearly a consequence of my background. To this day, many of the people closest to me in life are artists.

I have tremendous respect for people who take time to make art and who, in a world that is hostile to artists, choose making art as a professional path. I think art attracts people who have difficulty fitting in to conventional life, which means that many of these people are interesting and inspiring.

Art training and marginalization also makes artists good observers. Many artists are economically challenged. They struggle and hustle to survive; yet, they manage to find energy to do their work. Since most artists do not have permanent employment and the cost of personal health insurance in the U.S. is prohibitive, I’m sure that very few artists in the U.S. have adequate health insurance. Some artists come from affluent backgrounds. Other artists find people who will help support them. Nevertheless, many artists really struggle. Even many artists who become well-known names to art-world insiders are living lives with great economic insecurity. Financial success comes to only a tiny handful. Many of the artists who choose this hard path do so because they can’t imagine doing anything else or can’t tolerate or manage more practical career paths. Such characteristics place these artists outside of prevailing standards of what it is to lead a useful, responsible, and valuable life. Unlike many people who fall outside of mainstream expectations, however, these artists are not silent. They make things; and, often what they make reflects what they have seen around them. Even art that is abstract or escapist reflects time and place. I think philosophers have a lot to learn from art and artists.

 

In your work, you give pride of place to the role that culture and social construction play in our cognition. This emphasis on plasticity and historicity in cognition sets you apart from most other philosophers who work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. How would you describe your work in this area, Jesse?

Thank you for this question. One of the things that I admire about your work is its emphasis on historicity and construction in conceptions of disability. I think that this orientation, which was so central to Foucault, gets far too little air-time in philosophy, especially in the analytic tradition. Almost all of my work concerns plasticity. My first book challenged the innateness of concepts. My second book argues that all emotions are culturally informed. My third book defends the Nietzschean view that morality is a product of history. My fourth book, Beyond Human Nature, was devoted to challenging biological explanations of behavior, including biological theories of racial differences in I.Q.; gender differences in aptitude for science; and medical models of mental illness. I am currently writing what I regard as a trilogy on social construction: a book about art, in which I argue that it is a cultural invention; a book about the construction of identity; and a book in which I argue that everything is socially constructed. So, yes, I think it’s fair to say that I’m obsessed with this topic.

Within philosophy of mind and cognitive science, there is a great deal of attention on, and emphasis paid to, the basic mechanisms of mentality. This orientation tends to promote a biological view, at least implicitly. I am guilty of this emphasis in my own early work on consciousness—the one place in my work where I have given little attention to plasticity. Of course, we can find exceptions. For example, there is wonderful work in cultural psychology and excellent work done from within science that challenges biological fixity.

History gets less attention. Nietzsche and Foucault helped promote a genealogical approach; however, there have been few contemporary practitioners of it. Your work stands out in this regard. I was also excited to see Anthony Appiah’s book, The Honor Code, which approaches moral values through historical change. Appiah’s narrative is a bit more vindicating than I tend to like—I am wary of progress narratives—nevertheless, it is a terrific read. I think that we need more work like this.

My forthcoming book on social identity includes a chapter in which I look genealogically and critically at three core concepts in Western morals: democracy, freedom, and human rights. The thesis of the book is that values are extremely important to personal identity and I approach values historically. In the spirit of self-critique, I suggest that some of the most deeply held convictions in contemporary Western society are problematic when viewed through the lens of history. I look, for example, at: the role of capitalism in the rise of constitutional democracy; the relationship between prevailing models of freedom and mass incarceration; and the use of human rights rhetoric in the reign of terror and the Napoleonic wars.

This kind of work is hard for philosophers because it requires a great deal of research into historical events, which training in philosophy usually does not include. Philosophers need more dialogue with historians. The structure of the modern university and its departmental divisions can be barriers to good work. I am, and will always be, a novice when it comes to history; but I think it’s important to make the effort. I’ve spent my career trying to bring psychology into philosophy, and, if we can do that, there is no reason why we can’t also use history as a source in our work.

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Brian Montgomery

 

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

My guest today is Brian Montgomery. Brian is a visiting professor at University of Texas-El Paso who works primarily in philosophy of language and epistemology, especially where they intersect, as well as on issues in standpoint epistemology and epistemic injustice and the relationship between science and metaphysics. He is engaged in a long-term project in mind-centered sexual ethics and the norm of monogamy and has written a screenplay about the relationship between Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill which explores the latter’s experiences of depression. Almost all of Brian’s hobbies involve films.

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Brian! When you began college, you were enrolled in a law enforcement program; however, you gravitated to philosophy. Tell us about your academic background and your motivation to pursue a career in philosophy.

Thank you for the invitation to participate, Shelley. Yes, I began my academic career as a criminal justice major at Western Illinois University. This start of my academic career was the culmination of the previous three years spent working for a suburban Illinois police department through its Explorers program. I initially joined the program as a teenager out of a general desire to help people. I was more than a bit idealistic back then and thought that my involvement in the program was the best way to help others. I saw a lot of good among the officers I worked under, but also a lot of bad. I was already disillusioned with the profession by the time that my freshman year began.

Consequently, I decided to switch majors to my favorite subject in high school: history. I had an Advanced Placement (AP) European history instructor my senior year of high school who specialized in Soviet history, and I decided to do it too. I did well with the Russian history courses, but struggled with learning the language. I decided to transfer universities for my sophomore year, and ended up at Illinois State University. Upon entering, I found out that I had enough AP credit to graduate in my junior year. Not wanting to enter the real world any earlier than I had to, however, I took on philosophy as a second major, as I was enrolled in an intro to philosophy course.

 

Academic Ableism

 

Academic Ableism is the title of Jay Dolmage's much-anticipated book, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press on December 1. Academic Ableism is also the name of a cutting-edge conference that took place over the weekend at UC Berkeley, with contributions by Dolmage, Margaret Price, Susan Schweik, Stephanie Kerschbaum, and others in Disability Studies.

In the spirit of universal design and accessibility, all of the materials presented at the conference, including presentations on hiring disabled faculty, ableist rhetoric and academia, universal design in teaching, and the experiences of disabled faculty, have been provided here (temporarily).

 

posted by Shelley

The Fallacies of Jordan Peterson and Why Everyone is More than Justified in Using Preferred Gender Pronouns

 

Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at The University of Toronto, has recently garnered some attention because of his beliefs on the topic of sex and gender. Peterson has come under fire because he opposes Bill C-16 of the Canadian Human Rights Code and Criminal Code, legislation whose recent passing by the Canadian federal government made discrimination on the basis of gender identity or gender expression a criminal act in Canada. He appears to think that the recent addition of particular identities to the Codes will, in practice, impinge on his freedoms of speech.

Peterson has also come under fire because of his preemptive refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns, including in instances where an individual prefers them and explicitly requests use of them; that is, even before anyone requests that Peterson use a certain pronoun, other than the typical “he” or “she,” Peterson refuses to use it. Peterson seems to think that the rationale for the use of gender-neutral pronouns is flawed, irrational, and unscientific. Moreover, he has characterized people who prefer the use of gender-neutral pronouns as “self-aggrandizing” and “narcissistic,” and perhaps a particular kind of irrational.

It's surprising to me that so few philosophers have responded to Peterson's arguments, given how well-known he appears to be and how convincing some people find his arguments. Indeed, since very few philosophers have taken issue with Peterson’s arguments, I will present the fallacious claims about sex and gender that he makes, as well as argue that his preemptive refusal to use preferred gender pronouns is philosophically spurious. I will not tackle the issues Peterson has with Bill C-16—although I think that his reasoning, when fully developed, is unsound.

Contrary to Peterson’s beliefs, there are good reasons to use the preferred gender pronouns of others. In addition, the reasoning that Peterson offered for why people should not use them is unthoughtful, vulnerable to strong philosophical objections, unsound, and in many cases invalid.