Discrimination and Disadvantage

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Lissa Skitolsky

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the thirtieth 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 Lissa Skitolsky. Lissa is an associate professor of philosophy at Susquehanna University (SU) whose research draws on work in Continental philosophy, genocide studies, and hip hop studies to analyze our cultural and political responses to mass violence and expose discursive practices that normalize genocidal patterns of antiblack violence in the United States. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled, Hip Hop as Philosophical Text and Testimony: Can I Get a Witness?, that is under contract with Lexington Books for publication in its Philosophy of Race series. In her free time, Lissa enjoys listening to underground hip hop and provides massage as a certified massage therapist. 

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Lissa! We met at the CSWIP conference in October 2016, where you gave a memorable presentation on genocide, mass incarceration, and hip hop. You aim, in your research, to expose the normalization of state violence through discursive practices. Please describe this research and your motivation to do it.

For junior high and high school, I went to a private Jewish day school where I received an early and comprehensive education about the Nazi genocide. Later in college and graduate school, I developed my expertise in the field of Holocaust studies, as I drew on works in Continental philosophy to better explain the political and social phenomenon of genocide in western politics. Agamben’s work, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, cleared the ground for the sorts of nontraditional studies in comparative genocide that I continue to publish. 

For at least thirty years, however, the field of Holocaust studies has been preoccupied with the “uniqueness debate,” in which scholars, mostly Jewish, claim that since the Holocaust was absolutely “unique” in western history—a historical novum—it cannot legitimately be compared to any other genocide in human history. In fact, for the historian Steven Katz, the Holocaust is the only event in history that can properly be called a “genocide”. His view rejects the more expansive definition of genocide codified by the U.N. in the 1948 Convention Against Genocide, in which the effort to “destroy” a population can take many non-homicidal forms, including the regular infliction of mental or physical pain. In the past fifteen years, many scholars in the field have critiqued and rejected this “uniqueness argument” in order to contribute to the relatively new field of comparative genocide studies.

Nevertheless, these scholars are still bound to the ontology of genocide as an “event,” and their historical genealogies of genocide exclude ongoing antiblack violence in the United States. For the most part, practitioners in the field cannot assimilate the systemic and structural destruction of black lives into their narrow conception of genocide, especially evident in their exclusion of the historic petition “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People” from their academic consideration. This petition was presented to the U.N. in 1951 by the Civil Rights Congress to formally accuse the United States of antiblack genocide; it was the first attempt to make use of the new convention to hold a country accountable for genocidal violence against a racialized population “as such.” 

Reshaping the Polis: Toward a Political Conception of Disability (special issue)

 

The fabulous special issue of Journal of Social Philosophy (Vol. 48, No. 3) that I guest edited is now online here. The theme of the issue is Reshaping the Polis: Toward a Political Conception of Disability. The contents of the issue are pathbreaking and provocative in a number of ways. The Table of Contents for the issue appears below: 

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Ladelle McWhorter

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the twenty-ninth 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 Ladelle McWhorter, who is the Stephanie Bennett Smith Chair in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at the University of Richmond. Ladelle is also the author of Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy, and more than three dozen articles on Foucault, Bataille, Irigaray, and race theory. With Gail Stenstad, she edited Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Ladelle, who is an avid gardener, lives with her spouse, four cats, two horses, and a mule just outside Richmond, Virginia. 

Life in the Carceral State

 

Last Friday afternoon, as I was on my way to a nearby grocery store to get some fruit, I was assaulted by a white man in his late twenties or thirties. Among other things, he pulled me onto the road by my arm and a handful of my hair and, when I fell on the ground, he yanked the hair out of my head and kicked me. After yelling at me, he walked away, yelling at me again when he reached the bottom of the hill. A number of people passing by in their cars slowed down to watch, some of them called the police, one took his photo, and two of them followed him in their vehicles. Two women, who had called the police, stayed with me until an officer arrived and took their descriptions of the events, as well as their names and numbers. There was no need to call an ambulance, I assured her.

When the officer asked me if I wanted to press charges, warning me that I would have to go to court if so, it wasn’t hard to decide. (I read Foucault.) She thought that she knew the identity of the man, suggested that he had “gone off his meds,” and said that he would likely be taken to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, when apprehended. As we talked, one of the people who had followed the man drove past slowly, informing us that the man had in fact been apprehended. He would have been hard to miss: he was wearing orange jeans. Another officer arrived and told the first one to the scene that the man was “E.D.P.” and had been taken to the hospital. When I asked what the acronym meant, the second officer said, rather reluctantly: “Emotionally Disturbed Person.” He had "a history." He was "in the system."

For the past four days, I have thought about what the man who assaulted me might have been subjected to after his apprehension. (I read Foucault.) Registration, examination, isolation, interrogation, surveillance. The psychiatric panopticon: a normalizing apparatus of the neoliberal carceral state that evaluates, categorizes, medicates, and segregates people in order to make them governable in certain ways, for certain ends, the most vital of which is the safety and security of the life of “the general population.” Nowadays, (most) people think nothing of the fact that the man would be deemed “mentally ill” and sequestered from “the rest of us.”

But it wasn’t always so. In the first volume of his history of sexuality series, Foucault pointed out that the idea of “the population” is an artifact of biopower, a new form of power that began to coalesce in the late eighteenth century and that has been so instrumental to the rise and expansion of capitalism. Power no longer requires the sword, Foucault wrote. For, now power operates through measurements of proximity to and deviation from the norm(al): the normal citizen vs. the criminal; normal behavior vs. antisocial behavior; the normal, the healthy, the sane, and the typical vs. the deviant, the perverse, the mad, and the odd.

Technologies of normalization through which people become tied to allegedly pre-existing identities and understood scientifically actually bring into being the kinds of people that they are said to (merely) recognize and accurately represent. Kinds of people seem to so conveniently fit into the categories to which they are assigned because the kinds and the categories are made that way.

 

posted by Shelley

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Melinda Hall

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the twenty-eighth 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 Melinda Hall. Melinda is an assistant professor of philosophy at Stetson University whose research interests include philosophy of disability, bioethics, and Continental philosophy. Melinda loves to read (and sometimes write) fiction and poetry, play tennis, and binge “prestige” television (but feel guilty about it later). Since last year, she has taught philosophy classes on various topics—including philosophy of disability—for incarcerated men at Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach.

  

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Melinda! Your background is unusual because you were homeschooled for several years and then transitioned to a public school. Please describe your childhood and upbringing.

I was raised in an evangelical Christian household in rural Ohio and was homeschooled until the fourth grade for religious reasons. I recall that after I transitioned to public school, I asked to be excused from science lessons on evolution and was completely bewildered that my teacher was upset with the request. Church and religion dominated my childhood, but I did not then realize how different my life looked from the lives of those outside my particular enclave.

Because my dad is a pastor, I, along with my three siblings, was under a great deal of oppressive scrutiny within the church. My personality and behaviors were continually monitored both within and outside the family. Because of this, I had little privacy and felt that my parents valued the opinions of other people, or perhaps even their wants and needs, more than my fundamental needs or development. I desired recognition from my father as an authority figure and struggled mightily with the fact that I continually failed to meet his (often shifting) expectations. In that way, at least, my story is not an unusual one. But, atypically, since I was educated at home and my dad was an authority figure at the primary institution where I was socialized, I did not have a competing authority structure or system to provide insights about alternatives and opportunities for change.

I remember that I was obsessed with proper etiquette and bodily comportment—I thought all the time about making myself as unobtrusive as possible—and with abstract concepts like purity and goodness, a preoccupation that I now understand was racially-inflected, among other things. This was true even while I subverted rules and tested limits. I think that I wanted to prove that I was lovable even if I was “immoral;” but, I was, at the same time, also hyper-aware of rules and believed that one’s value came directly from rule-following. Long before I became a teenager, being appropriately feminine and growing into what the church understood as Christian womanhood was a major, daily issue that I had to confront, plan for, and control. I received the strong message that I needed to hold myself accountable to those norms or risk a variety of punishments, both immediately and in the future.

As a teenager, I often worked to "serve" the church in different capacities and wanted very badly to fight against injustice. The way that I understand injustice and how to fight it has radically changed from that time period, but in this way at least I have a continuous interest from my childhood. Teaching, as an adult, in a volunteer capacity at the Tomoka Correctional Institution is a way—among dedicated colleagues—to intervene against cruelty and build community ties in a fundamentally hostile space. Teaching work on disability there has been very important to me, revealing to me in an immediate way just how many disabled people are imprisoned, how many imprisoned people are disabled. I would estimate that, of the 20 men in the classes that I teach, 80 percent identify as, in some way, disabled. 

 

[Description of image below: Close-up coloured photo of Melinda, a white woman with long brown hair, who is standing in front of a red brick wall. She is wearing a v-necked, black-and-white patterned top and smiling widely. The photo seems to be a selfie.]

 

 

Please explain how you tie the transition you made to public education with the social constitution of disability.

I had immense difficulty with the transition to public school. I felt that I was sent to school as punishment for transgressions. Major problems included the fact that I did not know what the rules were in my new context and could not understand (until after many weeks) the structure of practices such as homework and the format of daily schedules. It did not help that in Ohio there was standardized testing in fourth grade, when I entered; I came in after the beginning of the year and was required to immediately make up hours of missed testing alone in a room with a testing monitor. I made myself literally ill worrying over an additional standardized test, which I took later in the year with the rest of my class. I could not eat or sleep after hearing comments that my teacher made about the importance of the testing. I remember that I repeatedly got up during the test to sharpen my pencil and was afraid to leave the room to go to the bathroom.

In general, I recall my hands trembling and experiencing breathlessness throughout the school day. I believe these physical symptoms lasted for at least several months—I remember wondering if I would always tremble while at school and trying to figure out how to compensate so that no one would notice. Escaping notice became an obsession; I stood out in so many ways and wanted desperately to erase the differences between myself and the other students.

When I was asked questions about myself, I had a difficult time telling the truth and fabricated stories to meet expectations. But this simply made it harder to talk to my peers, as I was dealing with multiple overlapping fears that I would be “found out.” I never wanted to undermine anyone’s positive views of me, so I preferred my friendships to be sporadic and static, making flash connections and then moving on, rather than continually interacting with anyone in particular and—inevitably, so I thought—disappointing them. These relationship trends have lasted into adulthood.

It is hard, as an adult, to thoughtfully evaluate these experiences because I was very confused at the time. Often, I did everything that I could to avoid my intense discomfort, even dangerous things like hiding outside the building before school and purposely missing the bus after school because I was too anxious to find someone to sit beside. Because of these behaviors and my many absences, I was flagged for interventions and received some counseling.

My situation highlights the ways that institutions both create and then pathologize disability—in this case, social anxiety. Schools, as neoliberal institutions, reward outspoken and highly social children and young adults, and expectations of continual, intense interpersonal interactions and performances create binds. The early mornings, long days, and large class sizes contribute to this. These features are especially hard on those from minority and marginalized backgrounds and non-traditional students.

When students fail to be responsive to the demands of these settings or develop negative responses to them, they become subject to medical taxonomies of various kinds and are carefully observed. This is one way that disability is constructed: through the demands of institutions and the censure of individual responses by those same institutions. Of course, even referring to my experiences and situation as “social anxiety” is already deeply informed by this particular historical moment, including a variety of material conditions, labor practices, and ways of talking about psychology and medicine.

 

What, in your view, are the most unacknowledged, persistent, and significant barriers to institutions of higher education for students and faculty who are constituted in this way?

There is a strong expectation in contemporary academia for an entrepreneurship of the self; this kind of entrepreneurship and academic careerism depends upon many of the same traits and skills that are required in many other neoliberal institutions, including the traits and skills that make one “confident, bold, and striving,” as Hickinbottom-Brawn puts it. Although the rewards and benefits of one’s labor and efforts belong to an institution or are expected to be funneled back to institutions in various ways, the risks of one’s academic entrepreneurship belong to the individual and the individual alone.

This is true, of course, for faculty, but I see these dynamics impacting students and their activities, too—especially in connection with activism and social justice work. Institutions ally themselves with these efforts only when it is regarded as beneficial to do so—usually without investing in the work itself, leaving these investments to the striving individual. Importantly, faculty must sell, support, grease the wheels, and fill the gaps of academic institutions; this includes providing all kinds of informal, unpaid social services (like counseling and mentorship) to students who are, meanwhile, underserved or pressurized by these same institutions. In other words, academic institutions produce fundamental and extensive needs in students who then turn to faculty to relieve the pressure. Yet, faculty are also undermined by institutions. To be clear, these conditions impact everyone in academic communities, but I claim that they present special difficulties for those who experience anxiety.

To use some specific examples, the need to be in continual, immediate contact with colleagues and students is very difficult for me. I take sincere pleasure, and sometimes even energy, from these relationships, but the demands of interpersonal interactions come at great personal cost and keep me on an anxiety rollercoaster—my days often include many hours of meetings, often one-on-one and involving very difficult content. Constant email contact is also difficult for me to maintain. This is fundamentally misunderstood by many of my colleagues and students as forgetfulness or disorganization, or even a personal slight.

I know that it is confusing that someone with anxiety can be a successful teacher and speak each day in front of large groups. So, misunderstandings about anxiety abound and are difficult to combat. Further, as a young woman in academia, there are great risks to publicly admitting that I experience anxiety; it sometimes feels impossible to claim anxiety and describe its effects on me without increasing these effects or adding new obstacles. Compounding this predicament is the issue that many in academia are cynical about anxiety and disability more generally. They feel that disability accommodations are off the rails and student needs are completely overblown and should be cut down to size. I work all the time to talk through and combat this ableism and believe that it stems in part from a fundamental inability to think institutionally rather than individually.

For instance, turning back to the material conditions of faculty, the precarity of the academic career—which includes everything from adjunct positions paid out at the poverty line, to tenure and promotion, to intricate publishing procedures that advantage those with time, money, and other resources—contributes to continual crises among academics. When one wonders about or engages in hand-wringing or dismissal with regard to rates of anxiety and related experiences of depression and other issues among academics, but does not consider the fundamental insufficiencies and risk related to the lifestyle and typical wages of academics, the role of both social construction and the academic institution in the production of what is called disability are overlooked.

Finally, I want to reiterate the fallout of institutional indifference to the everyday needs of students, faculty, and staff—from essentials like food, rest, and sleep, to seeing on the syllabus thinkers who look like you and sound like you. While universities trumpet 24/7 services for students, they remain difficult places to live and work and leave it to community members to meet needs that often the institution creates in the first place. This is, of course, done haphazardly and ad-hoc with the resources community members have available and leaves all of us needing and desiring more.

 

Melinda, your fabulous new book, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics, was recently showcased in a series of posts—that is, a symposium—on this blog. For readers and listeners who missed that series of posts, please tell us what motivated you to write the book and what you take to be its most salient arguments.

Thank you for hosting a symposium on my book on this blog! My motivations reach back to college. Then, I started studying philosophy right away, because even though I intended to do political science and eventually run for office—working on issues like education and economics—I noticed that it was in philosophy classes that questions that I cared about were asked. I didn't want to count up Congressional votes. I wanted to think about power and how it works. I discovered Foucault and started reading (or trying to read) him. I became interested in ethics like it was a second skin. When people asked me about my interest, it seemed so obviously intriguing that I had a hard time answering. I took every elective and course offered on the topic and started to read bioethics.

I noticed immediately that bioethics was absolutely derisive about disabled people, disability rights, and well-being among disabled people. I couldn't believe the lies and distortions about disabled people and their capabilities, as they were demonstrably false and offensive. Because of problems with my eyesight—I was told that I had a degenerative condition which caused a precipitous and consistent weakening of my eyesight; these symptoms remain, but I can wear contacts...for now—and because of my anxiety, I saw myself as vulnerable to these discourses.

Now, since in my work I question the boundaries of disability and ability, and recognize the social and political constitution of these labels, these matters have shifted. It is clear to me that bioethics as a discourse is a place where disability is framed and produced—reality following and framed by language and concepts. I work on bioethics and Foucault, still, and feel like I have never stopped thinking about either one of these areas of study or about disability since I encountered them.

In graduate school, I became interested in transhumanist literature as a primary example of the foibles and disturbing power over public opinion on disability that I observed in bioethics literature more generally. In this way, I became interested in writing my book, to combat this discourse. The Bioethics of Enhancement primarily focuses on transhumanists, the human enhancement enthusiasts whom I critique. But, I claim that transhumanist arguments are continuous with, not aberrations of, arguments elsewhere in bioethics; and so, they can highlight the biopolitical assumptions at the heart of it—that is, that disability is connected to risk is connected to death.

In the early chapters of the book, I engage in a Foucauldian analysis of the last century of enhancement enthusiasm and more moderate bioethics literature in order to support these arguments. One can also find my slightly differently-pitched critique of transhumanism on the same issues in an article that I published in a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly; there, I engage the under-utilized Foucauldian concept of vile sovereignty to demonstrate the problems with transhumanism.

The central claim of the book is that transhumanism and bioethics are twinned and that both are biopolitical. The biopolitical logic of bioethics situates disability as risk that must be managed. This treatment of disability creates and directs risk rather than identify and mitigate it. In this way, I claim, bioethics as biopolitics produces risk and distributes it (unevenly) in the name of risk management. This, in turn, impacts how disability is viewed and stigmatizes disabled people.

Shelley, in your work you have connected bioethics tightly with politics and situated the discourse as a “predictable product and tangible outcome of” the movement of power in society, specifically in the mode of what Foucault articulates as biopower, or biopolitics. Following these insights, on my view, bioethics is an academic and professional field in which experts are asked to establish protocols for and critically react to the role of medicine in everyday life, evolving technologies which mediate bodies and environments, as well as relationships between medical professionals and patients. Bioethics is, then, a network of relations in which power differentially operates. Echoing you, Shelley, then, I argue that bioethics is a medium of biopolitics insofar as it is a political organ, a normative discourse, and a gatekeeper.

In bioethics discourse, the responsible medical subject is the normal subject who chooses against risk. This normal subject is set up against the risky embodiment of others; these others are viewed as subject to chance and seen as threats to the entire community. The responsible medical subject becomes the responsible citizen who chooses to manage that chance. For example, when we decide to reproduce, we are urged to meet with genetic counselors and discuss the predicted future attributes and quality of life of our fetuses so that we can make decisions regarding how, when, and who to reproduce. These processes are posed as risk assessment and parents are urged to be risk managers even prior to the initiation of pregnancy.

In bioethics literature—for example, the work of Julian Savulescu—parents are urged to create the best child possible, which most often means choosing not to produce particular children whose embodiment is thought to pose risk and vulnerability. For Savulescu, this is a human enhancement strategy, although no one in particular is enhanced. Savulescu, writing with Persson, urges the practice of human enhancement to avoid catastrophic effects such as species extinction. Savulescu’s contentions are the central case study in my book. I also closely consider the transhumanist arguments of philosopher Nick Bostrom.

Prenatal testing and genetic selection are the technologies of choice for creating the best child. Given this, I also analyze the related matter of genetic counseling as a brief case study. The practice of genetic counseling presents genetic information and makes this information operational in decision-making—that is, a part of responsible parenting. Genetic counseling is a key part of the medical and cultural context of genetic selection. Exploring the play of choice in this arena will allow us to uncover the construction of both the disabled body as a site of risk and the unmarked or abled body as a site of choice.

I hope that my book highlights the ableism in bioethics literature and the general inability of bioethicists to imagine a life well-lived with disability, even while attempting to engage in fantastic imaginings of sci-fi futures. I also hope that readers and listeners of this interview will consider reading or listening to the symposium on the book to discover more. Thank you, Shelley, for hosting that symposium and for organizing the panels behind it.

 

In your contribution to the symposium, Melinda, you indicated that your next project would involve research on risk and the Zika virus.  Please tell us about this research project and how the position that you aim to articulate can be distinguished from the argument advanced in a recent article on the subject that appeared in AEON.

I received a grant from my institution to visit the Centers for Disease Control to better understand risk communication strategies in cases of viral illness such as Ebola and Zika. Risk communication, on my view, can put persons at significant risk. This is what I want to investigate, especially in connection with race and disability.

With regard to Ebola, I contend that an unintended consequence of public health discourse surrounding risk prevention in the case of Ebola virus disease is the deepening construction of African persons as inherently risky or vulnerable. Meanwhile, those in the West conceive of themselves as risk managers of these populations, rather than as vulnerable themselves. Indeed, researchers have found that stigma plays a role in misunderstandings with respect to the transmission and prevention of Ebola. Furthermore, I find that in public discourse surrounding the question of Ebola race acts as a key floating signifier referring to risky persons, risky traits, and the idea of risk.

Travel bans applying to affected countries, including Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, were widely called for by public figures and in social media in the United States. Panic over the threat of Ebola—partially expressed as panic over the presence, or potential presence, of West African persons and those resembling West Africans—vastly outstripped its potential impacts, especially when compared to far more widespread and also deadly viruses such as seasonal influenza. According to the CDC, the Ebola outbreak’s impact in the U.S. was limited to only two imported and two locally-acquired cases. Meanwhile, the CDC estimates that 5-20% of the U.S. population are impacted by the seasonal flu each year and there are roughly 200,000 resulting hospitalizations. In other words, travel bans were not necessary. There was some panic, too, over the transmission of Ebola via the sperm of affected men—a second kind of boundary-setting.

The stigma around Ebola continues to have a variety of effects, exposing particular individuals to risk. Just this week, The Washington Post reported on the apparently unnecessary death of a famed aid worker, stating: “Among the medical workers featured on Time’s cover was a Liberian nurse, Salome Karwah, who lost her parents to Ebola, beat the sickness herself and went on to provide care to scores of others.” Karwah died on February 17^th, just a few days after giving birth via Caesarean; she had seizures and other symptoms that caused medical staff who knew that she was an Ebola survivor to fear providing her care. In other words, she seems to have died due to that lack of care.

With regard to Zika, there is some evidence that the virus can be transmitted via sex between partners or from mother to child via the placenta, and there is evidence that Zika is linked to both microcephaly and Guillain-Barré syndrome. Even before this evidence was available, however, women in El Salvador were asked by governmental authorities to refrain from having children until 2018 for fear of microcephaly. This recommendation comes amid similar discourse in Central and Latin America, and even in the state of Florida, where I live. Yet, of several thousand cases of microcephaly in Brazil, only four cases involve infants who carry the virus in their tissue. Further, microcephaly is an under-defined condition that can have a range of effects. My concerns here are that the women who are asked to wait to reproduce are often the same women for whom contraception or abortion are near impossibilities, and that the caution to refrain from reproducing is justified by the suggestion of risk, that is, reproduction could result in a disabled infant. Men are not simultaneously asked to refrain from sex. Sexism and ableism are thus intertwined in this case.

The Aeon article you mention relates to Parfit’s non-identity problem, which is primarily about harm. Parfit was concerned with the idea that most accounts of harm are person-affecting, but that these cannot bear on cases like the infamous rubella problem. This problem is meant to suggest that there are other kinds of harm than person-affecting harm. In this case, it is assumed that a woman would certainly have a disabled infant if she went through with a pregnancy during a time period in which she contracted rubella. Since otherwise this particular person would not exist, how could she be said to harm the potential child by bearing them? Parfit suggests that bringing people into the world who are “worse off” than other persons who could come into the world is another kind of harm—this time, impersonal.

In the Aeon article, authors Dominic Wilkinson and Keyur Doolabh triangulate with Parfit’s discussion of two different kinds of harms, person-affecting and impersonal harms, to put forward the view that, in the case of Zika, we can balance avoiding both kinds of harm by investing in mosquito control and birth control. Along the way, they assume that disability is an obvious harm and further seem to assume that the risk of having a disabled infant simply is the risk that Zika presents.

I would object to both these assumptions as my primary departure from Wilkinson and Doolabh’s discussion. But, I would also add another issue that Wilkinson and Doolabh do not consider. They do not see much relevant difference between mosquito control and birth control, especially insofar as both involve the same two kinds of harms—person-affecting and impersonal. But, I see a relevant difference: the placement and burden of the risk management. With mosquito control, risk management is collective and the costs are shared by groups. With birth control, risk management is individual and the costs are more burdensome depending on one’s social placement and resources. I object to discourses in which it is claimed that individual persons must work to prevent the existence of disabled people, because this both naturalizes and depoliticizes disability and covers over these erasures by creating a kind of false voluntarism about disability.

 

A very perspicuous analysis. What books, articles, or other resources would you like to recommend to our readers and listeners on the topics that you’ve discussed in this interview?

For readers and listeners who want to know more about social anxiety, I would recommend: Sarah Hickinbottom-Brawn, “Brand ‘you’: The Emergence of Social Anxiety Disorder in the Age of Enterprise” in Theory and Psychology 23 (6): 732-751.

For readers and listeners who want to know more about my views on bioethics, enhancement, and risk in particular, I would recommend my 2013 article, “Vile Sovereigns in Bioethical Debate,” which appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly 33 (4) and is available online, as well as my book, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics.

For many of the background assumptions of my approach, I would recommend your 2008 article, “The Biopolitics of Bioethics and Disability,” which appeared in Bioethical Inquiry 5.

The positions that I argue against can be found in Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu’s book, Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement and Savulescu’s article, “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children,” which appeared in Bioethics 15 (5-6).

Thank you so much, Shelley, for inviting me to participate in your outstanding interview series. I am so humbled to be a part of it. So many in our profession have already benefitted from, and will later benefit from, the many interviews that you have done. I and many, many others appreciate your painstaking and fabulous work!   

 

Melinda, thank you very much for these references and for your work to articulate another narrative about disability in philosophy. Your insights are extremely valuable to many of us.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Melinda Hall’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, August 16th at 8 a.m. EST, for the twenty-ninth installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at [email protected]. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain with Jesse Prinz, Tommy Curry, and Audrey Yap

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the second-anniversary 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.

During the past year, for the second 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 areas of specialization and research interests. This second-anniversary installment of the series highlights insights and lessons that these philosophers offered the philosophical community and reflects upon the implications of these contributions to philosophy. Jesse Prinz (interviewed in February 2016), Tommy Curry (interviewed in June 2015), and Audrey Yap (interviewed in July 2016), have returned to Dialogues on Disability to assist me with this celebratory anniversary installment by commenting on interviews of the past year that both reflect their own research interests and remind us of their own interviews in the series.

 

Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, Jesse, Tommy, and Audrey!

Jesse, you did a fascinating interview that Bryce Huebner and I highlighted in last year’s anniversary installment, have been an avid follower of the second year of the series, and have contributed to discussions on several of the interviews in the second year. So, I’m very happy that you have joined me for this second anniversary of the series.

 

[Description of image below: A coloured photo of Jesse, who has light skin, pink hair, and 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 grey button-down shirt with the cuffs turned up, rings on all his fingers, and is positioned in front of a grey background.]

 

As you may recall, Jesse, Bryony Pierce was my first interviewee of the second year. In her interview, Bryony talked about a variety of subjects, such as the work that she has done to make philosophy conferences more accessible to a variety of philosophers, offering practical advice to other conference organizers about how to do so. One of the areas in which Bryony conducts research is experimental philosophy, an area in which you too do a great deal of work. I asked Bryony for her views on criticisms that some philosophers have advanced about experimental philosophy. Among other things, she said:

 

The methodology for which x-phi is renowned is that of applying the methods of experimental psychology to philosophical questions, especially the use of surveys testing intuitions in response to thought experiments. In a broader sense, it includes any empirical work aiming to address philosophical questions. Feminist philosophers have argued, I’ve now discovered, that the methods of experimental philosophers fail to allow for critical analyses of the social structures that underpin the concepts and attitudes under investigation, perpetuating sexism and racism. But the methods used in x-phi don’t automatically exclude other types of analysis. Experimental studies are done within a wider context, often complementing other methodological approaches, and shouldn’t be viewed in isolation. X-phi isn’t restricted to operating independently of theoretical work—the theoretical work is an essential part of the process, as is further work to replicate, clarify, or challenge initial findings, before any firm conclusions can be drawn.

 

Since you work in experimental philosophy yourself, Jesse, I’d be interested to know your views on this controversy.

I really enjoyed Byrony’s conversation with you, Shelley. I completely agree with her that experimental philosophy can and should be integrated with other methods. Methodological pluralism is a way to address biases and limitations that one might run into if one relied on a single mode of inquiry. Experiments allow us to probe things that may not be obvious from mere reflection and to discover factors that influence our judgments unwittingly. That is why experimental methods have been so important in the discovery of implicit biases.

That said, Shelley, we need to recognize that every method may itself introduce forms of bias. here is an outstanding student at my university, Amanda Huminski, who is writing a feminist critique of experimental philosophy. She argues, for example, that the focus on quantitative as opposed to qualitative methods relates to a gendered tendency to neglect contextual and experiential factors that may be important for understanding social phenomena. Huminski is actually using experimental philosophy as a tool in her critique of experimental philosophy. So, the method can contribute, while also exposing its own limitations. 

With respect to feminism, Shelley, I think it is important to bear in mind that experimental philosophy is, in some ways, an outgrowth of empiricist traditions in philosophy, such as Quine’s call to naturalize epistemology. Many feminists—such as Lynn Hankinson Nelson—have built on Quinean philosophy. Experimental philosophers have much to learn from that work. These feminist empiricists recognize that doing good science also requires doing good science criticism, that is, those philosophers who have been drawn to empirical methods must also cultivate a critical perspective on their own practices. Debates about methodology have focused on armchair vs. experiment, but we should also be thinking about experiment vs. thick description or how experimental methods reflect critical insights from the sociology of science.

The next excellent interview that you conducted was also on the theme of experimental philosophy, Shelley: your conversation with Joshua Knobe. In trying to illustrate the value of experimental methods, he described some of his recent work on the “true self.” Many philosophers think that the part of our selves that is most important to identity is the rational or deliberative part. Joshua’s studies suggest an alternative.  He said,

 

[P]eople's true selves call them to do what is good. Sometimes the part of the self that draws us to the good is the more reflective part, sometimes it is the more visceral part, but, this whole reflective/visceral distinction has nothing to do with our ordinary notion of the true self. The ordinary notion is, rather, that the true self is that part of us—whichever it might be—that draws us toward the good. 

 

This resonates with work that I have been doing with my collaborators, Javier Gomez-Lavin, Shaun Nichols, and Nina Strohminger. We find persistent links between moral values and people’s views about what matters most for personal identity. At the same time, I wonder how universal this phenomenon is, and why it seems so prevalent now. It seems people might also identify with, say, their musical taste, their cultural heritage, or even disability. Shelley, what do you think of this idea of the good self, given that you specialize in philosophy of disability and are a close reader of Foucault, who, himself, wrote much about the historicity of the self. Is morality all that there is to our conception of the true self? Is this universal? How might Joshua’s research look if informed by the kind of work that you do?

Jesse, Joshua’s work in experimental philosophy—including his work on the true self—has been very influential, instrumental in the development of empirical methods in philosophy, and is provocative for a variety of reasons. His work certainly raises a number of questions for me, including the questions that you have now posed. I wonder how much attention these sorts of questions receive amongst experimental philosophers trained primarily in analytic philosophy.

I think that when we talk about the true self, or the idea of the true self, Jesse, we must do so in historicized and relativized terms. The self is a historically and culturally specific phenomenon. Identity, including disabled identity, is a historically and culturally specific phenomenon. Morality itself is a historically and culturally specific set of practices that are learned through social enculturation. I think that Joshua, who has himself been very influenced by Foucault, leaves open the question of the historicity of the true self.

A certain formulation of ideas about the true self and true self-identification was foregrounded in my interview with Audrey Yap. Audrey’s remarks revolved around her ambivalence about identity and her reluctance to identify as disabled. Consider these remarks from Audrey’s interview, Jesse: 

 

I’ve struggled for a while with the issue of depression, disability, and self-identification, since it’s forced me to confront some of my uncertainty about the very purpose of self-identification in the first place. Given that my gender presentation and skin colour are such that I’m almost always read as a woman of colour, I rarely think carefully about this identity. It’s easy not to think about things that you take for granted. But since, in part through my own conscious decisions, my depressed mental states are often non-obvious, I’m not often read as depressed or emotionally atypical.

I’m sure, though, that much of my reluctance to identify as disabled has to do with internalized ableism and the too-common association of disability with weakness, dependence, and incapacity. I recently read a study about self-identification and disability that includes interviews with people who are reluctant to identify as disabled because they feel “normal,” or feel that their disability does not define them. For me, this refusal to identify as disabled reflects the long way that we have yet to go to in order to counter stigmas surrounding disability, especially the stigma according to which it is impossible to be both a “normal” person and a “disabled” person.

 

Given that you expressed ambivalence about identifying as a disabled person in your own interview for the series, Jesse, I’m interested in your reactions to Audrey’s remarks.

I have to confess, Shelley, that in a consistently illuminating year of interviews, this moment in your exchange with Audrey was really a highlight for me, and I’m very glad to have this opportunity to reflect on it with you. I think a lot about this issue of identification with depression.

On the one hand, depression is extremely stigmatizing. Because of the medical model, Shelley, depression is treated as a form of illness, and that classification takes away agency and immediately marks it as bad. Professional competence can be called into question, and, at a social level, there are the twin dangers of pity and avoidance.

On the other hand, Shelley, for those who wrestle with depression, it really can feel like a core part of one’s identity, and, though it takes a toll in many ways, depression can contribute to one’s way of seeing the world: sardonic humor; distrust of utopianism; intolerance of superficiality; a capacity to see forms of well-being that transcend happiness; realism about one’s own capacities and others’; a desire to find refuge in art; a respect for solitude; and solidarity with the down-trodden; among many other things.  For many of us, Shelley, these are traits that we value and that we are pleased to find in others.  Stigmatization of disability is a loss to everyone, since important perspectives are suppressed and silenced.

The theme of depression also figured prominently in your interview with Karl Viertel.  Karl is using a pseudonym, because of the stigma associated with depression, and that allows him to really open up. I hope the interview is widely read. Karl talked about the fact that depressive episodes really can interfere with work; someone who is otherwise successful may have periods of serious impairment. Karl also talked about social anxiety, conveying some serious concerns with these remarks:

 

Many people with social anxiety find things like networking, creating small talk, or speaking in groups to be incredibly stressful or even painful. It is entirely common for me to perseverate about the details of my interactions after I attend a talk in which I ask a question, or after I go to dinner or the bar with other attendees of the talk, or go for a night out with other faculty members in my department… This feeling creates, as a result, a general disincentive to spend time socializing and networking. Judging a philosopher’s qualifications according to the people that she knows may work against a candidate who experiences social anxiety. …I’ve always found it worrisome that alcohol features so prominently in the hiring and process. A well-known faculty member in my department once claimed that the real test of a candidate comes at dinner-time during the campus visit.  As he put it, “I don’t want to end up hiring a candidate who can’t handle his(!) alcohol.” This assertion raises particular problems for me: for one, my antidepressants are processed in the liver, and so I need to avoid heavy drinking; for another, alcohol is, of course, itself a depressant.

 

These are really important observations, Shelley. Karl talked about his battle to manage professional duties, such as teaching and interviews, but he also drew attention to the fact that academics are often measured by their ability to socialize and drink. Do you think sociability and personality are given too much weight in academic philosophy? Is there a way to address these concerns without preventing those who like to socialize from doing so?

Thanks for posing these questions, Jesse. I do think that there are prescriptions in the profession—some explicitly prescribed and actively maintained; others implicitly prescribed, yet actively enforced—about socializing, sociability, and personality that disadvantage many disabled people, among others. These prescriptions rely upon a restrictive conception of normality with respect to, for instance, interpersonal behavior, tone and speech patterns, and general comportment, as well as normative assumptions about time, effort, likeability, approachability, responsiveness, and so on. These expectations and requirements effectively limit the extent to which many disabled people (among others) will be perceived as viable and valued colleagues—potential and actual.

The issues that Karl has raised should in fact be incorporated into critical discussions that circulate within philosophy with respect to “inclusion” and “diversity.” Jesse, notions of accessibility need to be expanded to cover a range of modes of interaction and sensibilities, especially given that, historically, disabled philosophers have been excluded from the profession and thus must necessarily direct unaddressed claims to entitlement at their colleagues if they are to join the profession and thrive in it.

At some disability studies conferences, Jesse, coloured stickers are applied to nametags as a way to signal whether a given person should be approached and engaged with on a given day or at a certain time. So, a red sticker on someone’s nametag means that the person doesn’t, for one reason or another, wish to be approached, engage, or interact; a yellow sticker means that the person is somewhat reluctant to engage, or cannot engage for an extended amount of time, and so on; and a green sticker means that the person is having a good day and encourages others to interact with them.

Jesse, the use of this technique at philosophy conferences and meetings would be one way that these contexts could be made more accessible to a wider range of philosophers, while simultaneously working to undermine expectations and assumptions about appropriate levels of engagement and means of interaction. There are many ways to be part of a group activity. Like many mechanisms to increase conference accessibility, this technique requires little effort or expense on the part of conference organizers, but can make a huge difference to some disabled people.

Tommy, you also did a terrific interview that Bryce and I highlighted in last year’s anniversary installment, raising the profile of issues that disabled black men confront, Africana philosophy, and community. So, I am very happy that you have returned for this anniversary installment.

  

[Description of image below: A sepia photo of Tommy, a black man, who is wearing a dark shirt and dark suit jacket and is standing in the frame of an open door. He has short black hair, a beard and mustache, and is looking directly at us. Leaves and branches of a tree and a patch of sky can be seen in the background of the shot.]

 

In his interview with me in September, Tommy, Elvis Imafidon discussed issues of togetherness, community, individuality, and solidarity in the context of African philosophies, as well as addressed the question of who is in and who is left out of philosophical ideas about community, including global community. In response to the concern that I raised with respect to the way that Euro-American philosophers tend to leave disability out of their ideas about what the subfield of global ethics encompasses, Elvis said:

 

Well, Shelley, claiming that disability is outside the scope of discourse on global ethics and justice will be a very difficult position for any committed global ethicist to sustain. It’s like creating an excuse to run from one’s own job. You see, disability studies covers a very broad spectrum. From the philosophical angle alone, we talk about the ontology of, the epistemology of, and the ethics of disability. We talk about disability and feminism, the aesthetics of disability, and so on. … In researching albinism in Africa, I have not only been concerned with critically exploring the ontological basis and moral issues surrounding the beliefs about, and attitude toward, PWAs [people with albinism] on the African continent, but also about questions of human rights and justice for PWAs in general. Shelley, PWAs go through hell in many African communities. We are hunted and killed, discriminated against, refused jobs, denied a normal life, treated as non-human and, in some cases, abandoned by family members and care-givers. Now, if scholars, including global ethicists, do not rise up against these actions by doing what they know how to do best—changing the world with novel ideas— the status quo will be maintained.

 

As someone who works in bioethics, ethics, and Africana philosophy, what are your thoughts on Elvis’s observations, Tommy?

Shelley, let me begin by saying that Elvis’s interview was striking and extremely educational. It reminds Black philosophers in the West of the increasingly needed contextualization of our claims concerning racism and white supremacy throughout the world. In the United States, dark skin is criminalized especially amongst racialized men— Black, Brown, Indigenous. Amongst Black Americans, lighter skin is often indicative of beauty, is associated with class mobility, intellect, and of course “good hair.” Elvis’s work was a stark reminder of how, in a different cultural and geopolitical context, a white phenotype on a Black body could be—and this is the important part—socially stigmatized as a disability.  

Elvis’s interview with you is in fact an important contribution to the literature of philosophy of disability and Africana philosophy, the latter of which too often concerns itself with primarily middle class concerns of discrimination, rather than various socioeconomic and geographic realities of Black Americans. I would not have thought of albinism as this kind of disability in Africa. That albinism in Africa is disabling in the ways that Elvis described shows the need for comparative work in Africana philosophy between African-descended peoples and their traditions, rather than an exclusive focus on the negligent lacunae of white canonical figures.

In particular, Shelley, I was struck by Elvis’s following depiction of people with albinism within various African communities. He said:

 

Traditional African ontology consists of a conception of what it means to be a person but, unfortunately, according to this conception of being, PWAs do not satisfy these requirements. So, PWAs are non-human beings. A PWA is, according to the African traditional conception of being, a different being, an Other. African traditions go further to solidify this difference through ideologies of otherness, ideas, and beliefs about the other that have been driven down into the consciousness of Africans, even though they constitute false consciousness. For example, the four-year-old kid in Tanzania or Zimbabwe can confidently, with great fear, point to a PWA and scream: “A ghost is coming”. That is what has become part of the child’s consciousness: the false belief that PWAs are ghosts, passed down from generation to generation. Other common ideologies of otherness about PWAs include the following: we are witches; our body parts can cure diseases and can be used for money rituals; and having sex with a virgin female with albinism can cure HIV/AIDS. …I was stunned recently when, while I was researching online for some materials on albinism in Africa, I discovered that one of the most frequently asked questions about PWAs in Africa is this: Do albinos die?

 

In this passage of his interview, Shelley, Elvis argued that people with albinism are subject to a mysticism which makes their bodies victim to any number of atrocities: dismemberment, rape, and HIV infection. They are dehumanized and treated as disposable flesh, in Imafidon’s account. Inquiry into this social stigmatization and dehumanization through specterism  should be regarded as an urgent and compelling area of philosophical research and social activism. I learned so much from his contribution. 

Shelley, your work to point out the marginalization and outright exclusion of disabled philosophers from areas of philosophy that are believed to represent diversity—race theory, feminism, queer theory—has been substantial. When I read Cecilia Mun’s interview, I couldn’t help but hear these concerns echoed by Cecilia. I was particularly moved by her directness and concrete proposals in describing the silencing and marginalizations of disabled people throughout philosophy. One can see this push by various disabled philosophers who are truly challenging the structural obstacles and very real stigmatizations that continue to circulate throughout professional philosophy. I think Cecilia’s perspective on these obstacles is spot on. For example, she said:

 

I think it’s important to acknowledge that regardless of our discipline’s and academia’s goal of diversification, professional academics constitute an exclusive community. Not everyone can do what professional academics do, and not everyone wants to or should want to. This is one reason why professional academics belong to “disciplines” (to be contrasted with the “institutions” with which we are affiliated). It takes years of study and practice to succeed in any academic discipline. Like all other work, it is mentally and physically exhausting to do our work well. Not everyone will be able to perform in such a way that will allow them to flourish as professional academics in their chosen discipline. This does not lessen one’s value as a person nor afford anyone the right to treat someone with less respect. It is simply a reason that one ought to take into consideration when deciding whether or not a professional life as an academic is one that would make them happy.

 

Given the widespread inaccessibility of higher education and the homogeneity of philosophy, it seems especially important for disabled philosophers not to make the illusions of merit and the recognition of high performance the standards with which they evaluate their own worth. Shelley, what is your reaction to Cecilia’s interview given its closeness to many of the arguments your raise in your own work?

Tommy, I was grateful that Cecilea broached these issues in her interview with me. Cecilea managed to address both the urgent need for diversification within the discipline and profession and the need for recognition, on the part of philosophers, that the job of professional philosopher is not a badge of superiority. Cecilea’s point, I take it, was that these two elements of diversity are mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing. I think this assertion is a crucial reminder to philosophers that they must engage with nonphilosophers and nonacademics in order to genuinely put many of their claims about diversity and inclusion into practice, especially with respect to disabled people, nondisabled Black people, nondisabled people of colour, and nondisabled trans people.

Last November, I interviewed Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò who, like Cecilea and other interviewees of the past two years, talked about the frustrations of feeling as if one is an outsider within a profession that continues to generate ways in which to preserve itself and guard its own borders. Near the end of his interview, Femi said:

 

Folks express interest in philosophy of race—an example I choose for obvious reasons—who have never and, as far as I can tell, would never, step into a Latinx, Black, Gender Studies, or Asian-American Studies department and ask a single question, despite the fact that the folks in these departments have, for decades, discussed the very topics now being Columbused by departments of philosophy. …Perhaps you find the work of these departments and the authors taught there hard to read. …Okay, maybe it’s that you’ve internalized the wider analytic discipline’s view on the rigor of their work. …Or: maybe you just find the coloreds frightening, and harbor a secret fear that some disgruntled one of them will eventually call you out in public or blog about something you’ve said and you’ll feel bad about it. …A final possibility is that you really are convinced, at the end of the day, that the aforementioned groups of people have nothing to teach you. While philosophers of language and mind can often be convinced to talk to linguists and cognitive scientists, respectively, here the crucial component of basic intellectual respect is absent. Hence, it falls to mostly white analytic philosophers to gentrify the study of oppression and save these disciplines from their ignorance about the Third Realm and Platonic forms.

 

What are your thoughts on Femi’s remarks in this context of his interview and the interview in general, Tommy?

I was taken by the honesty of Femi’s interview, Shelley. I think it’s particularly important for Black people to have conversations about the specific strategies that we use to navigate the white world. Black people often have to code-switch or speak in their nine-to-five to put whites at ease. Femi’s remarks about his brother resonate with many of the research interests that I have in general concerning Black male vulnerability and disability and how those differences are perceived by the larger white society. Code-switching is often a matter of life or death for Black males. The ability to recognize potentially dangerous circumstances and to avoid insulting white people are important lessons that Black boys and men must learn so that they don’t meet with lethal force or get accused of sexual offence. Femi’s description of his brother stresses this point.  As he explained:  

 

My brother’s speech isn’t easy to understand for most people and tends to revolve around a small number of subjects; so, he’s “low functioning,” I’ll concede, when it comes to basic communication and entertaining and dinner parties. On the other hand, he has an eidetic memory and will regularly relate to each of us our distinct favorite foods and flavors, and correctly advise us to call abroad and wish “Happy Birthday” to someone that he met decades ago for less than an hour. ...[M]y brother is a tall, heavy-set Black man who is difficult to communicate with. It has been very difficult to reflect on the fact that so many of the Black people who have been killed by police in recent years are disabled without recalling many of the negative interactions that my brother has had with people in the past, including police officers. I realized at some point that, for him, the stakes of being understood were very high and the effects of not being understood set the basic conditions of his life. It took longer to come to the view that the same was true of the rest of us, though the scale and granularity of understanding involved might be different; but that is the view I have now.

 

Femi points out that because of his brother’s appearance—tall, heavy set, Black, and male—it is crucial to his survival that he be understood. As with the story that Femi relayed about his mother’s intonation when talking on the phone with white people, Shelley, Femi wants to underscore that the ability of his brother to put whites at ease is necessary for his safety and well being. As Femi argues, furthermore, this need to communicate-demonstrate compliance with police officers is a necessary act even for nondisabled Black men. As he put it:

 

Being misunderstood, by itself, isn’t so bad. But some misunderstandings are worse than others. I am particularly interested in how distributions of social power, broadly construed, interact with problems in mutual understanding. Take, for example, if a police officer misunderstands what I mean to do when I put my hand in my pocket. The danger of this misunderstanding isn’t in the idea in the police officer’s head about what it is that I’m up to, but rather in what the officer is socially sanctioned to do to me on the basis of an interpretation of my action that is itself socially sanctioned. My feeling of anxiety in that situation, similarly, is tied to and exacerbated by the power asymmetry that characterizes the interaction.

 

I really appreciated the existential problems conveyed by Femi’s autobiographical interview with you, Shelley. The interview demonstrates why epistemology has to be engaged from the perspective of the subject trying to know and be known to others. Femi’s interview was honest and forthright, showing how the problems of his life are the fuel for his philosophical project. Fear, anxiety, worry, and care for his brother really make his interview real. It’s earnest philosophy, in my view. 

Audrey, the engaging and thought-provoking interview that I did with you last summer has been highlighted in this anniversary installment and I’m very happy that you joined us to reflect on other interviews of the past year. In the interview, you talked about your campus activism with women of colour and indigenous women. In my interview with Joe Stramondo in December, he talked about his activism with ADAPT and Not Dead Yet. At one point in the interview, Joe said:

 

A half a dozen of us—mostly using wheelchairs—showed up at the Lansing field office of this senator and handed a demand letter to the person who, I believe, was her chief-of-staff, asking for co-sponsorship of the bill or at least a meeting and stating that we were not leaving until we got one of these demands met.…Then, we “escalated” by using our wheelchairs and bodies to physically block all the exits of the office and settled into our chanting. …I think there is a lot that is philosophically interesting about non-violent direct action in general. …Yet, this story is particularly illustrative of how the stigmas and stereotypes around disability can actually be harnessed as a political tool by direct action. I believe that it was the staffer’s unwillingness to publicly display disabled people as something other than objects of pity that got us the signed letter of co-sponsorship. Elsewhere, I have written about how an ideology of pity functions politically to maintain the status quo of disabled people’s oppression. 

 

What are your thoughts on direct action as a political tool, Audrey? And what philosophical insights do you, as a philosopher-activist, think can be derived from direct action? 

That’s a great question, Shelley. I think that direct action and political protest have often been viewed as non-philosophical activity by many philosophers, but I’m glad they’re gaining increased visibility. I know you’ve noted in some of your work that the discourse around epistemic injustice often takes place on ableist terms, but at least one useful idea that it’s brought to the forefront in social philosophy is the concept of hermeneutical injustice and hermeneutical gaps. Protest as philosophical activity can sometimes be an indicator that the standard dominant frameworks for reasoned argumentation are not readily available for participation, sometimes because of a lack of mainstream hermeneutical resources.

I thought that Joe’s point about the staffer’s unwillingness to engage with disabled bodies as something other than objects of pity was particularly insightful. It was an amazing way to point out that we tend to lack social scripts for conceptualizing disabled bodies as agential—inspiration porn notwithstanding. Sometimes protest can be effective in ways that analytic argumentation won’t be.

 

[Description of image below: A coloured selfie of Audrey who is wearing a dark blue hoodie and holding her beloved dog Eddie close to her. Eddie has a coat of long black and white hair. They are sitting on a mountaintop. The breeze sweeps strands of Audrey’s long dark hair across her forehead. Trees and other mountains can be seen under a clear blue sky in the background of the shot.]

 

Also on the point of social scripts and hermeneutical gaps, I thought that this point from Jake Jackson’s interview was very interesting, Shelley:

 

Due to a general lack of awareness and conflicting information, people with mental illnesses are often left by the wayside about their own condition and have a difficult time confirming that there is actually something atypical about themselves. I describe this social experience of mental illness and the lack of public knowledge about it as leaving mentally-ill individuals “epistemically adrift”. …Becoming epistemically adrift is in part a result of hermeneutical injustice as outlined by Miranda Fricker and others, involving the sorts of systemic stopgaps that prevent people from knowing and better understanding issues in ways that would enable them to flourish. Becoming epistemically adrift is about more than just missing knowledge; it also results because there are too many knowledges. Not only do mentally-ill individuals have to navigate their life-world despite hermeneutical gaps; they must also navigate through different and often contradictory disciplines and ideologies.

 

The idea of too many knowledges as a kind of hermeneutical injustice is interesting, and I wonder what you think about it, Shelley. It seems on the surface to contradict what some people who work on epistemic injustice, like José Medina, point to as a solution to injustice, namely pluralism about knowledge.

Audrey, the remarks that you cite are among the many provocative associations that Jake made between (what he calls) mental illness and philosophical work—both what philosophical work has been done and what needs to be done. Jake seems to have pointed to a gap in Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice, that is, noted that Fricker’s insights about epistemic injustice do not account for cognitive diversity.

You referred to my forthcoming discussion of Fricker’s work. In that chapter, Audrey, I argue that the situated knowledges produced by people who variously identify as (among other things) psychiatric survivors, mad, or mentally ill are excluded from Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice; in particular, their subjugated knowledges are excluded from her notion of epistemic injustice by her use of the injustice/bad luck distinction on which she grounds her distinction between hermeneutical injustice, on the one side, and hermeneutical disadvantage that does not involve injustice, on the other.

I suspect, Audrey, that Jake’s remarks about the navigation that he and other people who identify as, say, mentally ill, mad, or psychiatric survivors must do refer to both their own subjugated knowledges and the authoritative, medicalized knowledges about their social situations and lived experiences.

To exclude the former, that is, the subjugated knowledges from understandings of hermeneutical injustice seems itself to be a case of testimonial injustice. The situation to navigate is not only one in which there is a plurality of knowledges, but rather that some knowledges are delegitimized and dismissed. One must come to know which knowledges are dismissed and delegitimized, which knowledges work to engage this form of epistemic injustice, and how they do so.

Audrey, Jake talked about how depression and anxiety have conditioned his university experience, including his experience as a student in philosophy. Whitney Munch, in her interview in February of this year, also drew attention to the ways that depression conditioned her experience as a philosophy student. Consider these remarks that Whitney made in the interview:

 

Throughout all the internal struggle to just exist, I threw myself into my studies. I translated. I read and translated different ancient Greek and Roman philosophical treatises on my own. It was routine, methodical. …I read about the worst of humanity, while translating Plato's Symposium. I was semi-withdrawn, but content with my books, with volunteer tutoring of refugee children from Sudan, and with activism that I did with groups like Amnesty International and protests at the School of the Americas every November.  By the end of my penultimate semester, I had applied to graduate school in philosophy. I was slowly feeling more...like me. …In 2008, I was left a single mother of a very young child. A psychologist that I saw said gently, “Don't you understand why you studied Stoicism?” I think that I answered, “because it's interesting to me.” She paused, and smiled. “You've been self-treating your depression all these years with philosophy—and especially with Stoicism.

 

Audrey, what are your thoughts in reaction to Whitney’s remarks about philosophy as a form of therapy?

Thanks for the chance to talk about this, Shelley! I loved this part of Whitney’s interview; I related to it quite a lot, probably because I went a lot of years, while a philosophy student, without medication—which these days helps me a great deal—or counseling. Ever since I’ve had philosophical vocabulary and tools, I’ve been using them to try and understand my own mental phenomena. I don’t know that it does anything besides make me feel less helpless in the face of my own unpredictable mental states, but I suppose that’s helpful in itself. Sometimes the project of trying to understand a thing, at least for me, makes it easier to cope with.

In those days, Shelley, I was more interested in formal logic, computer science, and philosophy of mathematics, and sometimes I wonder if I was drawn to those areas because it was maybe the only area in my life in which the answers were clear-cut and not messy, like what was happening in my head. I still find it comforting when puzzles have a clear solution. Maybe this is something like the way in which Whitney threw herself into translation projects: when your life seems like an intractable problem, the solvable ones are a relief.

Whitney also described some of the alienation and discrimination that she faced during her graduate school experience. In the interview that you did just last month, Shelley, Anne D’Arcy, also discussed the discrimination that she’s faced, but it’s discrimination of a somewhat different kind. Anne said:

 

On the first day of teaching a critical thinking course, for example, I noticed one young man, fifth row center, with a silly grin on his face during my entire introductory lecture. When I finished, I addressed him, asking if he had any questions because he looked as if he did. He readily responded that I was the same age as his grandmother, and all she did was sit in her rocking chair all day. … I asked if he thought that’s what I should be doing. He shrugged, still with the silly grin. He didn’t have to answer: I got it. …Old age is not decline, but it is regarded as such by most people that I’ve encountered. Perhaps the most grievous, albeit unwitting, attack on my age was made by a professor who said, “I sure hope that I have as many marbles as you do when I’m your age.”  He actually thought that he had paid me a compliment. And the class laughed. Yup, ageism is alive and well in academia. 

 

Shelley, the link many people draw between cognitive ability and age seems apparent in Anne’s experiences. Given that many people become disabled as they get older, what do you think about the relationship between ableism and ageism?

Audrey, I really appreciated Anne’s remarks about the ageism she has encountered in philosophy. Ageism is in fact endemic in philosophy and the university more generally. In her interview, Anne testified to some of the ways that both ageism and ableism continue to be naturalized in these contexts, rather than recognized as mechanisms of power relations.

Evidence of the ways that ageism is naturalized in philosophy abounds, Audrey: virtually all of the diversity initiatives developed in philosophy are forward looking and directed at "young" philosophers; search committees target their job postings and other aspects of their searches at “recent Ph.Ds” which is surely a dog whistle for ageism; Deans and other administrators promote ageism in the hiring procedures of their faculties; prejudices and biases about number of years on the job market persist; and so on. Such recruitment and hiring practices are strategies of the neoliberal university that philosophers ought to contest and subvert, rather than perpetuate.

These sorts of ageist practices in the profession especially disadvantage disabled philosophers and philosophers of colour who have attempted to secure jobs from a time—not so long ago—when attention to diversity was, at best, limited to the development of practices designed to increase binary gender equality in the profession. In other words, Audrey, “older” disabled philosophers and philosophers of colour who are the casualties of philosophy’s crimes of the past are re-victimized by ageist hiring practices in the present.

 

Jesse, Tommy, Audrey, I want to thank you for taking the time to co-produce this anniversary installment with me! Your comments on the interviews of the past year have reminded us how unique and insightful each of them is. I'd also like to thank you for your ongoing enthusiasm about the series. Because of your support, and the support of many others, the Dialogues on Disability series has established itself as a hub for the production of new kinds of knowledge about disability and, in this way, is shifting relations of power-knowledge about disability in philosophy and the university more widely.

I know that all three of you would agree that a great deal of work remains to be done to make the profession of philosophy a more equitable and welcoming domain for disabled philosophers, among others. I think this second-anniversary installment of Dialogues on Disability has shown that the series can be a guide to that end. Disabled philosophers have a tremendous amount to contribute to discussions in the discipline and profession, including discussions about diversity. I continue to believe that we have much to learn from each other and that the wider philosophical community has much to learn from us.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to our remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, May 17th at 8 a.m. ET for the twenty-sixth installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at [email protected]. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.

 

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Whitney Mutch

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain, and I’d like to welcome you to the twenty-third 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 Whitney Mutch. Whitney is currently an adjunct instructor at the University of Alabama and a professional translator of ancient Greek and Latin. Her primary areas of interest are ancient philosophy; philosophy of race, class, and gender; and philosophy of law. She is especially interested in Stoicism, with a focus on Stoic causation, ontology, and determinism. Outside of academia, Whitney is an activist in her community. 

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Whitney! Please tell us about your educational background and aspirations, as well as why you chose to become a philosopher. 

Thank you, Shelley. It's an honor to contribute to a series that I've read since you started it—almost two years ago! Doing this interview has been a thoughtful exercise, leading me to reflect on various experiences that I’ve had.  

I grew up with very loving and supportive parents and a younger sister, in Gainesville, Florida. I am the first person in our family to be born in “the South.” Despite growing up in a university town, I knew by high school that I wanted leave my hometown for college. I ended up attending Agnes Scott College—an all-women's college, in Decatur, Georgia—with the help of a hefty academic scholarship. At the time, I didn't think that I was making a political statement by attending an all-women's college. College is college, or so I thought. As soon as a high-school peer heard about my decision, I was teased with: “Oh, so, you're a lesbian?”  

This question was genuinely confusing and irritating to me. My sexuality didn't matter and was none of their business. I was confused because my thinking was simple: I am going to this school. You are going to that school. Why is it so different? I quickly learned that if you attend an all-women's college, you can expect to be asked a plethora of questions about your sexual orientation; you will be told that you are going to have a hard time adjusting to the “real world” because there are men in the “real world,” whereas an all-women's college is perceived as convent-like; you will be asked annoying questions like this before, during, and after college by people you’ve just met. 

There are no “freshmen” at Agnes Scott; there are, however, first-years. As a first-year, I was required to take either a religious studies course or a philosophy course. None of the religious studies classes seemed interesting to me; but, there was an ethics class that looked interesting. My high school had offered a philosophy class, but, during my senior year, it was offered at the same time as Latin. I chose to stick with Latin so that I’d have a solid five years of the language under my belt. I decided to take the first-year ethics course, which was such a good “fit” for me because it was designed as an historical overview of ethical reading. We covered Plato, Epictetus, Epicurus, Kant, Hume, and Nietzsche.  

I was an over-achieving student before I took the ethics course and had enjoyed all the other courses that I’d previously taken. In this course, however, I wasn't just enjoying philosophy: I was thriving and flourishing. I loved it so much that I was taken aback when classmates weren't as enthusiastic about it. I remember that a friend in the course quietly complained to me that it wasn't an “issue-based” ethics course. In many ways, it was her comment that made me realize how much I was learning in the course, and how I felt refreshed, energized, and challenged by it.

 

How did your autoimmune illness condition your experiences as an undergraduate and graduate student? 

I should first explain my autoimmune illness. It's not very common; most people have never heard of PANDAS. PANDAS is the acronym for Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections. The onset of the illness occurs in childhood. PANDAS is an over-reaction to strep and possibly some viruses, including influenza. When a person with PANDAS is exposed to or has strep, the autoimmune system of the person not only fights off strep, it then attacks parts of the brain, changing their neurochemistry which can cause tics and phobias, among other things. For me, this change in my neurochemistry affects my mood and results in treatment-resistant major depression, as well as anorexia. My doctors and I understood that I had major depression and a history of anorexia when I entered college, but everyone considered them to be under control. I do not mean that I was healthy; but, I ate enough to not draw attention to myself or be hospitalized. It wasn't discovered until my senior year of college—shortly after 9/11—that I had this autoimmune condition.  

When I am depressed, I am a melancholic depressive. I may cry and that's relief. Mostly, I cannot cry, but wish I could. My mind goes down an interesting path. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no freedom from Plato's Cave allegory—which, as a classical literature and language and philosophy double-major, I very much relate to. Living in my thoughts can be good, but dangerous, when depressed. I never missed class—that would draw attention to me. But I didn't see the point of it all, the meaning in life. Everything was morbidly futile. I don't feel like eating when depressed—I feel like a burden, that I take up too much space—so I know my eating habits went downhill for a bit. I tend to be very rigid when I'm depressed, so that I stay “on track.” But that rigidity feeds—pun not intended—into my eating disorder, which in turn thrives on my depression.  

I negotiated college by obsessing over reading and re-reading. I know a good part of some works of philosophy by memory because I read them, re-read them, and then read them again. It wasn't good enough—for me. I would walk across our small quad, my legs shaking with anxiety and need to sit down before I went to my two-student, Descartes lecture. And, I would re-read something that I knew by heart, anxiety gripping me. My parents provided a lot of emotional support over the phone and instant messaging: “Wait, how many times have you read this?” and “No, you don't need to read it again. Put it away, get out of the dorm for a bit, and call me when you get back.” 

In my senior year, my depression came back, stronger than ever. I watched 9/11 occur, and I was almost numb. My most prominent thought was, “Why is everyone surprised? The world is terrible.” Suicide suddenly seemed like a possibility; I felt capable of acting on it. THIS scared me. I immediately called home and was honest with my parents about how I felt. Nobody panicked. They asked if they should come up and be with me until a new doctor could meet with me. I promised them that I would push through. And I did. It was only a week. I continued with my usual coping mechanism: studying, translating, writing, reading, researching topics of interest that I was not studying at the time. The doctor was kind. She took a very long and detailed general health history. A trend started to emerge. Every time I had had a minor stomach bug, my mood plummeted shortly after, generally within two weeks. She suggested that I have PANDAS and explained to me what this autoimmune disorder is. 

Throughout all the internal struggle to just exist, I threw myself into my studies. I translated. I read and translated different ancient Greek and Roman philosophical treatises on my own. It was routine, methodical. I read more about genocide, which is a topic that has always intrigued me from a “HOW? WHY does this STILL happen?” standpoint. I read about the worst of humanity, while translating Plato's Symposium. I was semi-withdrawn, but content with my books, with volunteer tutoring of refugee children from Sudan, and with activism that I did with groups like Amnesty International and protests at the School of the Americas every November.  

By the end of my penultimate semester, I had applied to graduate school in philosophy. I was slowly feeling more...like me. This very thick fog was burning off. My last semester, I was happy. I was actually happy. I began to be less rigid, more spontaneous. I kept up with my work, but allowed myself to have fun. I didn't feel the need to punish myself for existing.  

Graduate school was an entirely new world in so many ways. For starters, I left an all-women's college for a department that was over 90% male. I did not expect that to be the issue that it became. I expected to be treated as a semi-equal, at least. A newcomer, yes, but as someone who is capable of philosophical thought and logic. Being talked over in class was new and frustrating. It was confusing the first time that I watched as a professor applauded when a male classmate said exactly what I had previously said. I would momentarily second-guess myself: “I did just say X--> Y, didn't I? Maybe I didn't say it clearly?” That thought was short-lived. I was irritated, and I tried to do what I could. I sat as close to the professor as I could in most courses. A male peer noticed this and sat by me in classes that we had together, offering to speak up if and when someone spoke over me. I was also the youngest student for much of my time in graduate school, and I looked younger than I actually was.  

Nevertheless, I forged ahead; my depression was at bay, my eating disorder was at bay. I learned that the person that I wanted to study under was generally rather respectful of my ideas. One of the first things that I did in his course was challenge a translation that he presented to our class. Afterward, a peer who also studied Greek sent me a nasty email for challenging a tenured philosopher. But the tenured philosopher himself seemed to enjoy our exchange. He explained our translation disagreement to the class, but acknowledged that I was correct: ”aner, andros” is Greek for “man, mankind,” while “anthros, anthropos” is Greek for “human, humankind.” 

During my graduate studies, my newly diagnosed autoimmune disease was finally managed. I knew what signs to watch for and was pro-active about taking care of myself. I did, however, undergo a period of traumatic stress my second year in graduate school that required outside treatment. I wish that I had felt comfortable asking to instruct a different course that semester than the one I was assigned; but, I didn't, and ended up leading discussions that were enormously personal and painful to me. After the class, I would either walk to my car and cry, or close the door to my shared office and cry. I shook. I was getting help outside of academia for PTSD; but, I felt comfortable disclosing this arrangement to only one person from whom I asked for a referral to a good psychologist, my voice breaking. My voice breaking was shameful, that I was traumatized and needed outside help felt shameful. I relied on outside support—my partner of the time, my parents.  

Again, I threw myself into my work, including more translation: Greek to English, English to second-order logic, second-order logic back to a more polished English; learning the flaws in Stoic logic that I researched; and reading about topics not related to my ancient philosophy studies. I remember a peer noting that I wasn't a “real” philosopher because I focused on ancient philosophy. According to him, ancient philosophy wasn't “real” philosophy. I studied and passed examinations. I cannot say that I have felt proud of any of my accomplishments in academia, and I think that is, partly, due to the autoimmune disease. I recovered from the traumatic event and continued my studies. When I was asked to teach philosophy in Greece, I jumped at the chance. I was hired for this job, in part, because I had studied in Greece over three summers. I kept pushing to be better, to do better. Altius, citius, forties: higher, faster, stronger. That motto of the Olympics ran through my head over and over, like it was a record, but, this time, my partner kept me in check from going overboard.  

 

[Description of coloured photo below: Whitney, a white woman, leans against a wooden fence, looking down to her left. Leafy trees, ferns on the ground, and a clear sky can be seen in the background. Whitney is wearing a white t-shirt that reads: "This is what a philosopher looks like."] 

 

In the interview that I did with Karl Viertel, he explained the ways in which the depression that he experiences is related to his work in classical German philosophy. Whitney, what is the relation between the illness that you experience and your focus on ancient philosophy? 

I first read Epictetus' Enchidrion when I was 19, in my very first philosophy course. It made so much sense to me, I immediately started practicing Stoicism. I dug deeper into the texts of Stoicism as well, while trying to practice Stoicism. When I first tried out Stoicism, it was half-jokingly, to amuse myself. I was waiting to get on a plane and an announcement was made on the overhead speaker that we would be delayed. I had just read the opening lines of the Enchidrion. I chuckled to myself and thought, well, let me see how this works. I moved my bag so that I could rest my feet on it, and kept reading.  It was quite freeing, to not worry about something that I had no control over. Not being upset by things you cannot control...that's not an easy thing. Letting go of anxiety that a delayed plane can cause was surprisingly easy; I liked how that letting go and focusing on what I could control made me feel. It was appealing to me. My depression makes everything feel overwhelming. Using Stoicism to take stock of what I can actually control—which is not much—frees my mind and my time. I do not worry, for the most part, about things that I cannot control. When I took a graduate course at Emory on fate in the ancient world, we examined the Stoics’ views regarding determinism, fate, free will. I wanted to learn more about this. I started translating Epictetus, Cicero, and others on my own.  

I cannot control my autoimmune disease, including when it will kick in, so it's futile to worry about this before it flares again. I can control how I react to most things, and whether it is worthwhile to be upset about a certain thing. If it is something to be upset about, I channel that feeling into activism and giving back to my community. I am no Stoic sage, but I still find their philosophy sadly misunderstood by so many. This philosophy is incredibly helpful for pushing through dark moments. If there is something that upsets me, and I can do something about what upsets me, I'm wasting my energy being upset and not doing anything about it!  

In 2008, I was left a single mother of a very young child. A psychologist that I saw said gently, “Don't you understand why you studied Stoicism?” I think that I answered, “because it's interesting to me.” She paused, and smiled. “You've been self-treating your depression all these years with philosophy—and especially with Stoicism.” It was just an observation. I left that session not believing her. Of course, she was wrong, I arrogantly thought. She doesn't understand how awesome philosophy—and particularly ancient and Stoic philosophy—is! Over a few months, however, I slowly realized how right she was. Philosophy, in many ways, helped me live when I couldn't see why. It kept that one part of my brain curious. Stoicism was my self-prescribed treatment. 

As for the rest of ancient philosophy, I find it amazingly comforting. It's comforting to be reminded that depression isn't new. Tyranny and authoritarianism aren't new. Almost everything that we are currently facing—personally, professionally, and as activists—isn’t new. People were subservient, people fought back, people survived. There is solace in ancient philosophers and the philosophy that we have from them. Even Socrates being charged and sentenced to death was a political maneuver. He arguably was a victim of the politics of the time.   

 

Due to institutional inaccessibility, ableist prejudices and biases, and other barriers, many disabled students receive less mentorship and support from their professors and teaching assistants than their nondisabled peers enjoy. Did you receive appropriate and adequate mentorship and guidance during your student years, Whitney? If so, what forms of support and mentorship were most effective and most appreciated? If not, what forms of support and mentorship were not available to you, or at least not adequately? 

During my undergraduate years, I absolutely was supported for the most part. I think it was during my sophomore year that I went to talk to my adviser for Classical Languages and Literature, the late Sally MacEwen. She didn't make me feel like a failure or any of the things that I kept telling myself I was. She listened. She nodded, and said, “I understand” or “I hear that you're feeling like you're not doing a good job, but your other professors are saying that you are.” Oh, what a gift that was! She listened. No judgment. Real support from someone who saw my potential and believed in me—as she did in ALL her students. Sally MacEwen also recruited me into a diversity workshop organized by the National Coalition Building Institute, where I was trained to help others talk through their differences that could potentially lead to hurt and hate.  

SallyMac, as we called her, encouraged me to talk to my philosophy advisor, John Parry. I very reluctantly did, and he opened up to me that he had been through some struggles. I really appreciate both of my advisers’ openness, understanding, and support. I appreciated—but also dismissed—times that they would hold me after class to discuss an idea and would gently say, “You look a little gaunt/too thin.” “How can I help?” “Do you want to talk?” “Just thought I'd let you know some people are concerned and I told them I'd check in with you.” (Strangers or acquaintances saying this sort of thing to me infuriates me; it's like telling me to “just eat.” It's dismissive of the fact that there is a real issue here, and it's not as simple as “just eat.”) Agnes Scott is a small liberal arts college. When I studied there, the student-population was less than 1000. And my majors were even smaller; so, I had more than one seminar with only two people in it. In this sense, it was like a giant family that shared the same academic interests as you. 

I didn't disclose my disabilities to most professors during my years at graduate school. I was given some opportunities; but, ultimately, I felt supported by only one professor—and our areas of interest within philosophy weren't similar. I don't feel that I was provided with much, if any, mentorship. Compared to the favorites, I was not offered any sort of mentorship. Professional support was closed off.

Again, I was naïve. I did not realize someone else's decision to send me to teach in Greece would have so many nasty repercussions for me from peers and professors alike. I received several anonymous emails that, I suppose, were meant to intimidate me. I don't know. I didn't think to report these emails or forward them to anyone in a position of authority. Throughout graduate school, one peer sent me an email, at least semi-annually, telling me “all these things are wrong with you and your approach to philosophy.” It would include a line about how “grateful” I should be that the person wasn't going to “report me for being so disgusting.” If I truly was so horrible ethically, they should have reported me. I never responded to those emails, nor did I file a complaint. I simply forwarded the first one to an advisor, who thought it was ridiculous. I was really surprised by the drama. 

 

What is the relation between your upbringing in a family focused on social justice, your philosophical training, and your activism? 

I knew my family was “different” from many, but not all, of my childhood peers, but I never really knew how to explain it. In my family, it was unsaid, but assumed, that politics is personal, and that we should do all we can to make the world better. A simple example is that we would volunteer on major holidays at a local homeless shelter, when they had the least amount of volunteers; we would then go home and do our own quiet holiday cooking. “Whoa, this isn't normal?”  

My mom was raised Roman Catholic, but that side was more Dorothy Day Roman Catholic. They were at odds in many ways with the Pope. My grandmother would even comment about how the church's stance on abortion and birth control, lesbian and gay rights, etc. was ridiculous. My dad's immediate family was Presbyterian, but many more distant relatives were Quakers. My parents taught us to always give back to our communities, however we can do so. They still live by this creed through their own examples. I believe my sister was about four when she explained to an adult that we were boycotting a local business. The adult was respectful, but amazed that a child so young used the word boycott appropriately. If my mom wasn't volunteering, my dad was. And they were always furthering their own education at the same time, too. My parents have always organized various events, donated whatever they could—including time—to make change and progress possible. I think an unspoken tenet in our household was “sitting back is not an option.”  

 

[Description of coloured photo below: A couple dozen protestors pose for the photo in front of a large sign for Hobby Lobby. Some of them are standing and others are sitting on the ground in front of them. A paved sidewalk in the foreground, surrounded by grass, leads to them. Most of the protestors are holding signs about issues such as access to abortion and misogyny. It is a sunny day, but clouds can be seen across the very blue sky.]

That said, sometimes, taking care of yourself is what is needed to be effective. With an untreated autoimmune illness, I didn't know about or even care about self-care. I still struggle with this. When you are an activist, taking care of yourself is easy to dismiss. I was raised to do something about injustices. To vocalize injustices that I saw. I also learned to work against unjust systems from within, if needed—as a child this was often the safer method; as a white child, this was often the most effective measure.

My parents were always respectful of our differences, too. For example, I remember at age 8, stating that the death penalty was wrong. My parents disagreed with the particular case at hand, but we talked about the death penalty. We would debate issues. They treated my views with respect. I learned through this form of engagement to develop stronger arguments than “It's wrong”—Hey, I was 8! When I look back on my upbringing, I’m so grateful for such respectful, thoughtful parents who really value education and critical thinking and who were excited when I called home to tell them that I was going to major in philosophy and classical languages.  

In many ways, philosophy and activism are one and the same to me. I am doing what I can to bring change or challenge something over which I have seemingly little or no control. I volunteer as a clinic escort locally; sometimes I want to go over to the protesters and grade their pamphlets like a philosophy paper: “Okay, this claim invalidates your argument. This claim is unsound. Don't quote this religious text unless you're prepared to cite texts from the other four major religions,” and so on. No, I have never done this; I do clinic escort to help people in need. The thought will inevitably pass through my head during clinic escort, though. I just smile and stay quiet.

 

Are there resources—books, articles, or videos—that you would like to highlight on the topics that you have discussed in this interview?  

I think everyone working on the question of free will should be familiar with the Diodorus Cronus' Master Argument, for fun, if nothing else. Susanne Bobzien’s Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy was challenging, solidifying my work on Stoicism.
 
I was introduced to Stoic determinism and fate when reading and translating Cicero's De Fato (On Fate). It's rather informative about various views held by ancient philosophers on fate. I recommend Epictetus. All of it. Start with The Handbook/Enchirdrion, then move to the Discourses. Seneca, On Tranquility, is also quite good. 

For understanding eating disorders and what happens to a person when they have been in starvation mode: Carrie Arnold, Decoding Anorexia explains what occurs in the brain when a person develops and has anorexia or is in any state of starvation. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment from the 1940's is also of interest.  

Both When Abortion was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 and Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America by Leslie J. Reagan expanded my understanding of how recently abortion became an ethical issue and made me realize that there are some very ugly, racist, and elitist roots on both “sides” of this debate. 

Martino Traxler, my professor at Agnes Scott, introduced me to Mad Travellers and Rewriting the Soul by Ian Hacking. I forget the conversation we had that prompted him to mention these books, but I’m grateful for the recommendations.

bell hooks—all of her work, but especially Where We Stand: Class Matters, and Ain't I A Woman? were early eye-openers. Dixie Be Damned: 300 years of Insurrection in the American South by Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford explores the numerous slave and labor rebellions in the South. 

Methods of Logic by W.V.O. Quine and his Ways of Paradox and Other Essays helped me tremendously when I tried to work out Stoic ontological issues that I came across regarding causation. 

An excellent book about the lives of everyday women in the ancient Greco-Roman world is Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves by Sarah Pomeroy. 

  

Thank you very much for offering these diverse suggestions, Whitney, and thanks also for a very compelling interview. Your expertise in certain areas of the discipline has shone through your remarks. I’m sure that your remarks have resonated with many of our readers and listeners. 

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Whitney Mutch’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted. 

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, March 15th at 8 a.m. EST for the twenty-fourth installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at [email protected]. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.

 

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Jake Jackson

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the twenty-second 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 Jake Jackson. Jake is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at Temple University, with a M.A. from The New School for Social Research. Jake also teaches as an adjunct at a couple Philadelphia-area schools. His primary philosophical interests are in social philosophy/ethics and phenomenology. Some of his work in these areas is included in The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology (forthcoming). Originally from the Boston area, Jake spent his early adulthood in New York and now lives in Philadelphia with his wife and cats. He enjoys wandering in cities, science fiction, and spends a considerable amount of time on Twitter (as @CrankyEthicist), where he’s found an extremely accessible and positive academic and philosophical community that has become indispensable to his daily and professional life. 

[Description of coloured photo below: Headshot of Jake, a white male in his late 20s with a goatee, wearing a black, blue, white, and red checkered shirt, black sportscoat, and brown glasses. He is looking sternly to his left. Leaves and branches of a tree and a house can be seen through diffused sunlight in the background.] 

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Jake! You initially intended to study religion; however, you switched to philosophy after a class in existentialism during your first undergraduate semester “ruined [you] for life," as you put it. Please explain this motivation to do graduate work in philosophy.

Thanks for including me in this outstanding series, Shelley! When I first entered undergraduate studies, I wanted to study religion comparatively and intended to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. I was never “religious,” but that didn’t quite matter in UU thinking. I spent my adolescence rather lost and aimless, and had hoped that if I studied religion something would click into place for me.

There was a lot riding on this. I am a childhood domestic violence and emotional abuse survivor from multiple abusers. As a result, I grew up bored, angry, and depressed. Much of my teenage years was lost in bitter resentments, suicidal feeling, and cynical hope. I have major depressive disorder, coupled with acute anxiety. The depression developed over time, but I cannot remember a time without anxiety. The anxiety manifests in a few ways, depending upon stress, often leading to nausea, insomnia, and occasional painful back spasms. My mental condition is what has motivated me through life, or, you might say, de-motivated me.

Leaving for college was, for me, as I suspect it is for many people, a real chance to move away from my original primary stressors and start anew (and find new primary stressors, I suppose). Although I had an initial plan, my drive and focus was to do something that helped others in some way, out of complete necessity, motivated by depressive guilt.

At my undergraduate institution, Pace University, Philosophy and Religious Studies are a combined degree, so not only was I excited to study religion from multiple angles, but to also start thinking about the world critically. I enrolled in a course on existentialism in my first semester. Discussing problems, such as whether there is meaning in life, or the fact that one is forced into life with no respite from constantly choosing their lives amongst things that cannot be chosen, opened my eyes more than any vague religious feeling ever could. This course—my first proper introduction to philosophy of any sort— “ruined” me: ruined me in the sense that I was never again able to return to who I had been before the course.

At the risk of sounding like a cliché, what really ruined me for life was reading Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. The main question of the book, “Is life even worth living?” absolutely gutted me, not because it was a new question, but because it was a question that only a few years before I had asked as if I were completely alone in doing so. Perhaps the most important thing that I got out of reading existentialist texts at eighteen was learning that I was not alone in my loneliness. After years of feeling ignored and neglected, I had found a group of authors who worried about the same things that I had worried about for so long. It really was a case of no longer feeling alone. I switched my general interests almost immediately.  

Early on in my undergraduate degree, I got the inkling that not only was I going to ask these questions for myself, but I wanted to inspire them in others. I had extremely beneficial professors who took a vested interest in helping me with my studies, something I hadn’t experienced for years. They, perhaps unknowingly, developed me into the teacher that I am today. I want to name them, because I would not have pursued graduate study if it weren’t for the community fostered by: Harold Brown, the late Thomas O’Sullivan, and Ed Miller from Pace’s Philosophy and Religious Studies Department. In my teaching today, I can hear their voices in my own. In starting out graduate study, I was concerned with reading general theories of ethics based directly in dealing with others, guided by the influence that their instruction had on me.

 

Your research concentrates on the deconstruction of social attitudes and stigma towards mental illness, as you refer to it. In particular, you employ tools from phenomenology and existentialism, as well as the notion of epistemic injustice to address conceptual and other philosophical problems with respect to moods, emotional deviation, and responsibility. Please describe this fascinating research.

I fell into this line of research indirectly, to be frank. My M.A. thesis was more concerned with general problems involved in the development of an ethics from Husserl’s work on empathy. I also had a recurring interest in the philosophy of emotions. I found that our general social attitude toward emotions is rather cruel because it tends to gaslight individuals’ feelings in pursuit of reason. Meanwhile online, I had become friends with Zara Bain, who encouraged me to write for her PhDisabled blog. I had a few apprehensions at first, since, for a while, I felt insecure calling depression and anxiety issues as “real” disability issues. But this, of course, was my own internalized stigma.

Depression and anxiety are lived conditions that directly affect a person’s everyday life, social and otherwise. The turning point—sort of the last straw—was when Robin Williams committed suicide in 2014. The immediate public reactions to this loss, especially, betrayed horribly stigmatizing narratives on what mental illness is and what it means for society. More particularly, I found Russell Brand’s claim that Williams’s “divine madness” was a “gift” to be atrocious as it normativizes suffering as something that is worthwhile so long as it gets some sort of results. Depression and mental illness in general are not superpowers. I found this claim, and other takes on the issue of Williams’s death, repulsive. I finally got around to writing my own post for PhDisabled on depression and its general silence in academic philosophy, arguing that we need to take mental illness seriously if philosophy is to position itself as a force for good.

The post was very well received overall with occasional rediscoveries, and has since become a sort of rallying cry for my research. The amount of feedback from other students and academics who reached out to say “this is me too” made me realize that this area of research needed to be developed. I wrote the blogpost immediately before I entered my Ph.D., and have since worked on the issue of social attitudes to mental illness, particularly depression. I find that even more “positive” accounts of mental illness that try to vindicate it as “resilient,” nevertheless create unattainable expectations for depressives.

Although there is a vast and rich field of work on emotions as the foundational basis of ethics, the literature by and large does not know what to do with the issue of mood disorders. Despite the literature, there is still a resounding silence on mental illness even when it comes to citations or indexes. If anything, many accounts of philosophers of emotion glance over mental illness as a passing remark to differentiate their theory from its applications to the margins of disorder. This silence directly excludes mental illness and mood disorder from questions of agency or responsibility. Much of academic philosophy falls right back into more popular and brutally-unreflective social stigma narratives without remorse. My longer-term hope is to work out a theory of responsibility that works directly with mood disorders and, also, applies to neurotypical moods.

For example, many of our more standard attempts to understand responsibility in the existentialist tradition look at the feelings of guilt and anxiety to discuss responsibility. I find that, yes, guilt and anxiety are relatively moral moods, but are not normative. These feelings are not necessarily felt for a reason, as is the case for mood disorders, but still nevertheless are directly-motivating feelings that guide us in our everyday lives. Guilt and anxiety are in a sense callings: they demand that the individual act.

My concern is to work on ethics that centers the experience of moods and mood disorders through consideration of what exactly one is supposed to do when one feels guilt or anxiety, yet there’s no direct reason for the feeling. Where traditional accounts ignore mental disorder, I seek to get right to it and ask what it means to be responsible for one’s extreme moods. This sense of responsibility is a “response” to one’s factual situation. I want to explicate what one should do when overwhelmed by moods.  

 

Jake, to pick up on your last remarks, you intend to write your dissertation on how the absence of clear understandings of the ontology of “mental illness” leads to social stigma and exacerbates the poor living conditions of people who are already disadvantaged. Can you tell us more about this aspect of the project and give us some sense of the institutional, social, and professional consequences that you hope it will have?

Yes, so my plan—I’m in midst of research for my prospectus—is to talk about moods, mood disorders, their social understanding—or, rather, lack thereof—and how to combat both stigma and perpetuated anguish. When it comes to talking about mental illness, just about everyone has an opinion about it, informed or misinformed by our interconnected social life-world. How we define mental illness is an inherently social issue as it conditions our social narratives about responsibility and expectations about the role that mentally-ill individuals are supposed to play in society. Due to a general lack of awareness and conflicting information, people with mental illnesses are often left by the wayside about their own condition and have a difficult time confirming that there is actually something atypical about themselves.

I describe this social experience of mental illness and the lack of public knowledge about it as leaving mentally-ill individuals “epistemically adrift”. This situation arises from a few different factors. Becoming epistemically adrift is in part a result of hermeneutical injustice as outlined by Miranda Fricker and others, involving the sorts of systemic stopgaps that prevent people from knowing and better understanding issues in ways that would enable them to flourish. Becoming epistemically adrift is about more than just missing knowledge; it also results because there are too many knowledges. Not only do mentally-ill individuals have to navigate their life-world despite hermeneutical gaps; they must also navigate through different and often contradictory disciplines and ideologies.

There is no definitive authority on mental illness, especially because expertise is continually and increasingly under credibility threat within American society. Most people have an opinion regarding mental illness, so each discipline has different approaches and conceptions of it. Each distinct disciplinary approach to mental illness proceeds to account for some truth behind the phenomena, but each in turn provides a differing sketch of what mental illness is and what is to be done about it. Where each rigorous disciplinary attempt at explicating what to do about mental illness is in good faith, each of them has its own failures regarding care.

Psychiatry’s adherence to the DSM—to the point of uncritically calling the document its bible—and the medical model have led to a problem of instrumentalizing and categorizing conditions, occasionally with the general accusation that the field is much more concerned with accurate diagnoses than care. Much of the mental healthcare system in the United States is relatively dependent upon practitioners, state laws, and access to affordable healthcare, rather than any governing force, such as the American Psychiatric Association.

Meanwhile, the anti-psychiatric movement argues strongly against the horrors of malpractice, yet nevertheless has reduced the state of mental illness to a purely social structure or malingering condition. Religious narratives of sin and guilt naturally persist in the world to this day. In addition, a full-blown “happiness industry” attempts to commodify and sell good feelings to consumers under the guise of homeopathy and other capitalist exploitations that only make mentally-ill people feel more inadequate and insecure for being “unhappy”. All these different approaches result in not just misinformation, but a lot of noise that mentally-ill people must figure out for themselves as instructions for care and responsibility.

In turn, these issues are compounded along intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and class. The very question of access to sufficient mental healthcare, let alone social awareness of mental illness as a concept, gets further befuddled when we look to these sorts of social differences. People who experience discrimination in general are blocked from access to proper care and therefore denied the proper social awareness of their own life. The mental healthcare system in the United States (and other places) is hard enough for people with relative privilege to navigate in order to receive adequate care.

Locked-out and epistemically adrift from hermeneutical and other forms of injustice, mentally-ill individuals commonly deviate from social norms and get themselves into direct trouble with the society that has failed them. The most pervasive de facto mental healthcare system within the United States is the criminal justice system and the mass industrial-prison complex where the largest in-patient facilities are within prisons. We, as a society, manufacture anguish; this comes about in many ways. There’s insufficient resources for preventing or correcting physical, emotional, and other forms of abuse. Also, the seriously mentally ill are under threat of death in any encounter with law enforcement when they deviate from the norm. Those incarcerated are additionally put in undue solitary confinement and other tortures when they strike out against a system that has failed them.

Another problem concerns those considered to be “higher functioning” mentally ill-individuals. People who are, more or less, able to function in society may, as a result, not even know that they have a disordered condition. A large part of the problem of neurotypically-based society is that it sees everything as a binary: mad or sane. Many people do constant comparison work. There’s a distance that appears in these comparisons: “I’m not as crazy or sick as this other person.” This ends up being a contributing cause for worsening mental health, as many believe that they cannot seek help for themselves as there are others who have it worse, taking themselves as martyrs because they think others deserve care more than themselves. The same happens readily within cases of trauma or abuse; because one can think of worse situations, one humbly admits to oneself that they are not in need of help or downplay their experiences by a way of self-gaslighting. Caring for oneself cannot be dependent upon the sufferings of others, but only one’s own self. The previous sentence may seem obvious or tautological, but it needs to be stressed regardless.

Ultimately, I hope that my work directly challenges these sorts of vain and stigmatizing direct comparisons and critiques the overreliance upon categories of mental differences while explicating a better form of inclusive ethics. My hope is that this remains a viable project in terms of directly holding mental health systems and attitudes accountable. I still have my hopes for academic work in the future, but also see myself doing policy or consulting work on mental-health advocacy. I do hope that this work nevertheless directly opens philosophers to address more practical problems in policy for social stigmas against, and expectations of, mentally-ill people.

 

In addition to the research you do, you teach. You’ve described your teaching methods to me as “performative emotional breakdown.” What does this phrase mean and how does this idea shape your pedagogy?

Ha, well… that serves me right for trying to write my initial bio as a series of silly one-liners… I find that much of teaching—at least teaching that inspires students—is performative in some sense. There’s something vitally theatrical in teaching. Maybe it’s the mood disorder, but I don’t know how to teach without a direct emotional investment in my lectures. I have more consistently chosen to accentuate my emotions while teaching, rather than try to suppress them. The first time that I taught a class, I tried to suppress my feelings as much as possible, but it totally arrested me with anxiety.

I feel my way through lectures and get rather anguished and worked up throughout. I pace around the front of the room quite a bit, in part just out of feeling restless and unable to stay still, otherwise I get petrified with anxiety and cannot speak. In more basic or non-applied classes, I typically don’t follow my pre-planned lecture notes, but rather improvise my way through the text’s major claims and their general applications in everyday society. In teaching mainly Gen-Ed and intro courses, much of my teaching is to a relatively captive audience, many of whom are already resentful of the course by its requirement alone. The best that I can do is to “trick” them into caring about the course material as much as I do.

 

[Description of coloured photo below: Jake leans against the brick exterior of an apartment building looking grumpy. He is wearing a blue, black, and white checkered shirt, a dark jacket, dark jeans, and glasses. His right hand is in the right pocket of his pants, his left arm is raised and bent at the elbow, and his left hand is behind his head. To the right of him, grey spray-painted graffiti on the building reads “create confusion!”]  

 

 

Primarily, I find myself asking rather gadfly- or koan-type questions, trying to draw out the fact that people’s day-to-day perspectives of the world are already built on top of assumptions they’ve never considered. For example, teaching The Republic, I ask if family is even important; teaching Marx, I ask what money even does or what is inherent about gold that makes it so special, or even just the general question “what is freedom?” I prefer to play the room and see what people already know or think they know; then, I try my hardest to disorient them so that they find better and more rigorous bearings. This, overall, is what I feel should be the basis for philosophy, especially teaching philosophy, not some overtly-technical jargon, but a re-orientation for a more ethical and interconnected everyday life.

The results of my teaching style are… mixed. Every semester I get students who go out of their way to thank me, talk about how much they’ve learned, arguments they’ve had with their parents/roommates because of things I’ve mentioned, and other very appreciative comments. But I also have several problem students that I don’t know how to handle, other than to, unfortunately, internalize their hatred towards my instruction that I’ve so entangled with myself.

This past semester, I had a weird experience teaching the same Gen Ed course back-to-back. The general population of the first class was not receptive toward me, let alone patient with me. But, the second class was extremely enthusiastic: sometimes I could barely get a word in edgewise on genuinely-positive class discussion. The overall result was a sort of emotional whiplash, going from extreme lows to highs within the course of a couple hours.

Given the growing traction of hate-groups in the past few years, however, I’ve been receiving a lot of pushback. My teaching evaluations especially have taken a strange hit, including comments that didn’t answer the question prompt, but got bogged down in relatively threatening sour grapes over the fact that I “stifled true opinions”—which I think were likely hate-speech or dog-whistles. So, I’ve stopped reading my student feedback forms for larger classes until there’s been some time to cool off.

I have been toying with the idea of doing a student-evaluation swap with a peer: have a trusted peer read the full reviews without reading them myself, this person would excise the intentionally-hurtful comments, while best explaining any legitimate concerns in terms of improvement. I think it is still vital in this culture of bad-gamification and consumerization of teaching to find what is good in one’s teaching craft amongst so much negativity and growing political cruelty. I know that I am appreciated, but I still need it in writing to affirm myself amongst my own internalized negative noise in anxiety and depression. It has taken so much for me to feel worthwhile, yet it is always ever so hard to navigate.

On the positive side, I’ve had many students who have been excited about the work I’ve taught and have received rave reviews as well. Students keep in touch, reach out, let me know that I’m the reason they got into interesting fights with their family and roommates. I know that I’m doing work that is appreciated and gets people out in the world and questioning the consequences in their lives, which has already vindicated so much for me.

 

Have you encountered barriers in your role as a student or teacher? If so, can you describe these barriers to us and suggest how they can be dismantled?

I’ve had a few hang-ups here and there; but, thankfully, I have not faced much in the way of institutional barriers. I’m what would be considered a “high functioning” depressive. I typically get my work done on time and seem functional to most people; but, I am constantly blocked by anxiety. After a few bouts of grief and sudden loss of friends and family, I’ve at times felt just completely lost and unable to do anything beyond going through the motions of being a student.

I spent the entire time of both my B.A. and M.A. not taking care of my mental health, which had a terrible toll. I spent much of my studies feeling inadequate or at the whim of my moods and holding out from losing control of my life. Again, part of why this happened was that, in midst of everything, I either did not see myself as someone who needed care or as someone who deserved care because I could easily find others who had it worse than me. One barrier, however, overall is the silence surrounding mental health that pervades even the best-meaning institutions and faculty. Sometimes when there are no words, there is just the need to listen.

 

[Description of coloured photo below: Black sidewalk sandwich board with blue and white text that states “NO BAD VIBES ALLOWED.” Part of Jake’s image is reflected on the sandwich board as he takes the picture. He is wearing a blue and white checkered shirt, skinny jeans, and lace-up shoes.] 

 

 

Sometimes, when fully engrossed in my emotional experience, I feel completely alienated and apart from others and feel persecuted. I get paranoid and socially anxious so often, both openly irritable in order to push certain people away and to feel additionally hated by those that I admire, even when that’s unlikely to take place or known to be false. Some days, it’s not about the barriers one faces from others, but the barriers that one makes for oneself in the face of others. I’ve taken on a bit of a rough reputation by peers as “abrasive,” but, as best as I can figure, I need to be somewhat rude to ensure that I can take care of myself. This sort of ethic is explicated clearly in Havi Carel’s work, which I cite later in this interview. The result of this strategy has been rather alienating, overall, and I haven’t quite found the community that others do in department peer groups. I have occasionally found myself destroying good friendships and relationships due only to my own belief that I do not deserve their company. This result has, perhaps, been the hardest burden to bear.

 

What do you want to recommend on the topics we’ve discussed in this interview or, alternatively, on anything that we didn’t discuss?

I do want to take a moment to stress the importance for graduate students to forge community. Academia and the so-called “life of the mind” are inevitably rather alienating and lonesome. Even if a good community is hard to find locally, I highly recommend forging your own community through digital or other spaces. Go to conferences, especially interdisciplinary conferences, collaborate, reach out to others. There’s a bizarre cult of “required sufferings” in academia: resist this. Personally, Twitter became indispensable for me when I could neither relate to local others, nor financially and emotionally afford to go out. In turn, I have made several extremely close friends and have been socially-enriched by the constant availability for conversation.

In terms of resources on the topics we’ve discussed, my recent thinking has been heavily shaped by these books: Havi Carel’s Illness: The Cry of the Flesh and her most recent Phenomenology of Illness; Lisa Guenther’s Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives; Nancy Nyquist Potter’s The Virtue of Defiance and Psychiatric Engagement; and Matthew Ratcliffe’s Experiences of Depression: a Study in Phenomenology.

Thanks again, Shelley, for including me in this very important series.

 

Jake, thank you very much for sharing your moving insights and experiences with us. I’m sure that your remarks have registered with many other graduate students and faculty alike.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Jake Jackson’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

_________________________________________

 

Please join me here again on Wednesday, February 15th at 8 a.m. ET for the twenty-third installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at [email protected]. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.

 

Society for Philosophy of Emotion/Journal of Philosophy of Emotion

 

As a Vice-President of the new Society for Philosophy of Emotion (SPE), I would like to encourage you to join the SPE now!

The SPE is associated with the new journal, Journal of Philosophy of Emotion. See the CFP for our inaugural issue!

In February, the SPE will circulate the CFP for its first conference, which will be held in NYC in 2018. Plan to join us in NYC!

 

posted by Shelley

CFP: Embodiment: Bodies and Embodied Experience, University of Toronto, May 8-9, 2017 (deadline Jan. 9, 2017)

 

17th Annual University of Toronto Philosophy Graduate Conference

Embodiment: Bodies and Embodied Experience

Conference: May 8th-9th, 2017

Keynote Speakers: Kristie Dotson and Evan Thompson

with a panel on Disability, Illness, and Madness

Submissions Due: January 9th, 2017

 

Discussions of embodiment span many areas of philosophy. Early modern metaphysicians discuss the relationship between body and mind. Buddhist and continental phenomenologists explore the limitations on conscious experience that arise from our embodiment. Bioethicists and disability scholars raise issues of autonomy and end of life care. Feminists and critical race theorists draw attention to the important role that our embodied experience plays in our philosophical intuitions. Philosophers of language debate the protected status of pornography and hate speech. Epistemologists consider the problems of privileged knowledge, implicit bias, and epistemic injustice. Philosophers of mind turn to methodological questions and empirical studies of embodied cognition.

Accordingly, we conceive of the conference’s theme very broadly, and we welcome submissions from all areas in philosophy that relate to the conference’s main themes. Interdisciplinary submissions, submissions from underrepresented areas of philosophy, and submissions from underrepresented identity groups are particularly encouraged. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Perspectives on embodiment from particular thinkers, traditions, and historical periods
• Bodies and (in)justice, oppression, hate speech, pornography
• Reliability of perceptual knowledge, phenomenology, proprioception
• Bodies in political space, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, Occupy
• Metaphysics of gender, embodied experience of time, space, and causation
• Experiences of disembodiment and dissociation, body dysphoria, anorexia
• Social bodies, epistemologies of race and ignorance, standpoint epistemology
• Embodied experiences of pregnancy, abortion, sex, and sexualities
• Comparisons of Eastern and Western approaches to embodiment and phenomenology
• Interdisciplinary research and methodologies: cogsci, history, religion, sociology
• Other papers intersecting with the research of Kristie Dotson and/or Evan Thompson

Panel on Disability, Illness, and Madness: In collaboration with UP, our local chapter of Minorities and Philosophy, we will be holding a panel on philosophical engagements with disability, illness, and madness. We hope for a range of approaches to these topics, and we encourage any authors who feel their work addresses some aspect of philosophy and disability to apply. Each panelist will have 15 or 20 minutes to present. Authors who would like to be considered for the panel should submit a 300 word abstract. Authors submitting to the main conference program who would also like their abstract considered for the panel should indicate so in their submission email.

Accessibility: We are committed to having an accessible and inclusive conference. We will arrange teleconferencing for those who may experience barriers to physical attendance; we will reimburse childcare expenses; we will have private rooms available for quiet spaces, breastfeeding, prayer, etc; and we are currently looking into the possibility of ASL interpretation. The Centre for Ethics has accessible single-user gender neutral bathrooms, priority bluespace parking, and is step-free accessible from the parking lot. Limited travel stipends are available. For information on access, including venue location and physical accessibility, click on the accessibility tab at our site, or email torontophilgradconf@gmail.com.

Deadline for Submission: January 9th

Please send submissions to torontophilgradconf@gmail.com.

All submissions must be in PDF format and prepared for anonymous review. Conference papers should not exceed 3500 words, and should include an abstract not exceeding 300 words. Submissions to the panel should not exceed 300 words. In your email, please include your name, paper title, and institutional affiliation. Authors may submit to both the paper sessions and the panel, but only one submission per category. Submissions are due by January 9th, 2017. Authors will be notified of decisions on or before March 1st, 2017.

All are welcome to attend, but submissions are only open to graduate students.

For more information, go here.

 

posted by Shelley