Discrimination and Disadvantage

Repression and Controversial Ideas

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

posted by Shelley

Feminist Philosophy of Disability and Genealogy: An Intervention (Nov. 9, 2018)

 

[To increase the accessibility of my presentation, I have now posted it to Discrimination and Disadvantage, the philosophy blog that I coordinate. If you'd like to read along with me, type 'Discrimination and Disadvantage' into your browser and follow the link to the blog.] 

 

Feminist Philosophy of Disability

and Genealogy: An Intervention

 

Presented to the Department of Gender and Race Studies,

University of Alabama,

November 9, 2018

 

Introduction

This paper is a feminist intervention into the ways that disability is researched and represented in philosophy at present, a feminist intervention distinctly designed to subvert the dominance of individualized and medicalized approaches to disability in philosophy and the marginalization of critical philosophical work on disability. Nevertheless, some of the claims that I make over the course of the paper are also pertinent to the marginalization in philosophy of other areas of inquiry, including philosophy of race, feminist philosophy more broadly, Indigenous philosophies, and LGBTQIA philosophy. For although the discipline of philosophy largely continues to operate under the guise of neutrality, rationality, and objectivity, the institutionalized structure of the discipline implicitly and explicitly promotes certain ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies as bona fide philosophy, while casting the ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies of other philosophies as mere simulacra of allegedly fundamental ways of knowing and doing philosophy, marginalizing these other philosophies and rendering them more or less expendable.

A certain limited number of subfields of philosophy—that is, metaphysics, ethics, logic, epistemology, and philosophy of language—are widely regarded in the contemporary discipline of philosophy as foundational to it, uniquely distinguishing it from other disciplines of research and teaching and reaffirming its self-ascription as “the queen of the sciences.” Philosophers who continue to hold this conventional view of philosophy maintain that these subfields are the necessary, unchanging, and “core” elements of philosophy, while other subfields of philosophical inquiry—such as philosophy of race and feminist philosophy—are said to be merely applications and contingent derivatives of these foundational subfields. That is, philosophers who understand the structure and practice of philosophy in this conventional way take for granted that the former subfields are ontologically and epistemologically prior to the latter subfields and, indeed, render the latter subfields conceivable in the first place. For philosophers who distinguish in this way between “core” subfields of philosophy and “applied” subfields of philosophy, the questions and concerns that make up the former subfields are generally regarded as timeless, disinterested, and universal in character and, alternatively, the questions and concerns that constitute the latter subfields are generally taken to be accidental, interested, and partial.

Against this conventional and biased understanding of the institutional structure and discursive practices of philosophy, my argument is that the classification of subfields in philosophy, the relations between the classifications of the subfields, and the questions and concerns that these subfields comprise is no mere value-neutral reportage or representation of objective differences, relations, and similarities that await discovery and recognition; rather, classification in philosophy (as elsewhere) is performative insofar as it contributes to the constitution of the very value-laden resemblances, distinctions, associations, and relationships between phenomena and states of affairs that it puts into place. Although many philosophers continue to represent philosophy as a value neutral, detached, disinterested, and impartial enterprise, political, social, economic, cultural, and institutional force relations influence every aspect of the discipline (and profession) of philosophy. Every philosophical question and concern, as well as every subfield that these questions and concerns constitute, is a politically potent artifact of historically contingent and culturally specific discourse. As contingent artifacts of discourse, furthermore, every philosophical question, every philosophical subfield, and every specialization in philosophy has a history, a history that can be traced genealogically (see Tremain 2013, 2017, ix-xi).

My genealogy of feminist philosophy of disability aims to resist and disrupt the conventional—that is, individualized and medicalized—understanding of disability that most philosophers presuppose, drawing upon Michel Foucault’s toolbox of insights to do so. Although mainstream philosophers variously allege that their claims about disability are value neutral and disinterested, a feminist philosophy of disability that draws on Foucault scrutinizes the political character of these claims, as well as both its own claims with respect to disability and the presuppositions on which they rely, arguing (with Foucault) that discursive practices are the products of historically contingent and situated force relations. My argument, in what follows, is designed in part to show that Foucault’s body of work offers the most sophisticated and politically astute tools with which to articulate a feminist philosophy of disability that takes account of its own historical and cultural specificity and contingency.

 

Genealogy, Problematization, and Disability

Introduced by Friedrich Nietzsche in A Genealogy of Morals ([1887] 1999) and adapted by Foucault in works such as Discipline and Punish (1977) and The History of Sexuality, Volume One (1978), genealogy is a historicized approach to philosophical inquiry, distinct from the ahistorical conceptual analysis, deductive reasoning, and logical argumentation that characterizes mainstream analytic philosophy. Foucault adopted genealogy to critically inquire into the history of necessity on a given topic and the historical emergence of the necessary conditions for states of affairs, underscoring the importance to such an approach of contingency and of questioning what has been taken for granted as self-evident. Foucault’s genealogies—which he variously referred to as “histories of the present” and “historical ontologies of ourselves”—are concerned with questions about the conditions of possibility for who we are now, that is, questions about how our current ways of thinking and acting came into being.

Foucault’s genealogies were inquiries into the “problematization” in the present of certain phenomena—such as abnormality, perversion, sexuality, and madness—inquiries that attempted to uncover how “solutions” to certain problems have been constructed, in addition to how these different solutions resulted from the problematization of these state of affairs in the first place (Foucault 2003, 20–24). Foucault’s genealogical studies of the problematization of abnormality, perversion, sexuality, and madness (among other things) are not positivistic appeals to a form of science that more accurately represents these phenomena, nor are these studies intended to provide normative responses or solutions to these phenomena. Rather, Foucault’s genealogical studies were designed to show how certain phenomena and states of affairs became thinkable, that is, emerged as problems to which solutions came to be sought. Foucault’s historical method of critical inquiry requires that we ask about the values, purposes, and aims of our current practices, the circumstances of their emergence, and the historically contingent forms of power that contribute to their constitution (also see Hall 2015, 2016).

My feminist philosophical work on disability—which, in some respects, extends Foucault’s own genealogical examinations of the problematization of abnormality, madness, perversion, and other phenomena commonly associated with disability—is thus most aptly characterized as a feminist genealogical inquiry into the problematization of disability in philosophy (for example, Tremain 2006, 2010, 2015, 2017). Just as Foucault’s genealogical studies of the problematization of abnormality, perversion, sexuality, and madness were not intended to provide normative responses or solutions to these phenomena, my inquiry into the problematization of disability does not offer an explicitly normative feminist proposal or response to the phenomena of disability. Instead, my feminist philosophical inquiry into the problematization of disability is designed in large part to indicate how a certain historically and culturally specific regime of power—namely, biopower— has produced certain acts, practices, subjectivities, bodies, relations, and so on as a problem for the present, as well as to indicate the role that philosophy has played and continues to play in the elaboration of this problem. In other words, my aim is to articulate an analytically robust and empirically grounded feminist philosophy of disability that interrogates the historical conditions of possibility for its own articulation.

Despite the apparent variety of questions that mainstream philosophers throughout the discipline have asked about disability, the cluster of assumptions that underpins their inquiries takes for granted the metaphysical status and epistemological character of the category of disability, casting disability as a self-evident designation that science and medicine can accurately represent. On the terms of these assumptions, disability is a prediscursive, transcultural, and transhistorical disadvantage, an objective human defect, that is, a nonaccidental, biological human property, attribute, or characteristic that ought to be prevented, corrected, eliminated, or cured. That the individualizing and medicalizing assumptions that have conditioned work on disability in mainstream philosophy are contestable, that disability might be a historically and culturally specific and contingent social phenomenon, a complex apparatus of power, rather than a deleterious natural attribute or property that certain people possess, has not been considered, let alone seriously entertained.

Philosophers who argue that the social inequalities that accrue to disabled people are necessary consequences of a self-evident physiological, or natural, human characteristic make certain assumptions about the relation between biology and society, that is, about the relation between nature and nurture, that my feminist philosophy of disability is designed to undermine. Dorothy E. Roberts (2016) has distinguished heuristically between two approaches to the question of the relation between biology and society, approaches that she refers to as “the old biosocial science” and “the new biosocial science.” As Roberts explains it, the old biosocial science posits that biological differences produce social inequality, whereas the new biosocial science posits that social inequality produces biological differences. The biological determinism of the old biosocial science, she notes, is achieved in several ways: first, the old biosocial science approach separates nature from nurture in order to locate the origins of social inequalities in inherent traits rather than imposed societal structures; second, the old biosocial science postulates that social inequalities are reproduced in the bodies, especially the wombs, of socially disadvantaged people rather than reinvented through unjust ideologies and institutions; third, the old biosocial science identifies problems that stem from social inequality as derived from the threats that oppressed people’s biology itself poses to society rather than from structural barriers and state violence imposed upon oppressed people; and fourth, the old biosocial science endeavors to intervene and fix perceived biological deficits in the bodies of oppressed people rather than end the structural violence that dehumanizes them and maintains an unjust social order.

Roberts points out that, by contrast, the new biosocial science posits that every single biological element, every single biological process in the human body, every human cell, and everything that happens to a human cell is affected by society. All of life, Roberts remarks, is at once biological and social. There is, in short, no natural body. Genes do not determine anything. Moreover, our brains are plastic, with the ability to be modified by social experience. As Roberts points out, biology is not a separate entity that interacts with the environment; rather, biology is constituted by these interactions (2016; see also Roberts 1998, 2012; Prinz 2012; Gilman and Thomas 2016). With Roberts, various authors have argued furthermore that critical analyses of biosocial science must consider how claims about the social construction of biological phenomena are produced, in what contexts they are mobilized, and for what political purposes (for example, Pitts-Taylor 2010). In my work to articulate a feminist philosophy of disability, I aim to critically and genealogically denaturalize and de-biologize the phenomena of disability in these ways, among others.

Feminist Philosophy of Disability at The University of Alabama (Nov. 8-9, 2018)

 

Next week (Nov. 8-9), I will visit The Department of Gender and Race Studies at The University of Alabama, as part of the Department's Politics and Democracy Lecture Series.

On Friday, November 9th, 3:00-5:00, in the Gorgas Library, Rm. 205, I will give a presentation entitled "Feminist Philosophy of Disability and Genealogy: An Intervention." The poster for the presentation is copied below.  There are other events (excursions, informal seminar, meals, etc.) associated with my visit. If you are in the vicinity and would like to get involved in any of these events, please contact the Chair of the Department of Gender and Race Studies, Utz McKnight ([email protected]), for details. 

[Description of poster below: The names of the department and lecture series appear across the top of the poster. Below this information, the title of my talk, my name, and the date and location for the talk appear to the right of a snapshot of the cover of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. A bio for me appears below these details. The bio reads: "Shelley L. Tremain holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, has taught in Canada, the U.S., and Australia, and publishes on a range of topics, including (feminist) philosophy of disability, Foucault, ableism in feminist philosophy, and bioethics. Tremain is the author of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2017), the manuscript for which was awarded the 2016 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities, and the editor of Foucault and the Government of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2005; 2015). She was also the 2016 recipient of the Tanis Doe Award for Disability Study and Culture in Canada. Tremain coordinates the Discrimination and Disadvantage blog, where she posts Dialogues on Disability, the acclaimed series of interviews that she is conducting with disabled philosophers." Below the bio, the poster indicates that the presentation is sponsored by The Department of Gender and Race Studies, University Programs at U of A, and the A&S Dean's Office, as well as that the presentation is open to University of Alabama faculty and students, as well as the general public.]

 

posted by Shelley

Citation Practices: More About Power Than You Think They Are

 

The number of citations that a philosopher's work gets is taken into account in the hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions of many philosophy departments. In addition, repeated citation of a given article can establish a new direction in the discipline, a new style of doing philosophy, or some other novel trend in philosophy. Furthermore, frequent citation of a certain philosopher’s work can elevate the professional status of the given philosopher and the area of study in which the philosopher works. In other words, the citation practices in which individual philosophers engage can, and usually do, have cumulative effects. To put it another way, citation practices on the micro-level produce systemic and profession-wide effects, many of which have significant and lasting consequences.

Some of the most significant and enduring systemic effects of citation practices comprise the reproduction, in various forms, of the status quo in philosophy with respect to the exclusion or marginalization of some philosophers, including disabled philosophers, and the exclusion or marginalization of certain areas of inquiry in philosophy, including philosophy of disability. Thus, marginalized philosophers and privileged philosophers who aim to eliminate the current asymmetries in the profession increasingly scrutinize citation practices in the profession: Who gets cited? Where do they get cited? By whom do they cited? Who hasn’t been cited? Which body of work has been obscured, ignored, and disregarded?

In short, a growing number of philosophers have become cognizant of the political character of citation practices, asking, among other questions, whether philosophers who have engaged in sexual misconduct, or make racist and antisemitic claims, or endorse policies that violate the civil rights of LGBTQ people, should be promoted through the citation and use of their work.

To date, most of the inquiries into citation practices have been concerned with the gendered nature of current citation practices in philosophy, demonstrating  the ways in which epistemic authority and professional recognition more often accrue to (white) male philosophers than to women philosophers and how the conferral of this epistemic authority and esteem affects hiring and promotion practices, reproduces biases in the profession, and even ultimately encourages women to leave the profession.

Although these critical inquiries into citation practices have helped to throw into relief the irreducibly political character of epistemic authority and esteem in philosophy, I want to argue nevertheless that critical inquiries about citation practices need to go beyond their current focus on who gets cited, how often they get cited, and in what venues, in order to examine how citation takes place, how it is done, and why a certain philosopher gets cited. For I maintain that even seemingly ameliorative citations can reinstate asymmetrical relations of power if they are done in careless or inappropriate ways.

My Journey In Our Struggle (guest post)

 

My Journey In Our Struggle* 

 

Guest Post

 

by  

 

Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, Ph.D.**

 

 

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

 

Why do I begin narrating my journey at this milestone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

     1        Getting Inside

     2        Dismantling His House

     3        Bringing It Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

This was a shift from faces to voices.

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

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

•    Anglican

•    Anglophone

•    Enabled by society

•    Wealthy

•    Gender-conforming men

•    Racialised as white.

But that's just one aspect of the curriculum.

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

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

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

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

That video went viral.

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

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

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

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

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

 

Burning Out: Resisting Resilience and Self-Care Narratives

 

Guest Post

 

by 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews C Dalrymple-Fraser

 

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

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

My guest today is C Dalrymple-Fraser. C is currently a Ph.D. candidate and Vanier Scholar in the Department of Philosophy and Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto. Their primary research interests include practical ethics (especially bioethics), social epistemology, and philosophy of disability, usually in combination, and not always in that order. C’s dissertation will explore the roles of different kinds of “silences” and exclusions in health practices, with a focus on disabled and queer communities. In their spare time, C can be found resting or resisting with friends, visiting other people’s pets, taking selfies with bees, and occasionally misplacing puzzle pieces and library books.  

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, C! Many graduate students in philosophy are concerned that their projects are not socially relevant, not philosophically important, or do not have practical implications. At least once in your studies, you considered dropping out because you felt that your work would not have an impact. Please explain why you felt conflicted about your position in philosophy and why you decided to continue in the field. Other students who are grappling with these issues might recognize aspects of their own situations in your response.

Thank you for the invitation to participate in this series, Shelley! I’ve learned a lot from the past interviews published in the series and I’m grateful for a chance to join the conversation.

I suppose that I’m often questioning my position in philosophy, but it was toward the end of my first degree that I most strongly considered leaving the field and academia in general. I’ll just mention two reasons here.

First, I was addressing the consequences of my failure to accountably seek support and accommodation for my mental health and health more generally. I struggled to accomplish even mundane tasks, let alone academic work, and developed bad coping mechanisms. Meanwhile, most of the representations of disorder, disability, and illness that I encountered in course readings were medically uninformed at best, stigmatizing on average, and largely raised only as limit cases or thought experiments about the boundaries of personhood or autonomy. This state of affairs didn’t help matters for my health or sense of belonging.

Second, a sudden wave of tragedies in my social groups and close communities, including several preventable deaths, made it much harder to go to school and think about, say, the compatibility of externalism about mental content with privileged access, the unity of the proposition, or other questions in which I was interested. It’s definitely a privilege to have been insulated enough from other goings-on in the world that it both took that long for me to feel this way and that I’ve never had to fight to “belong” in philosophy; but, it became difficult for me to justify my own position in philosophy when I could have been working in other spaces that I perceived to have more demonstrable or direct impacts on communities and peoples. Since the world keeps spinning, this is a challenge that I regularly confront.

I don’t want to suggest that people can’t do that work separate from their research, nor do I want to necessarily value some kinds of research over other kinds. I also want to resist the idea that research must be “impactful” in any specified way, because many norms around how we understand “impact” have been used to discredit different kinds of work and research and leisure that don’t fit our disciplinary ideals. But I couldn’t divorce my research and studies from the rest of the world in the ways that I would need to continue doing them as I had been.

Just as several reasons made me question my position or ability to continue in philosophy, many things played roles in continuing. For one, I was invited to a few volunteer opportunities that disrupted the boundaries between the university and the community in which it is located. Engaging in this volunteer work showed me additional ways that philosophy can be relevant to, or enriched by, issues and perspectives outside the discipline and academia.

Around the same time, I learned more about my family history of Alzheimer’s and redirected my remaining studies toward bioethics. At bioethics conferences and events, I have been able to talk directly with patients and professionals in ways that are often unavailable to people who are not in academic or health professions. This has allowed me to raise or translate concerns from groups to which I belong or to which I have proximity, and which are not often addressed in academic or professional contexts. I have friends in other graduate programs who were encouraged to switch schools or programs because their work was turning “more practical than philosophical,” so I can’t understate my fortune to have had these opportunities and the ongoing support of my mentors, peers, and friends. In short, institutional philosophy and bioethics have been spaces in which I could ask the kinds of questions important to the people around me and take up a certain kind of advocacy in research and teaching.

 

[Description of image below: C, a white person with facial hair, is sitting in a brightly lit office, facing the camera and faintly smiling. They are wearing round glasses with a golden glasses-chain, a vertically striped, button-down shirt, and a jacket with a floral design. Books on bookshelves fill the background of the shot.]

Your motivations to stay in philosophy were informed by a philosophy discussion group that you facilitated at a youth shelter. Tell us how your thinking and research have been transformed by your experiences with that group.

Unfortunately, our group ran for only a few months because of some disruptions to the shelter’s funding and ability to organize volunteer programming. Still, it was an amazing experience while it lasted. It’s difficult to put a lot of it into words, in part because I’m still learning from and reflecting on those experiences and also because many of the stories and knowledge circulated aren’t mine to share. There are a few things I have permission to discuss.

The experience made me reflect more on teaching practices and wider interpretations of accessibility. For example, we agreed on discussion topics collectively and did not assign materials. We wanted to acknowledge differences in interests, abilities, access to language and jargon, etc. and, because we were a drop-in group with a constantly changing membership, we didn’t want to discourage turnout.

Reflecting on the successes and failures in these strategies has directed me to stories and scholarship on why and when texts are necessary, who they centre or exclude, what the academic emphasis on written texts and documents over, say, oral traditions means for access—both in terms of who can read them and who can produce them—the price of textbooks, and so on.

Our discussions on my role in these conversations and spaces as a multiply privileged white academic also challenged me to listen and learn more about anti-oppressive research and teaching, and about relational accounts of knowing. Research as Resistance, edited by Susan Strega and Leslie Brown, and works by Margaret Kovach, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and Shawn Wilson have been great entry points here, though I came to them quite late.

After one discussion, a regular member of the group commented that they liked the group because they felt heard, that although the care workers in the shelter were helpful and had good intentions, these workers tended to listen, as part of their jobs, with an agenda of identifying if anything was wrong. When the speech of the members of the group was regularly monitored for problems, they had a harder time being heard on their own terms.

I was glad that they experienced the space in that way, but I don’t think that I was a good listener. I had an agenda while facilitating the discussion, and that agenda was informed by the academic norms that I accepted and internalized. While it may be difficult or impossible to listen without some agenda, we can often be more critically attentive and accountable to our agendas. So, the comment was an encouragement to think about my failures to listen to others, on their terms, and to learn about how we can create and reproduce different kinds of “silences” as listeners in how we choose to be an audience. bell hooks’s Talking Back and Adrienne Rich’s poem “Cartographies of Silence” were important for thinking about these issues, in addition to everything that Kristie Dotson has written.

CFP; Ableism in the Academy: A Series About Disability Oppression and Resistance in Higher Education (deadline: Dec. 10, 2018)

 

Special Series

Call for Manuscripts

Critical Education

 

Ableism in the Academy: A Series about Disability Oppression and Resistance in Higher Education

 

Editors:

Steve Singer, The College of New Jersey
Jessica Bacon, Montclair State University

 

An early expression of interest and a 250-500 word abstract December 10, 2018. Please address correspondence to [email protected] and [email protected] including "Critical Education" in the subject line.

 

Manuscripts due dates: Due to the nature of a special series, we will be accepting and reviewing manuscripts on a rolling basis until April 10, 2019 with the potential of extending the CFP.

 

Ableism is a pervasive problem in the academy despite the protections put in place by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, theoretically guaranteeing disabled students access to educational experiences free from access barriers or discrimination. Generally, ableism is defined as the persistent devaluing of disability, or the belief that disability is an inherently negative state of existence and able-bodiedness is a preferred way of being (Campbell, 2009). The academy and all its parts (e.g. faculty, administration, student body, and staff) often view disabled people as burdens and not as scholars (See Dolmage, 2017; Kimball and colleagues, 2016). Unsurprisingly, there is scant scholarship that focuses of ableism in graduate degree programs, because disabled students are not offered admission to these programs, or there is a high attrition rate for this population. Only 5% of disabled students earn advanced degrees, which is roughly one-third of their able-bodied counterparts (Ryan & Bauman, 2016).

This special series examines all levels of ableism in the academy, with a special focus on graduate degree programs and structures in higher education that marginalize disabled students or limit the access to graduate degree programs. These levels of ableism include: cultural, institutional, interactional, and personal strata.

Ableism manifests in four ways: overt, covert, aversive, and laissez-faire (Keller & Galgay, 2010). Overt ableism is easily recognizable and generally accepted or goes without notice because of its ubiquity. Covert ableism describes ableism which is hidden intentionally or unintentionally or is that which is rationalized. Aversive ableism describes ambivalence, reductiveness, avoidance, or a general denial of ableism. Finally, laissez-faire ableism describes a notion that any disparities between disabled people and able-bodied people or extant barriers are the result of disabled people’s own actions.

We welcome a wide range of methodological, empirical, theoretical, and narrative manuscripts for this issue. We particularly encourage scholarship which prioritizes the voices, contributions, values, and needs of disabled people. Additionally, we are interested in intersectional analyses of the experience of ableism alongside other marginalized groups who additionally confront, for instance racism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, etc. The series is also open to stories of activism or resistance against ableist practice in higher education.

We invite the submission of shorter, personal narratives to further contextualize and partner with empirical or theoretical manuscripts. These narratives will be reviewed based on their relevance and contribution to the series theme, and we are open to a range of styles of writing. The four expressions and four levels of ableism described above should be used as a guide for potential foci of submitted manuscripts, though papers need not explicitly name these.

Potential topics of study of ableism in higher education and graduate degree programs at cultural and institutional levels could include but are not limited to the following topics: Admissions processes, evidencing competency, policies, facilities, administration and faculty acting as agents of the institution, degree requirements, “tradition” and “rigor,” performance, assessments, coursework, campus climate (e.g. pity, pathology), status quo, campus organizations/support, intersectional oppression, reinforcement of ableist norms, inadequate disabled population/peerage, academic or social resources, or accommodations.

Potential topics of study of ableism in higher education and graduate degree programs at interactional or personal levels in graduate degree programs, could include but are not limited to the following topics: Attitudes or actions of faculty or staff, attitudes or actions of peers, socialization/campus involvement, observed and inferred ableism by individuals, personal beliefs about disability, learned behaviors, internalized oppression, intersectional oppression, disability identity formation or change, advocacy, or activism.

 

Word limits:

1. Methodological, empirical, and theoretical papers should be between 4,000 and 8,000 words in length.
2. Personal narratives should not exceed 1,750 words.

For details on manuscript submission see: CE Information for Authors

 

References

Campbell, F. K. (2009). Contours of ableism. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dolmage, J. (2017). Academic ableism. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Kimball, E., Moore, A., Vaccaro, A., Troiano, P., & Newman, B. (2016). College Students with Disabilities Redefine Activism: Self-Advocacy, Storytelling, and Collective Action. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 9(3), 245-260.

Keller,  R.  M.,  and  Galgay,  C.  E.  (2010).  Microaggressive  experiences  of  people  with  disabili-ties. Microaggressions and marginality: Manifestation, dynamics, and impact, 241-268.

Ryan, C. L., & Bauman, K. (2016). U.S. Census: Educational attainment in the United States: 2015. Retrieved from https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/83682/EducationalAttainment2015US.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

 

posted by Shelley

Testimony, Uncorroborated

 

When I was in graduate school, a fellow philosophy graduate student, a classmate, the "star" of the department at the time, sexually assaulted me in the living room of my little three-room ground-floor apartment.

I was sitting in a kelly-green armchair that I had bought for $10 at a secondhand store.

 

Do you believe me?

 

He had come to my place on the pretense of filling me in on some work for classes that I had missed that week. So, it must have been a Friday evening or a Saturday evening.

No one else was there to see what he did. No one else was there to see that he did it.

 

Do you believe me?

 

On separate occasions shortly thereafter, I told two of our male professors what had happened that evening.

I think it happened in the evening. I think it was around 8 o'clock in the evening. But it might have been around 6 o'clock or even 5 o'clock in the afternoon. It gets dark early here in the Winter.

 

Do you believe me?

 

One of the professors snickered when I told him. So I changed the subject.

The other professor looked away when I told him. Then he changed the subject.

 

Do you believe me?

 

posted by Shelley 

Beyond Inclusive Syllabi

 

Nondisabled white women are generally included whenever philosophers wish to identify various underrepresented groups in the profession. Indeed, these women are generally given priority in any list that itemizes groups that are underrepresented in philosophy. I contend however that it may be time to reconsider this discursive and conceptual practice.

As I point out in a 2013 article, nondisabled white women are the most advantaged, or, to put it the other way, the least disadvantaged of any underrepresented group in philosophy. In Canada at present, women make up about 35% of full-time philosophy faculty. Almost all these women faculty are nondisabled (and white). Since disabled women in Canada make up about 20% of the overall population of women and less than 1% of faculty in Canadian philosophy departments, it seems plausible to assert that nondisabled women (not only nondisabled men) are in fact overrepresented in philosophy departments in Canada.

The underrepresentation of disabled philosophers in the United States is grave. In Canada, the situation is even more dire. In the past fifteen years, the low percentage of disabled philosophers employed in Canadian philosophy departments has remained relatively constant.

In the late 1980s, nondisabled, white feminist philosophers within the Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA) pressed the leadership of the organization to develop strategies to remedy the pronounced gender inequality in Canadian philosophy departments at the time. Almost immediately, the CPA Equity Committee was formed in 1990 to address this issue. Indeed, the CPA Equity Committee’s initiatives in this regard have been very successful: many nondisabled white women philosophers, especially feminist philosophers, have a noticeable presence in Canadian philosophy.

Nevertheless, the situation for other underrepresented groups, including other groups of women, has remained relatively unchanged since the CPA Equity Committee was formed. Although the Committee is now mandated to consider the situation of various underrepresented groups in Canadian philosophy, the Committee‘s legacy remains relatively the same: almost all the philosophers hired in Canadian philosophy departments are nondisabled (white) women and men.

With a few exceptions, nondisabled feminist philosophers in Canada seem to be largely unconcerned about the dearth of disabled faculty in their departments and in Canadian philosophy more generally. At present, in fact, there is not a single disabled philosopher of disability employed full-time in a philosophy department in Canada. Given the centrality of bioethics to the curricula and infrastructure of some of the larger Canadian philosophy departments, the current state of affairs—the prevalence of a medicalized and individualized conception of disability virtually precludes critical philosophical work on disability—shields these departments from threats to their funding sources, as well as sustains their institutional and disciplinary identities as purveyors of cutting-edge scientific, bioethical, and biomedical philosophical research and knowledge.