Discrimination and Disadvantage

Ring In The New Year With BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY!

 

I would like to wish all the wonderful readers and listeners of the Discrimination and Disadvantage blog a Very Happy New Year!

I sincerely hope that the New Year will provide all of you with adequate food, shelter, clothing, love, and friendship, abundant philosophical mentoring and inspiration, as well as renewed determination for resistance and rebellion.

I would also like to thank Thomas Nadelhoffer and Kevin Timpe who, in January 2015, invited me to contribute to Discrimination and Disadvantage, a blog that they planned to initiate.

My experience as a contributor to and coordinator of Discrimination and Disadvantage has been immensely rewarding personally, offering an immediate public outlet for my philosophical views on disability and other apparatuses, motivating my commentary on the profession, and enabling me to remain connected to the philosophical community throughout precarious times.

I believe, furthermore, that my writing at Discrimination and Disadvantage has provided an important professional service, exploring previously unexamined lines of inquiry in philosophy, shining a spotlight on disabled and other marginalized philosophers, and drawing attention to structural inequalities within philosophy that have been obscured and neglected.

Now, on the eve of 2019, I am thrilled to announce that in early January Melinda Hall and I will launch an exciting new blog called BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

 

BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY will aim to:

• provide up-to-date information and cutting-edge critical analysis of biopolitical asymmetries and other mechanisms and effects of power in philosophy and beyond, especially with respect to (the apparatus of) disability and racism against the abnormal;
• showcase the insights of members of underrepresented constituencies in philosophy and the work of marginalized areas of specialization in the discipline;
• advertise CFPs and other notices about publications, conferences, workshops, institutes, and other projects pertinent to underrepresented philosophers and subordinated areas of philosophical inquiry;
• offer a venue for disabled and other underrepresented and marginalized philosophers to gain the experience and skills required to both engage in philosophical discussion and contribute to the profession of philosophy more generally.

 

Beginning in January, BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY will be the new home of Dialogues on Disability, the acclaimed series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers. I have a fabulous line-up of interviewees for the months ahead.

Melinda and I hope that you will join us at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY to forge an innovative path of philosophical critique, resistance, and insurrection.

 

Until then, Happy New Year!  

Shelley Tremain

 

 

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Gen Eickers

 

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

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

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

 

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

Thank you for having me, Shelley!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

Reviewing the Reviewer

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

posted by Shelley

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

 

How Diverse is Your Paper or Curriculum? 

Take the Test and Find Out!

 

 

Guest Post

 

by 

Axel Arturo Barceló

Instructions:

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

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

 

Assessment of your score:

A Tribute to Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 - June 25, 1984)

 

Michel Foucault died of AIDS thirty-four years ago today. With his body of work, Foucault left us bountiful gifts, most of which gifts have to date been largely ignored, dismissed, misunderstood, and ridiculed by mainstream philosophers and even some feminist philosophers.

Across a range of other academic disciplines and a variety of activist struggles, nevertheless, the richness and prescience of the work that Foucault did both within the academy and beyond it have long been recognized and put in the service of expanded ideas about social justice, increased representation of marginalized and vilified people, the insurrection of subjugated knowledges, and the validation and proliferation of diverse forms of human existence.

Perhaps the unfortunate way that many philosophers have hitherto regarded Foucault’s work is changing or will soon change. I would like to think that Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability and all my other writings that draw on Foucault’s claims will play a role in improving the way that philosophers understand his fascinating work.

Foucault’s final words in his lecture of March 28, 1984, the final lecture of the last course that he gave at the Collѐge de France, were themselves poignant, moving, generous, and prophetic:

 

There you are, listen, I had things to say to you about the general framework of these analyses. But, well, it is too late. So, thank you.

 

Thank you, Michel Foucault. We are indebted to you.

 

[Description of black and white photo below: in a darkened space, Foucault is leaning over a table on which a beaker of clear liquid sits. Light shines on the right side of his face and upper body. He is looking down at something, perhaps a piece of his writing, with concentration. His right hand is outstretched as if beholding wonder.]

 

posted by Shelley

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Catherine Clune-Taylor

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the thirty-ninth 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 Catherine Clune-Taylor. Catherine (Cato) is a postdoctoral research associate in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University, who holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Alberta and a B.A. of Medical Science in Immunology and Microbiology from Western University. Catherine’s doctoral project was a critical analysis of the science, ethics, and biopolitics underwriting medical efforts that aim to secure a cisgender future for a minor, the medical management of intersex conditions in children, and the treatment with so-called conversion therapies of trans kids. Cato is currently the Vice-President of CSWIP.

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Catherine! You have various areas of expertise because you have a varied educational background. You began your academic career in the medical sciences. What motivated you to continue your education in philosophy? And how have your backgrounds in both medical science and philosophy complemented and complicated each other?

Hi Shelley! Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s an honour to be included in this important series. As you know, I’ve been a fan of your work for quite some time.

I do have a pretty varied and, in some ways, atypical background for a philosopher. I was born in Toronto, Canada, to a white Canadian mother of Irish Catholic and French-Canadian descent and a Bahamian immigrant father. I aspired to become a doctor from a pretty young age—maybe four or five—it’s what I remember always wanting to do. My parents really supported and positively reinforced that plan.

For the child of an immigrant from a working-class/lower-middle class family, that was a very legible pathway towards class mobility. I took all the maths and sciences in high school and got a full-time summer job while I was still in high school doing administrative work in a busy family medical practice in Toronto. I was fifteen with my eye towards my eventual medical school applications, filing test results, making referrals, booking appointments, triaging patients over the phone. Things like that. I even went back to Toronto to work at the practice for the first couple of summers that I was an undergrad at Western.

I started my first undergraduate degree at Western, with the plan of pursuing my M.D. as soon as I was done or doing a M.Sc. in microbiology before going on to medical school. I start to stumble—and I mean, really stumble—off this path when I took Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality with Helen Fielding as an elective during the second year of my B.M.Sc. I took the course because it fit into my lab schedule and satisfied my essay requirement for that term. It also sounded personally interesting. I was already out as queer, active in LGBTQ organizing on campus, and identified as a feminist, albeit a rather naïve one. The very first topic that we looked at in the course was the medical management of intersex conditions, reading work by Anne Fausto-Sterling, Suzanne Kessler, Robert Crouch, and Michel Foucault. The reading had a huge impact on me.

Like the rest of my classmates, I was horrified by the heteronormativity of the treatment model; by the lack of evidence supporting it; by the blatantly unethical performance of medically unnecessary genital-normalizing surgeries on those unable to consent for the sake of “society;” by the fiction of naturally dimorphic sex; and by the legacy of physicians withholding information from and outright lying to patients and their surrogates, all of which the authors that we read detailed. I was also very taken by Foucault’s account of biopower as a form of knowledge/power over life itself, particularly in the medical context. As someone actively working to become a doctor, I just couldn’t shake the readings or their implications. It disrupted a lot of what I thought I understood about medicine: about its role in society, about the relationship between biomedical science and medical practice, and about the “objectivity” of science itself.

So, I continued to research intersex conditions and their management on my own after the class moved on, reading in both the sciences and the humanities, doing work on the topic where I could manage to work it in. For example, I did the major research project for my Biochemistry of Genetic Diseases class on the most common intersex condition, Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia.

I also began to take more philosophy courses—as many as I could, really. When I was advised that the conditions of my B.M.Sc. program wouldn't allow me to double major, I took a heavy course load, such that by the time I finished my degree in Microbiology and Immunology, I had enough philosophy credits to complete my B.A. in the area in only one more year, which I did. The more engaged with philosophy that I became, the more I researched intersex conditions and their management.

The more Foucault that I read, the more alienated that I became from my dream of going to medical school. I had begun to reinterpret and reframe some of my past experiences with medicine in terms of my own medicalization as a patient and the medicalization of my parents, both of whom were disabled. Most importantly, I had begun to reflect on the patients with intersex conditions who had come through the practice in which I worked and the way in which they and their families had been managed.

Many of my favourite feminist philosophy professors at Western encouraged me to consider graduate school in philosophy so that I might continue to pursue my research and concerns about intersex conditions. In all honesty, I took their advice and enrolled in the M.A. program in philosophy at Western not because I was sold in any way on the idea of professional philosophy as a career, nor because I felt like I had found my “true calling.” Doing the M.A. simply seemed like a productive way to spend a year while I figured out what to do “for real”.

Completing my M.A., however, only left me feeling further adrift; the courses that I took and the research that I did only served to put me even further off a future in medicine. Moreover, as the child of working-class parents, neither of whom had advanced beyond secondary school and one of whom had never completed elementary school, it wasn’t anywhere on my radar to be an academic, let alone a philosopher.

At twenty-five, with three degrees and unsure of what to do next, I decided to take a year off and was lucky enough to be offered two year-long courses to teach at Western—which I enjoyed far more than I expected. During this time, Tracy Isaacs, Carolyn McLeod, Helen Fielding, and in particular Samantha Brennan, encouraged me to apply to do a Ph.D. at the University of Alberta where I could work on intersex with Cressida Heyes—who, at the time, was the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality.

I had absolutely no idea at the time how lucky I was to be guided towards working with Cressida. I could go on at length about the ways that she supported and guided me, intellectually and personally, during my Ph.D, which was, admittedly, very difficult. I had very little funding and had to work a good deal to keep myself afloat during my doctorate. I was also the first Black woman to go through the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Alberta, which was about as homogeneously white, male, and hostile to feminists as a philosophy department can be. There were multiple times when I almost dropped out. I would have dropped out if I hadn’t had Cressida’s support. I am a far better philosopher than I ever imagined that I could be because of Cressida and her guidance.

In October 2015, I defended my dissertation, for which Judith Butler was the external examiner, was awarded my degree in June 2016, and began my three-year position as a postdoctoral research associate in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies on July 1, 2016.

 

[Description of coloured photo below: Catherine, a Black woman with very short hair, is sitting in a car, looking slightly sideways into the camera, and faintly smiling. She is wearing fabulous glasses with cat’s-eyes shaped frames. Light is pouring in from a window behind her.]

 

I think of my backgrounds as deeply complementary. Indeed, I could not do the kind of thoroughly interdisciplinary, critical research that I do without the kinds of formal training that I’ve had. There are certain arguments and conclusions that I make in my research that I could not have come to without the experiences that I’ve had working in medicine, the work I did in different research labs, or the training that I’ve received in both science and philosophy.

That said, I think that we do not acknowledge the additional training and workload that rigorous interdisciplinary scholars often must take on—in those rare academic contexts where interdisciplinarity is actively encouraged beyond mere lip service. I do think that there are ways in which my backgrounds and the kind of research that I do puts me in a somewhat complicated position disciplinarily.

Philosophy is a discipline that, to its detriment, loves to police its boundaries. The deeply interdisciplinary nature of my work detracts from my legibility as a philosopher. I also increasingly find that various aspects of my background lead others to make certain assumptions about my work or the positions that I must take. For example, I’ve encountered the assumptions, more than once, that because I am influenced by Foucault in my approach, or deny the “objectivity” of science, that I must be anti-science and anti-medicine, or somehow don’t understand science or am unfamiliar with its practices—none of which assumptions is true.

What is Trans History?

 

An article in Perspectives on History, the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association poses that question and responds with a brief genealogy of scholarship on trans history and activism in "What Is Trans History? From Activist and Academic Roots, A Field Takes Shape." Here is an excerpt from the article by Kritika Agarwal:

 

Today, transgender studies and transgender history are legible fields of academic study: there are two volumes of The Transgender Studies Reader, a journal (TSQ: Trans Studies Quarterly), a number of new or forthcoming books from major university presses, and a spate of recent job ads seeking people with research and teaching interests in trans studies or trans history.

Unfortunately, the advances in academia paralleling the increased visibility of trans people in the public sphere have been accompanied by political efforts to regulate the lives of trans people. This includes the ability to access public spaces and basic necessities such as healthcare and economic security. More than a dozen states considered “bathroom bills” in 2017, and violence against trans people, especially trans women of color, continues to rise, according to the Human Rights Campaign and the Trans People of Color Coalition. With so much at stake and an audience that’s finally paying attention, trans history is a field filled with a sense of urgency and potential.

Prior to the emergence of trans history in the academy, much of the writing on the lived experiences of trans people was written either by medical professionals and psychologists, or by trans people themselves as autobiographies. Many trans people encountered themselves as historical subjects through such popular works as Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (1996)—“I couldn’t find myself in history,” Feinberg wrote. “No one like me seemed to have ever existed.”

In terms of scholarship, most academics cite Yale historian Joanne Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2002) as foundational. “When that book came out, it went a long way toward creating a field,” says Elizabeth Reis (Macaulay Honors Coll., CUNY), author of Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex (2009). It was important, says Reis, “to have a history written where then other historians could start looking up the footnotes and seeing where to even go to find material.” In another seminal moment, Stryker co-edited The Transgender Studies Reader (2006, with a second volume in 2013) and soon published Transgender History, an accessible book for the general reader on the history of transgender people in the United States.

 

Read or listen to Agarwal's article here.

 

posted by Shelley

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

 

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

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

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

I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. Audrey acknowledges that she lives and works on the traditional territory of the WSÁNEĆ, Lkwungen, and Esquimalt peoples. Audrey, Devonya, and I offer this anniversary installment of the Dialogues on Disability series with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

philoSOPHIA 2018 Program

March 22-24, 2018

University of Richmond

 

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

Room Designations:

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

 

Thursday, March 22  

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

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

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

 

Friday, March 23

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

 

Fri. 9:15 – 10:15

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

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

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

 

Fri 10:30-12:45

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Commentator: Kelsey Borrowman, Villanova University

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

Response: Jennifer Scuro, The College of New Rochelle

 

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

 

Fri. 1:00 LUNCH

 

Fri. 2:15 – 4:30

LL: Panel: Genes, Parents, and Pregnant Women 

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

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

 

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

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

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

“Feminist Heterotopias,” Margaret McLaren, Rollins College

 

CM: Panel: Disrupting Colonizing Discourses 

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

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

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

 

Fri. 4:45 – 6:30     

LL: Keynote Plenary. Moderated by Ladelle McWhorter

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

 

Fri. 6:30 DINNER

 

Saturday, March 24

Room Designations:

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

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

 

Sat. 9:00 – 10:30

LL: Panel: Breath, Race, and the Human 

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

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

 

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

 

CM: Panel: Feminist Biologics of Becoming through Raymond Ruyer

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

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

 

Sat. 10:45 – 12:30

LL: Panel: Grappling with Materialisms 

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

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

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

 

CL: Panel: Bodies of Knowledge 

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

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

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

 

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

Commentator: Devonya Havis, Canisius College

Commentator: Lauren Guilmette, Florida Atlantic University

Response: Shelley Tremain, Independent scholar

 

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