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 Damion Kareem Scott Redux

 

For this forty-fifth installment of the series, I have reposted the fascinating interview that I conducted with Damion Kareem Scott in December 2015. I know that readers and listeners of the series will be delighted to revisit this interview with Damion. The original post of the interview and comments to it are here.

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

____________________________________________

 

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

My guest today is Damion Kareem Scott. Damion is an adjunct professor in Philosophy and Africana Studies at the City University of New York, a M.A. student in African American Studies at Columbia University, and a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at Stony Brook University. Damion is passionate about music and dance, though he doesn’t dance as much as he once did. Damion enjoys traveling and looks for ways to do so on the cheap. He also enjoys interacting with non-human animals, listening to music, and watching films and loves table tennis.

  

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Damion! You have lived in various parts of the world and you speak multiple languages. So, why don’t we start this interview with your personal history? Please tell us about your background and what it is that brought you to Africana Studies and philosophy.

Sure. I was born in the Bronx, New York City, in the early 1970s. Both of my birth parents are Jamaican nationals who became naturalized U.S. citizens. My early years were characterized by a certain amount of trauma, deprivation, and violence, about which I won’t go into detail. In the mid-1970s, after my parents split up, my father moved back to Jamaica and took me with him. At that time, political violence and gang-related homicides were endemic in Jamaica. My family returned to the U.S. in the early 1980s, first migrating to Chapel Hill and, subsequently, to Dallas. I spent my Christmases and summers in Brooklyn and Miami. My exposure to a lot of difference conditioned some of my values.

These various geographies are crucially different in a number of ways. For instance, the American South was, and continues to be, a region rife with explicit and overt Anti-Black/White Supremacist racism. Dallas lacks population density. Due to these sharp differences of culture and demographics, my family and I experienced direct and targeted racial animosity and violence. This direct and overt racism is, of course, fully compatible with the “institutional” and “structural” manifestations of anti-Black, anti-minority racism in the northern U.S. that have become all-too-familiar aspects of much of contemporary North American culture; that is, one form of this racism reinforces the other form.

I became conscious of America’s racist/racialist obsessions as I started to come into my own as a person. In order to develop my self-identity, I had to deal with instances of violence. I was forced to learn how to defend myself and my sisters, both mentally and physically. That I had to think through, and against, issues of violence at a young age led me to develop a sharper, quicker, and more creative perspective, namely, a philosophical perspective. I would come home and ask how I should respond when some white kid called me a “nigger,” or a “Yankee” or a “foreigner with a funny accent.” I learned how to deal with things in a non-violent way. I fought physically only after all rational (albeit youthful) attempts at persuasion had failed.

Sadly, tragically, there were guns. As a teenager, I witnessed America’s culture of guns all around me, including the phenomenon of young people who came to glorify firearms through family traditions handed down to them, traditions that were anathema to my own familial and cultural values. Despite my loving, caring parents and siblings who had joined the ranks of the “diverse” suburban American middle-class, both nonracial and racially-charged instances of crime and violence happened all around us, as well as to us. I have repeatedly been the target of racial profiling by the police. On a number of occasions, police officers have trained their guns on me. Because of these combined circumstances, I started to think broadly about philosophical notions of personal identity and political solidarity, as well as about issues of race, ethnicity, and inclusive humanity. Little did I know that this thinking would develop into committed projects in academic philosophy and Africana Studies.

As I got older, I began to stand out in school academically. I went to a public high school, although it was a new “magnet” school staffed with caring and well-intentioned teachers. Eventually, I became a National Achievement/National Merit Scholar, winning several academic accolades. I matriculated at New York University in the early/mid-1990s, using a college scholarship (and some student loans!) as the ticket back to my my wider family here in New York. I intended to study physics, musical journalism, or dramatic writing; but I took a philosophy class in my first year and got hooked. I had read a few classics of African-American political and liberational thought in high school—The Prince, Soul on Ice, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X—but not really any other kind of philosophy. I enrolled in an Introduction to Ancient Civilization general studies class that had a large component on Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius gave me a lot to think about, a lot to which I could relate. Although I declared as a dramatic writing and philosophy major, I dropped the dramatic writing double major as a junior and became a physics minor and philosophy major. I had become enthralled with analytical metaphysics at the juncture of philosophy of science.

As an undergraduate, I began my continuing engagement with a certain type of “Continental” philosophy, that is, logical reconstructive type of approaches to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and existential phenomenology, as well as Deleuze, Derrida, and post-structuralist interventions in language and ontology. Professor John Richardson at NYU helped me to formulate my thoughts coherently through engagement with historical figures in post-Kantian Continental Philosophy—especially Nietzsche and Heidegger—in relation to my prior, nascent phenomenology and conceptualizations of difference and deviance. Richardson really encouraged and motivated me to pursue an advanced degree in philosophy. Professors Ed Stein, Paul Boghossian, Marya Schechtman, Sigrun Svavarsdottir, Mary Mothersill, and Galen Strawson also made big impressions on me as an undergraduate. Thomas Nagel was a big influence on the shape of my developing philosophical ideas. He was an incredible teacher. From Nagel’s work and classes, I acquired a broad sense of analytical philosophy. His work seemed more far-ranging than most of the analytic philosophy that I had encountered, instilling in me a sense of how very unorthodox and minority positions could be clearly, yet rigorously, articulated, especially in the philosophy of mind.

My fortunate selection for, and attendance at, two Rutgers Summer Institutes for Underrepresented Groups in Philosophy during the 1990s—first as a student mentee and subsequently as a graduate student mentor—also greatly influenced my philosophical development. The institutes enabled me to learn about the specifically academic aspects of the burgeoning field of Africana Philosophy that I now love. I had returned to academia after roughly a decade away from it because of a shift in my lifestyle due to both the onset of degenerative joint disease and economic hardship. Since my return, I have had the pleasure to work with such fine scholars as Professors Ann O’Byrne, Megan Craig, Ed Casey, Peter Carevetta, Marcellus Blount, Stephen Gregory, Harvey Cormier, and Robert-Gooding Williams.

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.]

 

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.

Ten Questions About What It Would Be Like

 

1. What would it be like if nondisabled philosophers didn’t determine the questions that get asked about disability and how they will be answered, didn’t determine whose answers will count and why?
2. What would it be like if nondisabled feminist philosophers genuinely paid attention to what disabled feminist philosophers say about ableism rather than reconfigure our assertions in order to retain positions of privilege and dominance over us?
3. What would it be like if the pervasive, complex, and complicated apparatuses of disability and ableism were not reduced to the notions of “accessibility” and “accommodation” for the convenience and comfort that policy offers?
4. What would it be like if nondisabled philosophers no longer appealed to elaborate ethical principles in order to justify their casual mistreatment of us?
5. What would it be like if nondisabled philosophers acknowledged that their award-winning scholarship on (say) the Gettier problem, gender bias in science, propositional knowledge, or vagueness does not, in and of itself, make them experts on disability?
6. What would it be like if feminist philosophers were to acknowledge that their almost exclusive focus on sexual harassment has to some extent been self-serving, enabling them to conceal their own ableist and racist offences?
7. What would it be like if nondisabled feminist philosophers stopped using gender, race, and sexuality as a way to shut down discussions of ableism and preclude from consideration how mutually constitutive and reinforcing apparatuses of force relations shape those reactionary discursive practices themselves?
8. What would it be like if nondisabled feminist philosophers took it upon themselves to challenge, without coaxing, the ableism of philosophy, in particular, and of academia and society, more generally?
9. What would it be like if a nondisabled philosopher who consulted me about the exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession actually took on board what I said rather than regard it as “beyond the scope of the current project”?
10. What would it be like if every concession to justice didn’t come with some subtle reminder that it is indeed a concession?

 

posted by Shelley

Reading about Class, Reading for Change, Reading with Eribon

 

In Bodies & Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization, Ladelle McWhorter describes at length how reading Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, changed her, changed her world, changed the configuration of the world for her. As McWhorter puts it at one place in Bodies & Pleasures,

 

Reading Foucault's text was not a cognitive act so much as it was a re-cognitive act. The text changed the way I saw the world, but it changed the way I saw first of all. It showed me precisely what I saw. No book had done that for me, or to me, before. Whether Michel Foucault, the man who sat down one day and wrote those words, was queer or not, the voice I heard was queer. It bespoke an angle of vision that I recognized, an angle of vision more or less forced on me because of the social position I as a particular kind of sexual subjectivity was forced to occupy, an angle of vision I had thought could never come to speech.

 

When I first read the introduction to Foucault's series on the history of sexuality and his equally astonishing Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, I too was changed, my world changed, its configuration changed, who I thought I was in it changed. Among other things, and perhaps most significantly, the books enabled me to begin to recognize the political, economic, social, and institutional character of normalization, the ingenuity of its disguises, and its invaluable service to what I have since come to understand as a particular apparatus of power, namely, disability. McWhorter's Bodies & Pleasures and Racism and Sexual Oppression: A Genealogy amplified these constitutive and transformative reading effects, as well as motivated others.

Now, another book has unexpectedly changed me, that is, I once again feel that I have been transformed by a text, my world reconfigured, this time by reading Didier Eribon's remarkable autobiography Returning to Reims. The book has changed (among other things) the way that I understand what "class" is, its complicated relations to and with sexuality and race, changed the way that I understand myself as an intellectual with a working-class background, and enabled me to more acutely understand the fundamental relation between academia and class. Passionate, poignant, and beautifully written, Returning to Reims is a love letter to working-class people, a testament to our struggles, and a witness to our subordinated existence. (That Eribon is the author of a groundbreaking biography on Foucault, by far my favourite biography on Foucault, makes the erstwhile biographer's autobiography all the more compelling to me.)

Virtually every page of Returning to Reims conveys at least one thought-provoking insight; hence, selecting a passage to excerpt in this brief post was not easy to do. Perhaps in the coming weeks, I will write a longer review of the book for the blog. For today, however, I want to share with you one of the book's calls to resistance. On pages 154 to 155, Eribon, concluding a section of the book in which he considers why his parents and others on the left in France have been drawn to the forces of the right, remarks:

 

So we find ourselves back at the question of who has the right to speak, who takes part—and how—in decision-making processes, which is to say not just in the elaboration of solutions, but also in the collective definition of the questions that it is legitimate and important to take up. When the left shows itself to be incapable of serving as a space in which new forms of questioning can be elaborated and tested, when it ceases to serve as a locus in which people can invest their dreams and energy, they will be drawn to and welcomed by the right and the extreme right.

Here, then, is the task that social movements and critical intellectuals must take up: the elaboration of theoretical frameworks and of political modes of perceiving reality that enable not an erasure—that would be an impossible task—but as great a neutralization as possible of the negative passions that are at work within the social body, especially within the popular classes. Other perspectives must be offered and a different future sketched out on behalf of what might then deservedly once again be called the left.

 

posted by Shelley

CFP: Connecting the Struggles (Canisius College, Buffalo, Sept. 21-23, 2018; deadline: Aug. 30, 2018)

 

Connecting the Struggles: 

Call for Presentations for the Prison Abolition

Western New York Conference

 

We invite you to join us for the first-ever Prison Abolition Western New York (PAWNY) Conference. The conference will be a regional gathering of people working on issues related to prison abolition and mass incarceration. Our theme is “Connecting the Struggles.” As our theme suggests, the conference will be an opportunity for individuals and organizations to meet up and develop ideas and strategies to build a world beyond prisons.

The conference will bring together activists, organizers, academics, and members of the public who are working on issues related to prison abolition to discuss how we may connect our struggles and develop strategy to create a world beyond prisons. We also hope to highlight the voices of those who are at the frontlines of the struggle against the many facets of the carceral states in which we live and die today, for our lives are built upon the resistance of our ancestors and are haunted by the unchanging root sources of colonial power: the militarized occupation of stolen lands and the racialized labor that was forced to work them. Contributions may take the form of workshops, presentation, or artworks and performances.

We strongly encourage contributions from artists, particularly those currently or formerly imprisoned and those whose lives have been affected by the carceral state, and artwork that expresses experiences of and interactions with the penal system and its effects. We encourage artists to use any medium of their choosing - visual arts, applied design, music, performance, poetry or any form of writing, and more. There will be a gallery show and performance space is available for theater, dance, or other kinds of performance.

 

Possible topics for presentation include:

Abolition vs. Reform
The School-to-Prison Pipeline
ICE and Immigration
Jails and Bail
Disability and Mental Health
Gender and Sexuality
The Prison-Industrial Complex
Solitary Confinement
Parole
Political Prisoners
Restorative and Transformative Justice
Indigenous Peoples and Incarceration
Abolition Lawyering
Policing
Incarceration and Intersectionality

 

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

 

How Diverse is Your Paper or Curriculum? 

Take the Test and Find Out!

 

 

Guest Post

 

by 

Axel Arturo Barceló

Instructions:

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

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

 

Assessment of your score:

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain 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.

Emancipation and Debt (May 27, 2018)

 

 

Emancipation and Debt

 

by 

 

Isabell Lorey

 

Presented in the session "Power and Domination,"

Emancipation Conference,

Technical University Berlin, May 27, 2018  

 

1. In the modern age, emancipation means the liberation from relations of power and domination and hence from dependencies. The task is to become a free subject independent from others that is capable of governing itself. This bourgeois idea of emancipation is—not only Foucault made this clear with his theory of governmentality—the basis of a masculinist form of liberal-capitalistic and democratic governing since the 18^th century. The free subject governs itself in a way that simultaneously makes it governable in the frame of biopolitical governmentality. This free subject is male, owns property and is white. Emancipation means in this instance to become a subject within the scope of this norm.

Proceeding from movements and struggles of the 1960s and 70s, Foucault explicates in his text “The subject and power” that what we have to liberate ourselves from is exactly this form of emancipation. A current practice of liberation needs “a critical analysis of our world,”[i] a critical analysis of the present, according to Foucault. As is known, he is not concerned with emancipation from all power relations–—as if this were possible. A critical analysis of the present means to understand, in which relations of power and domination, who can become a subject, who may not, and how we are bound, in both cases, to an allegedly own original “identity,” which either ties us together in groups and discriminates us and/or individualizes and separates us, and makes us (self-)governable. An emancipation from such identity politics does not lie “at a future date,” not in the promise of “liberations, revolutions, end of class struggle”[ii]. Instead, we need “to refuse what we are” and what we are now forced to be, in the present. According to Foucault, we have “to liberate us both from the state and the type of individualization which is linked to the state,”[iii] and search for new forms of subjectivation.

2. In the etymology of the Latin word emancipatio, emancipation cannot be separated from patriarchal domination of ownership. Mancipatio means­­­—by the laying on of the hand (manus)—to take a thing in one’s possession. In Roman antiquity, those who did not have any, or no entire, law of a person were also treated as thing—first and foremost slaves. E-mancipatio then meant the liberation from the domination of ownership. In the strict sense of the law, emancipatio means various things: to release the son from patriarchal power into independence, to release the daughter into the hands of another man or to liberate a slave from the ownership of his master. The pater familias hands over his former property. The dominating subject is the one who releases and liberates.

3. In 1968, the mythical year of the student movement, and at the end of the decade of independence of most African states from colonial domination, in this year of 1968, Stokely Carmichael made clear at the likewise legendary London “Dialectic of Liberation Congress” that, even in the second half of the 20^th century, a white practice of domination is often hidden within emancipation. Carmichael, who later became a central figure of the Black Panthers, was chairman of one of the most important Civil Rights Movements in 1968, the SNCC, and author of the book “Black Power.”[iv] In London he said: „I’m amazed when I pick up the paper and read that ‘England today decided to give independence to the West Indies.’ Who the hell is England to give me my independence? All they can do is stop oppressing me, get off my back. [...] So that you cannot grant anybody independence, they just take it. And that is what white America is going to learn. They cannot give us anything. No white liberal can give me anything. The only thing a white liberal can do for me is to help civilize other whites, because they need to be civilized.“[v]

Independence is not a gift, not a mercy of the (white) West. Those who enslave cannot bestow independence. But they can stop to oppress, to dominate and to enslave, and can contribute to “civilizing” other white people. The ruling must emancipate themselves. They have to reject to become a superior subject and therewith becoming an autonomous and sovereign subject. 

4. Emancipation is a promise for a future liberation. Instead of being a practice in the here and now, a matter of breaches in the linear construction of time, it belongs to the time of the victors, the time of the ruling, the time of domination over ecology, over the “surround”[vi]. Progress and growth are grounded in increasing inequalities and economies of superiority and in the wealth of a few. “Progress for whom?”[vii], asks Carmichael in 1968. „We will have to tell you when progress is being made. You cannot tell us when progress is being made, because progress for us means getting you off our backs [...].“[viii]

5. Saidiya Hartman has reminded us that the freedom given from whites counted as a kind of present to the enslaved, as a gift for which they had to prove themselves thankful and worthy, and which put them in debt and made them guilty. This gift of debt binds the “freed persons” to the past with an inverse responsibility and lends duration to the debt up to the present day: for in the logic of debt only the indebted individual is responsible for the doings of the past.[ix] This displacement of responsibility onto the individualized debt of the freed erases history, the history of slavery. Enduring black debt serves the linear historiography of the white victors.[x] Even long after the end of slavery the debt relation inscribes itself onto an enduring, indebted servitude-at-work in the context of freedom, individualization, and self responsibility, through which, in the logic of debt, black emancipation remains bound in an asymmetric relation to the white “benefactors,” Hartman argues in the chapter “The Debt of Emancipation” in Scenes of Subjection.