Imagine Sisyphus Happy

As we announced April 23, Feminist Philosophers is shutting down. This is one of a series of posts by FP bloggers looking back on the blog and bidding it farewell.

The internet is exhausting. Academia is exhausting. Politics are exhausting. It’s a bit of a miracle—and a testament to the dedication my co-bloggers—that Feminist Philosophers had such a long run, given its subject matter and role in the discipline. It is hard to have productive conversations on the internet about anything, let alone contentious matters of deep social import. And trying to effect change in academia about things as simple as copier use, or keeping a departmental fridge clean, can leave one feeling like Sisyphus—so, when I think about how my predecessors here at Feminist Philosophers successfully shifted the status quo of the entire discipline, I am nothing less than awed with their accomplishments. I’m grateful for everything they’ve done, and it would be unfair to expect more of them. I am, though, one of those who remains optimistic about the potential for online discourse to be a real force for good in the world. I want to use my last post here at Feminist Philosophers to say something about why I think engaging in tough conversations online is still worthwhile, despite its seeming futility.

In the 1960’s, Stanley Milgram, conducted a series of well-known experiments at Yale regarding obedience to authority. If you aren’t familiar with the details, participants thought they had been randomly selected to play the role of “Teacher” in an experiment on memory. Those who were assigned the role of “Learner” were actually part of the research team, though the “Teachers” didn’t know it. The basic experimental set up was this: The Learner was supposed to learn list of words, and then recall it. If they made a mistake when reciting it, the Teacher was supposed to administer a shock to the Learner. Learners weren’t actually given shocks, but the Teachers didn’t know that either (and they were given a low-level shock themselves at the beginning, to have a sense of what it would feel like). They were told the voltage of the shocks would go up with each mistake, until it reached 450 volts. In one version of the experiment, where the Learners were hidden by a wall, once the shocks reached a certain point, they would vocalize discomfort, ask to be released, and when they weren’t, if the Teacher kept going, they’d stop responding, as if they were unconscious. If the Teacher objected, the experimenter would ask them to continue – until the Teacher objected five times, at which point the experiment would end. Roughly 2/3rds of participants continued all the way through, administering the highest voltage. In a variant condition, where Teachers and Learners were in the same room, full compliance dropped to 40%. In a condition where the Teacher needed to touch the Learner to administer the shock, compliance dropped to 30%. Proximity to others—as basic as merely being in the same room—can enable resistance, and consideration, when callous deference to the status quo would otherwise be the norm. Engaging in discourse with each other online is a way of creating cognitive and imaginative proximity when physical proximity isn’t possible.

Of course, whether online discourse is successful will depend on whether we actually talk to each other rather than past each other; and obviously, that’s actually really hard. It’s hard for a lot of reasons. For one, in matters of moral or political dispute, we all tend to think we’re right and the other guy’s a jerk or troll. Elif Batuman illustrates a nearby phenomenon poignantly in The Idiot:

I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo: a Disney movie about a puny, weird-looking circus elephant that everyone made fun of. As the story unfolded, I realized to my amazement that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, the ones who despised and tormented the weak and the ugly, were rooting against Dumbo’s tormentors. Over and over they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to the bullies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.

That we all tend to think we’re the good guy can make genuine discourse about controversial matters especially challenging.

Talking to each other can be hard for another reason though. Who we take to be authoritative, credible, or even legible, is not determined in a vacuum. Our beliefs are deeply interconnected. Our political views are informed by our social networks. What information we recognize as interesting, relevant, or trustworthy is shaped by our social relationships. When our friends communicate, we understand them. When we interact online with people who are very different from us, have different background evidence, different relationships, different interests, different experiences—it can feel as if we’re speaking different languages.

It’s not impossible though.

I know minds can be changed because my own has been, many times. The first feminist philosophy course I took was an independent study. I suspected feminist epistemology was nonsense, and set out, initially, with the aim of arguing as much. That research led me to this blog. I became a regular reader, then a commenter, and in graduate school, a contributor. (If you want to read a genuinely fascinating story—Megan Phelps-Roper, previously of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church—went through a radical conversion via Twitter.)

I’m not naïve. I know engaging online can take a personal toll. We all have limited time, limited energy, and too much to do. There were times during my run as a blogger here where’d I’d get hateful messages posted about me on other sites, or sent to me directly—ranging from ordinary personal insults, to violent threats. Professional philosophers would regularly tell me that, as a graduate student, it was unwise to say much of anything online. If I had a dollar for every time someone said ‘keep your head down, wait till you have tenure,’ I’d have better odds at being rich than the average graduate student has at actually landing a tenure-track job in the first place. But if we share these burdens—if we take turns engaging, if we’re generous with one another, if we intervene when we witness bad behavior—together, we can accomplish enormous things.

Imagine Sisyphus happy, not because the world is absurd, but because erosion–tedious, slow, challenging–ultimately moves mountains.

Critical Self-Reflection and Opening Up Philosophy

As we announced April 23, Feminist Philosophers is shutting down. This is one of a series of posts by FP bloggers looking back on the blog and bidding it farewell.

I started blogging here in the summer of 2012, four years into my Ph.D. program. When I began that program in the fall of 2008, I didn’t know much of anything about feminist philosophy, and I didn’t care to know anything about it. I thought gender was a shallow and inconsequential human category, so there was surely nothing interesting for philosophers to say about it. Furthermore, since it seemed like there weren’t many women in philosophy, I had a suspicion that any sub-field dominated by them (applied ethics, feminist philosophy) was probably not that good.

By the time this blog invited me to join, I had had some major shifts in my epistemic and ethical worldviews, and had switched from specializing in philosophy of physics to philosophy of psychology, with plans to write a dissertation on gender & race stereotypes and self-identity. I had discovered, in large part through blogs and connecting with philosophers over social media, that there was, in fact, a lot of interesting things for philosophers to say about gender (and other socially hierarchical categories.) I had also discovered that the demographics of the field were not such an obvious case of how the meritocratic chips had fallen.

Another half a decade later, I view social & feminist epistemology as my intellectual home base. One of my current interests is how phenomena like epistemic injustice and active ignorance may be playing out inside the philosophy profession, especially in terms of boundary policing and teaching practices. While there is so much work left to do, it is also striking to me what has changed since 2008. Many critiques of the profession that would have been laughed at (that I remember being laughed at about) are now taken up seriously in many places. You can even get published (in philosophy journals!) talking about them.

There is still so much work left to do, so much critical self-reflection the discipline needs to undertake. But there are people doing this work, opening up philosophy to new subfields, new methodologies, new conceptions of itself. I would like to highlight some of the work being done to help us let go of these unnecessarily rigid and hierarchical boundaries…though in some cases a more apt analogy may be that people are taking up sledgehammers to those walls and gates.

Opening Up the Canon

Although by 2014 (my 6th year in grad school) I had heard lots of stories of people leaving the profession, and already knew about criticisms of our eurocentric canon, the discussion of Eugene Park leaving stood out (Park’s Original Post). The way he framed it made it really sink in for me that there’s lots of collective bad faith and active ignorance regarding philosophy’s narrow and eurocentric canon. (The collective part is important–it’s a lot harder to maintain active ignorance if the rest of your peers and role models aren’t also succumbing to it.)

Bharath Vallabha’s commentary similarly emphasizes this point, that we should find it fishy that a discipline that claims to care about universal human truths doesn’t seem that motivated to actually investigate what life (and thought) is like for huge swaths of humanity. These posts fueled my own motivation for getting outside my philosophical comfort zone and exploring areas of philosophy I was/am ignorant about. Two resources I’ll point out are The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, which has short podcasts on the history of Islamic, Indian and Africana philosophy, along with more well-trodden areas. The second resource is The Deviant Philosopher, which has resources for incorporating marginalized areas of philosophy into your teaching, even if you’re not trained in these areas.

Breaking Up White Supremacy in Our Universities

One worry that some have when discussing initiatives such as The Deviant Philosopher is that if we ‘spoon feed’ reluctant white/privileged philosophers fragments of marginalized philosophical traditions (including disability studies, trans studies, etc.), they and their departments may take that as justification for not hiring marginalized philosophers with expertise in these areas. If they think they can teach a bit of Confucius here, the medical vs. social model of disability there, with maybe a sprinkling of Egyptian ethics or the metaphysics of gender somewhere in an elective, then they don’t need to ‘sacrifice’ a whole hire on someone who does Chinese/Africana/Disability/Trans philosophy. In this way, we could crack open the door for some non-standard inclusions in the canon, but maintain an overwhelmingly and disproportionately white university, in terms of tenured faculty and upper administration.

This means that, besides thinking about the canon, we must also continually think about bodies in the room. One philosopher who has continued this work is Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, who outlines some of the initiatives he’s organized in a post for Discrimination and Disadvantage. With a gadflyish knack for calling a spade a spade, he points out that there is clear interest among students, faculty, and the public to address questions such as “Why Isn’t my Professor Black?” and “Why Is My Curriculum White?” He says of a more recent project,

“It is my duty as a Black British Millennial to exhume the hidden histories of my own generation, in order that I may, through a better knowledge of myself and of how I belong, act as a bridge between the two generations either side of me. Indeed, this is the motivation underpinning my current participation in the Global Warwickshire Collective’s project, Windrush Strikes Back: Decolonising Global Warwickshire, which aims, within the Caribbean community in Britain, to train members of the generation that comes after us, in the tools of historical research that will enable them to recover and record the stories of the generations that came before us. And I think that’s quintessentially what I’ve come to realise my belonging is: it is the role I have to play in an ongoing multi-generational struggle.”

Ed Kazarian at New APPS wrote about Coleman’s experience, and pointed out the structural features by which marginalized junior faculty can be pushed out or set up to fail.

“It would be difficult to write a better recipe for blocking someone’s progress and setting them up to fail. To return to the dance metaphor above, it’s the second phase in a classic two-step: the institution is challenged, so it offers the person issuing the challenge a limited, poorly constructed, and unrealistic ‘opportunity’ to ‘shake things up’ and bring about real change, only to see them fail a year or two later.”

 

Queering Philosophy

A further aspect of opening up philosophy, one that Coleman and others are excelling at, is demonstrating the need to queer philosophy, and how to do that at a structural and institutional level. Annika Thiem argues in 2015 in a post at Philosopher’s Eye that,

“The goal then has to be not to establish queer theory as a recognized subfield in philosophy, but to elaborate how the questions and methods of queer thought can more generally inform and transform the practice of philosophy and its standards for knowledge production.”

Thiem argues that one strategy for accomplishing this is “to reject the rhetorical gesture that renders queerness as something that “is studied only out of personal interest” or something studied “objectively” from a distance. This gesture positions the “ideal” philosophical authorial voice at a distance to queerness”.

I think another effort that is working to queer philosophy in this way is Shelley Tremain’s extensive series of interviews, Dialogues on Disability, hosted at Discrimination and Disadvantage. (She is now at the blog, Biopolitical Philosophy.) Tremain’s interviews demonstrate a broad understanding of disability, and  that philosophers are indeed embodied creatures with embodied experiences that play a role in our research, teaching, and thinking.

 

Public Philosophy, Leaving Academia, Health, and Hazing Culture

This is already a very long post, and there is a lot more work I could talk about. One huge topic is Public Philosophy (post by Eric Schwitzgebel at The Splintered Mind), which is now taking off in lots of corners of philosophy. Two quick shout outs to public philosophy that I personally enjoy: the podcast Hi Phi Nation and the youtube channel ContraPoints.

Another topic is rethinking what a philosophy Ph.D. program is for, and how to address the increasing numbers of people with training in philosophy who leave academia (by choice or not) and obtain non-academic employment. Recently, Matt Drabek has written, “Leaving Academia: A Guide” at his blog, Base and Superstructure.

As part of thinking about graduate programs and academia, philosophers have also started to talk more openly about mental health and the ableist stigma they often face. One example is Peter Railton openly discussing depression in his 2015 Dewey Lecture.

Lastly, I think that philosophy (and academia more broadly) has a hazing problem. In many places, we normalize patterns of cruel, humiliating, or abusive behavior that’s meant to ‘toughen up’ people or build a collective identity (“everyone goes through this”). As a result, many graduate students report feeling too terrified/hopeless/unsupported in their programs to work/sleep/ask for help. Furthermore, there is evidence of  disproportionately high levels of depression and anxiety in academia, with no reason to think this does not apply to philosophy. To say the least, the onus should be on those who think that cruel and callous trials by fire (on papers, in referee reports, at job interviews) are reasonable actions or sound pedagogy. My sense is that what we frame as ‘rigorous’ criticisms of one another are, often in truth, lazy and unreflective defenses of convention. (See: Dotson’s How is This Paper Philosophy?)

Thankfully, some corners of philosophy are pushing back on this sink or swim (while we fire cannon balls at you) approach to graduate education. One place that I’ve benefited from is the Philosopher’s Cocoon, which “aims to be a supportive environment for early-career philosophers,” including graduate students. I envision a future for our discipline where this type of resource is the norm, instead of an exception.

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I’m grateful to have been part of Feminist Philosophers, and to have benefited from those whose advocacy and argument have opened up opportunities for professional flourishing, for myself and others. I look forward to a career of critical self-reflection and contributing to the further opening up of what philosophy can be. (If you’re interested, I talk about this at the end of my paper on women’s ‘interests’ in ‘philosophy’.)

Although some think that most of the worthwhile questions and ideas in philosophy have already been asked and thought, I think we’re just getting started.