Listening at Union Station: Unearthing and Assessing Privilege in Our Scholarship and Beyond

written by Mark Standish
edited by Todd Dias

This post is part of the series Philosophy Otherwise.

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2014 was the first year that I commuted through Union Station. It was a mess. When I stepped out onto the platform, I was like a lab rat trying to find my way down into the subway. The plywood, blocking certain pathways and revealing others, seemed to reconfigure itself every week. Back then, when the concourse sat just off a hurried Bay Street, Union proved no respite from the cold business district to which it sat adjacent. Union’s bathrooms, too, were gray and cold. Tiny aluminum sinks moderated water consumption. I had a complex relationship with those sinks. One summer evening, I found myself with my leg stretched over the counter so my foot could reach into the sink, trying to rinse off the dog poo that I stepped in while, unfortunately, wearing flip-flops (who doesn’t clean up their dog poo on Front Street?). Needless to say, those sinks are meant for washing your hands, not your feet. This is why I always thought it was strange that security patrolled those bathrooms so regularly. I mean, what would a homeless person do with those sinks? Weren’t the sinks themselves deterrent enough?

In those days, Union was a space that seemed to lack time, as if nothing happened within its walls. My trips through, twice daily, produced remarkably few memories. In fact, the dog poo and being handed free Cheese Whiz are the only two specific memories I have. I’ve since realized that that was by design; the experience was supposed to be as unremarkable as possible. I was supposed to go from point A to point B with the least possible obstruction.

Four years later, one of those plywooded areas was unveiled. The York Street Concourse. Just before the opening of the concourse, an elbow found its way into my forehead and sent me back into the all-too-familiar throes of a concussion. After spending a few weeks recovering, I decided to reenter normal life for the start of the winter semester. I emerged onto the platform at Union. Herded down the stairs, I stepped through the doors into the York Concourse. The food court, previously hidden behind caution tape, was open. I knew this immediately. The added LED screens, spectacularly wrapped around pillars, shouting advertisements at me, forced my eyes to the floor.

Then, in the subway station, I looked up to find more screens mounted opposite me. When I got to class, someone showed me a video on their phone, which I politely watched, thinking about the damage I was doing to my brain, growing dizzy and nauseous.

A few days later, I was driving down King Street in Hamilton. It just so happened that there was a new digital billboard on King and Dundurn. Then, I was driving my girlfriend’s car. Did you know that the instruments on some cars are displayed on LED screens? Of course, you did. I did, too. It just didn’t really mean anything to me.

At times in Union, or on the Gardiner, or in my friend’s living room, I felt overwhelmed. I felt like a person in a snowstorm, shielding my face from the elements. These moments of bombardment acted like synecdoche. They were minor aspects of the world that reminded me that the world at large wasn’t made for people with concussions.

In a sense, the recent history of Union Station says more about me than it does about Union. Union went from a place quintessentially free of obstacles to one littered with them. But Union hadn’t changed—not substantively, anyway. The truth is that there were screens enough to bombard me before the new concourse. Did I consider that those screens might be hurting people? Not once. Not until they were hurting me.

Did I consider the security guards patrolling the bathroom? Not really—not more than as a curiosity. But I’d imagine a homeless person would’ve considered them. I’d imagine a Black person would’ve considered them, too. (Or, indeed, anyone discriminated against by racial profiling.) 

Did I consider the difficulty that the plywood blockades would pose for someone who uses a wheelchair? Nope.

People without certain privileges cannot simply pass through Union without a second thought. Union forces them to consider it. And yet, Union is designed to be left unconsidered—if it’s memorable, something is wrong. That’s why I didn’t have any memories of it. Though, once I felt that alienation—that sense that this place was not for me—I had to ask: Who was it made for? Has it always been like this, and I’ve just never noticed?

This is one way I’ve come to understand my privilege: I have the privilege not to consider.

I don’t have to consider the police when they walk past me. I don’t have to consider my sexuality or gender when I walk into a church. I don’t have to consider which bathroom to enter. I don’t have to consider the hulking man walking toward me on the street. Just like I didn’t have to consider the LED screens in Union before.

So, what does this mean for me? How should I respond to this newfound realization of my privilege (which stems, ironically, from the loss of some of my privilege)? There are a few options.

After realizing that I’ve lost some privilege, I could forgo considering my privilege in other areas. However, this option is naïve to the reality that privilege, like oppression, is intersectional; in some aspects of our lives, we have more privilege, and in others, we have less.

Or, I could pretend that I haven’t lost any privilege and force myself to continue inconsiderately. I could try to live as before without considering my new limitations. This option obviously perpetuates privilege and only works to delay the inevitable realization being thrust upon me as I face the consequences of neglecting my cognitive health.

Another option is to look inward; I could feel guilty about the privilege I’ve had my entire life. But guilt, in my experience, is debilitating. Being consumed with my own experience of privilege distracts me from actually considering others and the ways they’re typically not considered.

In the few years I’ve spent trying to reckon with my privilege, I’ve tried to avoid all three of these responses. This is why I’m telling my story. It’s not meant to highlight my own lack of privilege—I still have plenty to spare! It’s meant to highlight that in losing some of my privilege, I realized, in a small way, how much privilege I had and continue to have.

But it wasn’t just a mindset. My mindset reflected my world because our world was made for people like me. Our way of being–the way of being for the privileged–has annexed almost everything. This is exactly what colonialism was/is; colonialism makes the world into a home for one group. Given that the world was my home, I felt comfortable, which shielded me from seeing the conditions of my comfort.

My experience at Union disrupted the comfort I used to feel. That discomfort called me to respond. But I felt the three responses I outlined earlier were wrong-headed. Instead, I decided I needed to begin by changing my hermeneutic. My experience at Union prompted me to revisit how I consider the world. Unfortunately, privilege is ingrained in me and our culture. Because it’s ingrained in both me and our culture, I can’t always see it. It just seems natural.

Because privilege often feels so natural to me, I need to undertake some kind of practice to disrupt it. For this reason, I’ve been trying to teach myself to listen. But listening is really hard. It’s not just being in the presence of someone else talking. Listening takes work. As best as I can, it requires me to enter into someone else’s world and imagine being otherwise. And, as I’ve started to realize, when someone lets you into their world, their world can haunt you. For this reason, listening doesn’t stop when the person stops talking. In listening, it’s as if you carry their words and those words begin to illuminate your world differently. In this way, listening can reveal structures in your world that you couldn’t see before. Listening, then, is more than just lending an ear. Instead, when I listen, I submit my very way of seeing the world to the other person. In so doing, I submit myself to the call inherent to their experience. Thus, listening is not distinct from action. I would venture to say that you haven’t really listened if listening doesn’t call you to some form of action.

Further action might begin with more listening. Perhaps I’m called to seek out another text about how my world developed in relation to the other person’s—how the structures that subjugate that person are a part of my history. But it’s not enough for me to know and acknowledge the history of, for example, Residential Schools and my faith tradition’s complicity in them. I still haven’t listened to the call that those experiences demand of me. The call is to submit to the other’s perspective. This means relinquishing control over the world and the structures that uphold my security and the other’s precarity.

As scholars, the work of listening must extend into our scholarly life. Being privileged means that the solutions I propose concerning the world’s problems are prone to being my solutions to my world. If unchecked, privileged scholarship that doesn’t   easily perpetuates this insidious colonial impulse: to assume the world is ours (that is, for those of us with privilege) for the taking/making. Scholarly listening involves choices about who to read, what to write on, and how to write on it. It involves recognizing that my perspective and world are incomplete and that I should cede some of my airtime in classrooms, publications, conferences, and conversations. Conversely, I must recognize that another’s perspective might be complete in ways mine is incomplete. Therefore, scholarly listening involves submitting your world to colleagues, students, and scholars with whom you wouldn’t naturally engage.

Recently, I’ve been working on a very simple way to submit myself to others; I’ve been trying to combat my impulse to speak first. And when someone else speaks, I try to submit myself to them instead of formulating what I’m going to say next. That’s just one small response. But, small responses can snowball. Listening to your colleagues or students might cause you to see more deficits in your perspective, which in turn might call you to listen more. I hope that as I learn to listen first, I will begin to make listening my way of life. In this way, listening provides direction to my long pursuit of unearthing and appraising the privilege that cuts through myself and our world. 

Towards a Pedagogy of Listening: An Interview with Elisabeth Paquette & Gideon Strauss (Pt. II)

by Elisabeth Paquette, Gideon Strauss, Héctor Acero Ferrer, and Andrew Tebbutt
edited by Todd Dias

This post is part of the series Philosophy Otherwise.

On February 28, 2022, Andrew Tebbutt and Héctor Acero Ferrer, conducted the following interview with Dr. Elisabeth Paquette and Dr. Gideon Strauss on behalf of the Philosophy Otherwise team. This interview has been published in two instalments. You can revisit Part I here. In Part II, presented below, the interviewees delve more directly into Dr. Paquette’s philosophical work and its bearings on a potential decolonization of pedagogical practices. 

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Gideon:

Your research focuses on the work of Sylvia Wynter and Alain Badiou. Imagining their bodies of work as tectonic plates, how would you describe the boundaries where they press upon each other? What do you find salient in the field of tension generated between Badiou and Wynter?

Elisabeth:

That is a beautiful question. I have never thought of their bodies of work as tectonic plates, and so I appreciate it. I think that there is in some way significant overlap between Badiou and Wynter, and this is part of the reason why I brought them into conversation. In a general sense, they’re both interested in what universal emancipation looks like. They’re both interested in thinking about systems of oppression, systems of knowledge, and politics broadly construed on a global scene. This interest is fairly obvious in Wynter, but Badiou will also talk about Indigenous resistance to Canadian police in Quebec, and about various other locations around the globe in addition to France.

Where I see the difference, and it’s a significant one, is the way they respond to these concerns. In some ways it’s a difference in training, and in the fields of research that they turn to. Not that they’re completely different here, because Sylvia Wynter is quite a well-read person. If you haven’t read her work, I encourage you to do so. She’s talking about a ton of people within the canon of philosophy, in addition to brain scientists, literary theorists, languages and culture studies experts, and a variety of figures that exceed geopolitical or disciplinary boundaries. But their overall approaches differ significantly. Badiou is very much a Marxist, looking for a kind of traditional sense of Marxism, extending it through set theory and mathematics. In some sense, I think he turns to mathematics as having the answers to political questions. And I think that reflects a particular kind of training too—his father was a mathematician. And so I think that these orientations have coded Badiou’s approach to emancipation in certain ways. Also, in France, there is a certain conception of politics and of the ways that politics can operate, which really comes through in the way that Badiou approaches thinking about emancipation (you see it also in Quebec). 

But Sylvia Wynter approaches emancipation from the position of being marginalized. She has very different experiences, and she turns to different scholarship. She’s well read in the Négritude movement in a way that Badiou isn’t, even though Badiou will name the Négritude movement. So, for me, the benefit of bringing them into conversation began with the fact that there are all these points of contact between them. I found that I could bring them into conversation, because they were already in effect in a conversation, even though Badiou wasn’t speaking to Wynter, and Wynter wasn’t speaking specifically to Badiou—although she was speaking to the kind of work that Badiou is doing.

And so in thinking of them as tectonic plates, I might think of them as overlapping in some ways. But the place between them is something of a mountainous region that has emerged, one that is very difficult to scale. So it isn’t an easy passageway from one to the other, and it requires significant work to climb that mountain and go back down again. But there are points of contact that bring them into conversation, even as their goals and points of departure are significantly different.

 

Gideon:

Given your specific concern about space, how do you see the juxtaposition between Wynter and Badiou?

Elisabeth:

I think very seriously about space, about how space is constructed, and about how we move around it; and I think that we can also think about how Wynter and Badiou move through space. Badiou, for instance, lives in France, but he does work in other places. He had a big uptake in Brazil, and we know of him traveling to Brazil and working with scholars there. Sylvia Wynter held a significant position during the creation of the independence movements in Jamaica, and also studied in the UK and then moved to the US.

And so, various kinds of movements structure how they think and how we can think of them relating. In a lot of ways I think that Badiou is very much situated in a French style of politics. To echo what I said earlier, Badiou’s idea of the political space being empty of symbolism, is possible only in not recognizing the way that Christianity, for instance, already forms the undertone of that space. I think he holds this presumption throughout his work, and similarly thinks that mathematics has this possibility of doing its work from nowhere, of being politically neutral, and does not recognize the way that it is not politically neutral. It’s not just numbers, but numbers through a particular kind of culture and political system. Here I think his work reflects a lack of movement around spaces.

And in Wynter’s work, space comes up in various kinds of ways. She has a very particular way of talking about American universities and the way in which the field of Black studies is situated in American universities, off in the margins. She is influenced by being part of the diaspora, as someone who has a desire to move beyond boundaries. Here I think also of Rinaldo Walcott, an Afro-Canadian scholar at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the University of Toronto. Walcott writes about the importance of thinking about diaspora broadly, and I see this orientation informing Wynter’s work, in her desire to go beyond disciplinary boundaries, which is tied to going beyond boundaries of nation-states and other such things. I think that we can see these scholars’ ways of moving, or their lack of moving, around space, as emblematic of the kinds of work that they’re doing. 

Andrew:

You talk about the idea of creolization, which is an idea you draw from Jane Gordon. It partly has to do with staging encounters between thinkers, who, for example, a thinker who represents a dominant knowledge system, say, European philosophy and those who are placed outside of that tradition. For this process of creolization to be effective, the encounter must be equally imposing on each side. Can you say more about this idea of creolization as a way of thinking about scholarship and how it might avoid just being an “inclusive,” appropriative mechanism?

Elisabeth:

So great question, Andrew, and there’s a lot to say there, and there's a lot of work being done on creolization right now, which I really appreciate. And so, there’s many different ways, I think, to approach this concept in particular. So, to your point about being inclusive, I’m not for the inclusive model. It just maintains problematic structures and just includes a couple people of color or women or something like that. And so I think that often what I’m looking for is a radical re-conceptualizing of philosophy, beyond the disciplines of what we see now. So, how to start?

So, there’s the question of "Why would I have written this book? Why bother spending the time on Badiou, instead of just talking about Wynter and rejecting Badiou completely?" And I struggled with that in particular. And so I think that also it’s the heart of your question too, because my goal wasn’t to recenter Badiou and thus recenter European philosophy in so doing, but rather what I also recognized is that there are a lot of people who read Badiou and who aren’t reading these other amazing scholars who are doing important work, who have historically continued to critique the kind of position that Badiou has offered. And so in this instance, to whom I am writing this book is often Badiou scholars in particular.

I’m telling these people that they aren’t drawing these connections and I’m doing that for them. They’re very obvious. They’re very plain. And so I want to say, “you need to be attentive to this and be able to account for it.” I think that Badiou scholars should be able to account for the critiques that I’ve provided. So that’s my first answer: it's to provide, recognizing the world in which we move through, an attempt to address [these overlooked connections] in some ways. So it’s offering these kinds of tools for thinking about how we should critique Badiou. And also, as I said at the end of the book, I’m addressing the question of why we should be reading Wynter: because she offers so much. So maybe that’s one way of answering your question. 

Here’s another way: I’ve been reading a lot of Audre Lorde lately. And so thinking about solidarity across differences and also the kinds of productive and creative capacities that comes from difference. And so thinking about multiple different localities and ways of theorizing and using the creative differences between them to understand and produce new kinds of things.

And so I think that’s part of what we could think creolization is doing: bringing things together that create certain kinds of frictions that will produce something out of it. What that looks like can be different in a variety of contexts. And so often we talk about it in European terms. But I think also there’s a lot of a really amazing work that’s being done across east-west philosophizing, Indigenous theorizing, across nations also. Whether you’d use the term creolization for it in particular, I'm not sure, but maybe we can think of it as this epistemic disobedience and moving beyond certain kind of boundaries and thinking of the kind of creative capacities that come through knowledge from different positionalities.

And that would also be a way of decentering European theorizing, which I think is often the critique that comes with creolization in the way that I described it. And Jane Gordon is really explicit about it. It’s not just centering on Europeans and then adding marginalized figures here and there. There are other things going on. There’s also what Souleymane Bachir Diagne calls “provincializing” the European canon. I think that is also another helpful way of thinking about it. 

So it’s not that the European canon exists internationally or ought to be the foremost. It is just one among many that we could read or could not read. And so against the rejection of European canon, broadly construed, if we just provincialize it and think of it as one among many, then you can take it or leave it depending on what your interests are. And Souleymane Bachir Diagne is from Senegal. He teaches the United States and he’s also heavily influenced by not only various African theorists but also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and a few other figures, European figures. 

Gideon:

Now shifting focus to your own practice as a pedagogue, how does your scholarship on Badiou and Wynter impact your pedagogy?

Elisabeth:

That’s a great but also a difficult question, because I feel as though my pedagogy and my research are inherently intertwined. I’m really fortunate to teach the classes that I want to teach; classes that I’m interested in, including texts that I’m interested in reading. This means I’m going to read more and more of what I want to teach, which impacts the kinds of things I research. The two are not separate from each other. 

With regards to the research we’re discussing, my engagement in the critique of canonical Western figures was related to a class that I was teaching. I taught a class in feminist theory that was cross-listed in Women and Gender Studies and Philosophy. In this particular class I taught Luce Irigaray, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, and Sylvia Wynter. I’ve been reading Kristeva, Irigaray, and Beauvoir since my undergrad, and these were very much the texts that I was taught for years. In my class, my students and I would perform critiques of these texts, from the perspective of disability, race, sexuality, gender, and Indigeneity, broadly construed. In this way, my class engaged in a kind of critique similar to the critique I did of Badiou. 

But, on the other side of things, I learn from Wynter all the time how to teach philosophy. I know from conversations with Lewis Gordon that Wynter doesn’t like philosophy (or rather, she doesn’t like European philosophy), and I hold onto this fact. I also think about how to go beyond the boundaries of what women think is philosophy, or what gets stated as philosophy, in my teaching. Again, I’m cross-listed between Women and Gender Studies and Philosophy, and no one’s looking over my shoulder at what I’m going to teach and whether or not it’s philosophy or not. 

Holding onto all of these things simultaneously means that there is a need to go beyond what we might think is philosophy in order to do philosophy. What counts as knowledge is much broader than what I or someone like me might previously have thought, and broader than what we have previously been taught counts as knowledge and something that ought to be taught. 

And one further point, which goes back to the conversation about the amazing work that you all are doing: where knowledge comes from is also something to hold onto in classrooms. I learn from my students at the same time as I am teaching them in the classroom, which requires me to think about how to manage these things simultaneously. I try to bring my students into this conversation, discussing with them how to create spaces that will support them, and I find that they teach me simultaneously as I teach them. But there are power balances to be aware of here—for example, it’s not the job of my students to teach me certain kinds of things. These are things I’ve learned in my research, and from Sylvia Wynter in particular.

Gideon:

Can you offer an anecdote of a moment in your practice that illustrates the incorporation of your research into your teaching.

Elisabeth:

Okay, great question! Again, these are really difficult questions and I commend you for them, because I think they're very nuanced and it’s hard to do justice to them. I'll offer a story of success, one that felt good. There are also other feelings around it, of course, as there are always many feelings around teaching. You all know this: teaching is always nerve-wracking, and no matter how much you do it there are a lot of emotions involved. 

I’m teaching a Queer Caribbean Theory class right now, for the first time this summer, and it is nerve-wracking also because it’s a new area of study for me in several ways, even though I've been reading Sylvia Wynter, Aime Cesaire, and Frantz Fanon for some time. It’s a relatively small class, with ten students. It’s a graduate level class also, which is great. There are a lot of queer folks in the class, and some gender non-conforming trans folks. It’s predominantly white students in the class, but there are a few people of color, and several bilingual students as well. 

Much of the discussion circulates around Audre Lorde’s conception of the erotic, from her essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” We spent the first half of the semester engaging with various scholars who employ this conception of the erotic in their text. The students are therefore primed in thinking around this concept of the erotic for six weeks or so. And then, after the midterm break, we finally read Audre Lorde’s essay. As preparation for the class, I tasked students with asking themselves: “What is the erotic? What are a few keywords that you would associate with the erotic?” And so they’ve thought through some of the main themes beforehand. (I typically prime them with questions like this about their readings every week, and our classroom discussion is often structured around those questions.) In this sense the class was an opportunity for them to approach what Audre Lorde means by the erotic. 

To start things off, I asked them to take a couple of minutes to make some notes on what they think the erotic is, and, in conversation with another person, develop their ideas of what the erotic is. And then they get into groups of four—so two groups of two come together and compare discussions. We spend the three-hour class doing this escalating group discussion. The erotic is a central concept, as I mentioned, for a lot of the texts that we read, and so the point of this exercise was to give the students the opportunity to tell me what this concept means, and then to develop a conversation collectively. It would be easy for me to give my description of what I think the erotic is, but something that’s really beautiful about how Audre Lorde writes this essay in particular, is that she leaves it very much open to interpretation. And so this class was an attempt to engage in the practice of bringing our own responsibility to knowledge creation. A lot of these students are queer, and so they will have some understanding of what the erotic means to them in particular. And even if they’re not queer they might well have some sense of what it means to them. And so, providing them the opportunity to foster their own engagement with that concept and with their own experiences became central to our discussion of the erotic.

And then I had a follow-up question for them that was, I think, even harder to engage—namely, “How is it that you see the erotic operating in your own life? What does it mean to employ the erotic in the way that Audre Lorde is talking about it?” The point here is to take hold of this conceptual tool that Lorde is giving to us. She provides these tools to provide language for people’s lived experiences, and the hard part, again, is to make a connection between the conceptual tool and our lived experiences. We didn’t finish with a whole lot of definite conclusions (this was only a week ago), and I told them at the end of the class: “Each class from now on, I want you to think through your activities, the things you do throughout the week, when do you see the erotic arise, those moments of joy that Audre Lorde talks about?” Again, I think it’s important to know that when we talk about philosophy, that it is very much bound up with our lived experiences. 

In fact, I’m done with the cliche, “ivory tower” approach to philosophy that is just about concepts. I don’t think that any philosophy is just conceptual. I think that even for the people who are writing the history of traditional philosophy, it’s bound up with their lived experiences. They just have very specific lived experiences that we’re not always attentive to. And so being attentive and thinking about how it is that the philosophy that we’re doing is very much bound up with certain lived experiences is really important for all my classes, and for all the things that I’m doing. Often, I basically gave the class over to the students, asking them annoying questions every so often. I tell them repeatedly, “I’m just going to ask you annoying what-does-that-mean? questions,” pushing them to explain a little bit more. Last time we did this they took over the whole class and they did a wonderful job with it.

As a teacher, it’s tempting to jump in and be part of the conversation. But I also know that there are instances when I ought to remain in the background and give them the space to foster their own point of view, pointing them in the right direction only when I need to. At the end of the class I have been describing, I had a student say, not to me, but to the class, that it was the best class that she’s had for a long time. And so it reminded me of the importance of the de-centering of myself in these spaces, and of the fact that students are very capable of doing this kind of work and having these kinds of conversations. 

Gideon:

In the context of this joyous story of students doing workshops on their own lived experiences of the erotic, as theorized by Audre Lorde, at an institution that is not friendly to such terms as “social justice,” what are your pedagogical tactics of survival in such an environment?

Elisabeth:

That’s a great question, and is certainly an active one that I think is going on where we are in particular. There are various kinds of techniques that we employ. When our department received backlash for putting the words “social justice” on our website, the statement was crafted through pragmatism, because there’s a lot of pragmatists in my department. And so it became possible to use philosophy to provide language that would convey the same points that the words “social justice” were intended to employ.

So I think that, being trained in philosophy and being trained in argumentation, it’s become possible to provide these techniques to make arguments, to be sort of stealthy with use of language also. And that’s been a good tactic. There’s also the safety-in-numbers bit. And so I’m part of a caucus on campus that I helped found when I first arrived here in 2015. And that caucus, which is not part of the university, but is able to have an impact on the university, has been used to push certain things through at the university and often will turn to full professors to do the most heavy lifting and support people who are less supported at the university. And that includes students, it includes untenured faculty and adjunct faculty and staff as well.

So that’s another tactic. And so I think that there are certain kinds of skills and those kinds of navigating that are things that I hope to learn and hope to do for other people too moving forward. And I think that, maybe the point is that it requires many people across many spaces. It requires this kind of activism or solidarity, or thinking about how people are differently situated at universities, such that we can provide support for each other and step in and step back when we need to. But these are active things that we’re continually engaged with.

Gideon:

That’s a great thought with which to end our conversation: your call to collaborate, to act in solidarity across university spaces. Thank you very much for your time and wisdom, Elisabeth!

Elisabeth:

Thank you for welcoming me into this conversion!

[Revisit Part I of this interview here.]

Towards a Pedagogy of Listening: An Interview with Elisabeth Paquette & Gideon Strauss (Pt. I)

by Elisabeth Paquette, Gideon Strauss, Héctor Acero Ferrer, and Andrew Tebbutt

This post is part of the series Philosophy Otherwise.

On February 28, 2022, Andrew Tebbutt and Héctor Acero Ferrer, conducted the following interview with Dr. Elisabeth Paquette and Dr. Gideon Strauss on behalf of the Philosophy Otherwise team. This interview will be published in two instalments. In Part I, the interviewees frame the conversation through a series of reflections on the Philosophy Otherwise colloquium—which took place in ICS between November and December of 2021. In Part II, they delve more directly into Dr. Paquette’s philosophical work and its bearings on a potential decolonization of pedagogical practices. We present to you Part I of the interview.

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ANDREW:

Gideon, I'm wondering if you could briefly describe your impressions of the Philosophy Otherwise colloquium that we organized at ICS last fall (November-December 2021). In particular, how has it shaped your thinking about the practice of philosophy?

GIDEON:

Before I answer your question, I want to mention two of my own commitments in participating in the colloquium. One was to collaborate in ICS’s consideration of the white supremacist habits that are embedded in our own tradition of scholarly practice. I think part of the intention of the colloquium was to recognize as a school that we have continuing habits of scholarly practice that were shaped—acknowledged or unacknowledged, intentional or unintentional—in a context of white supremacy. Coming to terms with that legacy, I think, was part of the intention of the colloquium, and it was also one of my own commitments.

Another commitment that I brought to the colloquium was my investment in land acknowledgements. My hope was to learn from the conversations in the colloquium series about ways to integrate an acknowledgement of the histories of human presence in the regions that I inhabit and traverse. And “inhabit” and “traverse” are important words for me, because I inhabit two regions. I inhabit the ecologies around a town called Stellenbosch, in South Africa, which is an agricultural, university town, and I also inhabit Toronto. I traverse these spaces nomadically, in a kind of  annual migration, residing mostly in Toronto, but spending significant time in Stellenbosch. And to think about how to acknowledge the colonial histories of these places was also an intention of mine. All of this raised some questions which I'm far from answering. What is it to “acknowledge”? What is even acknowledged? Whose histories do I attend to and how do I attend to those histories, taking into account my own situatedness as a settler twice over? I’m a 10th generation settler stock in South Africa, and by the privileges of my appearance, I’m grafted into the settler aspect of presence in Canada. And so, whose histories do I attend to, and how do I attend to those histories when it comes to acknowledging?

This commitment to land acknowledgements translates into a query about the integration of land acknowledgements into my own practice. Here, there were three practices that I was concerned with specifically. The first is my practice as a scholar. The second is my practice as a citizen. And the third is my practice as a member and participant in the life of a particular local faith community. I was also concerned with how these practices interact with each other. 

So those were the commitments and questions with which I came into the colloquium. Turning to my experience of the colloquium itself, I would say three things stood out to me. Perhaps the big one was the need to cultivate listening practices. I remember a particular conversation that we had with Colombian philosopher María del Rosario Acosta, who emphasized both a posture of listening and practices of listening as ways of doing philosophy that need attention. That resonates with me as someone who tries to do philosophy phenomenologically, but in a way that's informed by ethnography. But a question pressed itself on me: what does it mean to adopt a posture of listening? What does this look like? I especially appreciated the claim that there’s a tactfulness to listening, that listening requires an attentiveness, not just to context, but to shifts in context and to micro-contexts. This question also came up for me when we had a conversation with Lori-Anne Dolloff, a scholar from the University of Toronto, about Choral Practice and about a composition that included Inuit song. What stood out to me was how choirs along the hundredth kilometer from the US border engaged with Inuit song, and how this relationship to song has shifted over generations, so that a previous generation of Inuit had a certain response to the song while a current generation of Inuit have a different response to it. And so listening practices, in an ethnographically-informed philosophical practice, require listening, and then listening again, and then listening again…

I also felt challenged by some of the conversations in the colloquium about the need to act in the face of the risk of doing wrong. And specifically, the question of how to negotiate the risk of offering offense, of doing damage, while at the same time needing to act—here considering scholarship as an act (or at least as a practice with a series of actions). This led me to think also about pedagogy and our institutional presence in the world, both in relation to other academic institutions, but also other communities and institutions, in terms of how we institutionally must act, while probably doing damage or causing offense, as we do so. How do you negotiate that risk? And how do you nurture a disposition institutionally, but also personally, that resists the temptations of cynicism and apathy in the face of difficulties like these?

Lastly, I take away from the colloquium series as a whole an awareness of the immensity of these tasks,  and of the immensity of the forces involved, specifically in relation to the smallness of our school and the relatively negligible effect of my own scholarship. Against the backdrop of what I've said above, I’m made aware of the need to cultivate both modesty and perseverance as parts of my disposition, but also parts of our institution’s disposition in the world. In terms of the effect of this in my practice of philosophy, I would say that it brings about an intensification of my awareness of the need to embed philosophical practice ethnographically, and to pay attention to what might constitute practices of listening, philosophically speaking, in these various dispositions, of modesty and perseverance in riskiness. 

ANDREW:

Thank you, Gideon. What you’ve shared provides some very helpful context for the conversation that we had in our colloquium, especially given that it was “in-house,” so to speak. I have just one further question, before we move on to your dialogue with Elisabeth. What stood out to you in particular about Elisabeth’s presentation in the session in which she joined us, especially in terms of the relationship between questions about philosophy and questions about pedagogy?

GIDEON:

A few things stood out to me. The first one has to do with a question that I’m going to ask Elisabeth later on, and it concerns the “tectonics” of the encounter in Elisabeth’s work between the bodies of work of Alain Badiou and Sylvia Wynter, and how they press up against each other in Elisabeth's reading. And I have to say, as a caveat, that I’m not a Badiou or a Wynter scholar, so I’m coming at this question with the posture of a beginner. What stands out to me at this point is Badiou’s commitment to the emancipation of all, versus Wynter’s commitment to considering Indigeneity and race in particular (not to exclude the gender aspect of her work, which is there, but is not what jumped out to me in the context of our colloquium). The way in which those differing approaches to emancipation press up against each other and create fissures, fractures, and saliances is interesting in Elisabeth's work. 

Also, in her dialogue with ICS Junior Member Abbi Hofstede, Elisabeth said: “One thing I try to think of when I think about the academy is what counts as knowledge in academic spaces, and who counts as knowledge keepers in these spaces as well.” And so those questions—what counts as knowledge and who counts as knowledge keepers—really stood out to me, as well as the implications of thinking through these questions. Elisabeth also said: “This should be a live question for us as philosophers always: ‘what counts as knowledge?’” I’m intrigued by that. 

Also in the conversation with Abbi, Elisabeth talked about the importance of humility and the importance of unlearning and relearning over the course of one’s career. This connected with my concern for nurturing a kind of a modest resilience (or resilient modesty) in our scholarly practices, and for what the implications of this would be in the pedagogical relationships between newer and older scholars in their trajectories (especially taking into account your concern about hierarchies of knowledge keeping).

Lastly—and this didn’t stand out that much in our conversation, but Elisabeth did mention it, and I found further reference to it in her online presence —I was intrigued by her concern for monuments, which has me thinking about the texturing of space by means of memorialization. In any case, the notion of texturing spaces by means of memorialization, by means of monuments, is very interesting to me. But then I also wondered about the other means by which we texture spaces in ways that memorialize, as well as the mnemonic effects of the texturing of learning spaces and what those effects are on the scholarly practice. And so I’d be intrigued to hear what Elisabeth might be able to take from her study of the public effect of monuments on the texturing of space, and what insights she might have for the structuring of pedagogical spaces, mnemonically. 

HÉCTOR:

Thank you, Gideon. Now we’re going to go over some introductory questions for you, Elisabeth. We want to get your thoughts about the experience you had with us in November, and ask you to point us to what you found interesting. The colloquium was an experiment for us at ICS, a way to create a space where spontaneous-yet-structured conversations and scholarship could be produced. But also so much work went on behind the scenes to create a space that was safe enough and open enough so that people could have conversations in which they could bring—in ICS language—their “whole selves” to the table, and have their own stories be part of what was discussed and interacted with. That was a way for us to foreground questions of racial identity and marginalization, and to incorporate those concerns into our dialogue—because you can’t incorporate stories without incorporating concerns about how different people interact in that space academically. And so, we want to ask you if you see value in that approach to doing communal scholarship. Do you think there are other alternatives we should explore in order to effectively incorporate the types of concerns that we want to address with this experiment? We know you do a lot of this work in your own context, so is there anything from your own learnings that can be incorporated in what we do here with this project?

ELISABETH:

First of all, thank you for inviting me back. I do value the kinds of things that you are doing, because in philosophy spaces in particular, there isn’t a lot of time spent on conversation, collective learning, and skill-sharing, and I think that this is something that you all have brought to this philosophical space, and I think it’s extremely valuable. So I enjoyed participating in the colloquium, and I got a lot out of it because I don’t often get to have these kinds of conversations and be in these kinds of spaces.

I also think it’s wonderful that you have faculty and students who are doing this together, and that faculty show up for these initiatives. Often there is a kind of distance between faculty and students in which faculty feel like they ought not to be learning alongside students. But it’s really valuable to be able to learn from your students simultaneously, and this is something that flies in the face of a lot of how we think about academia. I often reflect on how we as faculty think of ourselves and of what we “ought” to do, as well as how we think about knowledge (in particular, the difference between thinking of oneself as a “holder” of knowledge versus understanding knowledge as something that’s produced between us and in community). I think these conversations are really valuable, and so you all are doing a lot of great work. I know that from the organizing I do with the “Feminist and Decolonial Politics” workshop that I do every year; these conversations take a lot of work behind the scenes. This work requires constantly shifting, navigating, getting feedback and then reshifting again, and having ongoing conversations about how best to implement things, how to change things, and whether to change things. 

From my own experience, I think it's always important to remember that there is no one way to do things, and that it is really important to create many spaces in which these kinds of conversations can happen. Creating these open dialogues about pedagogy and content is really important, as is having spaces where you read texts that you might not otherwise be introduced to. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that no one space is going to do everything nor should one space do everything. I often get comments in response to the workshop in which people say, “Oh, can’t we do this thing…?”, and I think to myself, well, you could do anything, in theory, but in reality you can't do everything. The workshop, as an example, can only do certain finite things. And so the more people are doing things, the better. The more we’re encouraging and empowering people to do these kinds of things collectively, the better. And the more we show up for other people doing these kinds of things, the better. Because no one space can do all things. And so I think this is related to the humility that Gideon brought up before, that you need to recognize that you can’t do everything, and you shouldn’t think that you could do everything.

HÉCTOR:

I think that the insights you offer about space—that no space can do everything, that we need to be present to support others’ work, that we should recognize the limits of the spaces we create—are true “takeaways” for us. And our second question, which is more general, is along similar lines. Are you hopeful about these types of exercises? That is, are you hopeful about efforts to consider issues of oppression and marginalization in academic contexts? Are these conversations gaining momentum? Are they gaining momentum pedagogically? Or do you think this is something that we’re doing now, but once the urgency is gone, we will go back to things as they were before?

ELISABETH:

I hear this question as asking whether I’m hopeful for the field of philosophy. I think this is a great question, because I think hope is really important, but is often felt to be lacking in the era that we’re in right now. So I think it’s something to really hold on to. I have a “yes/no,” or  “both/and,” answer to this question. I’m hopeful in the sense that I think that the field of philosophy is changing. I think that there are more and more spaces that are opening up, more and more students and faculty being trained in areas that are distinct from the canonical conception of philosophy that I was trained in. So this is changing, and I think there are more spaces to do that kind of non-canonical study. I think that there is more attention paid to, and more funding for, this kind of work. And these are all things that I think are structurally important for changing the field of philosophy, in addition to people doing the content work, which really matters. There have always been wonderful scholars doing content work in non-canonical fields, but I think it’s also growing in various ways in terms of institutional support.

So I'm hopeful in those ways. But I am also not hopeful that university is going to become decolonial in any sense. I think that this would require that the university look extremely different from the way that it looks right now, and I’m not sure what this would look like. It’s not a matter of saying that we ought not do this work. I think that doing the work is really important, but I also know that the institution of the university has huge structures of white supremacy and settler coloniality behind it. For example, the fact that institutions are on Indigenous lands is not something that’s going to change overnight. So there’s definitely a “both/and” to my thinking about hope: I think that we should continue to do the work as though it’s possible while also recognizing that there is a horizon of possibility that we may never get to, certainly not in my lifetime.

GIDEON:

Actually, before we continue with my prepared questions, I want to ask Elisabeth to elaborate on your last comment, where you point to the need of holding on to hope even if we don’t see the results in our lifetimes. Over the weekend I listened to an episode of the CBC radio program Ideas, from December, that featured a lecture given by a science fiction author named Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson is trained in literary Marxism at the University of San Diego. He’s written twenty or so volumes of science fiction, and last year (or late in the year before) he published a 700-page book called The Ministry for the Future, a work of climate fiction. In the lecture, Robinson made a distinction between utopia and what he calls "Optopia," and argued that both are necessary, that it’s necessary to imagine good places that are difficult to imagine achieving from where we are now. Robinson argued for the social importance of utopias, even though we can’t get there or can’t tell how we might get there. By contrast, Optopia, which is what Robinson describes in The Ministry for the Future, is defined as the best possible future outcome we can imagine, knowing what we know to be the case now. In his book, Robinson tells a story about climate change that focuses on what we must do, we have to do to avoid extinction, given the limited period that we have. So, given the system of nation-states and the reality of capitalism (and he’s an anti-capitalist, and is opposed to the nation-state), Robinson wanted to offer an imaginary that took into account what we’re going to have to work with while we are addressing the climate crisis. And he calls this an Optopia. And I wonder, when you look at the prospect of decolonization of the university, what is your Optopia? What is achievable for you, imaginably achievable within, say, your lifetime, with regard to decolonizing the academy?

ELISABETH:

That's a great question. I do some work in and across the university and with various caucuses to push for change around various communities. First of all, there are the easy things. For example, for the first time in the university’s history, we’re going to have a Native American woman teaching Introduction to Native American Studies. She was a student at UNC Charlotte, she’s also staff, and she’s adjuncting for the position, so she’s paid (although adjuncts in the southern US in particular do not get paid very much). Beyond this, having full-time tenured faculty who are Native American women teaching Native American studies, and also other topics that they would choose to teach, would be a great thing to see at the university. Additionally, having a full professor who is an African American woman would be a great thing to see at our university, which doesn’t exist right now. So there are small things like this that I can point to about our institution in particular in terms of what things should look like. But I don’t know if that’s what you’re asking about or not. Because in my dream world, I imagine having representation at the university that is consistent with the population of Charlotte in particular, in terms of the demographics of the university, staff positions versus faculty positions, race, gender and ethnicity.

 

Also, there’s the issue of ensuring that university is affordable for more folks. This seems like a really far-off dream, but it would be amazing if this were possible, given the kinds of structural inequalities in Charlotte, North Carolina (which does not cost as much as it does cost to live as Toronto, I realize). However, the degree of poverty and the inability to move between socioeconomic status in Charlotte is ranked very low for the United States generally. Again, I don’t know if this answers your question, but if I were to write a list of the things I want to see implemented right now, these things would be on it.

GIDEON:

You did. You’ve given us some wonderful glimpses into your thinking here.

[Continue with Part II of this interview here.]

The Prosaic, the Exotic, and the Logic of “Othering”: A Medieval Account of the Nature of Things

by Bob Sweetman

This post is part of the series Philosophy Otherwise.

"I am betting that here, in Thomas’ Liber de natura rerum, we witness a depth of expectation about the world that is operative in the scourge of colonialism and racism, marking the modern history and everyday life of European societies and the many colonies they founded. I am wondering whether it is a logic we should watch for in our subsequent examinations?"

Thomas of Cantimpré (c.1200–c.1270) wrote a sprawling encyclopedic work, the Liber de natura rerum, on what he called the nature of things. In it he surveyed the physical, plant, and animal life to be found below the circle of the moon. His approach was hermeneutical; he sought to understand the meaning of life and existence, both on and below the physical surface of things. For him, understanding involved penetrating distinctions. As our senses told us, “this” was not “that,” which allowed us to point at one thing as opposed to another. Moreover, each separate thing had a meaning to it that was both patent (available already to our physical senses) and hidden (demanding not merely conceptual thought, but insight into the moral horizon that contextualizes the whole nature of things, grounding their integrity, and setting them in relation to the Maker). Toward that end, Thomas relied on a variety of sources: works of geology that described the virtues as well as the appearance of minerals and gems; bestiaries and medical works that described animals and plants; and astronomical works that addressed the supra-lunary spheres (charting the influence of the moon, other planets, and the stars in the heavens on life and existence below). This conceptual work involved distinction-making followed by definition of the things so distinguished, whereby each thing could be understood as something internally one and at the same time other than everything else. 

In his view there was a logic to life and existence, a logic available to us human beings by which we could make our way sure-footedly in the world. It was a logic that traded upon differences, irreducible differences that nevertheless were brought together in one unity or another via a harmony or equilibrium by which opposites were forged into composites that were themselves opposites to other composites. These composites could continue to be harmonized into greater compositions until one arrived at the first opposition: that between the divine Creator and the Creator’s creation.

Thomas’ view was a very complex play of sameness and difference, of unity and diversity, opposition and composition, generation and corruption, all integrated via principles of harmony into an eye-popping weave of equilibria at ever so many levels and of ever so many sorts. Thomas’ way into this complexity, as said, was hermeneutical: the world was a text that could be read. Moreover, the meaning of the text was itself multiple: it could be read on a literal level, an allegorical level, a moral level, and a mystical or eschatological level, much like the Scriptures of the Christian Church of the day. The world-as-text could be preached, and indeed, Thomas (who was a member of the Order of Friars Preachers), wrote this encyclopedic work to help preachers find material for their sermons.

What makes this text interesting in the present context is the logic of the world as Thomas describes it. It is a two-term or binary logic of distinctions in which a world of primary differences is yet understood to be a world with an underlying unity by which different things are composed into equilibrial wholes by the power of harmonization—opposites brought into compositions holding the opposites together at least for a time. This simplest of patterns was reproduced fractal-like across the whole expanse of the world from the hidden subterranean realms below land and sea to the highest reaches of deep space. In short, the world was a union of opposites for Thomas. Each unity has an opposite that contrasts to it as its contrary.

Thomas' experienced world was the Northern and Western quadrants of the world as he knew it. The North and West then had the South and East as its opposite. Persons, states, animals, plants, and minerals were fairly pedestrian in the Northern and Western quadrants of his experience and he describes them as such. And that meant that these same things would be opposite in the Southern and Eastern quadrants of the world. They would be exotic, marvels with strange and unaccountable properties. They would look strange and act strange, and be redolent with occult features unheard-of in the parts of the world that Thomas knew, even if his world was full of miracles and wonders by our contemporary standards and expectations. The North and West was wet and cold. The South and East was hot and dry. Life in the North and West was hard, with most eking out a bare existence against the looming spectre of starvation and death. Life in the South and East was soft. Cities were made of gold; people from the highest to the lowest lived effortless lives of torpid ease. People in the North and West were fair skinned, people in the South and East were swarthy. People in the North and West were morally striving. People in the South and East were morally indolent. You get the picture.

There is a logic to the world that guides Thomas of Cantimpré’s pen. It is a logic that is far older than him, and would far outlive him. It can be seen in the ancient Greek travellers’ reports that so interested Heroditus and in the soldiers' reports that interested the later Roman historian Tacitus. It is the logic at work in the early modern travellers’ reports to the Far East that set the European imagination alight in the 16th through the 18th centuries that Donald Lasch chronicled in the multivolume Asia in the Making of Europe. These were of course the centuries when Europe and its offspring forged a colonial logic that had room for the institution of slavery ironically (or perhaps not) just when the natively [Western] European species of unfreedom were disappearing. 

I am betting that here, in Thomas’s Liber de natura rerum, we witness a depth of expectation about the world that is operative in the scourge of colonialism and racism, marking the modern history and everyday life of European societies and the many colonies they founded. I am wondering whether it is a logic we should watch for in our subsequent examinations? I am wondering if we should ask whether this logic is a peculiarly Western logic or whether it can be found at play in other civilizations of the globe? These are a few questions that thinking about Thomas of Cantimpré’s Liber de natura rerum for the first time in years has left me with. I think of them as interesting, even worthwhile, and so I leave them with you.

Towards a Philosophy beyond Racism - Series Conclusion

by Andrew Tebbutt and Héctor Acero Ferrer, Series Editors

This post is part of the series Uprooting Racism.

Over the past 18 months, we at ICS have been reflecting on the reality of systemic oppression and its impact on our institution and community. To bring focus to these reflections, we chose to begin our work with an exploration of the ways in which systemic oppression is weaved into our religious and scholarly tradition, attempting to identify how such tradition can speak to today’s world anew. One of the venues in which this conversation has taken place is Ground Motive, through this “Uprooting Racism” series. We invited members of our community to document their own reflections and conversations, certain that our internal discussions would be enriched through a broader, society-wide dialogue. We are grateful to the individuals who contributed to this series, as they provided a number of insights and responses that continue to nourish our community in its journey forward. In bringing this series to a close, we would like to highlight some key learnings from these contributions, so that they might continue to speak to us in our ongoing efforts to uproot systemic oppression in our context.

In her contribution to this series, Junior Member Abbi Hofstede describes systemic racism as one of the “pervasive weeds” that infects the soil on which ICS has founded itself. One of the striking aspects of this metaphor is the way it conveys the hidden and deeply-entrenched nature of systemic racism, which operates, as Abbi notes, less at the level of overt opinions and attitudes and more at the level of institutional habits and social structures—in “the roots,” so to speak, of the worlds in which we live and move. Together, the posts that make up our series “Uprooting Racism” reflect on this deeply rooted nature of racism, each grappling from a distinct vantage point with the past and present of ICS as an institution committed to the realization of divine justice in the world, while not immune to complicity with systemic injustice. In his contribution, ICS alumnus Dean Dettloff draws our attention to the willful blindness to racial injustice cultivated by—even progressive, justice-oriented—forms of Christianity, and we have been challenged to reflect soberly on how our Christian worlds often perpetuate oppressive and colonialist orders. Abbi points to the difficulty of recognizing the manifestations of racism and white supremacy, which all too often operate through socially accepted codes of conduct, and whose “uprooting” falls specifically to the responsibility of white people. In his post, CPRSE Research Associate Andrew Tebbutt attempts to navigate some of the subtle pitfalls whereby efforts in antiracism end up re-centralizing whiteness, and ICS founding Senior Member Henk Hart (whose insights we have been blessed to publish in this series as well as in the series “From Henk's Archives,” prior to his passing in March 2021) encouraged us hold our focus on the full breadth of discrimination, and to attend to the intersection of anti-black racism with discrimination toward other peoples of colour and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

We originally envisioned including more than four contributions to this series. That we are “ending” the series here, however, is by no means a result of the conversation about institutional racism and ICS fizzling out. On the contrary, as a community we have seen this conversation evolve, spilling beyond the context of Ground Motive to a number of exciting and encouraging venues. For example, the conversations represented by “Uprooting Racism” also led to renewed efforts to incorporate topics related to race and racism in the ICS curriculum, as reflected in courses such as “Pragmatism, Race, and Religion,” “Colonization, Racial Identity, and What it Means to be Human,” and “Cultivating Learning Communities of Grace.” Additionally, in the fall of 2021, members of the ICS community participated in a colloquium series entitled “Philosophy Otherwise: Relearning the Philosophical Craft,” which invited guest scholars from around the globe to dialogue with us not only about institutional racism but also about the demands facing philosophy (and theology) in light of struggles for gender equality, justice for Indigenous communities, and the colonialist undertones of Western thought.

In wrapping up “Uprooting Racism,” then, we intend to signal this broadened scope of our reflections on our institutional practice, and to focus more directly on their implications for philosophy. As many of the contexts listed above have urged, the institutional roots of racial injustice are intertwined with—if not identical to—certain conceptual roots, placing a special burden on institutions of higher learning such as ICS centred on engagement with ideas. Briefly put, thinking philosophically about systemic injustice, oppression, and marginalization may not reach the full depth of these issues, to the extent that part of the problem is philosophy itself. Consider the following statements from philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff:

If we say that race is not an ontological category, and that it is a mere artificial overlay on top of more basic and more real categories, we risk losing sight of how significant the effects of racial identities have been, and how those effects have permeated every philosophical idea. Ontology itself might then be able to avoid a needed self-critique. Metaphysics and epistemology could proceed with their habitual disregard for issues of race, and political philosophy could continue to introduce racial topics only in the stages of applied theory. *

These remarks appear in the overall context of Alcoff’s challenge to the view that the “socially constructed, historically evolving and culturally variegated” nature of racial categories entails that “race” is ultimately not real. Denying race the status of an “ontological category,” she argues, “exacerbates racism” by “conceal[ing] the myriad effects that racializing practices have had and continue to have on social life, including philosophy.” Reasoning along with Alcoff here, our goal in moving beyond this series is to deepen and raise the stakes of our “self-critique,” exploring the relationship not only of our institutional life but of our very philosophical practice to the struggle to dismantle racism. 

In launching our next Ground Motive series, “Philosophy Otherwise: Knowledge Reconsidered, Learning Reimagined,” we look forward to continuing the efforts initiated here to lament our complicity in structural injustice, to listen to silenced and marginalized voices, and to imagine new futures for Christian thought and education beyond racism.

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* See Alcoff, Linda Martín, “Philosophy and Racial Identity,” in Ethnic and Racial Studies Today, 32–33, 2013.