Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the fifth 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 Anne (“Doc”) Waters. Anne has lived with anxiety and depression for most of her life and is disabled in other ways. From her mother, she learned that privilege is something to be respected, never turned down directly, but rather transferred around, to be regenerated among less privileged people. She thinks that this is the most important lesson that she has learned about privilege and regards it as her own Native American principle of fairness. Her work also addresses the development in philosophy of transformative non-binary ontologies. She currently lives in her mother’s hometown of many generations, in the swamps of the Gulf of Mexico at the Tamiami Trail near the Withlacoochee River, where she spends much of her time hiking, writing poetry, and doing horticulture with her husband.
Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Anne! You are one of less than forty Indigenous philosophers in North America and one of only fifteen Native American philosophers in the US. What motivated you to study philosophy in graduate school and become a professional philosopher, despite this severe underrepresentation of Indigenous/First Nations/Native American philosophers in the profession?
As a Seminole woman, as a daughter of many generations of both American Indigenous and Jewish military officers who were born into and lived in America long before and since the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, I was born into and have lived in America in an era before and after the all-important Vietnam War. The living of my life has been deeply influenced by this history. During this time, I spent three years working for the Navy Department in the Pentagon. My husband is a Native American Vietnam-era Veteran. As philosopher, as poet, and as lawyer, I have experienced the angst—anxiety, fear, and hope—of these national and international politics that motivated my study of social and political thought. I remain an existential phenomenologist interested in ontology and metaphysics of ethics and social and political thought that encourages and nourishes citizen responsibility to be informed about local and world affairs. Thus, ontology and politics motivated me to study philosophy in order to better understand our human world.
I have had to fight very hard throughout my life for the privilege of studying philosophy. I decided to study philosophy after a course in existentialism and another course in the history of modern thought, back around 1973, while studying at a Brethren College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I have continued this passion for the discipline throughout my life, never wavering, and have been lucky enough to attend and teach at many different universities, over many years. I was motivated always by my love of reading, my curiosity about human experience, and the contemplation of our gallactic universe. Over the years, I had a very broad education of classical philosophy texts of many cultures, and enjoyed them all. The breadth of my philosophy background has enabled me to talk to philosophers of many schools of thought.
I have been personally motivated by faculty with alma maters primarily from Emory, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Yale Universities. Around 1976, I accompanied Joyce Trebilcot to a Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) meeting and, ever since, have felt a close bond with the early feminists of this organization who inspired and encouraged my work in so many different directions. Thus, I was philosophically active as a graduate student when early feminist philosophy was being written and delivered to SWIP forums. If you look on my CV, the lengthy one, you will see that I was lucky enough to have had more undergraduate and graduate philosophy and women’s studies classes than most feminist academics, enabling me to easily converse with, and be mentored by, diverse women philosophers. Working with Trebilcot was a pivotal experience, as was working with Bill McBride, and later Vine Deloria, Jr. If I wanted to know something, I went directly to the source and, in this process, came to know many generous philosophers over the years that have encouraged my work. They know who they are, and I am grateful to each and every one of them.
I did not think, in early career years, that my own ideas, my life choices, and my own mental and physical disabilities, nor the cultural disabilities of the profession that I encountered, over the span of forty years, would lead me on a journey for truth and equality via a political life led through philosophy and the APA. I recall in 1992, talking with McBride, about how I was not sure I would continue working in the APA, because there seemed to be no place for me there, nor anymore in the SWIP circles—I felt my own philosophical issues and concerns were outside the parameters of these groups. Yet with the intermittent, subtle coaching of McBride and Iris Young, I began my political work within the APA, leaving behind my relations with SWIP, which was busy cooking different problematics, and mentoring students quite different from me, creating its own mentor-mentee family trees. So, unbeknownst to me, I entered into the APA in 1992, to begin political work that would last the rest of my lifetime. During this time, I struggled to bring forth my own non-binary understanding of multiply-experienced discriminations and the multifarious experiences of simultaneous oppression. Rather than explain how experiences of discrimination intersect, as many others were doing and do, I have worked with a different metaphor to explain how my own experiences are simultaneous cognitive dissonances of many discriminatory ontologies, operating within one time and place. This was one of the messages of my early paper “Language Matters: Non-Discrete, Non-Binary Dualism,” which is still used in many courses.
I was also motivated to work with the APA, around 1995, by graduate students and faculty who felt that they needed a leader, someone who could direct them about what could be done by American Indians in the profession, how it could be done, and where. By this time, I had already set up numerous programs in Women’s and Native Studies across the country, as well as designed philosophy syllabi on Women’s and Native Studies. American Indians in philosophy pretty much knew one another back then, as there were so few of us. Most of these grad students have received their Ph.D. by now. I believe we have nineteen at last count. Throughout the time I did this work, I was guided by Deloria, Jr. and others whom I met along the good red road, who would show up at various times, to encourage me to continue this work. Members of the APA Committee on Blacks in Philosophy, especially, encouraged the creation of the APA Committee on American Indians in Philosophy; it was from the generosity of these scholars that I learned much about both organizing and following my philosophical passions.
To be a philosopher in the twenty-first century, for me, is to have one’s thoughts always challenged by privileged ideologies; to be of no school, yet be of many schools; to understand the pragmatics of what passes for ‘truth;’ and the gap between lived ontologies and colonial settler ontologies. It is also to live a life of political complexity, professional anxiety, and profound joy, depression, success, and friendship; it is to be dependent upon the state at times, recipient of national relief, and to carry a respect for, yet mistrust of, one’s own governmental forms. It is also to seek in all of one’s political actions, practical solutions to very difficult life problems for many people who are not among the “privileged” classes, people who barely survive. It is to not walk alone, but to be a mentor, in the best way that I know, who assists in the development of an ontology of fairness. This is what motivates my work as a philosopher, poet, and lawyer.
What is your current status and relationship to the profession and to other philosophers?
As time went on in the profession, I came to understand that being differently abled—mentally or physically—becomes part of who you are in central ways as people see you and judge you through these lenses. What it took me a long time to understand was that it really was true, as I had suspected long ago, that some philosophers thought less of the degrees, less of the work, less of the experience, and less of any of our philosophical abilities simply because we are different, or differently abled. Underprivileged philosophers have to contend with discriminations—in our own philosophical community—that will attempt to make our degrees and work less valued than the degrees and work of the privileged philosophers who have attended the “good” schools, had the “good” mentors, and got published in the “good” journals. My work has been motivated by a fuel to change this social predicament of unfairness that constrains the development of philosophy itself, to go beyond the current mundane reproduction.
As with other discriminations, the relationship between being differently abled and valued less because of differences of mental or physical abilities sets an ontological stage of hegemonic relations held intact by an ontological system exhibiting these same hegemonic relations, as they are embedded in a solipsistic metaphysic. Differently-abled vulnerability is also a product of social stratifications and privileges held in place and created by the “normatively abled,” that is, ableism. The classes enabling the normatively abled to dictate a hegemonic structure of value also enable the setting of an ontological stage that reinforces other hegemonic relations held intact by the philosophical assumptions of an ontological system. Sexual violence, for example, mental or physical, can be a practice of racism—indigenophobia, for example—as well as an abuse of a sexual nature toward a differently-abled person. I do not believe that we ought to separate out different reasons for an attack that use a binary logic of explanation because it does not adequately depict the multifarious ontological experience. We do not experience ourselves as binary objects of discrimination. It is important, I believe, that we not divide the discriminatory experiences into separated segments as experienced, but hold the whole together. Others who have tried to do this ontological shift, or turn, have quietly motivated my doing philosophy. This has included many persons.
One cognitive problem in developing Indigenous thought in the US is not the belief that, as one Washington University professor once told me, “Indians can’t do philosophy,” but rather that non-Indians must learn to shift their ontological bearings in order to understand Indigenous philosophy. This is not easy for many. Whether our dominant philosophical community can make this shift, or turn, to appreciate different ontological moments of non-binary thought or Being is a serious question that will determine the progress of Native American philosophy in the US. One way to begin such a dialogic encounter may be to ask: “What does a heteronormative ontology of sexuality as projected upon differently-abled Indigenous women look like? Anyone interested in responding to such a query would certainly motivate me into a discussion of non-binary ontology! And that is how relationship is developed within our profession when it follows its own creative force, rather than following in the footsteps of the politically correct, or popular theorists, etc. I have enjoyed the community of many philosophers in this respect.
Physically- and mentally-challenged Indigenous women have an extra, or more complex, burden to carry in this social respect, just as lesbian Indigenous women carry the complexity of unpacking a unique colonial socially-engineered oppression. Remaining marginal and oppressed, Indigenous philosophers understand the cognitive dissonance that must be crossed over upon each new teaching assignment, every conference presentation, or each new collegial encounter. The inability to understand how it is that "others" do not so experience this cognitive dissonance and also do not detect the behavioral or social messages that are given when cognitive dissonance ensues indeed confuses and astounds me, especially when these “others” are ”feminist" scholars. Some folks’ assumptions that the person with whom they are engaged in conversation has the same experience of words, concepts, and draws the same inferences—inferences that are made by those in power of the ontological realm of communicating—troubles me in this day and age of consciousness about various oppressions. This concern influences my interactions with philosophy colleagues.
Every new encounter with a potential academic mentor has been laden with worry about which of these parts of myself were not going to be acceptable to faculty or colleagues. Every new encounter with possible mentors lay the terrain that I would have to walk in order to continue the doing of philosophy. This was not easy terrain by any means of the imagination! Any slip of tongue, turn of the head, or unexpected voiced opinion could manifest itself in dissatisfying a faculty member—and we all know how difficult this burden can be at all times throughout graduate school.
I have always considered myself lucky to have had some wonderful mentors in philosophy. From Steve Watson, out of Emory, I learned that things may be more complex than at first thought; from Melbourne Evans, out of Berkeley, I learned that metaphysics is still an active field, regardless of what the philosophers who would throw it away claim, and that it very much informs our world and how we look at it, and live in it. From Trebilcot, out of Santa Barbara, I learned that it would be important to find something in common with anyone with whom I talked philosophy, which generally meant finding out what motivated their thought, as well as understand that some folks were simply not going to acknowledge that an American Indian could do philosophy. From McBride and Young, I learned that patience and listening could enable a person to abstractly, if not in experience, understand what difference differences make. I am most grateful that these individuals were able to conceive of me as a person capable of doing philosophy; at that time, a rarity in our profession. My relationships with them have been grounded upon the philosophical and working with them has produced nothing less than excellence.
As for my relations generally with philosophers, my early love of philosophy was, as I said, nurtured in existential thought, in both philosophy and literature. It was a long time before I would return to it at Purdue University. During early graduate years at Washington University, I suffered a great deal of cognitive dissonance, trying to play "catch up" in order to understand—via analytic philosophy—what accepted normative philosophical views were, as well as how they affected my ability to succeed in philosophy. Luckily for me, I found a few folks who believed in the philosophical work that I wanted to do and kept faith that I could do it, both within the APA and elsewhere.
You have published pathbreaking work on Native American philosophies. Please describe the focus of both the work that you have done in the past and your current research and writing.
From 1995 to 2005, much of what I wrote was done for the APA Committee on American Indians in Philosophy Newsletter. Looking back over those years, three books published in 2003 stand out as important to my career. I believe that the most important book that I edited is, of course, American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays, which you’ve noted.
This book changed the way that many approach American Indian philosophy. The book contained the first and only collection of articles by American Indians holding a Ph.D. in philosophy. When I was invited by Oxford to do a book, I decided that it should be a community project; that it would be important to gather together in one place, for the first time, philosophical articles written by professional American Indian philosophers. It took a while to put the book together, for, at the time I started the book, most of our authors in philosophy were still graduate students. The traditional philosophical organization of the book itself is what caught the eye of many philosophers. It was an attempt to show that something different from the norm of what had been identified as “American Philosophy” was in fact coming upon the scene, and it was America’s heritage Indigenous philosophy. It followed in the footsteps of Scott Pratt’s work—and the work of others—on Native American contributions to American philosophy, and thus opened the door for philosophers to notice something new happening in this field. I enjoyed working with the folks of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy.
The follow-up text to the book on American Indian philosophy was American Philosophies: An Anthology, which I co-edited with Leonard Harris and Pratt. We tried, in that text, to put together voices that had hitherto been left out of the rubric of “American Philosophy” and place them in a context that showed how different ideas played upon one another over an historical era. The collection was the first published anthology of diverse and minority voices in American philosophy. The book’s context did not “mesh” the articles that were chosen into an overall similar theme and thus it was a difficult task to bring them together. Nevertheless, these divergent voices conveyed at least one central message about the history of philosophy in the US. When the “cacophony” of voices emerged, they combined to show that a very different picture of ideas has circulated, and circulates, in America than the logically progressive flow of elite professional philosophy that is assumed and taught by so many. This second text presented, and still presents a series of controversial statements and opened a political dialogue about what “counts” as philosophy in the US.
The 2003 special issue of Hypatia that I co-edited, which focused on work by Indigenous women, also presented a new way of looking at philosophy, as well as explored the intersection of philosophy and women’s studies. I wrote an important and extensive introduction to this volume. Shortly thereafter, feminists in philosophy published my “Feminist Indigenous Philosophy” articles. As I’ve already said, my most successful of these philosophy articles continues to be "Language Matters: Non-Discrete, Non-Binary Dualism." The women involved with Hypatia have inspired the progression of the philosophy of Native American women. Little was written about American Indian sexual victimization, until we—myself, Inez Talamantez, and Annette Jaimes (A.J.) Guerrero—published Andrea Smith's work in Hypatia. I believe it was my relationship to the profession and with certain specific philosophers that led to the publication of this special edition about Indigenous women and philosophy. The early organizers of the project—too many names to give here—were most helpful. This publication opened new paths for feminist philosophers. Smith gave philosophers a new meaning to the phrase “Indigenous woman's experience.”
A glimpse into my current research features two books that I have been trying to write for the past few years. They are expanded projects. The first of these has a tentative title: Crossing Borders to Return: American Indian Women in Academe. This book is about a journey that many American Indian women take into academe, only to discover that there is no place here for us that embraces our traditional values of fairness and respect for one another, leading us out of the very gates that we have fought so hard to enter. Although many Native academics remain in the system, others have opted to shift from philosophy to Native American studies, work at a tribal or local community college (as I did), or simply drop out of academe. I feel that it is important to document this philosophically troublesome era of our Native scholarship.
I have tentatively titled the second book, Criminals on the Courts’ Bench: Paradoxes of the American Justice System Through the Eyes of a Native American. This book is about what is happening in the court systems in the US. The downturn of the economy has affected attorneys and all of their support personnel, as well as judges and all of their support personnel. Criminal law has become a tool used to pump money into a legal system that keeps people employed, rather than operating as a scale of justice. At the same time, many judges whose jobs have been cut by the downturn now participate in alternative legal systems under the guise of "mediation." These judges are making well over five thousand dollars a day, which amount is being paid by big business and governments to maintain the law in their favor. I am concerned about this development because it could set dangerous precedents of legal activity, as the courts become less and less open to assist any type of underrepresented person—usually of low income—in the system who does not have a "high profile case" and the money to spend on courts making law. The numbers of victims of bad law that suffer in our prison-industrial complex grows and grows in accordance with our government’s economic decisions, rather than criminal justice philosophically grounding itself. Angela Davis, whose work I have always respected, and whose philosophy inspired my own (alongside many others) has spoken about this phenomenon a great deal.
I am also currently working alongside Andrea Sullivan—a Muscogee scholar who recently received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Washington—on an article about Native American philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and was recently asked by members of the Society for American Philosophy to participate in one of their society’s future conferences. Of course, I continue my important work for the SUNY Press series Living Indigenous Philosophies, as co-editor alongside Agnes Curry at St. Joseph’s University.
Given your experiences as a student, researcher, and teacher, how do you think Native American philosophy would transform philosophy if it were genuinely incorporated into the teaching and research done in the discipline?
If, as a graduate student, I could have focused on the ideas of Native American thought, my dissertation might have been very different. I focused on ontology, morality, and law in the work I did, but would have liked to have had more background in ontologies of women of color, because this would have helped me to understand certain decisions individual women were making with respect to abortion, especially due to contextual backgrounds. My dissertation included the most comprehensive bibliography about surrogacy written at the time and this was partly because I crossed over between different disciplines such as philosophy, women’s studies, and law, in order to bring those perspectives to my work. If Native American studies, women’s studies, and Native philosophy had been incorporated into the teaching and research done in philosophy, my work might have looked very different. In fact, I think that my career would have looked very different. Also, importantly, if I had had a philosophical understanding of being differently abled that went beyond the limited feminist analysis available back then, I think that my life in academe would have been structured around such understandings. I kept my own differently abledness “in the closet.” So, I think it is fair to say that my most important and continuing interests in philosophy might have been quite different. Most especially, I believe that I would have continued my work in philosophy of science and ontology, and in logic.
One thing that I have not talked about here, but which is related to ability to do philosophy is ageism. Much has been written about this issue by women in women’s studies, but I believe that philosophy, as a discipline, has not been able to wrap its politics around how ageism directly impacts the ability of philosophy to change toward the better over time. I hope that we will see more written about how age is used to condition and create the current situation that we have in philosophy now, one of reproducing similarity, rather than investigating differences. I am hoping that both American Indian and Latin American philosophers will grasp onto this issue and run with it, but one never knows: ideas can hang around for years before they get picked up and put to use!
Getting back to your question, Shelley, I think Native American philosophy has the potential to open up Indigenous philosophy to the world, and that this is a good thing. I want to maintain important differences where they exist, but global Indigenous thought poses challenges to the formal academic discipline of philosophy everywhere; it has the power within to radically transform how we perceive and experience our world as humans on our planet, in our galaxy. There is much to learn, and even more to experience, by knowing how to make the ontological turn that we will hear more about in the future. There are colleagues standing by who are ready to take this jump, and leaders are of course needed.
An Indigneous philosophy would help us to understand that each identity which a person has that is indicative of a difference lying outside the “normative philosopher” is a site that may depict that person as lesser than, not as worthy as, or simply irrelevant to the doing of, what “normative philosophers” do. It is going to be very difficult to break through these glass ceilings and walls! But Native Philosophy can only be done by addressing this ontology of Being.
Philosophers, as ontologists, need to understand that my transcendental matter of experience is not an intersectional one, where each identity that I carry is taped or glued next to another. It is not that I am at one time attacked native, and then a lesbian or bisexual, and then as a poor person, or differently abled, but rather that I am all of these at once—all of these things that fit the category of “not our own” with respect to the philosophy discipline. We do not experience the world as stereotypes of non-white, lower class, differently abled, etc., but rather as the interfusion of these categories all at once. These categories do not intersect in my being, but all together create the identity of my being. Assuming that one is a member of different “subcategories” to the normative ignores, marginalizes, and diminishes the experience of my own unique differentness—it co-opts (or kidnaps) the reality of the non-binary lived experience.
Marginalization is about domination, it is about terrorization. It is about suffering. Marginalization closes down and puts into the closet exactly those elements of creativity that can move our discipline forward. They need to be pulled out of the closet. In reality, it is naïve and analytically misdirected to isolate the dialogues of differently-abled theory as discourse from the practices and material conditions wherein it is inserted and upon which and with which it interacts.
What changes do you think are required to the profession of philosophy in order for Indigenous philosophers and disabled philosophers (which are, by no means, mutually-exclusive groups) to fully participate and feel welcomed?
It is important that work in our core areas of ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, social and political thought, and value theory be done by those who carry yet-unarticulated experiences of life. Philosophy as practice, as both method and applied, is good; but the heart of what a philosopher does, as a philosopher, is wrestling with these investigations, hopefully in a search for truth, to make the world better. Feminist scholars—such as Sandra Harding in feminist philosophy of science and Lorraine Code in feminist epistemology—made great strides; now I would like to see more theory in consonance with newly-emerging ontological ideas about different experiences that are experienced simultaneously and merge together, looking at and experiencing the world in different ways. We have had philosophy leaders who have brought us to this place, and I include you, alongside so many others, in this endeavor, Shelley. To transform philosophy we need to open up a new way of understanding how we experience the world that is not granted by binary logics. For myself, that means keeping the personal political.
If we look at the APA, for example, and consider it as representing a community, we need to ask to what purpose is this community moving, if any? What is its purpose and what is philosophy, as a profession, trying to accomplish? Why, and by whom, is it funded? And how does it reproduce its own reality that reflects back to us relational ontologies of hegemony and exclusion? What interests, and whose interests, are “nested” in the relations that maintain hegemonic identity structures, as evidenced by the data of exclusionary group participation with which we are presented over and over again? I do not believe it is even possible that a binary logic can be used to discourse about morally appropriate meshed ontological relations among diverse folks.
I would like to see the APA sanction when more funding goes to philosophers who are paving new paths for us to walk and bringing in more diverse philosophers. A program that has one “different” person as a graduate student, and the rest just like the norm, this is not good. Nor is it good that we do not look at ourselves as a discipline and ask why we are reproducing the same set of types of thinkers and academics, year after year. We need to interrupt the flow of these same types of thinkers. Look at the job market applicants and you will see that they have all studied either the “classics” of European philosophy or American philosophy to the exclusion of much else. I’m not saying this training is not important, but it is not leading us to expand the horizons of our thinking. Year after year, we see the same type of candidates who will be hired to continue the traditions of their own colleges and universities. Our discipline has become the handmaiden of academic engineering: we reproduce for the establishment. This needs to change because what is reproduced and continued is racist, sexist, classist, heterosexist, ableist, and ageist. The underbelly of the profession has been trained to support each of these isms in our teaching, grading, papers, conferences, and mentoring. Individual philosophers need to own this.
Similarly, we need funding—and we all know where that is located—to support the new research that is happening among those who are breaking the old molds. We need to support our philosophers who work in new areas, rather than always give funds to the young of age, who are so easily co-opted to think in terms of preserving old regimes by using their youth. I am delighted about the diversity and inclusiveness syllabi online at the APA website.
Our current moment of living in a colonial world means that most folks in philosophy are, unfortunately, complicit in upholding and benefitting from the privileges of conditions and systems that horrifically exploit and dispossess differently-abled people, as well as Indigenous people, and other people who lack any privilege. If philosophers need to be involved shaping the narratives that can erase colonial cognitive violence, then we need to also ask how philosophers support the colonialist ideologies of their own institutions within the APA and how changes might occur. We have not yet figured this out. To shift gear from supporting the status quo of an educational institution is to risk not having a job—a great fear of many philosophers today. Indigenous scholars, differently-abled scholars, and all those without privilege have generally been silenced within philosophy, while the normative voices have been privileged.
You have already mentioned a number of books about Indigenous Philosophies and Native American Philosophies. Are there other resources that you would recommend for readers and listeners who wish to incorporate Native American philosophy into their syllabi for the upcoming year?
One of the most important books I've read recently is Aztec Philosophy: Understanding A World in Motion by James Maffie. Just last week I received a copy of Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt’s recent book American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present for review. That will be challenging.
Our most important resources are the tools that we need to recognize multi-experiential aspects of what it is to experience reality as an Indigenous woman—with disability, age, and so on—as a whole. When we talk about race, class, sex, gender, ability, and age in philosophy, we are talking about areas of research that are marginalized, if indeed, they are even recognized as legitimate areas of philosophical concern. Hence, when we try to talk about how these things merge in one person, it is going to be very difficult to use a western binaries-logic of experience. That is just not the way we experience the world.
Thank you, Shelley, for giving me the opportunity to participate in this interview. I have learned things by doing this project. I appreciate your work in this field and look forward to its future. This interview method of doing philosophy is transformative and brings home some important issues for philosophers to think about.
Thanks very much, Anne. You have made numerous thought-provoking remarks throughout this interview upon which readers and listeners of this interview should reflect. You have also identified a number of resources that philosophers should seek out.
Readers/listeners of this interview are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Anne Waters’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments will be permitted. Once again, I’d like to thank Bryce Huebner for the generous technical support that he enthusiastically provided as I prepared this interview.
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Please join me here again on Wednesday, September 16th at 8 a.m. EST for the sixth installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.
Anne, thanks so much for doing this interview with me. You said many interesting things throughout the interview. I would like it if you elaborated on your remark at the end of the interview according to which the interview method is a transformative way to do philosophy. This is a provocative claim because the format of these interviews is not the format that philosophical texts and discussions ordinarily take place. So, would you say a bit more about how and why you regard these interviews as a way of "doing philosophy"? Thanks.
Posted by: Shelley Tremain | 08/19/2015 at 01:40 PM
Anne has asked me to post this response for her. Shelley
Hi Shelley
Glad to join this blog! Thank you for the opportunity to share this interview ;-)
The interview style I conceive to be transformative because it gives philosophers (and “others’) opportunity to interact with philosophers in an open, accountable environment. It also ensures that when philosophers respond to queries, their responses are above board, and anything like, for example “ad hominem” attacks will not be able to work as well as they do in the APA environment where queries are often met with ridiculous responses, including rolling of the eyes, etc. This way, what folks say is as blatant as can be, and it draws in accountability. If our discipline of philosophy were to have more open opportunities like this, and include more diverse philosophers, we may be a bit further in dialogue, provided such was not compromised by “anonymous” remarks or “dissing” made by those who feel they hold more power within the discipline, and even within the APA. So man of our philosophy journals for example are still “old school” which means that it makes it more difficult to do philosophical work in areas traditionally unrepresented or in new developing areas, such as America’s Heritage Philosophy of American Indian Thought. One of the very new and recent journals I have been watching (and recently published in) is Confluence: Online Journal of World Philosophy. This journal is expanding how we think and do philosophy because it is bringing together philosophers from around the world into philosophical dialogue with one another. Lou Outlaw recently participated (along with myself) in developing a symposium of thought about “liberalism” and its limitations. Philosophers participated from various parts of the world in this dialogue, and looking at how each individual philosopher responded to Lou’s article is philosophically interesting in-itself! I would encourage everyone to have a look at this new journal (the first edition is free online).
What I am getting at here is that the APA has served the USA well developing the type of philosophy we in America are known for (pragmatism), and there are philosophy heroes and super heroes of this movement. But since the 80’s the APA has undergone some significant changes in our membership, and in our organization. These changes are opening up the discipline to more folks, and in so doing, getting more ideas of philosophical interest that are pushing the “envelope” of what counts as the “premiere” philosophy of the new millennium. I have heard graduate students with some remarkable new ideas (eg. MAP graduate students), ideas that are enabling better communication, and better analysis, than we have seen of issues in the past. In this way, your interview technique of doing philosophy is really able to grasp some of the current cognitive dissonances of our profession, and allow our scholars to talk about their work in a new less constraining, yet more accountable manner.
Dr. Anne Waters, J.D., Ph.D.
docwaters@gmail.com
Posted by: Anne Waters (via Shelley Tremain) | 08/19/2015 at 02:47 PM
Anne,
thanks so much for your response to my question. You've in fact addressed a number of issues that are topical in the profession at the moment, as well as other issues that have been a source of discussion for some time now. Again, I'm really glad that you perceive great transformational potential to the interview mode of eliciting information. Thanks.
Posted by: Shelley Tremain | 08/19/2015 at 03:48 PM
Hi Anne,
Thank you for doing this interview! I really enjoyed reading it and found, among many other things you said, that the implicit comparison between the U.S. justice system and the academic profession of philosophy to be really enlightening. I do believe that many elements of our profession (invitations to conferences, new job offers, and other sorts of opportunities) result in the sustenance of employment for those who already enjoy it and serve to maintain the status quo in terms of voices and resources. There has been a lot of related talk about this sort of thing in philosophy blogs in the last week as some have discussed "cliques" in philosophy.
As a young woman scholar, I would like to support the "ontology of fairness" you discussed and worry about inadvertently contributing to ontologies that "reinforce" hegemonic relations. I have a lot of leeway in impacting my students in positive ways, but feel much less sure of how to leverage my position (I am tenure-track at a small SLAC) in ways that benefit excluded peers and therefore contribute to fairness in philosophy. I don't often have the opportunity to spend money or use university resources. In lieu of this, I spread the work of diverse philosophers I admire to my students and engage in research that cuts across approaches and disciplines. I'm encouraged by some of the things you say about your experience in the APA, and recent changes in the APA, to consider becoming more involved in that organization. Do you have any advice for someone like me?
Thank you again, especially for the candor with which you discuss your professional experiences.
Posted by: Melinda Hall | 08/19/2015 at 07:19 PM
I was so glad to read this interview and to learn that Anne Waters is continuing her brave and groundbreaking work.
Posted by: Alison Jaggar | 08/19/2015 at 10:49 PM
I am posting a response from Anne, Shelley
Anne’s response is: I am so glad to read your comments Alison, thank you. I know how hard over the years you and so many others have worked, and influenced my own thought and politics, and that of so many feminist philosophers. I thank you especially for your support and encouragement of this blog! It means much to me and many others. :-)
Posted by: Anne Waters (via Shelley Tremain) | 08/20/2015 at 07:06 PM
I am posting this response for Anne, Shelley.
Hi Melinda,
Thank you for your comments sharing! It is encouraging to know that you use your teaching skills toward justice as fairness, as well as encourage the work of scholars moving in this direction. I think that is a lot to do, and I thank you for your work. Please continue it! I am wondering how an ontology of fairness might play out in your own ideas!
Since you asked, I would recommend to you that you consider engaging global philosophy. Check out the work, for example of Rosi Braidotti if you are interested in someone who weaves together feminism with ontology and metaphysics (can find on utube). And feel free to contact me via facebook or email and we can talk some more. I believe the internet has significantly changed access of philosophers to one another for the better (of the underclass for certain), and for sure check out the academia.edu website, where you can read some new fresh interesting global work being done in philosophy, or other disciplines that cross over into our fields (look for me there).
As for comparing the USA justice system and our academic profession of philosophy, I have followed the work of Angela Davis here for many years, and there are some other philosophers doing work in this area of the justice system more recently. I don't know of anyone who is brave enough in their career to draw the analogy of the role that the justice system plays in our culture, with that philosophy departments play. Tommy Curry comes to mind; he also has an interview on this site. Interesting thought—perhaps you will follow through thinking about that? I’d love to read a paper about it, or simply some of your ideas! There are a plenty of social and political philosophers who could be connecting these dots, and I am sure they would know how to--but again, they hold tight to the privileges of the system and don't engage in query too much off the beaten path, as far as the relation of our discipline to the dominant culture is concerned (remember, education is a colonial tool).
As for the sustenance of employment and maintaining the status quo, count on there being enough hungry enough younger scholars who are willing to maintain the status quo of the profession. This so unless it is successfully challenged by those who hold different value principles (this was method of Thurgood Marshall in Brown v Bd of Education of Topeka, Ks.); only a good work ethic could pull this off! The status quo is maintained by a system. Young scholars are easy to train to thinking, respond well to things like graduate funds, job offers, and publications (for positive sanctioning), and can be “shunned” (for negative sanctioning). As well, they support their educational institutions (and mentors) with loyalty (and this includes supporting the cliques that help support them!) I believe you have it right, philosophy is comprised of groups (some just like this), and a few lone individuals. It has served those who have benefitted from colonization (genocide), and in the USA continue to benefit from the colonization of the America’s; and similarly in other geographical areas. That is, all academics continue to benefit from the colonization done by their ancestors (I mean, when was the last time you read about America's heritage indigenous philosophy! sad grin).
Most importantly, Melinda, the next time you go to an APA meeting, remember that philosophy as a discipline is SELF-REPRODUCING (stand on an escalator or stage, and look below at all the suited philosophers); this re-production is done meticulously by those engineers who are paid well to be the gatekeepers (travel funds, publications, power at meetings, etc.) Like any institution, those who have power, some (ab)use it a lot, and those who do not have such, try to move close to, and please, those who do, in order to hope to share that power themselves (not generally for others, unless the “others” are their own mentors or their own student-faculty-families). Of course some philosophers simply drop out of these power ploys, and disappear into their own safe employment in academe. I try to remember to remember always that some simply drop out entirely.
Just as in other disciplines (think of science where “research grants” determine so much), the "have's" have an interest in continuing "THEIR OWN" whether "their own" is their ideas, or the children of families of academic colleagues, who train their children (and similarly situated students of class, gender, etc.) for academic jobs. Older scholars are known for seeking out young potential philosophers who will assist in the reproduction of their own ideas, as well as the discipline. This system has been successfully used more recently by some different and unrepresented philosophers. This includes feminist philosophers, who e.g. recruit young women into the discipline --though some have not been including "difference" factors, so ideas and pictures of these groups that are being mentored look pretty much like "family pictures" if you get my drift (actually I've seen family pictures that portray greater diversity!) So understanding these nuances can enable a person to find "their own" "clique" or at least being aware of how the system works, they can choose to "participate" or "withdraw" when this kind of power is used in the discipline (rather like Marilyn Frye's notion of "withdrawing support" to watch it collapse). Of course, it’s hard to withdraw if you have spent your life preparing for a job in the field! There are some in the APA now who are becoming aware of how these problems have influenced the development (or lack of development) of philosophy as a discipline.
Advice? Continue doing what your doing and look for those interstices of theory that make sense of the reality of the culture we live in, and keep trying to make a difference, always remembering to remember that you have benefitted from, and continue to benefit from, an unjust system of power and privilege that the privileged have and hold by virtue of the historical and on-going colonizations of so many people. This will make it easier to understand philosophy as cultural institution. Discrimination is, after all, about on-going deprivation of self-esteem minimally, and life for some, and this... for discussion another day.
Thanks for your comments, Melinda, and I look forward to meeting you someday! Know that individuals can make a difference, yet more than one person is required to make important differences. Seek out mentors of common value! Join the APA, but find commonality of value there, rather than commonality of climbing the philosophical ladder upscale to the economic and privileged classes some desire. Use the APA, if for nothing else, as an opportunity to join with others who have some common academic background, with which to talk about the values of the discipline and institutional organization, and how to spend your time there well. I hope you do join! And if you see me there, be sure to say “HI!” But know that it is important to not be “alienated” when attending these events, to find out who you know is going there first, and I'll hope to see you there someday! Thanks again for sharing community ;-)
Dr. Anne Waters, J.D., Ph.D.
docwaters@gmail.com
Posted by: Anne Waters (via Shelley Tremain) | 08/21/2015 at 05:17 PM