Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the twenty-seventh installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.
My guest today is Devonya Havis. Devonya is an associate professor at Canisius College, a Jesuit institution, whose scholarly research focuses on critical philosophy of race, phenomenology, and Michel Foucault. Among the issues that her current research considers are: how theorizing injustice might better generate possibilities for justice; what it would mean to develop a conception of auditory identity; and the proposition of creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy. Devonya enjoys practicing Martial Arts, reading wizarding narratives to remain in touch with the possibilities of “magic,” and participating in long rambling chats.
Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Devonya! You seem to have had a fascinating childhood and an equally fascinating life so far. You have told me that, even when you were a child, your father encouraged you to think critically and pursue intellectual interests. For example, once after you watched The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston, your father asked you if the movie had accurately represented the Egyptians in the film. Please tell us how this upbringing has shaped your thinking.
Shelley, thanks for inviting me to take part in these dialogues. I would say that my upbringing has had the effect of making me critical—not merely from the standpoint of criticizing something in particular, but in the sense of challenging what is given. This predisposition for “critique” was part of my development and probably made me more susceptible to the lure of philosophy.
The critical attitude is also something that informs the way I teach, my research, and engagements with “the community.” I put “the community” in quotation marks as a way of acknowledging a certain shorthand that discusses community as if it is singular when, in fact, the “community” that is being referenced tends to be non-singular, multiple, and subject to dynamic processes of formation and reformation. We participate simultaneously in numerous—sometimes even conflicting—communities.
One of the initial moves in developing a critical attitude is often becoming aware of the underlying presumptions that are operative and understanding how these assumptions motivate the particular positions taken and/or arguments that emerge from those positions. When teaching, I think it is important for students to use this type of evaluation in approaching texts—be they written or representational. In my research, this attitude has pushed me to utilize lenses with inflections that are often not registered in traditional philosophical concerns. I also think that the attitude of critique significantly informs my approach to community engagement. Continually asking the difficult and often uncomfortable questions and making ongoing interrogations of the commitments taken up are modes of being that I work very hard to embrace.
[Description of image below: Coloured photo of Devonya, a Black woman, who stands at the front of a classroom, beside a media station on which an open Apple laptop sits. She is wearing glasses, a gold necklace, earrings, and ring, and a beige, patterned, button-down shirt. Her left hand is in motion and she seems to be in full teaching or lecturing mode with people in the seats in front of her who are beyond the frame.]
Like many professional philosophers, you began your studies in another field. You initially majored in biology and chemistry in order to prepare you for medical school. What prompted the change of heart and led you to philosophy?
Actually, I was fortunate in that majors at my college were not declared until the end of one’s sophomore year. So, I entered college anticipating a major in the sciences to buttress my pre-med aspirations. Over time, I began to discover that neither my aptitudes nor interests were supported by the sciences. This realization came during a conversation with one of my professors—a political philosopher—for whom I was working as a research assistant. He asked me why I was taking biology. At the time, I paused and revisited the question: Why was I taking biology?
In retrospect, my high school experience of the sciences was mostly theoretical. I enjoyed being engaged with the ideas. Labs were an entirely different thing. I was not very adept at the details and concrete tasks in the lab. Moreover, the work did not tap into my passions or commitments. On the other hand, religion and philosophy did spark my interest. I felt passionate about the kinds of texts and questions that were the focus. My religion classes drew upon psychoanalytic theory, structuralism, postmodernism, and deconstruction. For all practical purposes, the religion major exposed me to contemporary Continental Philosophy, which captured my attention because it offered a way to use theory while simultaneously challenging the ways that theory can be exclusionary.
The philosophy minor seemed more traditional, but nonetheless operated with a difference—my first philosophy professor was a feminist philosopher. The issues that these courses explored and my desire to find a language that could be used to develop a theoretical account of lived experiences really drew me into philosophy. I remember reading about Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith who was externally indistinguishable from the average person but who embraced absurdity in such a way that made the knight open to possibility. We also read Foucault’s Madness and Civilization which underscored my concerns about the tyranny of reason.
Both texts spoke to me as a Black woman from Mississippi who had seen many uncelebrated “knights of faith” whose everyday courage allowed them to embrace the racialized absurdity that played out in their lives and to nonetheless transform it. The way they invoked such absurdity also meant that they could pivot to realize the possibility of different worlds. This was the sentiment that energized acts of resistance and movements for civil and human rights. I had already wondered exactly what was being asserted when one used the concept “normal.” My experiences in Mississippi suggested that power was at work in what could be understood as “normal” and my encounter with Foucault confirmed these intuitions. In short, I was hooked on theory. Religion and philosophy gave me a means of operationalizing these impulses to theorize.
You have published several articles and book chapters that use Foucault to talk about race. What path brought you to your specialization in the work of Foucault and race? And how would you describe your work in this area?
As I noted earlier, my engagement with Foucault came like a reunion with a long-lost old friend. His work gave me an academic language for things I had observed or lived while growing up. It is not entirely clear why Foucault’s work resonated so profoundly with me but it did. So, Foucault’s writing and ideas became a vehicle through which I could talk about, and render translations of, racialized experiences—especially those in the United States.
I would characterize my work through Foucault on race as critical exercises in translation. My use of the “translation” notion honors an ongoing tradition of critique that is part of the Black tradition—a tradition I like to describe as imbedded in Black Ancestral Discourses. It is important to honor these ongoing critical traditions, practiced by Black folk, without insisting that European philosophy is required to make the analyses self-consciously critical. This means that academic philosophy can be enriched through its engagements with other diverse philosophical practices.
My insistence on acknowledging Black Ancestral Discourses is also simultaneously a way of pointing out that it is a recent event—despite numerous intentional efforts by generations of elders—that the knowledge and critical traditions of People of Color have been granted minimal admission into the domain of philosophy proper. Even so, indicating the importance of these traditions remains an ongoing point of negotiation and contestation.
When working through Foucault, I embrace his notion of subjugated knowledges to clear an academic space where I can lay claim to those traditions that fashioned me into the thinker I have become. Learning to decipher, as well as navigate, the many written, oral, musical, and performative texts within the larger Black tradition—an umbrella term not meant to suggest that there is only one tradition or that it is a singular, unified tradition—has made me more creative as a scholar. This exposure has also made me more sensitive to the kinds of scholarly improvisation one can undertake with Foucault.
In addition to engaging the Black tradition, I would characterize my work as mounting theoretical “riffs” about injustice. I have deep concerns about social justice. Consequently, I have been increasingly convinced that the path to justice must be by way of theorizing injustice. It seems to me that such theorization is part of what is at stake when one undertakes genealogy. Interventions into injustice require strategies and tactics informed by history, context, and power dynamics. My reflections on parrhesia in “The Parrhesiastic Enterprise of Black Philosophy” were an effort to demonstrate some of the ways that Black people have generated resources for disrupting injustices despite occupying social/political positions that seemingly give them access to very little power. In this respect, the article blended Foucauldian insights about power with Black traditions that have exercised resistances in many creative ways.
My writing celebrates the multivalent labor of my ancestors providing narratives beyond the tales of oppression. For me, it is crucial that there be an account of the kinds of theorizing that have made these creative resistances possible. Some of my other writing uses Foucault to unpack the ways that seemingly neutral laws have racialized presumptions embedded in their very conception. I have used Foucault’s insights about disciplinary power and biopower to explore how state-sponsored entities put forward laws that are accepted as neutral and objective, but which are actually laws that obscure deeper assumptions and practices that promote injustice.
This line of analysis led me to discuss how “Stand Your Ground Laws” are actually racialized—a perspective that provides some explanatory analysis for events like the one we mark when invoking the name "Trayvon Martin." My current work draws upon this already established line of thinking and moves to examine the problematic ways our understandings of “safety” tend to depend upon “dangerous individuals” that we might describe as “criminals” or otherwise define as “abnormals” who, from a larger structural standpoint, are perceived to be in need of management and correction. Such management always depends upon networks of power and often involves the deployment of power in ways that do not register as race-based even though they rely upon processes of normalization that characterize certain bodies, traits, etc. as acceptable or unacceptable.
Foucault argues—and I suspect many Blacks in the Americas would agree—that even though the explicit theme of race has seemed to disappear, it is actually imbedded in the very mechanisms through which modern states function. This is a particularly provocative assertion especially when examined in the context of something like the recent acquittal verdict in the Philando Castile case. In a public statement, Castile’s mother even remarked, "The system continues to fail black people, and it will continue to fail you all.” How might analysis of these events be differently inflected if we began by theorizing that what we have characterized as procedural failures are actually not accidents or exceptions but rather regular features of state functioning?
Working through Foucault to talk about these underspecified, racialized events is one way of unpacking and translating some of what is at stake. This type of translation may also illuminate some of the reasons why, even in the same encounter, some people register racialized experiences while others insist that race was, absolutely, not in play. People of Color are frequently asked to legitimize the perception that certain events "were not about" or "are not about" race. I find this particularly interesting because it presupposes that one cannot simultaneously be a Person of Color while also staffing apparatuses of white supremacy. But, one can simultaneously do both. The functioning of the mechanisms is not dependent upon the identity of a particular individual. Rather, as the model of the panopticon instructs, the efficiency of the mechanism is that it can be staffed by anyone.
I’m glad that you referred to one of the methodological reversals that Foucault’s work motivates. How do you think we should use Foucault to investigate and write about disability?
I do not know if I would offer a “should” in terms of using Foucault’s work. I like the idea of remaining open to the possibilities that emerge when people utilize Foucault’s ideas. You have done much with Foucault and critical disability scholarship. It is a bit awkward having the expert ask the student about Foucault and disability. Nonetheless, I think I like the idea of using Foucault’s insights to explore how power dynamics are operative in assertions of “normality/abnormality.” This also means it is important to explore—as you have done—the structures that define something as abled/disabled. For me, this kind of work is imperative so that we better understand how we are conditioned and participate in perpetuating existing structures.
Moreover, investigations and writing about disability promote an awareness of the different possibilities that emerge when we embrace difference, rather than trying to correct, fix, or make what is different conform with or be the same as what is assumed to be acceptable.
Again, I am attracted to the idea of ongoing, reflective refusal—that is, refusals to participate in everyday practices that have become normalized. I think uncritical participation in these seemingly “normal” everyday practices functions to perpetuate injustice. I read Hannah Arendt’s comments about the “banality of evil” as a complementary caution. So, the kind of work you and others are doing with Foucault and disability maps out many of those everyday places where refusal and resistance are necessary conditions for disrupting injustice. This type of work enlists scholars to understand that the very discourses through which we conceptualize and theorize, at the same time, condition the possibilities for what makes an appearance, how it emerges, and the possibilities for interpretation.
Reflecting on the limits of discursive framing brings to mind one of the many cautions that my father often discussed. During my childhood, he constantly reminded me that while tests provided information, equally important was determining what tests could not measure, what remained unattended. He would always tell me that, when considering results, it was necessary to weigh the limits of the tool used. Becoming attuned to these absences and discursive gaps was a unique kind of literacy that held the promise of places from which one could practice refusals, mount resistances, and create other possibilities. I think there are similar promises in much of the scholarship that uses Foucault to interrogate disability.
Please tell us about the Immersion East Side Ignatian Seminar that you co-direct and why you think community involvement is an important endeavor for philosophy faculty and students to engage in.
Immersion East Side (IES, for short) is an effort to help students realize that the kinds of injustice that they so readily see and identify in foreign countries also exists in their own neighborhoods in the United States. The course involves a twelve-day immersive experience during which students go into Buffalo’s Black communities to engage individuals and institutions in an effort to better understand existing issues and challenges.
The immersion challenges students to experience solidarity with persons who have been marginalized by unjust institutions, economic conditions, social and political structures. IES, as Father Kolvenbach aptly describes it, seeks a “well-educated solidarity” that emerges when students “let the gritty reality of this world into their lives, so they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, respond to its suffering, and engage it constructively.” The course puts students into new contexts and settings thereby pushing them beyond simple conceptual engagement that can be staid. Being "in the field” challenges students to have contact that may make them more open to further inquiry and ultimately action on behalf of justice.
Black folks in the Americas have long existed with "separate and unequal” living conditions that have perpetuated an alternative society with its own rites, rituals, and practices. Buffalo’s East Side is part of this larger tradition—one in which spirituality has been a vital component, whether it is expressed within the formal dimension of the Black church or in the ironically celebratory music of the blues. Grassroots community-based organizations also play a role in the city’s communities, often providing interventions in places where government and private interests do not.
The immersion engages spiritual, cultural, and grassroots institutions on Buffalo’s East Side to gain insight into how they make sense of community conditions, respond to the specific forms of economic injustice affecting their communities, and promote action to remedy these conditions. It is an exploration of the troubling realities of the East Side but, importantly, the immersion is also a celebration of how, even in the midst of incredibly immiserating conditions, Black people have developed a survival aesthetic that fosters a capacity to create and find joy even in the midst of a desert.
Albert Camus has written, “We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.” This sentiment seems particularly accurate when considering Buffalo’s East Side. Many presume that the dismal statistics and effects of poverty are matters of individual choice or poor planning. They recall a time when certain neighborhoods on the East Side were vital centers of business and activity. These views are part of a larger perspective that sees "the city" as a dangerous, crime-ridden place that is best avoided. An alternative, more generous view, could be characterized by the desire to “help,” while simultaneously maintaining a comfortable distance from the people who populate the East Side.
IES interrogates such uncomplicated views and interrogates the unreflective focus on “helping” the downtrodden. The goal is to foster an increasing understanding of the complex social, institutional, and structural mechanisms, as well as the patterns of neglect and complicity, that have rendered Buffalo’s East Side an area where its residents do not have the same advantages, resources, and infrastructure as similar hard-working people living in the suburbs.
One could say that IES offers a call similar to the one that Camus penned when he issued a “lucid invitation to live and create in the very midst of the desert.” In keeping with this summons, IES seeks to have students experience the creativity and resilience of everyday life on Buffalo’s East Side. It highlights those “absurd heroes” who, like Sisyphus, engage in ceaseless toil without succumbing to nihilism. Not only do immersion participants explore the factors promoting unjust conditions on Buffalo’s East Side, they experience some of the joy that is produced despite all the daunting impediments.
To me, IES is an example of the ways that philosophical theorizing has practical application and the ways that it can give rise to particular interventionist practices. It is not simply the written texts or documentaries that prompt students to think differently about the world. There is also something about the method of inquiry and participating in engaged, sustained critique.
Students and faculty reflect upon their experiences, develop, and execute a fall semester project based upon the concerns that have emerged during the twelve-day intensive period in the summer. The course has demonstrated the importance of taking philosophy into the community and it has also made those who participate appreciate that philosophy is not simply what happens in Ivory Towers. For me, it reiterates the importance of seeing philosophy as an ongoing practice that must also draw upon resources from other disciplines.
Utilizing critical methods from philosophy while resourcing information from other disciplines has had some interesting effects. Exposure to such issues as redlining and the ways opportunity is tied to one’s residential geography has given many students a language through which they can describe their experiences.
Another outcome has been a deeper understanding of the structural and institutional barriers that accompany ascriptions of race, class, gender, disability. Students often uncritically accept the myth of racial progress and are thereby not aware of the extent to which race, combined with these other factors, has had and continues to have adverse effects on one’s access to many opportunities that we have come to believe are distributed based upon merit and hard work.
I think it is important that philosophers engage with communities, share their resources, and provide spaces so that alternative narratives can be constructed and heard. Bearing witness in this way is an important form of service. Taking the the classroom into the “grittier parts of the world” is also crucial for fully appreciating the impact philosophy can have. I think of these types of community engagement as part of the active practice of philosophical intervention that disrupt injustice. It gives us bridges across which we can link work in the academy to the various kinds of work being done in the community. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Would you like to recommend some books and articles to our readers and listeners on the topics that you’ve discussed in this interview?
As great as Foucault’s lectures are, I would encourage reading or re-reading his books. There has been a lot of attention directed toward the lectures—almost as if the published works are no longer relevant. I think reading both is crucial. Works like History of Madness, Discipline and Punish, and History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, still have great resonance. I would also encourage people to be on the lookout for your forthcoming book, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, and Jennifer Scuro’s forthcoming work, Addressing Ableism.
Beyond these texts, I would recommend following certain thinkers. While there are many notable scholars producing work on race, the following thinkers provide particularly complex and interesting accounts of processes of racialization: Kristie Dotson, who writes about epistemic oppression and Black feminist thought; Denise James, who has done a compelling segment featured on the Unmute podcast programming; Falguni Sheth, whose work on political race was featured in a segment of The Stone on the relationship between race and liberalism; and Janine Jones, who has written about black fungibility for the blog Abolition. These scholars also have additional articles and/or books in print. I mentioned my work on both Black Ancestral Discourses and parrhesia earlier in the interview and have provided links to it. I have also done a podcast on "Stand Your Ground" laws and state-sponsored racism.
Devonya, thank you very much for these terrific references and for your thought-provoking remarks throughout this interview. I love your use of Foucault and the way that you described the purposes and goals of the IES.
Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Devonya Havis’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.
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Please join me here again on Wednesday, July 19th at 8 a.m. EST, for the twenty-eighth 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, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.
Hi Devonya, Shelley, and Readers,
Thank you for this interview. It's always nice to learn about another philosopher with whom one shares some of the same interests.
Devonya, like many feminist philosophers, I am also concerned with questions about the structural injustices at work, especially in places like the United States, and I've been thinking about the question of what might be the most healthy, reasonable, and effective approach to dismantling or transforming those social structures that have given rise to all the injustices that occur in our country.
Structural inequalities, unlike the more particular (person-to-person, at the level of the individual) inequalities seem to be such that they necessarily require one to consider the potential chaos (that would effect large populations of people or groups) when such problematic structures are overturned. So the question of how these problematic structures ought to be overturned becomes tricky, especially if someone (e.g., the president of the United States) is responsible for maintaining a balance of peace, safety, and equality within a society. For example, I believe President Obama did a great job during his presidency, but I think his policies as a whole, along with some Supreme Court rulings, were too much and too quick for our society as a whole to handle; President Trump being president now, as I see it, serves as evidence for this in terms of representing a right-winged, conservative backlash against some of President Obama's policies.
Do you have any suggestions or ideas on how such structural changes ought to occur so that progress towards equality can occur without the United States (or similar countries) having to go through what the United States is, unfortunately, currently going through?
Posted by: Cecilea Mun | 06/22/2017 at 01:17 PM
Cecilea, thank you for your questions. In responding, I would like to "trouble" the presumption that dismantling or simply transforming social structures will necessarily end injustices. And, that transformation can come without or with minimal discomfort. This is not to say that desiring dismantling or transforming is misplaced. Rather, my inquiry is about the points of leverage for change.
Foucault warns that "we have to conceive power without the king." I take this to mean that we have to consider that overthrowing structures does not necessarily attend to the ways that our practices have already been conditioned by those very structures. This means that even when certain structures are gone or transformed, our practices are still haunted by the seemingly absent structures. For example, the way Michelle Alexander describes structures of incarceration as the New Jim Crow.
Jim Crow as a formal system has seemingly been eliminated through the Civil Rights Movement and yet, we have "normalized" race and criminality in ways that effectively reproduce Jim Crow. In general, most people in the U.S. until very recently did not question the "fairness" of the criminal justice system even though for decades groups like Amnesty International have criticized the system and noted it as a human rights violation.
So, what I understand you to have described as particular, person-to-person inequalities depend upon framing made possible by larger structures. Meanwhile, those same person-to-person inequalities simultaneously reinforce and reproduce structural inequalities. My point here is that everyday practices and social structures are interdependent. They are therefore not necessarily linear but at least bidirectional. So, the ability of the criminal justice system to function as a form of Jim Crow without public outrage relies upon an everyday uncritical acceptance of certain kinds of presumptions -- about who commits crime, that there is a direct relationship between crime and punishment, that existing structures keep everyone safe, etc. These presumptions are also reinforced in everyday person-to-person practices.
This suggests that our very presumptions about reasonableness, chaos, peace, and safety have already been inflected by the structures we say we want to dismantle. Coming to critical awareness of our everyday complicity -- even with structures we seek to dismantle -- is an important and often untended aspect of opposing injustice. I think this is among the important leverage points for change and resistance. What do our visceral aversions really tell us about the positions that we are really living out, not our professed commitments?
This means that structural changes also depend upon keenly understanding historical and contemporary material conditions. An example, for many, Obama's presidency did not bring the kind of extensive shelter that some believe was recently blown away by Trump's election. While the recent election granted permission for gendered, raced, classed, ableist rhetoric to be embraced publically, it did not mean that those things had previously been absent. From this perspective, Obama did not move all that quickly and was largely blocked with respect to many hoped for structural changes -- among them maintaining voter protections from the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
So, we have to realize that our sense of what constitutes well being, safety, or peace may not be the same for others who must contend with different historical material conditions. It is important to engage those "voices" that constructively disturb our prevailing points of view. "Voices" that make us continually think differently. And, to the extent possible, use classrooms as places to actually engage.
Models like the Black Lives Matter platform (https://policy.m4bl.org/) offer possibilities for enacting structural change but such change is always something from my perspective that must be collectively chiseled out.
Posted by: Devonya N. Havis | 06/23/2017 at 01:50 AM
Disability is not inability
Posted by: lisa | 06/30/2017 at 04:57 AM