 Good morning. Can everyone hear me? Oh good. Okay. I'll say it again then. Good morning. Oh Very good to have you. I am Sarah Brill Chair of the Department of Philosophy here at Fairfield and on behalf of my department and my fellow ethics symposium subcommittee members Chris Sealy and Toby Svoboda and on behalf of myself It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the first ethics here and now event a Daylong symposium on racial justice reproductive justice Climate justice. Thank you for being here. It's very good to have you The ethics here and now initiative was conceived as a forum for fostering innovative Dynamic thinking about the most pressing calls of action to our time in Keeping with this commitment to thinking the here and now we would like to begin with a call to thinking and action By recognizing that our presence in this time and place is a direct function of the violent action and logic of the United States settler state in its ongoing history of colonization and Thus in recognizing our obligation to educate ourselves and others about this history and to act accordingly To that end we invite all in attendance today to consult materials posted through Organizations like the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center the akamot educational initiative and native land digital We have also been honored by the support We have received from all parts of the university and I'd like to take a moment to offer some thanks First from the office of the provost we have the indefatigable defense of our faculty in the form of the provost herself Dr. Christine seagull and Dr. Jacqueline barishka assistant vice provost of scholarly community and creative engagement Provost seagull herself is here to offer a few welcoming comments. So I'll now turn the floor over to her for a moment Thank you provost seagull. Thank you. I think that's the best welcome introduction. I've ever received This Friday morning brings us to the end of a week at Fairfield University That's not a typical but has been interesting I think in that we have hosted a series of interesting speakers and events on Wednesday night our open visions forum hosted Samantha power former US ambassador to the UN under Barack Obama who talked with us about Technology and polarization in the age of democracy and how we take steps forward Last night in this room. We hosted the Peter Kinesis fellow From I'm sorry Peter Kinesis professor from Boston College father James Keenan who talked to us about vulnerability vulnerability in Radical hospitality and what that means for our inclusive excellence initiatives here at Fairfield University and across campus Later in the evening last night. We had the deputy counsel general for the Irish consulate in New York Talking about Brexit and current concerns Related to that and you are here today to talk as Sarah just mentioned about dynamic thinking about pressing issues of our own time The theme across all the events this week at Fairfield University has been one of the University as a place for open discourse on critical issues Your presence here today Helps us participate in that discourse and continue to bring those issues to light And so we're thrilled to welcome you our invited speakers We're happy to have students participating throughout the events of the day and to continue With you to support dialogue That aims toward justice. Thank you Thank you provost seagull Secondly, we have enjoyed the generous support of the humanities Institute of the College of Arts and Sciences at Fairfield Now in its 35th year of supporting research and teaching in the humanities We are joined by the director of the Institute Dr. Nels Nels Pearson who would also like to offer a few welcoming comments Take it away Nels. Thank you Thank you very much Sarah and and thanks for all the work that was put in by Toby and Toby Sabota and Chris Sealy and and Sarah to put this together it's really the philosophy department's work that's made this possible and Also, thanks to my own program coordinator miss Elizabeth Hastings who has done a great deal of work to help us be sponsors of the event She's back in the back So I am Nels Pearson. I'm professor of English and director of the humanities Institute I just wanted to take a moment to say a few words about the Institute and about our support for the philosophy department's ethics here and now symposium 2019 as Sarah referred to marks the 35th anniversary of the Institute, which was founded in 1984 with the help of an NEH challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and since that time We've really tried to promote the study and teaching of the humanities as central to a Fairfield University Education as well as to establish Fairfield University as a hub for national and international scholarship in the humanities And we do that by supporting faculty and student research in both traditional and emerging fields in the disciplinary and interdisciplinary humanities and by sponsoring public programming and community initiatives and Today symposium I think really not be more timely not only because of the three issues it will address but also because of its aim to highlight The call to action that is or that ought to be inherent in their intellectual study In almost every era of the history of ideas and certainly throughout the development of the theoretical disciplines in the humanities The question of action has arisen of how to translate the insights that are afforded by speculative reasoning and critical hypotheses into action and into practice and Perhaps these two things that theory and practice don't drive one another as much as they should whether in the Academy or Beyond the Academy But when you think about the issues under consideration in this symposium issues of climate justice racial justice and reproductive justice I think that that interaction between our theoretical and intellectual understanding and our call to action or what we do with that understanding is absolutely crucial and in fact I think with those three things you could say it's kind of getting a bit late in the game, right? So it's for those reasons that we are absolutely delighted to support the philosophy department and to partner with them as they host this wonderful symposium ethics here and now All right at this point. I'll move rather quickly So we've also had generous support from the College of Arts and Sciences Common grounds fund and I'd like to thank Dean Richard Greenwall who had hoped to be here today But was unfortunately called away for a meeting We have also had a groundswell of support from over 20 departments and programs. They are all listed on the back of your program And I will take a moment to very quickly note that we've been supported by the departments of anthropology sociology communication history English modern languages and literatures Politics visual and performing arts and by the programs of applied ethics black studies Catholic studies classical studies environmental studies international studies Islamic world studies Judaic studies Latin American and Caribbean studies peace and justice studies and women gender and sexuality studies Thank you all We couldn't have done any of this without the expert support of our administrative staff Elizabeth Hastings Joanne Farance Christina Albino and Audra Bufard. Thank you all so much And then finally we owe a huge thank you to our panelists and our faculty Affiliates whom we will be introducing over the course of the day Thank you for pledging your time and thought with us as we strive to identify and amplify the calls to justice Embedded within scholarly and active approaches to racial injustice reproductive politics and climate change We'll begin with a panel discussion focused on racial justice our panelists our dr. Alfred Frankowski assistant professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University Dr. Devanya have us associate professor of Philosophy and women and gender studies at Kanisha's college and dr. Chiara Ricky Ardon the Clemens von Clemper postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center of Bard College The conversation will be moderated by our own dr. Chris Sealy associate professor of philosophy director of the black studies program Coordinator of the social justice signature of the magus core and associate director of the humanities Institute If that sounds like a lot it is Please join me in welcoming our panel so I get to start huh good morning So I'm going to try to stay still so that I can talk into the mic, but I'm used to moving so Since I am since I'm the first I get to thank Sarah Braille dr. Sarah Braille for the invitation and Thank you all for showing up so early at 9 o'clock in the morning to discuss philosophy and social justice So I thought I'd start off with with with just introducing something that I focus on in my own work, which is I think broadly I focus on the aesthetic dynamics of political violence and What that means is that My focus on this sort of by aesthetic is that I focus on those things that are That appear as violence and those things that don't appear as violence or the conditions under which some things appear as violence The conditions under which some things don't appear as violence or the conditions under which some things appear as Meaningful violence and the conditions under which some things appear as not meaningful violence So under this broad term aesthetic violence, those are the things that I tend to focus on and Which means that aesthetic violence isn't limited to talking only about Talking only about Overt violence, it's not just the violence of the police. It's not just the violence of the abusers not just the violence of the military, right? So I'm interested in how how forms of aesthetic violence are woven into the fabric of our everyday lives Or the conditions under which we find ourselves and how sometimes articulating or not being able to articulate that violence creates a condition under which We we find ourselves placed or displaced So within that rubric I've worked on Primarily thinking about histories of anti-black violence in the United States, but lately I've been brought in that work to include Colonialism, so I'll make a few claims here And your quills should go up a bit I'll make some claims that I'm not going to explain them that much right now So the first claim is that Part of my work is focused on anti-black colonialism and the claim is that anti-black colonialism is a political commitment to genocide the second claim is that We cannot understand the history of the United States without understanding histories of lynching of Terror spectacle lynching because terror spectacle lynching is not just an event, but an architecture of violence an architecture of violence So let me start with the first claim To say a few things about it So the claim is that anti-black by anti-black colonialism is genocidal It's genocidal in that it naturalizes processes through which the mass death and cultural destruction of peoples Designated as black or treated as black proliferate Genocide of course is not simply a reference to The mass killings of people but the destructions or undermining of people over periods of time through process through political processes There's the bell So As we as I sort as we think about anti-black colonialism I Think that one of the things that we have to consider are the one of the things that we have to make clear is that That it get clear in our thinking is that that is the concrete and least abstract way of talking about the world in which we find Ourselves so I don't deny that there could be other forms of colonialism or that colonialism That happens to many different people but our Colonialism the colonialism that happened in this world that was enabled by the slave trade that was enabled by the by the dispersion of black bodies across the across the world as a commodity Was an anti-black practice and as such it remains an anti-black colonialism It's only through anti-black colonialism that you have the settler finding themselves at a crisis With other people and not just having an immigrant experience So when we think about Europeans coming to the United States, right? They might have had an immigrant experience at first but once they became settlers They stopped having that immigrant experience and we could talk about their relationship them through With indigenous peoples as an anti-black experience as soon as it turns to killing as soon as the as soon as the Process ends up being genocidal from the from the get-go So Some of this I was led to some of this work through a book a book a series of essays that ended up Turning itself into more or less a book project thinking about Rwanda and the Rwandan genocide The 1994 war Rwandan genocide Appeared as with the as as as one of the pivotal genocides of the 20th century, but it was curious in so far as it appeared There have been many conflicts in genocide in Africa that had not appeared so why Rwanda? In so far as it appeared it appeared as an event a sort of world historical event, but It what was odd to me was that the aesthetic Domain of violence there Remained operative what was what was denied was that Rwanda as a gen as a site of genocide Was also part of a long colonial history So as it becomes it's taken up into the discourses of genocide It becomes less and less clear how that relates to its histories of colonialism and so in in effect it makes it makes the That history becomes something that is not that is not talked about nor After the genocide do we see a whole lot of discussion as to the processes through which the genocide Politically maintained itself the player politically emerged. So instead we see a post-genocidal phase in which the most overt forms of violence are gone or have been removed or have been dealt with in one way or another and yet on the ground people still feel like genocide could happen at any moment and so So it's important I think it's important as we talk about as we think about this that there are all that any violence has a number of aesthetic dimensions to it and raise this particular questions for us a Rwanda is also peculiar in that in so far as Rwanda stands out as a genocide It also makes that in the understanding of genocide in other areas become less and less clear Because in our political imaginary if we clean it up if we detach it from colonialism suddenly We can talk about it as being something like the Holocaust the Holocaust Of course is being a genocide that happened in Europe right heavily a place that Where violence where where the appearance of violence is something shocking so But again, right the Holocaust has its own colonial history that we don't talk about as well so So Rwanda was one of the places so thinking about the Rwandan genocide got me thinking a lot more about colonialism and thinking about these aesthetic elements of colonialism and how That's necessary for us to work through and against in order to Think more substantively about how our practices continue histories of violence how our Space the spaces in which we occupy are not simply present but have but but bleed over into the past And it got me to rethinking the way in which we Deal with something like histories of terra spectacle lynching So my claim here was that histories of terra spectacle lynching is a form of architecture not a form of historical events or not simply a form of historical events so we can talk about the history of Lynching as discreet particular events and it's important to talk to talk about the Individuality of each of these things right that the people's names the places in which it happened the communities in which it happened to Are extraordinarily important to make sure that that that we don't lose sight of that But once we start to talk about it as a history we forget that the lynching was never about the killing of just the body That's that it is not equatable to murder. It is not equatable to homicide if it were Then they would kill the body very quickly But the point of the lynching was to make the make the process of death go on as long as possible make the dismemberment of the body a fetish and That they were spectacles so they were community events When we sit when the current numbers on lynchings say that there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States that were recorded not to mention the ones that were unrecorded of course Right, we can say that these were these were These were as These were as American as American apple pie and cotton candy two things that were of course sold at lynchings But Again, I want to focus and On that they were structural so this so the way in which spaces were created through lynchings The way in which political power was disseminated through lynchings and the way in which these public events these public gatherings Use the the lynching as a political statement As a promise what I mean by that is that they used it as a promise that would be fulfilled in In future generations and so the whole entire political sphere of the event of lynching creates an architecture through which Blacks whites other folks have to readjust themselves not just in terms of The the actual lynching but in terms of the whole specter of violence When we talk about terrorist spectacle lynching, of course, we talk about it as being something directed at black bodies Majority over 70 of lynchings did occur Mainly targeting black men We talk about them as being Largely about black men We forget that these were sites and occasions for Men to be sodomized in public To be groped by crowds as they had their genitalia torn off We forget about that. We ignore the fact that they are not just Sites at which Race is being constructed or white supremacy is being reconstructed, but whiteness blackness Gender Are all being reconfigured within the lynching ritual And as something political We forget that native americans share in this history of lynching We forget that white women Share in this history of lynching as well And mexicans and asians in the later part of the 20th century as well Excuse me later part of the first half of the 20th century And so we should be concerned with what that architecture is What it means and how we how we think against it And so And so part so so the one of the upshots of the of the work that i've been i've been doing is to Is to try to provide the space for which We can think through and past the types of violence that we are that affect our spaces but actively take a role In thinking the political anew so Three places three sites of action That i think need to be reconfigured The history of mass incarceration which has met its strongest challenge in the abolition movement to abolish prisons Is a good start, but How does reconfiguring the society how does reconfiguring and rethinking the way in which we relate to peoples and spaces and environments Set up a ground for which Incarceration is not an option number two Ethics at the border in the border crisis Currently in the currently we have Until numbers of people being incarcerated in concentration camps at the borders We need more than just a political discussion of policies failed or inhumanity of particular regimes But a concern for rethinking the our ethics Relative to their suffering The last the last point is thinking about Thinking about what it means to to be to think of our political activity as A platform through which we rework what it means to build coalitions so Where it is it is Wonderful to see folks From different groups come together and build coalitions around shared interests What would it mean for us to think Of the environmental crisis as a racial crisis as a gender crisis itself What would it mean to decolonize That that that co the even the need for coalition building around particular groups Um So these are just some some of the things that i've been thinking about and I think that What the upshot of all this is is that there is a need for something like a decolonial aesthetics Uh of both practice and of the political So i'll stop my thoughts there So i'm i'm assuming that we have lots of questions. Um, so if I could ask everyone to jot down your questions We'll let all three panelists Give us a sense of what they work on and why it's significant to them Um, and then we'll open things up to questions so we could have a sort of holistic organic conversation So i'll now turn things over to dr. Havers. Oh, thank you. Um, I I always work in an explosion So you're just gonna flow with me with my How it unfolds i'm just warning you not apologizing um So I want to start with thank yous as well. You were You uh laid them out a little more eloquently than I so I won't Terri too long with that. Um, secondly um, I want to kind of Make an invocation as setting the context for um my work And by that, I mean I can't imagine Any of the work I do without also Understanding it as part of a continuum That is a legacy bequeathed to me by my ancestors And I stand on their shoulders and hopefully I will Lay a pathway for other people to stand on my shoulders and I say that because My work is not solely my own It is uh grounded in a community and so Because Philosophers tend to be abstract. I'm going to give you some concrete narrative pieces to hang this on Um, and I want to begin first With something from my grandmother Mama B And she had a recipe of for life And her recipe for life was Except the impossible Bear the intolerable Do without the indispensable I'm gonna say it one more time Except the impossible bear the intolerable do without the indispensable Now on the surface That sounds really horrific, right? And I want to argue That We can't simply Take that on its face There's some kind of ironic transformation That's going on and I want to Sort of juxtapose that with um Some other things that people like In particular Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin have said In particular Ellison says We could live with music or die with noise and we rather desperately chose to live And he goes on in a different work Invisible man And he says that when you have lived invisible as long as I have you develop a certain ingenuity And it's an ingenuity to solve the problem And he describes this kind of ingenuity in terms of Lewis Armstrong And he says he bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound I'm gonna quote Ellison at length here He goes on he says I discovered a new analytical way of listening to music The unheard sounds came through and each melodic line Existed of itself stood out clearly from all the rest said its peace and waited patiently for the other voices to speak I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well I not only entered the music But descended like Dante into its death In quote and Why I reference Ellison my grandmother my father is because What i'm interested in in my work is the ways that communities Develop their own critical tools and they have their own perspective and I say that because We were asked to talk about how we came to what we came to and it always struck me that People in the communities where I lived were not simply suffering and is rated dispossessed Oppressed people in need of being cured of their oppression, right? So there's kind of medicalization of all we need to do is cure them of their blackness and we'll be all right and it really bothered me because People in my communities didn't think of themselves As in need of curing They thought of themselves as resilient people who fashioned Possibility out of impossibility And that is a unique and creative skill and so When I found myself in classrooms With people who describe some describe themselves as progressive when I found myself At a Jesuit institution committed to social justice I was always bothered by the absence Of those narratives grounded in people who actively and critically struggle, right? And so much of my work I would describe it as critical troublemaking And I say critical because it's not just to create a problem, but it's also to shift How things are framed and unframed to shift as you were saying The ways in which we take some things up and don't take other things up most notably the way in which we act as if Cultures and peoples especially if they're deemed oppressed or colonized we act as if they don't have their own critical apparatus to investigate the world And so what is that and what does it mean To put those things together to come up with something new I mean we're all doing This academic thing But I want to argue that when we come to it With the entirety of who we are We have the potential of transforming what it is we learn and how that learning enters into the world and so I was as I was thinking about my remarks I The prompt Talked about well, what is your research? And I and I thought about that and I can never exactly say what it is I'm doing because I'm in the midst of doing it And you know you have that critical perspective once it's done And I think I'm always I hope I'm always doing in other words always Reinventing challenging But one of the big takeaways In reflecting on it that I'd like to kind of throw out there Is the way we conceive of work right so research Is one piece of What I do as what I'll call work And the reason I frame it that way is because so much Of our the entirety of who we are Can get closed off especially in academia in other words what counts as legitimate academic work Doesn't acknowledge often The embeddedness that I think is necessary within communities And not just sort of me as academic going into communities But me Bearing witness to the narratives that communities Tell about themselves and construct for themselves, right? And One of the ways to think about that is in terms of Hole in box Coven box injunction that we develop a well educated solidarity, right? so Solidarity is great but What is it if you don't come educated if you don't Develop a knowledge about the ways in which people Have histories have constructed them value them and live into The wonders of that and let me give you an example because that's kind of abstract so I always talk to Our administrative associates because one of the lessons for me as a young person is Everyone is super important and frankly At least at my institution my administrative associate manages to keep things running without her there would be a crisis And things would go into halt and yet there's a way in which we don't value That crucial critical work that is necessary so that we can do other kinds of work and so Research is a piece of work, but it's not all of work. So I was having a conversation with her and she's like, you know Why can't we just not focus on Races, why can't we just be people? And I looked at her and I said when you give up being Italian, I'll give up being black And my point there is In claiming that for me there is a legacy of pride, right? So when we talk about The education gap it's curious to me because Only within the last 50 years really has it been Factually or legally okay For black people to read and write So if you shift the lens, it's pretty phenomenal how far people have gotten Given these conditions these structural impediments to success you've got people who have Achieved remarkable things in spite of those obstacles. So how do we Shift that lens, right? How do we think from the vantage point of of those communities and how do we understand work as At least for me always embedded in a community a context and a history So I'd argue What I do has a number of dimensions One of the dimensions is what I do in the classroom And a lot of what I'm doing in the classroom Has to do with Uncovering or Talking about things that we think we know, right? So most of us show up and we go oh race we know what that is But do we really how does it actually function? And I'll I'll say if I have time I'll say a little bit more about that. Um, I also Think beyond teaching there is The necessary engagement with communities And part of that engagement with communities from my vantage point means Bringing whatever institutional resources I have to bear on projects that communities Determined for themselves and opening up access to rooms To time to resources And and that's a kind of that's a piece of work because you have to be in relationship with people You can't just show up and say We're we're doing service today, right? And in fact, which it's kind of controversial at a jazuit school, but I think we have to earn the the privilege of Being engaged with people because often when we do service And we say oh it's great. I helped them. Well We're not going to solve the problem of food insecurity by working at On the Pantries or Soup kitchens, right? and so what The net effect is how do the people who we believe are ourselves to be serving Understand what we're doing when we're doing service Are we really doing service or are we kind of creating a situation where we feel good about ourselves without rigorously confronting the issues and I I do a An immersion program in the jazuit tradition where we go out Into the community And we listen we bear witness to the community And it's a seminar and I was laughing last night talking about it Most of the people at my college think that it is service And we explicitly Don't make it service. It's a seminar We may do service incidentally a long way But we can't be of service until we understand Where people are their context, right? um Other pieces of work for me involve actively Resisting or refusing uh I'll call it broadly carcerality in particular, um Buffalo is really focused on Building what they call the catchphrase is building civic capacity And a lot of it has to do with engagements with developing people To lead communities, but also resourcing Community organizers to better understand the nature of that work and to help people do that work and to figure out how One might get a college degree While doing this work and then go out and be embedded in communities Thinking critically and with sets of skills to do that I am involved with a prison visiting project In new york most of the prisons are in rural areas and There is a group that was given a mandate to visit prisons and check on conditions in prisons They're based in new york city They have to travel from new york city to western new york to do this and so they need people in western new york to Help in that process And so That's part of What I would say is my work and I say all of this To Acknowledge the ways in which these lived every day experiences Transform the kinds of things I write about The kinds of things i'm thinking about and the way I teach and Some of the concrete things that i'm Actively working on on that end Have to do with How do I put it We recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of morn luther king's death I hear frequently in my classrooms That we are better off than we were in the 60s and that's an interesting narrative because What measures are we using other than how we feel or what we think or the fact that we have multiracial classrooms In a very segregated u.s. Society, right? And By none of the measures that king used or that most of us would use Are we any better off? So how is that narrative working? To excuse our commitments to structures that fundamentally Dismember people And and I take that language from a colleague In critical disability studies and so she talks about the idea of dismemberment Contrasted with a notion of in-memberment. So if we're thinking broadly about Not just accommodation But accessibility creating a world where We can all show up and thrive What kind of world would that look like? It's not a world where the burden of Productivity or success depends upon me working extra hard in order to get whatever accommodations are necessary for me to succeed, right? It's not a world where people end up with Impediments and we Tout them as primary example of hard work if they overcome the impediments as opposed to celebrating The rare and phenomenal achievement that they managed to get through, right? So finally The two things that i'm currently working on are one what I call a non normative ethics of refusal and There are Certain thinkers that I resource i'm not going to list them off if you're curious to ask me Because I don't want to go down that line, but the question is If we Exist in an unjust world How is any theory of ethics that we've constructed not going to be infected by that very injustice? So if we have a theory of ethics, I mean a theory of justice or a theory of ethics In a world that is Not really ethical or just Maybe we can't We can't rely upon those theories. Maybe we need to start With the failure of ethics and the failure of justice Before we can frame a theory Um And so part of that is that we often don't want to tarry with the uncomfortable We want to rush forward to What I'd call a foolish forgiveness Or hope as an evasion and I was thinking about this Last night when I was looking at for those of you who watched the news the The the way things in the court unfolded when the former dallas Police officer was convicted of murdering her neighbor and the news was all Titillated about the fact that the brother of the shooting victim hugged This woman who was convicted for it And for me, that's illustrative of how we want to rush beyond the conditions that produce these horrors To jump to forgiveness to to kind of celebrate that moment of reconciliation and Collaboration and I I think we have to refuse that Finally The thing that I've been playing around with Most Of late is what I call practices of freedom under conditions of unfreedom And what that means for me is I don't think it is reasonable for somebody like mama b or ellison or people who live within these conditions that they cannot radically change By their own action It's it's a little disingenuous to talk about freedom under those contexts And yet i'm not willing To accept that people are not actively working To move beyond the conditions where they find themselves And so for me, we have to talk about the practices that people use to strategically and tactically Displace the kinds of injustices that that They and we often face every day Um and There's an acknowledgement that this happens under conditions of unfreedom and it's unfreedom rather than oppression because People who are unfree Have some critical things to say about that condition They are not simply passively oppressed, right? They're engaged in some critical activity They're often commenting on it and using Tactics that may not register as resistance and one of the places That I Resource as an archive for this is music music and the black expressive tradition in particular spirituals Work songs blues jazz Sometimes hip-hop if it's old school and that's another conversation um But part of what's going on there On my account Is often a commentary on Unfreedom a characterization of the conditions under which One is produced as unfree And the ways in which we transform The the raw appearance Of that unfreedom in everyday lived experience how do we How do we live without the indispensable and yet not What are our possibilities for being otherwise? So i'll stop there. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you For your help, anthony. Thank you, sarah. Thank you chris and toby. Thank you to my fellow panelists And to everyone who's going to speak today everyone for being here It's really it's a pleasure and an honor and my hope for today is that I come out of it thinking differently And I can already see that that is going to be true So I want to talk today my title of my talk is called healing racial difference And what I do is very different from my co-panelists. I primarily My background is in continental philosophy and ancient greek philosophy rhetoric and politics and what I try to do is Appropriate ancient greek ideas to put them into conversation with the present And in particular what I've done is I focused on play-dose concept of difference And how it comes up through metaphors of disease And this is not what Devanya was talking about about Black people are need to be cured in some ways. It's actually I think gets to something profound which is that Difference makes us uncomfortable When we find ourselves in a unfamiliar situation We feel a disease within ourselves And so one of play-dose strategies for making us see Um and understand the concept of difference is to use language that makes us feel that disease makes us feel that uncomfortableness as a way to be able to begin to talk about difference And the work that I've done sometimes talks about how we can reread that language That might seem like a bad thing today. We want to celebrate difference. We want maybe to transcend difference. We want to Understand difference. So it might seem like a bad thing that play-doh is talking about difference in terms of disease But I think that if you read him closely, you can also see that difference and disease are generative that they're catalysts That they're responsible for the complexity of our world so that's a lot of the the work that I've done to date and Um I'll give you a better example of it and just a moment I want to also say that the other thing that I do is A little bit of what this conference tries to do So I'm part of a project called the activist graduate school And it we try to bring together what's best about academia with what's best about activism so that We bring the critical thinking that academics are very good at into the into the activist world And we try to bring that passion for action into the academic world I'm happy to talk more about that as well So our prompt was to talk about what we do and how we got here and why it's important How I got here is um, there's a lot of ways to tell the story But as it happens as an accident of biography I grew up in egypt and turkey In international communities where I was always being forced to navigate difference And I ended up in an interracial family Which my in-laws and my my partner have taught me a lot About the racism and are have given me a real stake in confronting it I like to say that i'm the auto immune response of the state meaning I was brought up in power and privilege, but it was by virtue of that that um, I Became so committed to overcoming the things that produced me the way that I am So today in terms of why what I do is important I want to I could offer you some abstractions about using the classics to undo the elite privilege that they have traditionally guarded I thought that it would be more useful to me to take the opportunity to do a little bit of work and let you assess for yourself Whether or how this kind of work is important So today I want to take on the question. How do we heal from racial difference and see what kinds of Resources play dough offers us for doing that So as I've already said play dough often talks about difference in terms of disease In one place where he does this in a very condensed and intense way is in the sophist And that's a late dialogue In which the visitor from aliyah sets out to define the title character and the sophists are where we get our words sophistry They were this group of itinerant teachers in ancient Greece And as they as they try to define him difference turns out to be really crucial At first they define The sophist in kind of a satirical or whimsical way they call them the hunters of young men Retailers of various kinds of knowledge an athlete in verbal combat But when they get to the fifth definition of the sophist, which is really a definition of the philosopher the visitor starts to Introduce the idea that being able to distinguish intellectually to make intellectual differentiations Is a form of soul cleansing What is the badness in the soul that needs cleansing? Well, he says to his interlocutor theatidas Presumably you consider disease and discourse the same thing. Don't you Do you think that discord is anything other than the difference among things that are naturally akin? Coming from some kind of decay This is a complex set of associations and equations Plato is starting with the building block of the association between disease and discord or civil war For the for the Greeks and even for us today. It was very natural to think about Civil war or conflict within the body politic as a disease as something that was harming the social community And in the same way it was perfectly natural to see the diseases as your body fighting against itself Which in fact it is a lot of your the symptoms like your fever is actually your body is immune response trying to fight off the Invention so we still use that kind of language His Plato's innovation here though is to say that what's at the root of that metaphor What links those things together is the concept of difference diafora And that that comes from a greek word that means To bear apart to disjoin to delay or defer to make a difference and also to quarrel or to fight So there is that that sense of conflict built into that for that verb that means difference to differ And then he then he adds this word decay Diafaro and the the very closeness between diafaro and diafaro difference and decay Really completes that semantic circle so that all these things are coming together Okay, i'm a visual thinker. That's why I have a power point. That's why I do this concept map for you that I hope kind of Puts these relationships into a clearer form So Plato goes even further than saying that difference is disease He adds another set of concepts as well He says that there are Two kinds of deficiency in the soul. This is the visitor speaking And we need to say that cowardice licentiousness and injustice are a disease in us And that to be extremely ignorant of all sorts of things is a kind of deformity So he's already said and something I didn't read for you that deformity and ignorance come from disproportion And so we have two sort of Senses of difference in the way that they lead to afflictions in the soul One really strongly difference, which is disease civil war and justice vice and the other is disproportion, which leads to deformity and ignorance Okay So is it appropriate to think about this schema of difference in the soul In relationship to racial justice or am I making too big of a leap and trying to connect to these domains? I think that it is important. I think that it is valid I think that racial difference is much less a matter of physical difference There is no gene for race And much more a matter of our history our souls our inner perception and very often of ignorance And there's a very good book that I want to read more called race craft by Karen and Barbara fields that argues that races The category of race is actually the effect of racism and not vice versa So we tend to think first there's race and then we build up these associations and prejudices around it rather. She says No, um, there's or these two women once a historian once a sociologist say First comes racism and then we start to develop the idea of race through all the the history and complex social Prejudices that emerge The second reason I think that it makes sense to um, think about play-doh together, sorry um, think about play-doh together with race is um That racial justice is rightly considered a form of injustice and that drawing these boundaries um When we think about difference, it's very difficult to think about Different groups as being equal almost always when we draw a difference It's to say that something is more than something else and something else is less than something else So when we begin to talk about difference inequality is always right at the heels and that tends to lead to injustice The third and most important reason though that I think that it's worth talking about play-doh in relationship to racial And justice is because this metaphor is as enduring as play-doh So in almost any in-depth article about immigration or in accounts of the holocaust um You you find this any anything that involves racial or tribal thinking the encounter with otherness almost always involves this metaphor of um Of disease so to give just one fairly recent example In an atlantic article on the case for reparations They were talking about redlining in chicago, which is the practice of debarring black people from owning houses in certain areas Um, and they the quote from the article is black people were viewed as a contagion So this metaphor we may not like it, but we are stuck with it And I think it makes sense to go back to where it um In some ways came from and see if there are any resources for overcoming it So if difference is a disease And I want to I want to emphasize that that's a a relational difference like a Um A difference between you and me not the difference in one group If difference is a disease, how do we heal? And play doh offers two explicit means of amelioration and one and two implicit The first thing that he says explicitly is on analogy with medicine and he says um That In or that just like injustice is treated with a or just as medicine heals the body the way to deal with injustice is through Uh, a corrective or punitive measure a colasticos and that's very straightforward something that's to redress wrongs And I think the analogy here is something like reparations like a fine in ancient Greece might be a colasticos So I think that's just um He doesn't say much about it and i'm not going to say a lot about it either The other thing that he says at greater length. This is more his um Uh, his ideological agenda here is that on analogy with gymnastics the visitor describes the other way of healing the diseases in the soul as Alencus or cross examination And this is the famous socratic process Of interrogating someone's opinions showing that they contradict one another And trying to rid them of the belief that they know what they know To shame them until they are ready to receive new knowledge And I I I don't know if this is more pie in the sky than reparations or less I wish that it was uh more common for people to change their minds through recent debates It doesn't seem to happen that often but I I suppose it still can um What seems to really change people's minds is experience And so that led me to look more deeply to what Plato might be saying implicitly about how to heal from these differences that make us uncomfortable And what I found was two hints about restoring About integration of differences and about the proportionality of differences So I'll take integration first So when Plato in the original quotes that I read you Plato was underlining that all the differences in the soul also have to be Akin to each other Sugene and then he underlines this a little bit later that um the things like belief and desire Anger and pleasure reasons and pains all these things that might be fit fighting within us are still Sugene they're still akin to one another and Sugene is the prefix sue or with with again a Race or tribe or family. It's the root root of our word genetics the root of our word genocide So if if disease is Caused by a conflict between things that are truly Sugene It seems like healing would have to happen through re-establishing kin relationships through warring elements And what's interesting to me is that in one of the most important developments of Athenian democracy out of aristocracy One of the crucial reforms did just that So after the tyranny of Pisa Stratus a guy called Cleusthenes Okay, so what he did is he wanted to break break down the power of these aristocratic groups So he redivided Attica into the thirds into the coastal region the city region and the inland region And then he created 10 tribes and the tribes were composed equally of one group from each of these regions And then those 10 tribes became the foundation of the Athenian democracy's structural system so for example the The council was composed equally of Members from each of those 10 tribes the presidency of the council rotated equally through each of those 10 tribes So what he effectively did was redraw the lines of affiliation and kinship within Attica so that You are working that you had a political stake That was bound up with people from a very different area than you and And you had to work together with them as well What would that look like in america? Well, it might look like a rough analogy would be what if we redrew the states along the lines of taking One part from the west coast one part from the east coast and one part from the middle What if we had a political affiliation that were based on that that redrew our racial lines? What if we undid some of the redlining and gerrymandering that has segregated our communities? so a recent book that I think makes this makes a similar case in a very powerful way is by elizabeth anderson's book on the imperative of integration recent macarthur fellow Who argues what i think is? Inarguable really that segregation is the cause of both material inequality and persistent racial bias And that the solution is comprehensive racial integration in schools and workplaces legislative bodies basically everywhere And despite the the difficulty of that The stress is that that imposes on the people who undergo it. It's nonetheless imperative for justice and democracy and I think the The point that she doesn't make is that spatial integration might make it easier to recognize the way that we're already Biologically mixed up with one another um Because of the the history of slavery Many people who assume they are white actually have some african-american ancestry and vice versa And that this kind of deep mixing is actually fundamental to who we are I think the more recognition that there is of that the more that we can Reintegrate socially as well So this is integration. I think is fundamentally a kind of a social change. What about a political change? Here I want to turn to talking about proportion and so then the other When play-doh is talking about the ignorance of the soul and in what way a soul becomes ignorant He argues that it's a a soul is trying to reach some target a soul is trying to get at understanding But it misses its mark. Why does it do that? Um, are we going to say that something misses the target because it's properly proportioned or because it's out of proportion? And he says of course that it's out of because it's out of proportion through disproportion and so the the obvious solution for Repairing that kind of disease or deformity in the soul is through restoring proportionality and I think the political case for that Is what's known as sortition or democracy by lot and the way that worked in ancient Greece is that there was a Naturally when you draw randomly from a group of people to get your governing body all marginal groups will be Naturally related or will be proportionally represented within your final group So how sortition worked in ancient Greece the image up there is of a Clare oterion and you can see there's 10 or 11 columns because later there were more than 10 tribes And the citizens would go and put their tokens in each of the little slot and then through A system of rolling the die. They would choose which row to choose. So each column was a Tribe and each so when you selected a row you would get an equal number of citizens from each tribe And this maybe you've never heard of it or maybe it seems abstract But this has actually been attempted sometimes in the contemporary world in Canada and British Columbia in Ontario. They drew up these citizen assemblies for electoral reform in which they were trying to reconsider their voting runoff system The Amish also do a system like this where they nominate people for to stand for office and then choose randomly among all those people that have been nominated Um, and it's it's an argue. It's an idea that's been argued that could have contemporary Applications for a long time. So CLR say the Trinidadian author CLR James wrote an essay called every cook can govern in 1956 And more recently there's a good book called against elections by a guy named I forget his first name, but the last name is Ray Brook so To kind of encapsulate everything that I'm trying to say If we're stuck with this metaphor And this intuition that difference causes disease and that's what are some of the ways that we can go about trying to heal that And I think that the answer is justice um, the answer that that play does seems to suggest about what that means is a reintegration of the differing parts and ensuring a proportional proportional share of power to the different groups In other words, what we need to do is take that Inequality that seems to reside at the heart of difference And try to neutralize it to try to figure out a way that we can be both different And equal And I'll just leave you with one thing that my father-in-law always says when he's doing racial equity training is that No one is only one thing No one is only white or only black or only female or only anything We're all lots of things and so it seems to me that achieving justice Involves making that inner plurality be reflected in the external world Thank you Okay, so at this point we want to open things up to questions and I know that some students have to leave As is the case right now the mass exodus um, so for students who Are able to stay for a couple more minutes. Um, we may sort of prioritize them because they have class Um, and I'm going to try my best to have a cue So I would ask you to do two things Raise your hands and get my attention And if and secondly if you can wait for me to get you the mic, which I will be running across the room We are recording this event. And so if you speak without the mic, we're not going to get your question We're not going to get your voice. So please be patient with me as I get the mic to you So So dr. Brill will actually run the mic Never mind quick change Okay, so So if you can say your name and your affiliation, um, if you are on campus if you're visiting with us From um, the community that would be great. So my name is sylvia marson-sackley I am a professor here of history and islamic world And I was really intrigued I came in on the second speaker. So I was really intrigued by your Bringing up the the trial, right? Um, and I was watching the news coverage as well And one of the and I was wondering if you could speak more about that defense the castle defense Okay, um Because that to me was just that it was even introduced was Crazy Um, but if you can break that down because I think it would be generic Germane to what you were trying to say also about breaking down a little bit breaking down the At least the way I understood it Breaking down these kind of Things that we take for granted Because the defense was she was coming into her castle, right? And then that gave her the The right to shoot Right, right? What's going on with castle defense and how I might broadly relate this back to our conversations about race is that the castle defense goes to What is encoded in law us law is our fundamental right to defend our castle our home Well as long as it's in our house, right? But if we think about things like standard ground laws They they remove Your castle from solely being in your home and they extend Castle protections to public spaces and a lot of So I think one of the ways we differ is for me We have to understand race first and foremost as a tool of managing populations And so We can say that race is not In bodies, however race invokes the use of bodies And and this is omie and winot who have a great book Racism without racist And racial formation in the united states and for me it's important to Especially because I work through michelle foucault who has a notion of racism against abnormals Broadly construed and he's not calling people abnormal But what he's talking about much as you discussed are the conditions under which we produce Exceptions and one of the things that we do when we produce exceptions is that we pretend that they are simply anomalous failures of A prevailing system of justice right to put it another way is Oh injustice is just because they didn't get that thing right, but fundamentally things are okay What I argue and other people argue is that By structural design Injustice is necessary for the functioning of These systems and mechanisms or to bring it Into a more concrete sense We need people who are Excluded from protection under the law in order to form a population or a polis it it allows our Our political structures our social structures to cohere because it produces Uh an affinity a group affinity for some people And it excludes other people, but it doesn't remove them from participation in the system. They participate in the system as access and and we can talk a little bit more about that but the the the defense Is if she believed herself to be entering into her home She in the united states has a right To defend her home now one of the tricky pieces with those laws is that they depend upon the reasonableness Of someone based upon a common man's standard So did I reasonably fear myself to be in danger? Which is loaded right? Because maybe the presence Of someone of color or someone who's different Makes me uncomfortable already and therefore escalates my level of fear. So the measure of what is reasonable as a sense of Being in danger or under threat Is tricky and and law has not Historically found a good way to deal with this and within that slippage is Sort of the everyday ways in which We are actually inhabited in worlds that these one size fit all things can't can't really fix And so if we think about something i'm sorry to go on and on so feel free to cut me off so one of the things That brought about this extension of castle law into public spaces understand your ground laws And this is how they framed it the people by the way alec We can thank alec for that and if you don't know what alec is ask me Essentially people said we need this law because criminals are are Taking away We're so worried about being Just to criminals that victims are losing out in this system They also touted standard ground laws as a way for people who suffer intimate partner violence to be able to defend themselves And what i would refer back to is the question of well, what does a criminal look like? And so embedded in that Even though it's not explicitly stated is a presumption of race as criminal And criminal as raced right and and so It's it's tricky and it also depends upon understanding the way in which race is an effect That that Functions in certain ways in our society. So I'm sorry to go on it left, but I'm maisha. I'm a visitor um So the last speaker invoked the the term racial healing and kind of as a response to to disease And um, I was thinking about that a little bit more. Um, and I'm wondering I have several questions I'm wondering is racial healing an idea. So so think about in a medical profession Um, one might say well, what is what is the what the purpose of medicine? Right? So some people may say well the purpose of medicine is to cure right? But we know when we take medicine certain kinds of medicine. There is no cure, right? So for the common code, there is no cure um, I take medication to Allow me to manage the pain of a headache for example um, and until there's a lot of uh, medicines for example That doesn't have that aim right? um And so so the question goes into the whole notion of racial healing is racial healing kind of this idea that we should ascribe to knowing that Um before we get there there are other steps that we can take to kind of manage or respond to that kind of disease Right, so I do I wonder what you think about that um And so then that leads me to also ask the other panelists How do they also conceive of notions of racial healing particularly also specifically in their in their work? um So yeah, thank you very Thank you for your question I think that the in some ways the reason I was asking about racial healing is um Because I think that it causes so much pain for people on both sides of what are unfortunately a Color divide a racial divide that still exists. I think it's incredibly painful and that none of us gets to have the full authentic Experiences and relationships that what we want to have out of fear of being stereotyped and perceived a certain way There's black stereotype. There's white stereotype the well-meaning white person who doesn't get it, you know Who's afraid of saying something racist and so it doesn't say anything at all Those things inhibit our ability to relate to each other and they're painful And so that's the sense in which I think it um, we talk about physical healing We also talk about psycho and emotional healing. Um, and I think it's probably closer to the latter kind But I've I've seen it happen. I think it does happen healing Yeah, what does it look like? Yeah, yeah, so so so healing just seems to be a little bit more specific about what can't what what the kind of healing that you're That that you've seen happen, right? So I'm just trying to imagine imagine that And the other panelists can jump into right because this is a question for everyone Well, um, did you did you want to say what? I'll say I'm thinking especially there's a recent article by Thomas Chatterton williams in the new york times In which he's talking about his so he has a new book coming out called unlearning race, I believe And he it's an excerpt from that book And he's someone who's in an interracial marriage and he lives in france and he Tells a story about going to his wife's grandmother's house and there's a really offensive object there and they fight about it And they fight and they fight and they fight And but at the end of it the line is I think my talk wasn't somewhere inspired by that final line where he says You know, but the end we can heal racially and and it's happened to me So I think his is the example that I had in mind Um, I stay away from metaphors of healing in these terms um And partially because I don't think that there is such thing as Uh recovering from an an inherently racist society um And so I don't so, um um What I would be wary of are are moves that look like Look like you are uh Somehow making progress and yet um You find yourself back in the same damn place that where you began And so I think that what what ends up happening a lot of times when people talk about racial healing is that they They've they've crafted this self that they can live with And for for whites in the society, that's that's that's usually that's usually something like I've worked as hard as I can on this Now I'm on to something else and so um And so I think that that real racial if we're going to stick with the term racial healing And then we have to we have to think about it in terms of constant work against something that is impossible, right? um So Derek bow when he says the when he when he at the end of I think it's faces from the bottom Faces from the bottom of the well, uh where he says he gives us this story about um This this teacher who he he uh grew up with and he says, you know How do you get up? You know your your house was bombed your You know you've you've you've encountered all this discrimination. How do you get up in the in the morning? And she says well because I live to antagonize white people And I think that's I you know sometimes, you know, we're not gonna we're not gonna You know if we think that the end all goal is that we're going to find Something where we are more whole Maybe but I don't I don't think that's I don't think that's what what we're left with I don't think it's the only option that we're left with I think that That we're left without that if we deal with if we're going to deal with Racism as a real thing in our society not just interpersonally like my partner and I can get along right but Once we leave the house She goes into the world as a white woman and I go into the world as a black man And That's just something that we got to deal with right when our tail light is out. I I tell her you drive, right? Because and you know and we can we can we can work on that interpersonally but The world in which we live in is not one in which Is accommodated to that sort of thing the the norm for our world is one in which racial trauma Is it's is it surplus value? So I I think we share a similar line um for me Healing is not The question or not for me the focus and part of that is because Of this lived experience, right? So if I am required to have a conversation with my children Not about if they're stopped by the police But what they need to do when they are stopped By the police or law enforcement my reality And my management is very different And I don't think as as I said in the previous question um, I don't think that that Structurally these things are different. Um I think two things for me just in sort of mapping out our differences a little bit more I don't see difference As fundamentally unjust. I see the way we interpret difference as the problem, right? So it's not The fact that we notice some people are black. Some people are white. Some people are brown. Some people are Asian That in and of itself is not a problem The problem is how we what we interpret those differences to me And the meaning of those differences is often grounded in how we're going to distribute resources Or how we're going to distribute social value. So one last thing um, so for me When we talk about integration, we're always talking about moving people of color who have been structurally excluded Into existing power structures. So I I am An opponent of integration because the very construction of it for me is problematic Along with the real ways in which people of color have always borne the burden Of integration, right? So for me, I just come from such a different Framework that I it's sort of like apples and oranges Following on the same part I'm sorry, Al. So we we do have a student and we have three more People in the queue, which is wonderful. So before we before we lose them. I want to make sure that they get in so Uh, hello, my name is Jake. Uh, I'm a student here my question was based off the third speaker's topic and um My question is how do we integrate intersectionality in this inner plurality? And if finding a solution against the disease In society if everyone is different What do we choose to focus on in that intersectionality to kind of find a common ground or solution for everyone Thank you for your question I think that what's interesting is um in my in my presentation. I was focusing more on social and political um Measures that could be taken to address structural and institutional problems And then in the comments, I turned a little bit towards the more personal Um, so I'm questioning my own move there But I think that the I would reiterate The proposal of sortition as a political Goal, I think that very much of what the conversation and about race in our country has become is identity politics and a sort of I think it does um Often become about these these personal questions of identity and I my hope would be that we could transform The cultural movement of identity politics into a political movement that makes a political demand that changes the way that politics functions And I for me. I'm more interested in rather than seeing reform measures here and there that would improve the situation or that situation What's to me interesting about sortition is that it abolishes The problem of um in fighting among who's more marginalized And instead says well if we use a system of proportional random representation Then everyone from every marginalized group will be equally represented And often proposals for sortition are combined with proposals for deliberative democracy meaning A group is randomly selected and then has the opportunity to learn and discuss an issue Um together and then make a proposal. That's what happened in the the example of canada that I was mentioning and I think that that's a an interesting political way forward that as much as And as much as these problems are an intrinsic part of our history and that we can even take pride in the Amazing resilience and cultures that have resulted I think We agree the world would be better without racism and how can we get there? So, um, how would we do this in the interest of time? We have three folks in the queue. Am I missing anyone else? Okay, so perhaps we can Get our questions out. Um say who is who it's for if it's not for everyone And if the three of you will be so gracious to jot them down and jot down your responses and we'll kind of take it from there Thanks, uh, my name is uh, sena kramer. I'm also a visitor from loyal americam University My question was just for dr. Fran kowski. I'm curious about your understanding of architecture like if if architecture Plays a role in the Distinction between what what appears and what does not appear In your understanding of it and how like just how you understand that architecture. Is it conceptual? Is it material? Is it alterable? Yeah Yeah, my name is jinza ruta. I'm visiting from the new school for social research in new york I have a couple questions one is Regarding the issue of difference And I my question is why should we accept I mean if if it is true that play to considers Difference as a form of disease. Why should we accept this point of view at all? Um, it seems to be wrong. I mean if this is you know in this interpretation play the release wrong and And I think that the risk is to somehow obscure the fact that differences become um a disease a social disease when they are underpinned by Relations of exploitation or domination so on differences on the on on on the on their own don't do anything They and then I had a question about colonialism The anti-black feature because this is a really a question of clarification because You were claiming that all colonialism in this world if I Heard correctly is anti-black and I was I wanted a clarification whether you were referring to the new world Or whether you were referring to the history of colonialism in general because i'm not so sure that Anti-black is a concept that helps us understanding for example colonialism in india or in the china And so on where the dynamics were different and the forms of racialization were also different Okay, and I think this is our last question I believe Hi, thank you. My name is nicole santsone. I'm an adjunct lecturer here in the visual and performing arts My questions are dr. Havis. I really was taken with your talk on um in the way that you're looking at Practices people use to displace the injustices they dispel Are they daily face and I was wondering if you could Maybe talk a bit about your method about how you understand or how you You are able to track Um Something that you just I kind of interpreted as you describing as may use tactics that aren't legible as resistance So how do they how do these tactics like emerge and how do you understand them? Is that? And so now we get to watch each of you answer those questions in 10 minutes So thank you for the questions. Um, so architecture um, so how I always understand how I how i'm coming to understand architecture and why I think it's a of a powerful way of thinking about um racialization and especially Terrorist spectacle lynching is because um, a it it allows us to think about um recenters how we think about place and in that Yes, it has something to do with what spaces appear And what spaces don't and how spaces appear as something as opposed to something else, right? So the town square for example Seems it seems perfectly fine But that's also the site of a lynching at which at which point, right? It becomes very clear with the How people are organizing around violence in this place and yet the next day, right? It has to he has to kind of erase many of those traces Um, and so there's something really really interesting about us about how space plays Central role in what we see and what we don't see What we can live with and what we what we don't live with and what we see as meaningful or not meaningful, right? Architecture Our architecture is all terrible. That's a really interesting question I think it really depends on the on how we occupy spaces And that we should see it as our task as occupying spaces and living those spaces differently, right? Um How we mark places as sites of remembrance and what we do with that remembrance, right? Because if we just mark it as a remembrance, then we just sort of throw it into the dustbin of the past Or we always talk about it as a as a memory and that seems to be one way of just making it go to dead Go to sleep, right? And so How do we how do we reconfigure our spaces as as spaces of interruption, right as opposed to as As something that just that just assures us that the spaces are are as benign as we like to think that they are um So I think I think how i'm using the term is is more political than it is Then it is in terms of design or in terms of of even just like visibility I could do you want me to just address the other one? That Can can I make a little comment on architecture? I think also even if we think about the structural design of cities under colonialism There's a lot to be said about the ways in which the very architecture structures a certain domination Of geographic sites. So I think architecture Operates in political ways if we think about the red lining that you mentioned And South Africa for example noted the way the u.s. Did that and developed townships to to avoid certain kinds of problems And the design of those townships Is built around the ability of the military to intervene and contain The very structure of it and and so I mean there is physical architecture. There's also social structural political architecture So I I think it's what you have to say about that is very provocative and interesting Am I next So isn't the question was isn't plato just wrong about disease indifference? Why should we listen to him at all? I think that's a great question. Thank you for asking it there's a I think that the first answer is we're stuck with the metaphor as I mentioned you will if you once you're attuned to it You will see it again and again and again Difference does make us uncomfortable and I think that's one of the reasons that it is an enduring metaphor for That we find that enduring metaphor But we have the option about how we decide to deal with it So today I took the tack of trying to talk about healing and other work that I've done I've tried to take the tack of what happens if we identify with the disease as the microbes as the bacteria And that that can be a productive way of of rereading plato But I think in general the answer of why we still read plato Even though he's so problematic for so many of the things that we want to achieve I take from martin heidegger another very problematic figure but he One of the things he says is to make a new beginning we go back to the old beginning and it And we transform it, but it's a little bit like What dr. Harris has haven't gave us a saying about community. This is part of our intellectual heritance But we are able to transform it into Shapes that we want it that fit our current needs Am I the method question? On my watch you have three minutes. So let's just say you have three minutes Well, hopefully I won't talk an entire three. Well, okay, so take I take half of that. Yeah, but I also want to say that there is something I think provocative about Existing in the difference which for me is why plato is relevant because this idea of how we transform people by by Bringing them to that discomfort that that disrupts right So I don't think you got to throw plato out even if we don't want difference to be disease Maybe we just engage with difference in different ways I'll think about it all. Okay So what is my method and I think of my method as a jazz improvisation. It's it's it's alchemical and experimental and I think your question was all right if we have these sites where there's transformation and Strategic and tactical in in vocation of certain aesthetic things. How do we know when it's happening? And how do we know when maybe it's commodified and it's two chains? Wrapping which is very different from old school hip-hop, right? This is two very different kinds of things and What I have come to as a workable solution is the idea of indexing Practices that have liberatory effects, right? so I drop on this notion of parhesia And fucco and we can talk later I'll run it down, but One of the issues is Who is the audience, right? so What might register to me in a work song as someone picking cotton in a field singing with a group of people With whom I form community is very different than what might register for The guy on the horse who's the overseer making sure I do work So one of the things I would say about about method is we have to be very careful about whose vantage point we're viewing a phenomena from right and for me in this I think goes to why you kind of ask this We often talk about experiences of race primarily From unraced positions And so what happens when we talk about the dynamics of being raced externally And we juxtapose that with how people who experience being raced also race themselves differently how they operate in that seemingly paradoxical and contradictory process and I think there are a lot of resources there and I'm always Troubled by the fact that Many people have written and talked about this stuff and they seem to be In the dustbin of history and we don't go back in resource and value what they're saying I mean, you've got political prisoners like george jackson. You've got Leonard pelter You've got all these people who have spent a lot of time thinking about this and What's going on that they fall out or they're not seriously engaged? So that would be my my shortish response Okay, so this is not the end. This is very much. I will take a break and come back. But first, let's thank our panelists Good morning everyone very good to see all of you Welcome to the second panel in our ethics here and now racial justice Reproductive justice climate justice symposium. We're very grateful to have you all here And for this morning leading into this afternoon. We'll be talking about reproductive justice I am sarah brill the chair of the philosophy department and I'll also be moderating this session Our panelists are chinsia arruta associate professor of philosophy at the new school for social research Naminaga swami associate professor of philosophy at indiana state university And sena kramer associate professor of women's studies. Loyola merimer las angeles Please join me in welcoming our panelists The structure of our panel will run as follows each panelist will speak for a moment about what they do How they came to do it and why they think it's important We'll hold questions until each of our three panelists has had a chance to speak and then I'll open the floor for questions So dr. Arruta if we could begin with you So first First of all, thank you very much For organizing this symposium That gives me the opportunity to have And also for organizing this in this form that gives the opportunity to have real conversations Among our works and And our research between the political the ethical And the philosophical so I am going to start First of all, I'm going to focus on my work on gender and capitalism because I mean I have a very strange profile in the sense that originally I was trained as ancient philosophy historian so as a specialist of ancient philosophy a particularly Plato and the new platonic tradition And and this is what I do Usually at the same time at 10 years ago. I also started working on gender And in particular I focused on Marxist feminism and on the issue of the relationship between Capitalism and gender oppression and the reason for doing this more than 10 years ago actually Was mostly political. So in other words This came not so much from my academic training, but rather from my political activism Because I've been a political activist since the age of 13. I think So for me going back to Marxist feminist debates was a way to Rebuild some for myself some important tools theoretical tools and also historical knowledge for My political intervention. So there was a always a very very Strict connection or a very close connection between my theoretical interest in feminist theory and specifically in a certain kind of feminist theory and my political commitments um, so in the In the past years what I have been doing was When it was still not very fashionable To basically go back to a number of texts written especially in the 60s and 70s by socialist and Marxist Feminist and also black marxist feminist and to see You know to somehow first of all reconstruct the debate that they were they were having Which was in many cases a debate focusing on the nature of capitalism and focusing on the reasons why Under capitalism in spite of this promise of universal Liberation and citizenship and equal rights why under capitalism Women and queer people are still oppressed Although in very different forms compared to previous societies So this was really my main Interest so my main The main problem I wanted to address. I did this first of all by working on the old very old unfashionable debates And then I started also going Beyond these debates and starting refining some concepts that were originally elaborated within these debates So one of these is for example The notion of social reproduction Which I have been using heavily in the past years and social reproduction refers to the To all the activities and institutions and labor that go into the reproduction of human beings into the reproduction of people Or labor power if you want to use a marxian term And this includes not only biological reproduction, but it also includes Socialization of children So child raising education Care for the members of the families and so care for the elderly care for the sick So I think it is a very wide Array of activities and forms of labor which take place Mostly within the family but increasingly also outside of the family So one of the of the characteristics of the old marxist feminism is that it was addressing the issue of social reproduction Especially within the family So what happens within the household and therefore interpreting women's oppression only in relation to the To the oppression within the family and what this caused in terms of you know lack of access Access to the labor market or things like this but Social reproduction theory today has broadened the scope why because in the past decades what we have seen Is an increase in the private in the Marketization of social reproductive work you know from private child care to Private education private hospitals And so on but also Restaurants laundry laundry trains and etc. So a number of activity social reproductive activity Happened directly through the market and what is interesting but also very sad is that The kind of devaluation of this of reproductive labor that already applied to the family applies also to these sectors of work When they are organized by the market. So in other words Statistically people working in the In restaurants or as nurses in hospitals or as Nanny caregivers of various kind and so on are Not only devalued but all but especially Paid much less than other kind of jobs. They have much more precarious jobs They are subject to Harassment more easily and so on. So in other words Social reproduction theory has expanded and this is what interested me as expanded these gates beyond the family to look at the way in which Society as a whole capitalist society as a whole Produce generates the conditions for Women oppression and for the oppression of queer people Then in 2017 we had An acceleration in this process of of thought of thinking not only Regarding my thinking but also the Other scholars and activists around me Why because in 2017 What took place was the first transnational feminist strike Which took place in dozens of countries of course with different levels of mobilization and participation But with some instances of really mass strikes in particularly in poland Where they managed to stop the ban on abortion twice Um in argentina where they went on strike against Femicides so to denounce gender violence And then subsequently in spain when were first five million and then six million people went on strike on march eight of this year On a plat on a very large platform Demanding not only the end of gender violence, but things like equal pay. So the end of gender wage gap services for public services for Against gender violence Reproductive rights reproductive justice and so on so this New way what I call a proper new feminist wave in the sense that it does The the mobilization has continued for Three years now even more from the fall 2016 It has continued to expand to new countries. So for example This year on march eight New countries have have gone on strike chili With the in chile. They organized the most massive demonstration after the end of the dictatorship Um Belgium and in june really a mass strike with 400,000 people In switzerland in a country of five six millions In a bit and so this is a movement really with a mass dimension that is that is growing um this movement And I was one of the organizers of the women of the feminist strike here in the states in 2017 And this organizing process gave me another And and my co-authors of the manifesto nancy frazer and titi batasharia the idea of Riding a feminist manifesto, which we call the feminist for the 99 percent a manifesto and And so the the idea was to articulate let's say Comprehensive view of the reasons why Capitalism is really bad for women and queer people This is very the simple thesis of the three or the text you know capital is really bad And therefore we should you know possibly get rid of it in some form So the the manifesto has 11 thesis that go from The you know a critique of liberal feminism and especially in the forums taken by for example, I don't know if you have read the Sandberg's text lean in feminism. So this kind of individual Emancipation or individual realization approach, which doesn't take into consideration what are the institutional and social constraints that make it impossible for the mass of women to lean in the worship they lean in And the risk, you know to lean in in those cases, you know for women working in immigrant women working in the fields in california or Mexican women working in mcdonald's in In new york the risk of you know leaning in on an individual level is to basically being kicked out So it doesn't really end very well So we were really dissatisfied with this kind of a liberal approach to feminism which had transformed feminism from a project of radical transformation of society as a whole and Liberation Into a project for the individual empowerment of very privileged women So in the manifesto, there is a critique of liberal feminism There is an analysis of the new feminist wave in particular the use of strikes as a very powerful tool of mobilization and also self identity of the of the movement self identification of the movement But then we also in the thesis analyze the Um multiple crisis of capitalism. So what we call the political ecological and Crisis that the and the crisis of social reproduction Um, and finally, uh, we articulate a number of thesis explain explaining why for example climate change it is true that affects all of us, but We we also know that it is affecting and it's going to affect particularly women because of the reproductive role and they they play in Especially especially in the global south We address the issue of racism and the lesson between race and capitalism, but once again showing how racialization has specific effects on racialized women We Um Then articulated also the possibility of of a way out And this the possibility of a way out which for us is basically overcoming capitalism through Social conflict social mobilization and they come together in in alliance and solidarity of different movements Now why it is we call this the nineteen percent or for the nineteen percent Of course, this is a quotation of a slogan from occupy. So it's an homage to to occupy But it was also it is also a way to say this is a precisely in opposition to lean in feminism or to liberal feminism Which is a feminist for the one percent in a sense or maybe for the 10 percent We wanted to say Feminism should be for everybody. So in other words feminism should articulate a project of liberation for and and challenge society for for everybody not just for A small elite that that can improve Their conditional life, but without this leading to any kind of improvement for for the rest of women and queer people I also want to emphasize some elements of influence That the movement had on our thinking in the sense clearly that the manifesto is also the outcome of Not only of our work on marxist feminism, but also the outcome of of the influence that black feminism had on Indigenous feminism had on our thinking marxist theories of crisis And also ecosocialism But there is also a direct influence coming from the movement. So in other words this manifesto Could could have not been conceived without this new feminist wave For tourism first of all because it would have been a bit absurd to write a manifesto in the absence of Of the subjectivities and the social movement who are actually doing the work And for whom the manifesto can be useful And the manifesto was really conceived as a as a tool for activists and for you know to be read by everybody but As an organizing tool that can be used within within the movement But also because this Feminist movement elaborated A number of positions That are quite That change somehow our perception about you know standard debates within feminist theory one example is Transfeminism So the movement basically everywhere calls Often calls itself trans feminist movement and and the reason for this is that What the movement wants to make clear is that when we say the word women this includes trans women So it's So the and so this is a rejection. Let's say of exclusionary Feminism against trans women And the the second big Element is of course the role of sex workers and their fights And again from this viewpoint it has become possible To to speak in different terms about sex work compared to the you know, the standard that let's say the traditional second way position about sex work Because of the self activation the self activity of sex workers So because of the fact that in in past years they have started Coming together organizing creating unions Articulating demands articulating an analysis of what sex work is which is not again an ideological analysis made by By women who have never been involved in sex work, but rather An analysis a serious analysis from within this kind of this kind of work um, so from this viewpoint the the The movement was really our teacher And and probably this manifesto is um That one of the texts I contributed to write that are really That really connect theory and practice and practice in in in the Closest way Finally, uh to conclude on why I think all of this is important um Well, I think it's important because we are in deep trouble And I think the climate strikes of the past weeks um are really contributing in Um disseminating the perception that really are in that we are really in trouble So in other words that this way this formal life this kind of society is not sustainable anymore Um, and it's not sustained has never been sustainable for for the people who have been traditionally enslaved exploited and dominated but it is also becoming insustainable for the for the planet as such um, so we really need to uh go back to rethink Capitalism in a very strong way. So, um, I mean, this was the intuition I had again, you know more than 10 years ago that The kind of feminism I wanted to develop needed to take seriously into account capitalism And this um entailed not only revising You know re-reading feminist theory in the light of Of the of you know of the absence of a consideration of class and capitalism at least in some forms of on some currents of feminism um But also entailed rethinking the marxist critique of capitalism. So in other words Trying to elaborate a much more expanded view of what capitalism means So not an economist Reductionist view or what capital is capital is not just economy the capitalist economy. It is a form of society or a formal life This it is what organizes in a fundamental way. I were living together today so that When I had this intuition You know 10 years ago I was you know, it was me and a few other people who thought okay, let's go back to marxist feminism and let's really insist on the centrality of of of capitalism From a marxist viewpoint And now we just actually becoming much more widespread especially after the The effects of the of the 2008 crisis And now the again the ecological crisis. I think it is really making This task even more urgent. So in other words, we cannot um We cannot limit our critique to the To interpersonal to the analysis of interpersonal inter subjective relations or Cultural and ideological the cultural and ideological aspects Of the various forms forms of oppression. We really need to Also understand what are the structures and the institutions and the the dynamic of reproduction of this society that actually Makes it makes it make it not only possible but necessary for these forms of oppression to be in place and we need to find strategic ways of Struggling against them Well, I bring greetings from maga country Um, and that's going to become relevant very soon As I continue to talk we are literally in the belly of i'm literally in the belly of the beast And i'm also the state that foisted mike penson mother Upon uh, this illustrious nation um, I came to the united states at the age of 18 as an immigrant to um Go to college and I had no idea About the united states other than what I had seen in the movies and this country gave me an excellent education And an interdisciplinary education. So my background is in continental philosophy post-colonial theory critical race theory south asian studies transnational feminism feminist philosophies, etc Um, and I've always been an interdisciplinary scholar. Um, I just published a book uh in which I Look at the period Of 80s and 90s when a lot of minority fields had just begun to gain a foothold in the academy and How euro-centric identity politics Made significantly hard one historical Uh, a really hard one historical era and conceptual contributions by These minority fields kind of unhappened So, you know, people worked really hard to get a seat at the table, but euro-centric identity politics made these historical events almost unhappened And and it's the identity politics is euro centrism And from there I then tried to bring philosophy feminism and post-colonial theory and by feminism I mean african-american feminism um together to confront climate change You know, how can these disciplines work together to confront climate change? Given the fact that these are the conceptual continuities that we can see in these disparate spaces That we're if we focus on the subject matter as opposed to positioning Then we can get somewhere in terms of Coming together to confront climate change um It's it's very interesting that I um I'm on the reproductive justice uh panel. So i'm going to I have a number of different levels. Um at which I Deal with this issue which leads to a very embattled existence First i'm involved right now. Actually. I just had a letter Published in the tera hote tribune star, which is the tera hote is the town And for some reason by some miracle. I was actually very pithy and it was like a three Sentence letter and it got published Because my colleagues and I from isu as well as rose hallman, which is the uh technology institute Are trying to change the sex ed curriculum in beagle county and I live very close to campus so that I can just ride my bicycle and Very prominently downtown tera hote, which is where I drive past downtown tera hote to get to campus There is the crisis pregnancy center And it's the crisis pregnancy center that is responsible for Sex ed in beagle county and the approach is abstinence only in fact. It is indiana law That it is abstinence only now what the content of that education is is very difficult to glean because all students get is this really Fancy shiny booklet with pictures and very little actual text So you can't you know, you have a hard time gaining a foothold in terms of how to critique The actual information And so my colleagues and I have taken Various approaches my son is in fourth grade, but this is what he's going to confront when he's in middle school And so we've taken different approaches And my approach has been to kind of de center the crisis pregnancy center By not giving it the reverence that it and the authority that it somehow automatically Presumes because it's the norm And so in my letter I actually I say, you know as a parent and a teacher I expect an educational institution to teach science Right and not some random groups culturally biased version of a healthy sexuality and You know, and I deliberately and very purposefully said some random group in in order to kind of Pull the rug out from under them and put the burden of proof on them. You know, who are you and why should I care? To give you any some examples of the kinds of things that are in that brochure The Students are told to eat Oreo cookies to them up And then put them in a bowl spit out and then they're asked so Would you feel attracted to someone who is so sexually used up like this Oreo cookie is chewed up? I know it's maga country, um, where you can where you can buy guns with your bird food No, literally like like seriously, uh, I'm not joking and another Another kind of Story that's used or parable that's used as a frog Being seduced by a crocodile And the crocodile is the woman and the frog is the hapless male And the crocodile is boiling a pot of water and is going to eat the frog So that's how sexuality is conveyed. I Yes, uh, it's frightening. It would be funny if it weren't so terrifying So so these are the efforts that you know personally now as a parent And and not thinking about these things abstractly, but actually seeing these things in in real life also right through down If you go through downtown tera hote And you cross the railroad tracks and there's a really wonderful donut shop Which is something I would really recommend at square donuts, but we do have some good things in tera hote um But there's a huge billboard that Has a quote from tokin saying, you know, sometimes even the smallest person can make a difference and obviously, you know, tokin is talking about the hobbit But the quote is used to uh for pro life There's also another billboard that Advertises father's rights The ability of men to be able to Have a say and even sue their partners in case of an abortion. So this this is very real and the literature itself and the approach Is completely disconnected from the reality of my students lives And the level of destitution and sexual violence That is the norm in their communities um that it it makes absolutely No sense to uh give an app to to have this abstinence only Approach because it's It's predicated on a society that just doesn't exist That is not their actual world And this kind of takes me to how I Confront these types of issues in my classes And one of the ironies of Being an indian woman in tera hote, uh and also not being a doctor Much to my mother chagrin I came all the way to america to study philosophy And gender studies And When students or parents have to actually Explain themselves to somebody different it is harder For them to look me in the eye and tell me that i'm going to hell Right and this is an on a campus where we have brother jedd And his wife who come regularly to campus with a huge uh billboard that or a huge Sign that says these are the people who are going to hell So it's everybody in the kitchen sink is going to hell There's probably going to be like six people who are not going to hell and they talk And as students are passing by They will refer to those students as hello slut Hello whore We know why you came to a college just to get some dick You like some dick in your mouth, don't you? And they're allowed to do that Including very vulgar gestures right and so you have 18 19 year olds You know who who think they're more mature than they are But now looking back, you know They're kids and They're just trying to get from one class to the next and they're being called slut and whore And if I were to refer to a student in that way, I would rightly be fired Um, but this is the the kind of assault to their self-esteem that the entire purpose of college is a sexual depravity depravity and The brother jedd will actually You know refer to his wife as What a woman should be like and say so honey you're what are you going to do when you go home? Oh, i'm going to make uh Some quiche for my family You know like I should you know, those are the kinds of things that They're trying to propagate and he apparently has a website and one of my students told me looked it up and brother jedd Welcomes the election of trump and says finally we can get rid of the homeless who are nothing but vermin So this is the kind of christianity that's being propagated, right? Um But so the approach that i've taken in my classroom is very ruthless um, and so, you know, I Jesus is always a student in your class, you know, he's not on the roster, but he's he's always a student in your class and What i've tried to do is to say, okay You know, I come from india We have lots of gods Our gods have many arms and many heads, you know So explain to me how exactly You know, I came from adam's rib Or explain to me exactly why i'm going to hell, you know, and it's very difficult to do that And in that respect, you know, i'm i'm taking advantage Ironically being an indian woman Has worked to my advantage because the The kind of conservative Bend towards authoritarianism works in my favor because they are very respectful number one And number two, it's much harder. It's much harder to say the same gibberish When you're not amongst your own group of people When you have to explain it to somebody who's outside and, you know, have to really say you're evil and you're going to hell, etc etc when You know, um, now, of course you have to be careful about the dynamic and the authority that you have and and the fact that You know, you're the one giving the grades, but Over time i've been able to sort of finesse My approach by, you know, humiliating myself in the classroom by making bad jokes The other thing that i've tried to do in terms of broaching these topics is Try to shift the burden of proof And Because I you know, I just there's no time for nonsense, right? There's just no time for nonsense and some things You just I they will not be argued in my class and if they are going to be argued and the burden of proof is on you So i've had people who will say things like climate change, you know is a hoax created by china or You know abortion is a holocaust or things like that and so what i've done is or racism doesn't exist Or i'm not racist and so what i've tried to do is When someone makes that kind of claim I go to the library and I actually get A lot of the scientific journals That are talking about climate change and you know are providing the data and I bring it to class and I say great Prove that these are wrong Literally proved to me that all of this science is wrong And they can't do that, you know because you you know, you can't they can't comprehend what's actually being said When it comes to Racism doesn't exist or or you know abortion is a holocaust I do exactly the same thing where I will bring in the literature. I will bring in Tons of books on the topic, you know started I mean we've been talking about race for how many centuries now, right? And so i'll say okay, so here are you know 10 books on the subject, which you have not read So tell me how exactly it is that you know you who lives in Indiana and in a town that's predominantly white and you've Because of your socio-economic class you actually haven't even been anywhere else How exactly you're right and all these people are wrong right And the reason why I do that is because you know this this entity called fox news, which I call radio rwanda actually You know has and the way in which it has perverted You know public discourse and and the poison that is now public discourse has This you know and traditional and Reg you know establishment media, you know both siding everything so that there's a false equivalence Uh Which was also played a big role in where we find ourselves now, but her emails that The assumption is that my opinion is valid And my opinion deserves attention and my opinion And it is your responsibility as the teacher to argue against me to demonstrate that I am wrong and I'm trying to turn that around and very ruthlessly sort of Let my kids know that you know nothing like you you know, you I mean you know nothing like how I didn't know anything. I barely know anything right now You know like if every time I listen to a nuclear physicist talk, I'm like, oh my god. I know nothing You know, you know, I know our world is made of magic and wizardry like listen to nuclear, you know Listen to nuclear physicists Um So that's the classroom portion But I also have a family in India That is very hindu nationalist and all voted for modi and uh We're very very excited and think that hindus are actually a beleaguered minority in india and I've I've finally in middle age come to the point where I've overcome The internalized gender norms that come with growing up in a in an indian family And to the point where even my body language changes, you know, as soon as I encounter my uncles or my aunts or my dad And my mom I've I've come to the point where I'm able to talk back now admittedly it's on whatsapp and not face-to-face, but I'm able to talk back um, and when we had the, um You know So I published this an article of mine is coming out in uh, philosophia about how Uh, I've got to speevax claim that it is Eurocentric to assume that imperialism began with europe And I'm and I talk about the remine and the Mahabharata, which are the two Hindu epics and how these stories were actually used to Mythologize what was what is really a history of genocide and theft and murder And the immediate response especially For for the tribal population in india india has largest tribal population And the immediate response of my uncle was Oh, we hindus are constantly tormented and but we have loved everybody and hinduism is open and and so I wrote back And nobody responded So that was good and then and then I had the um, the very shameful spectacle of Modi coming to the united states I think it was in houston, uh, and you know declaring his friendship with trump and And so and I all of my even my mother, you know voted for modi and we're very happy And so the point i'm trying to make is that I've been trying to use that experience My own experience, uh negotiating with my family, uh to understand what my students go through Because my students as first generation students, you know, they they know something is not quite right Right, they know that their worlds are very small Right, they know that a lot of what they've been told Doesn't really make sense when you have to actually explain it to somebody else who's not from that world But they don't have the vocabulary for it Right, they don't quite have the tools to process their own Experience, especially when they're going back home to thanksgiving and uncle fred is doing what uncle fred does Right, um, and so i'm trying to create that parallel between my own efforts with my family and what my students are going through And i'm also doing that strategically in so far as it might avoid the The kind of stereotype that when you talk about race you hate white people or your anti christian or what have you So I can talk about what it's like going home and Recognizing that you have a country that is uh, abysmally poor and 90 percent of the population The their entire purpose is to serve others Right there their entire purpose their their bodies are meant to be used and then discarded I mean it is a servant culture to the point where I uh remember once The the occasion wasn't the best occasion, but this actually adds to the story But when my dad passed away, I went back home and uh, we were having the hindu version of awake and the aunties the we call everyone auntie out of respect We're having a conversation about whether the women who come to clean their house should be allowed To sit on the park benches when they have lunch Just to be able to sit right and this is normal Conversation right And it's excruciating and then to go to my cousin's houses and you know see children working there And so how to As an immigrant in the united states how to confront those issues realistically Without at the same time reinforcing the stereotypes About india, you know that that I have I have been subject to and my scholarship has been subject to The last thing I wanted to talk about was my current work I'm writing a book on This woman known as guide tree speed back who's really hard to read I mean, she's no harder than any of martin heidegger or anybody else But for some reason she gets called on it. Well, we know the reason because she's brown, but um Um And uh, what i'm trying to do with her is to take one specific conceptual contribution that she's made in each chapter so for example symbolic clitoridectomy uh, planetarity transnational literacy and Show what that concept can do by reading a movie or a short story or what have you so kind the kind of generational work that needs to be done So that a scholar is can is read and she's terribly under read But the kind of work that scholars have done on derrida for example to ensure that he remains relevant And that the book is focused on india primarily on india and specifically bond slavery And so you have Tribals who have had their land stolen from them You have an entire government And private infrastructure predicated on their exploitation that that that is how the the government works. That is how the infrastructure works and uh, young girls are uh, so these men go into these villages and pay off the debt and Say that they're marrying The person's daughter and so the debt is like 300 rupees Which is barely three dollars or two dollars and people have been In bond slavery for 30 years or generations for debts that are three dollars two dollars or what have you And then these these children are taken to the cities where or to the towns where a lot of construction is going on So government contracts have been given the police There's police stations and they are prostituted and raped And there's nowhere to go because everybody the entire government and The infrastructure that surrounds the government contractors policemen The railway conductor are all participating in this exploitation, but In order to get clothes or medicine or toiletries you have to take out alone and The interest for that loan is and which basically amounts to Putting a fingerprint on a blank sheet of paper and the interest is like a thousand percent So all of a sudden you're in this situation where you're being prostituted And you're bringing in thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of rupees and But to be able to eat and have clothes you have to Pay for those things and so then you're in debt So whatever so you will never be able to pay that loan off, right? And it's you know, it's it's kind of ingenious in how evil it is, but it's also Hyper capitalism right in that sense india is the mecca for capitalism because you have Money being created literally out of nothing Literally out of nothing And and the one the one of the people that I read is mahashwita devi who's written a lot of Stuff on short stories and essays on bond slavery in india And so that's the approach that i'm and so there's no birth control. There's no education on Reproductive rights or what have you and so you know these these girls get sick get sexually transmitted diseases There's obviously no hospital care. They get pregnant. The kids are just thrown out and left to fend for themselves Begging in the streets going through trash So that's the the frame That I use when thinking about reproductive justice and and reproductive health now. I do want to plug Someone that Who's really fun to listen to about reproductive issues here um is a woman named imani ghandi and she has a Um a twitter feed that's called angry black lady But she's a lawyer and she does a podcast called hejamami And uh, and so she's really up to speed on What's going the shenanigans that are going on? all over the country In terms of abortion and uh And so I would really recommend listening to her So thank you And dr. Cramer Hello, thanks everyone for coming. Um my work is um generally attempts a political epistemology Of a concept that I call constitutive exclusion. So this concept is a kind of Um internal exclusion either within a larger conceptual sphere like a philosophical system or in a political body Which defines itself by excluding some intolerable difference But because this element is so central to the unity or the self definition of that thing whether concept or political body It keeps it around right it holds on to it or it retains that excluded element within itself But it doesn't allow itself to know this The excluded therefore remains within the concept or political body, but under an epistemological block I wrote a book about this concept Called excluded within which examines its operation both in philosophy and in political territory There I argue that constitutive exclusion operates through a kind of political epistemology In particular a kind of epistemology of ignorance as charles mills in his book the racial contract defines it In ignorance that's produced politically are not knowing That serves a purpose whether the smooth operation of determinant negation in the hegelian dialectic Um squeezing a multitude of differences into a contradiction to opposing differences that produces the movement of that dialectic Or the stable boundaries of a political system, which defines a fully intelligible political agency within itself I argue that constitutive exclusion of persons from this delimited field render them largely unintelligible as political agents Especially when they're trying to contest that exclusion So I do this in a couple of different ways or I investigate this in a few different ways In the book. Um, one of them is in the play antigone. So if you're familiar with the the antigone So There the city of thebes is ruled by this king creon Who can only be king because of his kinship with antigone, right? He's she's why he's got the crown But in antigone herself is excluded from political membership in the city When she contests this by exercising her rights to bury her brother A right that's been forbidden to her by the king She is seen as wild as monstrous as a threat to the very order of gender on which thebes as a political body is founded I also investigate this through an analysis of the 1992 los angeles riots Reading the multiple multiple Racial configurations of the riot And the the gendering at work in the riot Um, riots were seen for a very long time as like Straightforwardly political events Um contestations of lack of access to bread for instance lack of access to food or Protests against over taxation. That's why we got the french revolution for instance but increasingly there has been a A very successful attempt to render Riots as kind of unintelligible as political events the framework that we get instead is one of criminality or national security and that's a framework that is worked through race and anti-blackness and specific My current work pushes on similar ideas, but from a different place So rather than from a unity that represses or suppresses multiple differences I turn to city space because city space Has long been a resource for thinking multiplicity and difference From play does republic to iris mary and young's justice and the politics of difference City space is also somehow both like material and discursive. So I think it's useful. It's flexible in that way it um at least 19th century cities and post 19th century cities Even cities that are older than that but have been sort of rebuilt according to 19th century Standards or dictates sort of present a grid that's readable in a certain way Um, but it's also a space that shapes city dwellers Or city inhabitants just as much as as we shape it So in justice and the politics of difference Iris mary and young argues that the city is a normative ideal for the politics of difference that she defends in That book. It's a space that exhibits what she calls social relations of difference without exclusion She's really clear-eyed about the forces that block That possibility of the ideal from becoming actual though My new project asks if the city can still function even as that normative ideal And interrogates in depth those forces that shape the city now Primarily neoliberalism and gentrification I think that constitutive exclusion is still operative here. Um, but rather than producing A unity it tends to produce an experience of difference. That's curated in advance For a certain kind of reader of the city or an experience of the city and even that curation is um Though it's supposed to be a curation of difference a presentation of difference It's a remarkably homogenous one. So it's a A lot of spaces have a very familiar look a very familiar aesthetic all the same aesthetic It's a way of making it's what sarah schulman in her book gentrification of the mind would Talk about the the aesthetic gentrification a gentrification that operates in your mind Not just in the spaces a suburbanization of city space But the city runs on low paid and increasingly Gigged out work and increasingly those folks who do this work are pushed further and further out of the city While the housing crisis that pushes them beyond the city walls so to speak presents the solution to this problem As gleaming high rise apartment buildings in which hardly anyone lives they operate mostly as Dead coffins for capital not as homes for living human beings meanwhile Our city streets Have tons of camps of the unhoused who are pushed from one marginal space to another By a policing designed to protect home values a policing designed to enact gentrification And by architectures of cruelty The way this worked in my own neighborhood was There were groups of people who were living underneath the freeway overpasses and rather than offering them housing Rather than spending money to offer them services and housing if they want it we spend money Getting police to push them from one underpass to another and then we spend money paving over The underpasses with um round hard cobblestones so that they're very uncomfortable to sleep under Like not not a great use of resources. I think The new project draws on a huge scholarship, which i'm really just starting to Starting to get my hands around. I don't know if that that will ever be finished, but that's that's cool From critical urban geography feminist theories of space racial capitalism post-colonial and decolonial epistemologies political theory urban planning tenants rights struggles tenant union struggles Lots of stuff So why this matters and how I came to it how how I came to thinking of my work in terms of political epistemology is honestly from My experience in the world that I In that I that I realized I inhabited In the aftermath of september 11th and in specific the iraq war that was that experience was an experience of Watching epistemologies be built like a plane in mid-air every day new justifications new reasons for why this was necessary Which the large majority of the public simply Seemed to agree with and those of us who disagreed or who had questions were cast as traders Asking questions was a cast as tradership so Then I got a went to get a phd in philosophy where you know philosophy tells itself a story about itself That that's where philosophy began in the figure of Socrates. So it wasn't it wasn't an unfamiliar space in some ways I'm not sure if other scholars feel this way, but I kind of feel like my work is motivated by attention between fury and love A fury at the world as it exists and a love for the world as it could be Both are present at the same time though, right? It's not as if the world that as it could be is not here. It is here in specific spaces as well So both are present and neither is totalizing This is a little bit contradictory, but as a scholar trained in dialectics. That's totally comfortable territory for me So and there's also this contradiction or this tension between wanting to be Or feeling free to insisting on the freedom to follow my own curiosities in my work And also wanting to create concepts that can be useful Somewhere somehow in a larger product of freedom This requires epistemic humility and an ethics of listening And it connects the freedom of intellectual inquiry To the larger project of collective liberation of which that freedom is a kernel But so you might have noticed that I have said nothing whatsoever so far about reproductive justice I don't my my research isn't on reproductive justice or doesn't take reproductive justice as a site but as a Teacher of women's and gender studies. I think about reproductive justice A lot so if I were to say something about reproductive justice Here's what it might sound like. I think we could start from the concept of reproductive justice itself It's a concept that was developed by loretta ross amongst other activists loretta ross is the founder of sister song An amazing reproductive justice organization You should look it up in response to mainstream feminist movements myopic understanding of reproductive rights as being limited to access to abortion or it was called choice This their specific intervention was made At an enormous march on Washington dc I think it was called the march for women's lives. I can't remember the name of the march at any rate They had success at changing the name of the march and changing the focus of the march changing the concept of reproductive rights And shifting that to a framework called reproductive justice um, so reproductive justice challenged the exclusive frame of Choice a frame constituted by the exclusion of the voices and experience and theorizing of women of color and especially black women So when that political epistemology was challenged the concept itself changed The concept now for fronts the differential investment by the state in the reproductive capacities of white women And the disinvestment in the reproductive capacities of women of color And reproductive justice draws on what loretta ross is called a human rights framework Which argues that people should have their rights to either have children or not have children To parent those children in the way that they see most fit And they have the they have the right to that their children should live in a world that is healthy and safe for that parenting Whatever that looks like The broadening of this concept highlights the epistemological structure Of the frame of reproductive rights or of choice and it reorients our attention to the forces that shape the so-called these so-called choices I see this as epistemological work. It's also deeply feminist work. I think that that's what feminism does at least that's what Bell hooks and feminism is for everybody terms radical or revolutionary feminism This epistemological work Poses a number of ethical questions, however As the concept of reproductive justice broadens our attention to the wide array of forces that shape when how and under what conditions We give birth or don't we raise children or don't what we inherit and how we transmit that inheritance or reconfigure it And I would argue that the the current configuration of our cities plays a large role in shaping these choices Just for one small example School district districting plays an enormous role in Los Angeles as I'm sure it does many other cities in Giving people information about where they want to live like what neighborhood they want to live in And so this idea that you have the choice you can simply move to a neighborhood with a good school You sure you can if you can afford that this this notion of school choice connects up with the neoliberal feminism of choice From abortion politics to lean in and this functions to frame poverty as a choice to frame legacies of redlining or segregation or colonialism as a choice When in fact our zip codes or the zip codes into which we are born Largely determine our life chances And this this I mean, I think that's uh city city space is not limited to City space. It also organizes um rural space Ruth Gilmour for instance talks a lot about the relationship between the rural spaces that prisons are cited and how this interrupts connections of care and makes very much harder the care work than women of color in cities attempt to do to keep kinship networks together when people are in jail or in prison At any rate, I think that the ethical call that comes from this change of frame is one of responsibility and solidarity and ultimately of world building So this broader frame of reproductive justice Is a call to build another world to work with those already at work in building it right now in building that world That world is already here if we can only hear it. Thanks Thank you all, uh, we do know how time for questions So I will be uh running a mic around to those of you who do so if you could raise your hand But then wait for me to get to you because uh, we are taping and we can't hear you Or hear your question unless you have a mic with you So, uh, if I could if you'll just begin with your hands, I'll grab the mic and we'll continue thank you If you'd also begin with your name and your affiliation if you're a student or a faculty member or visitor My name is Kajal Gopwani. I'm a student. I'm a junior and my question is How can the government take measures such as For women to achieve equality such as equal wages the right to have inheritance Access to education jobs So if I've understood the question you're asking each of the panelists About large-scale federal measures that might ensure Greater gender equity. Is that the question? Thank you Who would like to begin with this? Uh, lovely if also large question Okay, um I'm going to answer this question not in terms of you know How concretely we can arrive there but in terms of what kind of measures would be necessary to To achieve at least some forms of equality now the So that one of the problems so far is that uh, very often when The issue of equality is approached. It is approached from a very formal viewpoint and just legalistic viewpoint um, and Since women are not the same. I'm not an homogeneous category But they are divided by class and race and ethnicity and citizenship and so on Obviously each measure is going to have a different impact And a different effect according to the different positions positionalities um So in order to really uh, then address The the issue it is necessary in any kind of policy to take into account all of these very complex Elements just to give an example um, I mean a state can and you know in some states in europe have already done this Can establish by law The illegality of the gender wage gap So in other words the illegality of pain women less for the same kind of work However The problem the problem is that equality in wage can be achieved in two different ways One way is to raise women's wages The other way is to lower Men's wages, which is what is actually happening. So in other words in sectors where Especially unskilled labor is employed The the what that we have witnessed in in the in the in the years is a feminizational labor, which is not just that More women are working in these sectors But also that the conditions they usually apply to women's labor So being paid less having less fewer rights and so on are then applied to men And usually it is racialized men. So immigrant men racialized men Uh, so from this viewpoint, you know when we are addressed the issue of gender gap wage gender gap This cannot be really Separated from another demand, which is minimum wage And the race of minimum wage. So for example to be concrete in the united states The When we organized also the feminist strike we connected explicitly The demand for wage equality to the campaign 5 4 15 So to the campaign for a minimum wage and so on Um Same issue for uh, you know reproductive rights or justice or abortion because of course you can I mean here at the moment in united states. We are really under attack on the issue of reproductive rights And there is the concrete possibility that there will be a challenge at the supreme court court level Even to jeopardize basically the legal Right to access Abortion But also from this viewpoint in a country where Most of healthcare is private and extremely expensive and millions of people don't have insurance And when they have insurance often abortion, for example, is not covered or even you know pregnancy Even for people with insurance cost an enormous amount of money When we speak about reproductive justice, we cannot just speak about, you know, defending the league For example, the legal right of abortion We need to speak about universal free healthcare And and and what actually would make it possible for women who do want to have an abortion to have access to the To the service to a safe service for it But also for women who have been denied mother motherhood Especially racialized women to have access to uh, Safe healthcare to good quality healthcare in order to have safe Gestation and pregnancies because at the moment there is this proportion for example in the number of black women who die of Childbirth because of the poor quality of healthcare they have access to so I mean, I don't have a complete answer to this large question, but what I would say is You know, whatever policy we imagine that involves, you know institutions The public sphere and so on we need to always take into account the complexity Of the of the various issues and take into account that Race and class play and citizenship play really a determined role in In terms of gender rights Would any of the other panelists like to I think one of the simple ways would be to not quote unquote elect nazis and russian assets That would really help. Um, but but I also think that, um, you know This goes to the heart of democracy, right and what democracy looks like and The recognition As About how hard it actually is to make a change A legislative change and that If you look, you know broadly at american history, what's happening now is shocking but also entirely predictable You know, there's lots of chickens that are coming home to roost in this present moment and And all of the issues police brutality, uh, which is legalized lynching Which was legal before anyway, but in any case, uh, you know what I mean, um, and And the other thing it's important to recognize is that so much of The abortion debate is really about white supremacy and policing, uh criminalizing black bodies Black female bodies and until you know, that Comes to the forefront Until that is actually the frame Uh within which these conversations are taking place, uh, I don't think we're going to get anywhere Especially because you know, it's easy to get impatient And you know, I try to tell my students, you know, it took how long did it take just to be able to sit at a lunch counter? Right. How long did it actually take? Right. So when you're when we're thinking about progress, uh And then the backlash that the millimeter of of progress that was made under barack obama Look at the backlash. I mean just look at it that this is this is what what white supremacy looks like That that this is what a majority of white people would prefer Right rather than a woman or a person of a man of color a person of color, right? So We have to recognize What we're actually facing Right, it's easy to assume that there's this process and everybody's going to follow the process and People are going to come up with rational arguments and we're going to debate them rationally when that's not the game being played you know A good argument doesn't just convince people because it has a ray of sunlight emanating from it, you know Politics is a different kind of of a ball game than what we as academics are used to doing and and so we can't blame Politics for being too political Right. Um, so those would be that those would be that would be my answer. Yep. Sina, please. Yeah Um It's a great question But I think that one of the one of the lessons that I've taken from Studying feminism and feminist movement In particular is a healthy skepticism of what the state can do for us right, so like we didn't get Rape crisis hotlines and shelters for domestic violence because the state gave it to us Um, we got those things because women struggled for them and did it themselves And I think there's a certain sense. Well, everyone should vote sure Voting is not where politics begins. Um, that's not where that's not the only thing the only tool that we have Some of these things I think Have to be done through I mean they simply have to be done through mass movement We have to do it ourselves, especially if it's the case that the state continues to maintain A different investment in the reproductive capacities of white women than it does in women of color and I think that That's an open question, right? Like there's In democracies that ought to be an open question And if it's a truly democratic state then when we're the state then we will decide But if it's the case that it's not then We're gonna have to maintain some a healthy skepticism of what the state will do for us Hi, um, my name is Tanika Simpson. I'm an associate professor in the undergraduate social work program here at fairfield So I have a two-part question. Um, so maternal and infant mortality rates in the u.s I think are like the second highest in the industrialized world, right? And then within the u.s We have all of these deep Racial inequities. So I guess my first question is is that a reproductive justice issue? And if so then how, you know, how How is that considered through an ethical lens? And then are any of you kind of examining that in your scholarship? I can just really really quickly. Yeah, it it's absolutely a reproductive justice issue Black women face four times the more the maternal mortality rate that white women face in this country So it's in in that sense. It's not a first world country for for black women in the united states Um, so that's absolutely a reproductive justice issue, especially under the framework as it was sort of invented by a sister song It's And it's absolutely an issue in of ethics as well in if we if ethics is about like, you know caring for Justice and equality and the freedom of all beings I myself don't do Research on that work. But yeah, as I said in in my My practice as a pedagogue of women's and gender studies That that work is that's like Women's studies one one oh one. That's what I'm teaching this semester. So yeah I think that's partly what My colleagues and I are trying to do at in the vico county school corporation which is literally just down the street from where I live and attending those meetings and You have five minutes to speak and to Broaden the understanding of what sex ed is and that it's not just You know the the female hymen Remaining intact, whatever that means But to include The a whole host of issues that would empower someone to make The correct choice for themselves, right? And to not constantly feel embattled While making those choices. So that's So this is kind of my start in in really getting out there Because usually I don't like to leave the house, but So this is this is my sort of step into Okay, this I'm in the school system. I'm teaching at isu. It's a small community Your name will get recognized and the town is dependent on isu. So isu news makes it into the paper And I have all of these students, you know, who are facing a variety of of issues when it comes to sex ed and and Health and access to proper care and what have you So how can I Bring all of this together but also not lose sight of kind of the transnational aspect of it because the the sex ed debate or the reproductive health debate that I've Encountered tends to be very American centered and and and sometimes it has a taint of american exceptionalism in it and so it's very hard to Negotiate that from the perspective that I come from. Um, so it's not a direct answer to your question But yes, you're absolutely right. This is definitely a part of the the larger struggle No, just that I I don't know how to answer The question from an ethical viewpoint in the sense that My approach is that this this is happening because of structural deep issues high history of misogyny and racism So I don't think it's you know, like necessarily the case that the doctor is a bad man or a bad woman and so on is is the way Automatically basically this process is work um and for this reason then my answer is always political and Both in terms of struggle and in terms of you know, what What what what we actually would need what kind of health care? For example, we would need in order to have reproductive justice and so on but of course, you know The fact that I want to solve this is ethically motivated but that's in the sense It's ethically motivated by the fact that I think it is deeply unjust and Unjustifiable from an ethical viewpoint, but I I haven't really worked Much on the ethical aspects Because I I'm more interested in you know, I don't think that the problem can be solved by educating individuals Uh, the problem requires, you know, a more structural systemic approach Hi, I'm Jenny Leatherman professor of politics and director of humanitarian action And also international studies I've always thought about um demographics as You know the essence of politics in many ways Um, certainly in deeply divided societies um And we're reproductive Issues come into play With respect to our own country. I often think about the The many different kind of strategies in which reproductive injustice is actually a function of supremist kinds of strategies and political control So I put under that category deportation I put under that category the incarceration of young mostly black males The separation of families at the border Um, I think that there's just like a whole Paniply of strategy So if you flip it around and you think instead of reproductive justice you think about what's going on in terms of reproductive injustice That's producing, you know, certain kinds of outcomes Um, then I think it's a wider um social phenomenon Then they may be the one we typically focus on Um, and in that context, I've always been Perplexed like why We should not want more abortions, you know in this kind of framework. Um, so Problematizing the way abortion actually works to Produce reproductive. I mean Problematizing the way bands on abortion actually works to produce reproductive injustice. I think is a really interesting aspect of that In the larger picture I just had a question for dr. Goswami and trying to imagine your examples and the worldview, right? So in the sex ed book and in the interactions that you described It was mostly targeting the women Correct. Yes, and so Where are the men here like are they is there a presumed innocence? There's the helplessness because they'll be seduced by the crocodile and boiled in the pot The women are the temptress Temptresses and we'll Okay, yeah No, it's you know, I mean I was thinking about the democracy question and how to even You know begin the kinds of conversation one of the things I said in my letter I'm very proud of that letter because it was like only three sentences and somehow I I don't know how for the first time in my life. I did that But I did say, you know willfully breeding prejudice, right and and ignorance is neither moral nor healthy, right? So it's that standpoint of morality. Uh, this also goes to the ethics question It's the assumption that this is abstinence is the moral approach that we have the moral moral high ground in that and to kind of turn that around but in a in a in a space where Sometimes you're like these are the people that I've seen on tv But I never thought I'd meet one like, you know, I lost my cat I'm sitting outside, uh, and a guy walks by with his dog And I'm like, did you see my cat and we get into this whole discussion about corporations and corporate exploitation And I'm thinking wow all these stereotypes about indiana are garbage because you know This guy is is a total socialist revolutionary and then he says Uh, but you know, but my wife and I are preparing for rapture and so this morning So this morning I just said, you know, honey, are you ready for this and all I could say was Well, are you going to take your dog? You know, I mean, you don't know what to do, right? Or I'm coming out of the hair place, uh after my haircut and It's 92 degrees in october in indiana right now, you know, I mean it's it's just Every you know apocalypse movie begins with people not listening to scientists, right and and and so Uh, and so I'm walking out and there's a young woman Cutting the hedges and I said gosh, it's really hot and she says we are so blessed to have this weather and And so you don't know what exactly would be the most effective strategic way to To create uh to prick that bubble Right, and that's that's the hardest part Is how do you prick that bubble because the soundness of the argument and the evidence and the rationality is not going to do it Right, so what but those are the tools we have so what how exactly And so then you're trying to come up with a great comeback line or you know, something like that But it's you know, it's a really uphill battle So you have time for one last question and that goes to cure I had to so I'll save One was for Sina, I wanted to ask you you mentioned that loretta ross transitioned the terminology from reproductive rights to Reproductive justice and I wanted to ask what you feels at stake in that shift and whether you think there's a still better term that Might capture more today or whether a new term is emerging anything like that Um and chintzia and also namita. I wanted to ask about the relationship between your activism and your academic work Whether you find that one takes from the other whether they fuel each other That kind of thing. Thank you I would I mean I I guess my my answer to that question is I don't know I mean, I think that reproductive justice is um I would just like encourage folks who were curious about it to go read the book on reproductive justice that loretta ross wrote um I think that it it's conceived of as an umbrella term and so it it has a kind of um I don't know it's still sort of a living concept, right? It's still one that's sort of being built and the politics of it are being built I I don't think that I'm in a position to say like that There's a better one coming around because it's still it's still living and it's still extremely useful for bringing together um everything from access to abortion to The practice of abortion doulas or to focusing on environmental racism and focusing on access to housing and You know free health care and and all all of these things that push way beyond the sort of limited framework of choice Okay Yeah, this is a complicated question for me because for a A couple reasons first of all in a sense, I must call I'm really a Plato scholar in the sense that I is no easy To combine contemplative life and active life and there is a constant tension here um On the one hand, I really would like to stay home read books and not to think about the ugliness Uh of the planet and to you know be lost in my The radical life on the other hand that when I do this then I'm constantly pulled From this other passion, which is to actually change Contribute to change the world and so on it's not very easy to negotiate between the two because you know We have only 24 hours in a day in a limited life Um, so I don't have a solution about how to combine them, but in my experience Uh, especially in the past 10 years really like theoretical work has been crucial for my political activism Uh in the sense it really clarified to me and and this was particularly true after I moved to the states And I was confronted with the reality that challenged challenged a lot of my previous assumptions I mean, I was already a marxist, but my marxist really changed and especially the The experience of racism in the united states and starting reading obsessively Uh, you know text, um about black power Black feminism and so on really You know forced me to really change also theoretically But also politically so in other words, I I had to learn a different way of being politically Politically active. So I would say that from this viewpoint. Yes, they do fool each other And they and I couldn't do one without the other but um And you know recently for example just to give another example I edited for viewpoint magazine a little dossier with Articles from activists of the feminist movement in various countries So from Saudi Arabia to Italy, Spain Switzerland, Argentina, Brazil and so on And uh, and these also were articles that somehow combined some elements of theory and They're practically the practical experience of being an organizer in the in the movement so I'm I think they're really like, um Connected but at the same time I must say that sometimes I really feel like You know Plato who would like to just withdraw and and read books Yeah, I'm the same way. I I'm two cats away from being a shut-in, but um Do you really want me to say that on I have six They're all rescues. Um, but but I feed the neighborhood cats too. Um, but um Well two things I I I don't really know what activism is right. I You know, I feel like the revolution is happening wherever you are And the place that you actually can make a difference instead Like I'm not going to show up in the middle of the Congo and say hey, let's start a movement, you know There's something, you know, there's a lot of hubris that accompanies that kind of Move where Because you've studied something so much you're able to then, you know, just directly apply it on the ground and so um I I try to think of Just the everyday stuff that i'm trying to do as activism like teaching Right being an indian person in the middle of indiana in a place that I never even knew existed, right? and teaching students and and becoming close to students who Live in towns where tera hote is a big town for them, right? They come from places where there's one stoplight Right, they've never met another person of color, you know And so that's one way in which I can make a difference, right? So given the skill set that I have That's that's making a difference the other issue the other way in which I've I've made a difference is in the academy and fighting fighting against a discrimination in the academy and I'm not very sympathetic to Uh The ivory tower stuff that that's not really making a difference in the real world because that is the real world And these battles are not worthless given how ruthlessly we're fought against again given the resistance that we face In the academy and how far people are willing to go to preserve their privilege Betrays that these are not uh Uh You know irrelevant Battles right Because representation matters and it's that representation that can then generationally Open the door to You know reimagining what what activism even looks like Right. Um, so that's my approach. I try I just I get very wary of What I call my you know Marxist philosophy dudes, right? Who who are who think that you know, they've got the Marx They've got the deludes. They've got you know, all these thinkers and they're gonna create this revolution and you know they support Bernie Sanders and what have you and and and there's no concept of knocking on doors and Talking to people and meeting people where they are, right and and how uncomfortable academics are Talking to non-academics Right. Um, so I really try to To avoid That kind of self selective, you know isolation Well, if you would all join me in thanking our panelists Good afternoon and welcome. It's very good to see all of you here Welcome to the climate justice panel of the ethics here and now racial justice reproductive justice Climate justice symposium It's our pleasure to have you here and on behalf of myself. I'm dr. Brill and my Ethics subcommittee co-members dr. Chris Sealy and dr. Toby Spivota. We'd like to welcome you We'll begin this afternoon with the first of our three panelists So we'll begin with Suta calling last founder and director of indigenous vision Followed by Marianne Hordkin associate professor of philosophy at colorado college and esme murdoch assistant professor of philosophy at san diego state university The conversation will be moderated by fairfield's own toby spivota spivota associate professor of philosophy Please join me in welcoming our panelists Probably every sentence I say can be expanded into a semester long curriculum. So Please, uh, wave at me if I start to go over Okay, uh, okina student anegosutaki sakepah komi Hello, my friends. My name is rain woman last one standing on the battlefield making the war cry I am from the blood tribe and the black feet tribe, which are both part of the black foot confederacy similar to the hodon ishoni here in new york and I Am founder and director of indigenous vision and so how that started was from a I call it my midlife crisis or my existential crisis when I was five and and What had happened is I On on the way to my grandma's house There was a funny looking hill and I had passed this hill for years and Finally one day in my who what why phase I said, what's that hill mom and she said that it was ghost ridge And I think I've always been a little spooky, but I was like ooh ghost tell me more and She said um, and it wasn't a fun ghost story. It was a A mass grave of my people and there's about 600 people buried in there from Um, the late 1800s starvation winter we call it Where the indian agent decided to hoard the food instead of distribute it to the tribal members And before that they had taken our hunting weapons our guns Um, and they fenced us in and we were not allowed to leave unless we had a permission slip from the indian agent Does that sound like a concentration camp? Okay, good So, uh, right after the uh, right after ghost ridge two miles down the road is A boarding school and it's I can't remember which church is run by but behind that Boarding school is another mass grave of children And so as a five-year-old girl It was kind of a a huge slap into reality of of what this country thinks of native people and specifically me as a child um Where I am uh kind of evidence of their failure and um, and then not too long after that my grandma took me for my first salon treatment and I um was refused service and the lady told me We don't cut your kind of hair and so um my grandma told me to go sit in the car and I heard yelling and um I didn't think too much of it then But I I understand now So um So that was the beginning of my my identity crisis and my purpose crisis and where I belong and really who belongs and so And then I fell back on a lot of tribal philosophy. So I was raised in a traditional blackfoot ceremonial lifestyle I was um In sweat lodges Before I was born and then about two and a half weeks after I was born and so I was raised very heavily with this Paradigm that is much different from the one that I ended up going like the the one we live in today And uh in this this identity and purpose crisis I became a very angry and a lot of peers And community members don't get out of that anger because They lack opportunity to experiences that aren't oppressive And so my mom and her friends realized this about me and started providing me opportunities to meet other people so that I am meeting individuals and not basing my reactions and my ideas about the world on um The injustices that are are happening And so fast forward a couple of years They ended up sending me to this camp for eight years and um bed time was always at 8 30 lights out and so around 11 o'clock I would get tired of reading under the blankets and everyone was asleep and I would go uh sneak down to the shore of the lake and build a little fire and um There's a way to build it so that nobody in any any direction can see the fire and so I would sit down there by myself and Fast forward a couple more years. I had a dream and in my culture. We're very guided by our dreams It's our direct connection to anything divine and guidance like and so this dream There were Guardians or spirits that came to me and they said um You need to be careful and where I was was I was laying on my belly on a floating dock out in the the lake looking at the stars twinkle off the rippling water and I I was thinking all of a sudden in my dream that wow, this water is really dark I I think I it's uh it look it's deep and I'm about 50 feet from shore And there is big pike down there Like I don't know if anyone anyone has seen a pike, but they're huge Like dinosaur looking fish with big sharp teeth and and so I was scared of swimming back because of Things in there and then I heard this voice and I turned around and my nine-year-old self didn't Know what kind of native people these were they had on different Clothing different hides they had different paint and and so I was really thinking You know who are they they don't look anything like a blackfoot person and uh, so their message was be careful of where you are because we can travel anywhere to protect you but we can't make it through the dark water and so I woke up with a very profound feeling of Of humbleness of of being overwhelmed with these this direct message and So I thought well, what can I do and then that summer I organized my first stream cleanup And another year went by and I did another stream cleanup and my friends and I I For the price of fry bread I hired my little brother's friends to help pull the trash out and we started pulling bags of trash out of This stream behind our community And the wind gusts get up to 80. So when they build houses half of the house blows away before the house is actually up and We had pulled a lot of trash out and there was this one area of cut bank where It was kind of muddy. We waited in there and pulled out car hoods tires This styrofoam insulation and That second year I saw beaver pups playing on a slide that I Was my trail down the cut bank and they had turned it into a beaver slide and so I watched them play with my best friend for a little while and then when they were done and they went back into their lodge My friend and I used the slide and and so From that point I was really hooked. I was I was like, okay. Well, I think I cleaned up this dark water Now at this time, but there's still always like this drive to figure out what dark water is and Fast forward a few years. I then became a water resource specialist in my specialty as in mining contamination cleanup and And then fast forward a few years I experienced Very typical common Issues where I was working at a national native organization And a middle-aged white male told me that the word squaw was simply not offensive anymore And and I said, what are you basing that off of and he said, oh well I know And I'm like, no, you don't you don't know Because I come from the northern part of the country Very similar. Well, I guess maybe a few clicks north from here if we're looking at the map With a heavy french influence and so He was familiar with derogatory spanish words. I'm familiar with derogatory french words And he had no lived experience of this Of anything like that and so I resigned because they didn't there was no follow-up with him and I went and became an equity trainer And started my own organization called indigenous vision and we are Mapping in justices essentially and So I I would first like to address there's a huge campaign to Honor native land and honor the traditional occupants and in the terms of justice What that does is it starts justice from the foundation of where it started and so So ultimately there's a lot of things that are are the foundation and the roots of injustices But specifically in this country was the genocide and the holocaust that the native people experienced here on this country So when the first boat like we're we're in the town of the first colony, which is really amazing to me And The injustice started here essentially By the 1600s The immune systems of native people here couldn't handle the The diseases carried from europe and And so there was biological warfare intentional warfare forced removal flat-out massacre and So what we do when we honor native land and we acknowledge land is we are taking that first step to Push back against injustices by remembering The injustice that happened right under our very feet So here in fairfield or unkoe Welcome to unkoe university. I think I pronounced that right Is home of the pojicet people the unkoas, sasquas, maximas and picoanax and I have probably witchered those but I want to thank those people For the sacrifices that they made so that we can be here Together and that we can talk about reparations to what they've experienced so Now what I do We do the justice mapping the equity training As a response to missing murdered indigenous people we do self-defense classes For women in the community and across the country I provide curriculum to facilitate classes no matter where you're at and and help get an instructor to you and so then Mapping wise what we do here what you what you see in front of you is a population based map and so This is what remains of the Estimated 100 to 120 million native people in the u.s The population was reduced down to 225,000 And it's still not Nationally addressed as a genocide, but it is And it was intentional Many people's grandparents were Paid by the government to be Indian killers. So We have a lot of A lot of injustices and and most times native people are just completely left off the table I've been asked if I'm enjoying the electricity or how different it is to not live in a teepee and and so there's just a Lot of miseducation which helps spur this map. So I want what I want to communicate with this map More importantly why I created it because as as I was working as a water resource professional I had been giving tribal leaders Kind of 101 environmental 101 presentations and that presentation was used around 2005 and And as time went on in 2010 I was still using the same presentation, but I went to go Look for my my sources that I had cited And I couldn't find them anywhere And I had not written down like all of the details needed to go find the paper copy of this research that you do because Google and journals make it so easy to find things now But I found that what I was using and the the information I was using in my presentations was disappearing And so that kind of gave me some urgency to start recording this and then as I Progressed I found out that Not only was our knowledge and our resources disappearing or just not being represented They were Purposefully being Erased essentially and so it didn't seem to matter which source I would go to newspapers journal articles Local papers even high school newspapers and try to find the one story where I remember it had been But they were all Error 404 pages and so somehow across the board From a state website to a high school website to all of the news outlets This article that I had cited had been removed and I couldn't Find anything and so I got really concerned that Okay, so the number one way industry Impacts environmental justice of the way environmental justice perpetuates itself in native communities is that huge industries Billion dollar industries can outlaw your us. They'll just wait us out in court We're small tribes Some tribes are only made up of 200 300 people left And they just we bring it to court and they just wait it out And they they have enough money to pay their lawyers As long as they need and and the tribes do not have that money. And so that spurred another Urgency for this map in that Eventually you'll be able to look up The perpetrators of these injustices and you'll be able to Look up who's responsible that one's pretty messy But you'll be able to look up in key terms in the search bar here Um an industry say Rio Tinto or their subsidiary Oh, yeah resolution copper. And so these are open pit copper mining people And they have got a huge Laundry list of human rights violations And um anyone who opposes them in South America specifically ends up mysteriously getting in an accident and so What I want to do with the map is Make it searchable so that you can search Rio Tinto and then it will populate in the map all of the tribes across the nation And eventually out into the world that are dealing with this company And instead of Fighting them alone, which is impossible to do. We don't have the body of scientists. We don't have the team of lawyers We will essentially band together and do the bundle of arrows philosophy where we are stronger together and less likely to break So This map is is up So um on my website, so it's indigenousvision.org and um it includes environmental and social justice information, so How we work that is a Where is my so I eventually got a little overwhelmed being the only Researcher looking at this stuff and I I would have interns from the university of montana and arizona state university come in And helped me with this information But I still was getting overwhelmed with the amount of submissions. I was receiving and to make sure that this is Not a double injustice that I don't get the narrative wrong again I have developed a network of cultural department directors environmental department directors tribal historic preservation offices environmental people grassroots activists across the nation Tribal people who I vet my information through and I I do the work for them and I send it to them to be edited Uh to edit it in any way so that that it really truly represents their perspective and so one example of that in in upstate new york is a educational roadside placard and um what these do is is Every year millions and millions of tourists like start off their their summer road trips And go see these points And nobody it has been completely unchecked since 1920 when most of these signs were erected The language has not been checked. So the language is reflective of 1800 thinking and so what did people think about other races and and other cultures in the 1800s? like literally literally anything was I think we're in the correct place witchcraft It um so I um that the placard in upstate new york says that it was um part of the successful clinton and sullivan campaign Who were generals under? I'm not gonna say because I I I look at that wrong but they um spent their entire careers Going up and down the east coast and burning villages to the ground And the educational placard says Clinton and sullivan came through here to check the aggressions of the hostile natives and were successful in um allowing the good citizens of I can't remember the word to um Successfully settle here and so what that language does is to An unsuspecting or uneducated or just newly learning tourists is it sets their foundation for How they view native people that placard is dehumanizing it um It gives excuses and reasons why the people were massacred and um And so I want to not um, you know, there's this big movement to take down all racist statues I I feel like just additional placards should be put up to point out the racism That way an important thing doesn't happen and we don't forget that racism So, um, if we forget it, it's bound to repeat itself again So I created a citizen science project and it's the first as far as I know citizen Native led citizen science project and you can report environmental injustices Incidents of discrimination hate crimes and violence To temper that I put food sovereignty projects Um food sovereignty is is a huge thing in native Um lands because It totally impedes the way we get our food and how we get our food and our health It's directly related to our health and our environment. So there's a tribe down in Louisiana right now That is fighting to be relocated together um their reservation is Sinking sinking. Um, so they are located right down here in Louisiana and um, they they're Affected by pipelines which have caused sinking near their tribe And they're right out, uh, right underneath New Orleans and, um There's a series of pipelines That go into the bay there. Oh, so sorry so sorry Um And and I hadn't any idea before I mapped out these Sorry, I'm not doing very good without a mouse but uh There's there's a series of pipelines in the bay there in the Gulf of Mexico that totally explained to me In addition with agricultural discharge and runoff Uh, or industrial discharge and agricultural runoff of why the Gulf is a dead zone So the entire Gulf of Mexico is a dead zone. There's absolutely no oxygen there. Nothing lives there Don't eat fish from there. Uh, so this this tribe is is fighting to be relocated together They're losing their reservation, which means they're losing their treaty rights and their sovereignty as a sovereign nation um And now they're just they just want to maintain that sense of community because they were forcefully removed from the east That to Louisiana they had lost a lot of contact with their significant places They have lost a lot of their cultural ways, which are are geographically dependent And so now all they had as they say as they said All they have left is their community. So their fight now is to be relocated together in Alaska we have more than a dozen villages that are um needing to be relocated because of um permafrost melt And the permafrost is melting and what's happening to the infrastructure in these villages Is the water and wastewater lines are shifting because the permafrost is not supporting those lines anymore And the problem with that is when a wastewater line is not supported anymore by the land It shifts and starts to leak and all of those leaks add up and it flow into their bay Which is their only food source. These people don't have a grocery store um In omsenag first nation Um a community of sarnia is located in chemical valley and they are experiencing Reproductive justice rights because of the amount of chemicals in the water and in the in the land that they are Experiencing in utero chromosome shifts. So, um, you can have a boy For the first six to seven months of your pregnancy And then all of the sudden you have a girl and so now there are three girls to every boy And pretty soon they're projecting that that will be four girls to every boy Um, so our boys are disappearing and that's a reproductive justice, right? Which is directly rated related to an environmental injustice And so what I like to say is that native people are the canaries of coal mines and or are canaries of climate change And um, everybody know what a canary in the coal mine is has anyone not heard that analogy? Okay, so the canary in the coal mine is a little Canary that they send down the mining shaft and if the bird stays alive, it's safe for the miners to go down If the bird dies, um, then there's a gas in there that will kill the miners So native people indigenous people are the canaries of climate change We don't have to send aid to other countries to assist climate refugees We have our very own climate refugees here, but we don't get news coverage Um, and uh But we have we have an opportunity Instead of just seeing if indigenous people will die or not just like the canary We have the ability to communicate and we have very rich histories and traditional ecological knowledge and environmental management That creates a sustainable way to live and it's based off of thousands and thousands of years of observations and um My tribe tried to save a town of frank um And there was I don't know if it was lost in translation But this town we told the settlers you can't live by this mountain. We call we call it Um, oh the word the word leaves my mind Essentially the walking the mountain that walks across the land and so for thousands and thousands of years We've watched this mountain walk across the land and even a geographer will tell me A mountain walking across the land. Yes, we've seen this mountain walk And so every so often this mountain starts to rumble and moves a little farther out into the plane And um, we've been watching it for thousands of years. We told the settlers don't put your town here They didn't listen to us and 30 years later The entire town of frank was buried under more rubble that they didn't even bother to dig anyone out because it was so deep And we told them and it was lost in translation Somehow but that is a traditional ecological knowledge concept that I like to promote um That if we can have better communications if we can listen to each other And if we validate the knowledge that we have Indigenous science and traditional ecological knowledge That we can possibly Make it through the changing climates Well, I first just want to say that I'm honored and humbled to be here with um, so many So many others who have so many thoughtful and provocative And important things to say I'm also really grateful for those who organized This conference and put in all the work to make it happen. Um, so very happy to Be part of this conversation Um So we were asked to reflect on our work and what brought us to it and so I'll I'll start with that And as I was thinking about this, I thought that um, a lot of what brings me to my current work is um Cognitive dissonance, I guess is one way of thinking about it um starting when I was Quite young. I felt like there was often a disconnect between um, my experience in the world and kind of the way in which the world was um, presented to me in theories or in sort of, um, political conceptions And understandings And so I so I started to puzzle about that and I think Continuing to puzzle about that has led me led me eventually to become a philosopher Where I get to do this for a living um, so some of the sources of cognitive dissonance were when I was really young like This idea that sort of the environment or what we what's often called the natural world um, it's just sort of a backdrop against which A social drama plays out And just really falls away and a lot of people's consciousness and that was just Didn't resonate with me and didn't make sense to me I also found cognitive dissonance in the way we sort of sort different kinds of organisms. I remember as a kid Picking some like a dandelion on the way home to bring to my mom and presenting it to her and having her say That's just a weed And thinking oh gosh, what makes something a weed and other things not weeds And feeling a bit puzzled about that um When I went on to college. I was actually a biology major I studied ecology and evolutionary biology And I found myself also experiencing cognitive dissonance around the kinds of models I was in a very mathematical biology department and the kinds of models that were being used to represent um, how animals behaved Interactions between animals and plants and ecosystems um Also seemed to me strange. So I remember like one lab where we were studying optimal foraging theory, which basically um Sort of predicted that animals would seek to maximize the number of calories that they could take in in a in a certain Uh period of time with minimal energy expenditure and thinking like this can't really It doesn't really seem adequate to capture the complexity Of the phenomenon that we're trying to think about here about animal behavior um, and so other places this played out were As I started to experience. I didn't really have a name for this But what I eventually came to understand is the very gender dimensions of science um, and then toward the end of college, um Which was in the for me in the mid 1990s The Debates international discussions around climate change were starting to happen and people were talking about some kind of treaty to address climate change and I remember Watching those debates or Looking at what was going on and and hearing that there was this great new, you know Target that we were going to set to stabilize greenhouse gases at 1990 levels And I remember thinking well, that's weird because it's only 1994 And it seemed like we had a pretty significant problem in 1990 So how is this actually going to adequately address the problem? And I remember being told at the time well, you just don't understand the political realities of the situation So what you really need to sort of attend to is the political reality and um I actually felt like deja vu in the recent weeks because I feel like in the youth the global youth climate strikes The same dynamic is playing out, right? We're being asked You know those of us who have Should have been doing something about this And who have the power to make change are being asked to take action and stop sort of just paying lip service to climate change and The response is often like oh, you don't understand the political realities. We just this this is the best we can do and I It's hard for me to believe that's true um, so I think a lot of my work um grew out of these forms of cognitive dissonance, which I guess you might sort of say is a kind of to sort of gather together a kind of dissatisfaction with um the ways and the kind of conceptual ways and also institutional and practical ways in which We understand and engage in the world. Um, and I've come to believe that the ways in which Like I was sort of educated to think about the world and engage with it Are actually sort of historically anomalous in certain ways and that there are many Rich traditions and ways of thinking about the world and how we might engage with the world that are That have been marginalized in various ways. Um, but that We have the potential and many of us have the potential to learn from so I think in recent years I've been I guess thinking about how um, it might be possible In various contexts, but in the climate context in particular to Make space for a wider range of voices Because I think the frameworks that have been used to conceptualize Climate change to conceptualize responses to climate change to to imagine possibilities of living differently are kind of narrow and cramped in various ways. Um, and that the conversation has very much been dominated by a sort of A kind of status quo way of thinking that I think really needs to be Um challenged in various ways Um, so one of the ways in which that's played out in my work is by trying to think beyond only Distributive justice issues in relation to climate change I think by now many people who follow debates over or discussions of climate change realize that the impacts of climate change Um Well, neither the contributions To climate change nor the impacts are sort of justly distributed. Many of the folks who have contributed the most Are sort of also most insulated from climate impacts And many folks who have not contributed very much are In some sense on the front lines of climate change But I think that the distributive issues aren't actually the only important issues They're really important issues of participatory justice and Recognition so not only do people get an opportunity, you know, not only questions of who gets to have a say or who gets to participate in discussions but what The disc the sort of discourse is capable of taking up And I think with questions of misrecognition often What I see is that in some of the mainstream discussions of climate change Really important ideas and perspectives are not even really heard There's not really the space to take up those ways because they don't fit within a certain kind of dominant framing um, and I I'll just give maybe one example, um of that and then um, and then Then wrap up, but Um, I've been working a lot lately on This idea Not working on it to promote it necessarily, but engaging with this idea of A climate geoengineering solar climate geoengineering this idea that it might be possible to use to manipulate The amount of sunlight that reaches the planet in order to Compensate for climate warming this involves schemes like Putting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect additional amounts of sunlight Or changing the reflectivity of low lying marine clouds And um, one of the things That I've I guess one of the things I'm interested in is how it might be possible to Broaden out our thinking about that as a climate solution And a climate response and what that might take And I think for one it takes you know more attention to the dynamics of power how You know how much inertia there is In reinforcing the status quo and looking for sort of a single You know magical solution like if we just put this stuff in the stratosphere We'll we'll solve climate change. I don't think climate change is a problem that's going to be Solved it's going to be You know a challenge that we engage with and respond to over The coming decades. It's not and it that has to happen on so many different levels Although it's a global problem. It plays out locally in many different ways in different contexts Um, but one of the things I've noticed in some of the discussions of solar climate geoengineering is that There's this strategy of sort of paying Lip service to certain concerns like the concern for engagement of diverse voices But then not much translation of that into actual practice So like one way I was thinking of this is it's this sort of acknowledge and ignore strategy Where it's interesting. I find people on like very different sort of Positionalities and sides of the debate with respect to this issue saying very similar things but meaning really different things by them So saying yes, we need to incorporate diverse voices. Yes, we need international perspectives and then proceeding To rely exclusively on say, you know very elite credentialed experts from institutions like harvard To guide decision-making so Anyway, I think there's actually Some big challenges there I sort of have tried to position myself as a little bit of a bridge between like main some of the mainstream conversation What might be called mainstream conversations? around some of these issues and some of the I think more deeper systemic critiques that Many of our panelists today have been giving super effective voice too. So I'll stop there Hello so I think everyone's been touching on the idea that it's really hard to talk about what you do Especially if you're a philosopher because that's kind of a contentious category even So I'm just going to start with Part of a blog post that I that I wrote that was addressing sort of the the main questions of my research And this is one of the ones that I put in the bibliography. So if people are interested in reading the whole thing You're you're welcome to do that But I thought that this was a nice way of sort of introducing what it is that I would I the main questions of my research so How do we talk about the painful violent distance between ourselves and the earth? How do we apologize reconcile with the land that makes us? How do we name the violent systems and histories that constrict spaces like weights on our windpipes? How do we speak the names that work to unperson us unhuman us unland us? These are some of the questions that trouble me and push me in my scholarship The connection of land and struggle is an intimate one I assumed then that the violence against humans and the violence against non-human nature would be connected in important ways In major cases of political reconciliation such as South Africa and Canada But that was not the case in fact Dominant Euro-descendant theories of harm and repair are limited in their exclusion of considerations of earth of land and of environment I have identified this omission as a problem But also as an opportunity to engage our different Environmental heritages identities and values in the work of healing in the work of reconciliation So I'm really interested in thinking about some of the problems that we face As a global community and having as having a global planetary Environmental crisis as being connected to the ways that we've conceptualized Environment and earth and the things that we thought are possible or ethical to do to the earth And consequently also to do to other people and so that's Really the crux of what I'm thinking about and sort of I'm thankful that I'm going last because I get the opportunity to sort of speak to some of the things that my panelists have talked about that are really important and that are really Really amazing to sort of think together with And so some of the things that I want to talk about is Our orientation to space and to land as something that's learned And that can be either liberating or oppressive right when we think about structures of domination And how we're inclined to relate to spaces in particular ways And I also want to think about Part of that orientation to land is is deeply Related to the way that we mark space right so to Historical markers to placards to street signs to names place names right and so I'll tell you a story because I'm I'm from here. And so I get to make fun of kinetica because I'm from here so Growing up here There are things that I reflect on now as someone who does or who who I who does decolonial anti-colonial work That seemed very strange to me now, but didn't seem strange to me growing up. So an example is in second grade Connecticut and probably other new england places have these sort of Organizations, maybe you've heard of them like daughters of the american revolution And so our local chapter milford is where I'm from Our local chapter of the daughters of the american revolution had an essay contest Where every like all the second graders in I don't know if it was just my school or or if it was district wide But had to write an obituary for george washington Um, and so I did this I remember I remember going up to our Only computer in our house and like creating the columns so it would look like a Proper newspaper right and writing this obituary about george washington and I got honorable mention And I was very proud of that and looking back on that. I'm like, what a ridiculous activity Right, like why was I forced to do this and then thinking about how I moved through the space of my town And you might think about this in in the context of new england as well new england is very proud of its colonial history Right, like I remember Milford and orange would often get into fights about like who was settled first In terms of like their colonial like Anniversary, right things like that and if it was older, it was better, right? That's very strange. It's very violent Right to think about those sorts of things. Um, and then just recently Uh, I I made a joke my mom's here. So I'm like I keep looking at her. Um, my mom's here and so, um She has a dog. She adopted a new dog and we were on a walk and um The dog his name is Alonso He would very purposely like crossed lawns and he would like pee on these colonial markers, right? Like like So I I was joking with her and telling her that she's got an anti-colonial dog Right, um, because like and I remember growing up thinking that this was very normal But there would be placards on like houses in my town that I would walk by all the time And I I took time to read them and see how bizarre they are right like george washington, you know hitched his horse to this porch Or like was entertained at this Location right and it's just like that that really informs how you move through space, right? If that's the only history that's taught to you that's going to impact the way that you relate to land as never having Um been anyone else's right? Um And so I think um to make this a little bit more uh academic, um Then just my observations. There's a quote that I want to read from An indigenous an indigenous scholar alien morton robinson who wrote a book called the white possessive Um, and so thinking about how this marking Is really important and also into the way in which we um sort of can background the land or the environment that we exist in And think of ourselves as the primary actors sort of on the scene Of anything that's going on. Um, so i'm going to start now. So um for indigenous people white possession is not unmarked Unnamed or invisible it is hyper visible in our quotidian and encounters whether it is on the streets of otago or sydney In the tourist shops in vancouver or waipahu or sitting in a restaurant in new york We experience ontologically the effects of white possession These cities signify with every building and every street that this land is now possessed by others Signs of white possession are embedded everywhere in the landscape The omnipresence of indigenous sovereignty exists here too But it is disavowed through the materiality of these significations Which are perceived as evidence of ownership by those who have taken possession This is territory. Um that has been marked by and through violence and race and quote So I sort of just want to trouble the ways that we Um rely on these constructions of land and think of them as sort of normal Or uh natural but they're very specifically constructed to reflect the belonging of some people and the Disbelonging or unbelonging of others um, and so I think that that's um Incredibly important, especially if we think about what that kind of dominance, um settler colonial colonial thinking has got us has gotten us in terms of Um the ecological crisis that we're currently in right so the kind of thing of thinking we've had this conception of land as being a commodity of being an object as being not Agential right as being sort of like Matter that just awaits sort of the formation of human development. Usually particular human development, right? So we see Development and industry And technology as these things that are working to improve the land in particular ways that we desire And that that's been very violent and very harmful to the earth and also to people So in terms of thinking about the environmental crisis, right? We can think well We've relied on this dominant sort of Eurocentric model for about 500 years And this is where it's gotten us and so how can we think about the rich? The rich ecological identities, heritages And histories that are also in the land right but that are obscured And how can we think about other peoples like indigenous peoples and afro diasporic peoples? Relationships to land as modeling a different kind of way of being in the world And so that's really the the majority of what I want to say so i'll stop there Okay, so thank you to all three of our speakers We have about 40 minutes for questions. So I'll run around with the microphone and take questions I'd like to start though with any student questions. So If you're a student would like to ask a question I'll get to you first and then we'll open it up more broadly to the audience. So just flag me down I'll come find you and just a reminder we are recording this so if you could state your name and Affiliation that would be helpful I'm lila. I'm a senior here and I'm an environmental studies minor So in regards to climate change we facetimed with someone from the un and he was actually very hopeful About climate change and I've taken many climate change classes and not everybody shares that same view So I was wondering if you guys could tell me if you were hopeful or not on the issue I think I go back and forth between the way I feel and each day is a different feeling But overall There is a little hope I don't I don't think that the conversation Is being pressed as urgent as it is And it's not a It's not a um, what am I trying to say? The issue is not that The world is going to end It's the world is going to end as we know it And we will not be able to find things or live the way we want to live where we are So at one point You or your descendants will be forced to And we're experiencing it today will be forced to make a decision based on something that's climate impacted For instance, my grandpa has shingles and had shingles and For the last 40 years of his life. We looked for a plant and And it became very urgent and worrisome then because We talked to all of the elders in our community and they all remember this flower and it's uh Um So i'm i'm looking into like tracking groundwater And and seeing how climate has shifted in our area to see if there's a seed bank available for this plant and um What this plant does is it it um curbs and suppresses Neurological dysfunctions. So if your your neurons are firing off and causing you pain this flower will help it And um, and it has no side effects besides dulling the pain, which is amazing But we can't find the flower and so in those days and the days especially when my grandpa was flared It was urgent and and doomsday because i'm thinking I might get shingles. I need to find this flower So it goes back and forth and then on our mapping project. We have projects of environmental excellence Which are models of traditionally logical knowledge that prove that sustainability does um Have beautiful impacts the monomony national forest Um by the great lakes is an example of that and they work on a tribal philosophy that was created um hundreds of years ago And they start at one end of the forest and work their way to the other end of the forest taking only the sick the dying The sick the dead and the diseased Which are diseased and are sick or similar But they only take those and then they work in one direction for a time And then when they reach the end they turn around and go back and by that time years have passed so So it's a very sustainable model and and what has happened over the last 150 years Is that there are more trees in their forests despite continuous continuous logging Um and the trees are healthier There's less invasive species and less pests and what they're also doing is they're finding that Trees that aren't growing in the southern parts of the territory anymore are Moving up So they're taking different species and planting them where they tend to grow So in models like that I feel like there is a lot of hope, but if we can do that on a mass scale There would be success I think I share the sort of mixed feelings I guess I tend to be a Hopeful person I'm often told by my political scientists friends that I'm like not very realistic But I think one way to I mean there are reasons not to be hopeful and I think the the politics Really needs to change around climate change and I would say obviously if you're thinking about the us the current administration Is really moving us deeply deeply backwards on climate change, but I also feel like Every administration has been problematic on this issue. Um, just When my daughter was in first grade she wrote a letter to Barack Obama president Obama expressing concern about climate change and asking for The president's response or policy on this and got back A form letter that said thanks for your concern and here's a picture of the white house dog Um, did not mention climate change at all. Um, so I mean I think And I think that actually is It's only was a small example, but it's emblematic of sort of the level of priority that this issue has um taken in in the in the united states on the other hand, I think climate change is not sort of As I said earlier it plays out in lots of different ways and lots of different contexts and I think there are creative ways of imagining how One might respond to it certainly It would be helpful if the countries that wealthy countries like the us would provide resources Like financial resources not control how adaptation takes place or control You know processes of mitigation and so on but actually provide Capacity and resources to places that are less That have fewer resources and have done less to contribute to the problem but I do think I one thing that gives me hope is that I think some of the framings around climate change just like are Limiting so this idea that we just have 10 years Um, I think that's meant to convey urgency and there is a lot of urgency But on the other hand, it's not like the world is going to end in 10 years, right? We'll still have to be grappling with this. Um, so I think Not framing um responses entirely in an all or nothing light and thinking about The multiple levels at which responses are possible, you know Whether that's in your local community At the city level in curricula At state level policy on renewable energy level standards In, you know, creatively thinking about how we might live in a radically different way that At least in, you know, not in those of us who live in these very material intensive Economies driven by sort of consumption and you know, there are other ways to envision good human lives And we need to do some of that work of rethinking Yeah, so I just I want to agree with what's been said already, but also thinking about We really have to get out of this this framework of thinking that we have and I think that's a an area for People who who are philosophers or people who are thinking critically to engage with that work, right because um thinking about just even some of the ways that adaptation is being framed and Coopted in these very capitalistic ways, right is going to produce the same problems that we already have Right in terms of thinking about how there's like people are predicting, right very smart people are predicting that there is going to be Basically adaptation apartheid, right? So like people the people who can afford to adapt are going to right and are currently very unequal wealth wise and income wise society and so that the the most vulnerable and the least Responsible in terms of like global carbon emissions are going to pay the highest prices, right? in terms of adaptation and that has huge implications for For thinking about who's going to bear the burden of climate change moving forward, but in terms of hope I also think that There are ways of thinking about this problem that are outside of the box, right? Like so thinking in the same framework is dangerous and and does Weird things, but we also have a ton of resources in terms of thinking about people who relate differently And who have related to the environment differently for thousands of years for millennia, right? And so we should make use of that That knowledge and also build those relationships to foster those kinds of those kinds of Relations to the natural world And so I think that that's But I I also do think that The urgent it's kind of interesting like the urgency that's trying to be conveyed in those kind of finite Time scales is is important But also thinking about how people have been and continue to organize against the the sort of status quo All right, so thinking about the the turnout for the the global climate strikes, right and thinking about The way people are framing that kind of that kind of activism and that kind of debate Are hugely important. So I think again, it's yeah, it's like a You you do kind of oscillate between being deeply deeply depressed and frustrated and right and then also seeing these like glimmers of Of hope because it's just yeah, that's just an it's an it's a wicked problem, right? So I think the word that that describes it the best is I call myself an apocalyptomist Hi, my name is Teresa. I'm also an environmental studies minor You talked about how technology is the dominance the dominance model of thinking and how Technology is kind of a way for us to improve the land But it actually in our minds and it actually degrades it. Do you think geo engineering is another Vestage of that kind of dominance model of thinking Thank you for that was that question directed at me. Yes, it was great um So I've been thinking a lot about um technology lately and I think that um the way like what we mean by technology really matters right because there are ways that um And I just wrote like a piece about this right there are ways that Techniques have always been employed to produce particular results, right and that comes from whatever community Is is doing that sort of technique But I think that the the equation or the equivalence of technology with this kind of relationship of domination Of the natural world is a very common way in which we think right and we think that sort of um An allegiance to technology through like industrialization and development is a way that we can sort of Get ourselves out of this kind of situation and I think that we need to trouble that kind of That kind of understanding because Not all Technology as we've seen not all the technology we've employed has been good for the environment, right? It's produced a lot of the problems that we have so I'm wary of some of like the geoengineering Issues that um that marion also brought up in terms of thinking that we can sort of Just use the same sorts of understanding or the same sorts of models to Get us out of this. I'm also very wary of the way that like colonialism is Restructured or refashioned in some of those ideas, right? So this idea that there's always there will always be another place that we can enact the same kind of violence on right? Or there's always another place that we can sort of go and produce the same sorts of societies or the same sorts of values so I think that We have to think And I was thinking in that piece in particular about like techniques that Indigenous peoples have cultivated for particular places by paying really close attention To what the natural world is doing right and not imposing a sort of will Of a human community onto the natural world But actually working with the conditions that exist To to to produce a sort of mutually beneficial way of an reciprocal way of being in relation with with the earth I'll just add really briefly. I mean, I think one of the interesting things about Solar geoengineering There's been limited research, but some on how people in sort of vulnerable Climate vulnerable areas Respond or might think about solar geoengineering. So It's hard to generalize because you know, there hasn't been tons and tons of research in this area, but There have been some common themes and I think one of the things that Wiley Carr who's done some research on this has found is that People in very climate vulnerable areas who are, you know, really worried about Having to move or radically Change their lives and livelihoods are not categor necessarily categorically opposed to solar geoengineering But they're really worried about who's going to control it And really worried about the possibility that this will be just yet another way in which The U.S. or other sort of global powers Subject them to Sort of a set of forces beyond their control from which they don't benefit So that's that's really at the heart of the concern Hi, I'm Nathan Schmidt. Uh, I'm a junior here and I'm doing a individually designed major in economic history No environmental studies minor, but I guess that's kind of the flavor of the day Uh, and this question is for basically anybody who wants to field it And I guess it could be tied to the whole issue of hope and How you want to do that? I think hope is also going to be a kind of a flavor of the day here um and I I don't want to get too tied up in Confronting the political realities of the situation because that usually feels like a dead end um But at the same time it feels like there ought to be Some most practical way in which to start Implementing the kinds of ideas of widening Like the base of voices and incorporating new ideas and actually following through instead of acknowledging and ignoring Like we've been talking about today most times it feels like you know thousands of people can put an entire lifetimes of wonderful effort for climate change Only for it to be undone by one careless politician with a stroke of a pen and It would be really nice To have some sort of framework to work in Or it feels like like at least feels intuitively like the work is going to count Ideas are great ideas, but I just want them to stick So does anybody have any ideas? You can have the mic back You should go ahead So a lot of the work that I do is trying to inspire hope and trying to find common ground of where we all are concerned about some aspect So, um, let's do a little exercise. So let's just take two seconds Um, everybody think about nature Okay Now, um, how many of you by rays of hands saw your saw people in nature? There it is so Now think about One of the times where you felt most connected and most hopeful in nature now Does that have a stream a river a lake a mountain? the ocean So there's our common ground at some point in our lives We've all found our hope and inspiration in some form of nature, but we don't have the communication skills to actually find that common ground Without prompting and so, um, out of this entire crowd only four people raised their hand of People included in nature. And so when we approach it from that perspective There isn't much hope for Healing and restoring ecosystems in nature when we separate ourselves from it And so we have to find that common ground in connecting ourselves to it and thinking back of when we first formed our opinions our thoughts and our relationships Um, and where that was I'll just add briefly that This is this is a big challenge right the issue of hope and I often have like students often ask me like, you know Does what I do make a difference or how how how could I make a difference and This is maybe a crazy view, but I think everything makes a difference Um, I think the way that we talk to each other makes a difference. I think I don't know the way we move through space the way we live in the world like all the all of that makes a difference um, and it may not be obvious What a difference it makes but I mean think about when Something bad happens to you like when somebody slams a door in your face or when you get I got my first piece of hate mail last week From writing a not very radical seeming Like little op-ed type thing. Um, but you know, like I was like that I mean I just recycled it, but I was like, oh that like That felt kind of bad, you know so like what you do Makes a difference and I think the other thing is that social change Is not this sort of linear thing. I mean there like Changes that occur that people never expected, you know, whether it's the Berlin wall coming down or you know other other large reorganizations that have happened So I guess I like to think about is like we can all do the work of sort of preparing the soil for change And while it may not seem obvious, uh, how that's contributing maybe At some point the the discourse the institutions like there will be a significant shift But we have to do the work obviously And I would just say that like a lot of the things that feel Like permanent and natural and normal They got that way by people creating them and and fostering like a feedback loop of of keeping those things in place Right, that's why structures and systems are so seem so intractable But also like coming from the philosophy sort of standpoint like we are dealing with Inheritances of the history of ideas, right and that those ideas have created these Structures and these consequences and those ideas can be changed And so I think that's also really powerful to think about right in terms of thinking how we And that it might not be an immediate sort of change, right? It won't be it'd be really hard and and gradual But that we can also effect change through through our thinking right through what we normalize as being Just the way things are right like that's the way things have been constructed Okay, and we can open questions now more broadly to everyone students faculty and visitors So flag me down and we'll try to get to as many people as we can still have about 15 minutes or so for questions Hi, thank you for your remarks I'm wondering and this is for any of you who want to answer it If you all can speak a little bit to the different ways of understanding the environment as having a kind of agency, right? so what How might You all talk about that And along with that if you could comment a bit. I don't know if it's related, but it occurs to me that we often Talk about sustainability in terms of these things that we need to do as individuals like we need to recycle You know, I want to give up plastic straws And have paper straws. I don't want to change straw culture. I just want to write. I just want a different straw and I'm wondering if That might be related to not seeing the environment as having a kind of agency but being something that Is acted upon or So however you all want to take that So I come up from a paradigm of thought where Not only does nature plants and animals have agency they have rights and so In blackfoot philosophy We are taught that we are fairly insignificant in the in the Scheme of things, but we are very significant in the impact that we can have and so There there are really great stories and the united united nations declaration of indigenous people is a great document to read for that that speaks to the rights of nature and When you think of it like that Speaking to the rights of nature is really addressing Our relationship to it, but more importantly the right to be the purpose and the place Of other things that are not too legged And so to this question and trying to think about the connections between them Yeah, so a lot of what I do is sort of talk back to this tradition that has created this understanding of Nature and the environment as non-agential right as not having agency and I think that's also a huge part in terms of thinking about The sort of responses that we've had historically to climate change right and thinking about our role in the the consequences that we're Facing because of that and I think that it does get to I think there is a connection between these sort of like individual sort of solutions Or ways of thinking about sustainability right because that's also coming from a particular tradition right of seeing humans as Superior and exceptional to nature because of their ability to be individuals to be agents in a world that is Conceived of as agentless except for humans right so I think that that has and so those those sorts of like Individualistic responses to how we can be more sustainable Right are actually unsustainable right because they forget that we are they don't think about the ways that we are related to a much bigger sort of system and and world and Yeah, so I think I try to think a lot with my students in because I teach environmental ethics about what it would mean to open the kind of a Little room for thinking about the agency of place and also thinking about the agency of place In not just like a negative way because I think there's ways in which we assign agency to the natural world now That it's like responding very violently to the violence that's been done to it, right? So I think that So I try to get and language is also very important for that right like I just use it right so thinking about how we can actually Through our through our language create this kind of distance that doesn't exist and that that is a way that we Um, we think that all in the solutions have to be this sort of individual Change it has to be a collective Change of the way that we think right and that comes from seemingly very small thing changes of of Orientation to to the world And I just like to add a small thing to that because language is very very important Think about how every state's fish and wildlife calls Deer or ungulate species game What does that mean? Yeah, I won't say much except to I mean just I think these are really helpful Insights I I think this is a place where although there are increasingly some resources sort of in the scholarly literature thinking about this that um a place where some of the dominant Like philosophical sort of Western European philosophical traditions Are really limiting and where we've been where I'll just speak for myself where I've been sort of like trained out of the intuition that parts of the natural world have agency because I think that was sort of like the assumption that I sort of started out with um, I remember not that long ago. Maybe eight years ago writing a paper and part of one of the Things I wanted to talk about in the paper was the possibility of solidarity with other species Um, and the editor said, you know, I think that's just too out there, you know, and I cut it So, um, it's something that I I think deserves more attention and that I and others should think more about Midway through your talk as me You mentioned a critique of reconciliation and the way it works And I would love to hear you unpack that a little bit more and specifically how you bring in Land and nature as an actor in that process And then I would love to hear your thoughts Sauta calling last about how you think of healing and reconciliation and who the actors involved are and who is being healed What is being healed? Thank you for that question. Um, so I I look at a lot of critiques of reconciliation like the sort of paradigmatic models that we have um, and one of the things that I was frustrated with was the ways that land was absent from a lot of the sort of um reconciliation processes and um But also in terms of thinking right like the idea of like repatriation or rematriation of land Is something that's almost never on the table Of reconciliation processes, especially between settler states and indigenous peoples, right? And so that's a that's a huge problem. Um, but also thinking about how What reconciliation requires this understanding of harm Or violence or political violent relations Between people is sort of confined to the human right? But actually a lot of the ways in which we understand Harm comes from what's happened to people and land right, so um, so some of the ways that I think about that is just getting sort of recognition of ecological violence as a huge dimension of the political harm that We're talking about right, so um, what I noticed especially in sort of Um philosophical theories of political reconciliation. There's this understanding that the harm is sort of It happens in the world But it's sort of confined to human communities Right, and so I'm thinking about Well, how to like when you think about settler colonialism, right? That's a that's a Um a system that's primarily about land right like everything that's happening is about access to territory and access to particular understandings or resources and getting those resources And if you don't even have that on the table of a reconciliation process like what are you actually Fixing right like what are you actually repairing? And so a lot of times what I've argued in some of my written work is that these models are still deeply colonial And they're actually not addressing the sort of primary harms that they Are identifying as things that they do not want to repeat and so I think By talking about The relationship of violence Like sort of frameworks and understandings we have of violence that are rooted in In really disrespecting and being violent to the earth and that those are really Important to the ways in which human communities violate and do violence to other human communities So I I think it was uh dr. Frankowski this morning who said, um We need to fail our way. Was that you? I'm not sure it was in the first panel So I I love that reconciliation is becoming a topic of conversation down here Because I'm a dual citizen between Canada and the u.s. And Canada Is about 10 years ahead in reconciliation? And they are failing their way to Reconciliation and so essentially, um, you can't you can't reconcile unless you take action and acknowledgements are are Well can be a slap in the face to reconciliation So we need to take those acknowledgements into action. And so For instance one way you can do that is take your phone Pin pin my website the submit a report down to your desktop and as you walk around town and read these Educational placards if they have dehumanizing language or they just have a skewed narrative submit a report and And what that does is it helps compile this this mass Narrative that we have and we can't change that narrative until we can identify where it's at and Another part that gives me hope in that is that as I've been Talking about my project across the country More and more people are starting to contact me and and asking if I can be the liaison to Donate their land back to the tribe And either donate it in full or open it up for cultural uses Which is a huge act of reconciliation because it not only goes Beyond acknowledgement it puts into action that you are opening Stolen land that was fraudulently bought and And allowing original people to come in and help manage that in terms of harvesting and You know just forestry So it's a it's a it's a beautiful thing that I find hope in that people are contacting and saying I don't want to just acknowledge I want to give the land back And or open it to to these cultural practices and and once we can get that relationship Connected again we Can start seeing the real impacts that that under The management of traditional ecological management you will see more birds you will see more butterflies and bees because Because of the management that's been honed over thousands of years It's it's directly focused on biodiversity in the most ideal conditions So I I really appreciate that question. Thank you Okay, so this will be our last question My name is Kajal. I'm an environmental studies major and um historical emissions emissions from like 100 years ago still affected our present and We don't have institutions to be adequate to ensure future generations would you know cut down their emissions So my question is that what are your views or thoughts about future generations and how would that affect them? So I often tell my students that carbons creepy right because we're we're dealing with like the the carbon ghosts of previous generations, right and thinking about our role in contributing to that trend or trying to mitigate that trend of of um Either increasing or decreasing carbon emissions and so I think future generations are hugely important, right? and I think that We also need to think about future generations in a more in a broader sense than Just thinking about human generations, right? So thinking about the The possibility like what kind of future we imagine For our planet, right for our earth and all the the beings that are not just humans And so I think that We really have to I think we really have to make that an urgent piece of of our thinking Right like having that orientation towards future and that you get You get really Different understandings of commitments to future generations by looking at different ways of thinking from different human communities and I think that that's um to to sort of Um rely on the the work that's already been done through the oral traditions of of indigenous people and of Thinking um thinking long, right? So they sometimes call it, right? so like thinking intergenerationally as as a rule and not just thinking about The the needs or desires of the current generation so in the philosophical literature, there's like a lot of Um There's a lot of weird a weird ways that that's taken up, right? So sometimes people talk about like debts to future generations or like payments to future generations Um, but that's also sort of within that that economic kind of um framework Um, but I I like to think kind of imaginatively about that. So one of the things I have my students do is write a letter to Whoever they want to imagine as a previous generation and what they want would want to say now And also to write to a future generation However, they want to imagine that and say say things and it's actually I think it's a really powerful Kind of exercise because you have the space to to think about those things, right? In ways that perhaps we're not encouraged to All the time in the society that we have so just even creating that space for thinking Um thinking further than our own own selves or our own communities um in blackfoot philosophy, um our children are smarter than we are And um, it's only when we put them through school and tell them what not to think that we actually dumb them down and dumb ourselves down Um, and then in school we learn how to categorize things and separate them and not think about things holistically And so your question reminded me of a time I was taking my kayak out and my son was with me and he's he was only A year and a half old at the time And we passed by a huge landfill And they had built the The landfill up pretty high and there was still trash blowing around and then there was a huge methane Burning there and my son's immediate reaction was to say, oh no, mom. There's trash and fire And I was like, that's right, baby It's bad, isn't it and he said yes, we should clean it up And um, and if my year and a half old son knows that like he is much smarter than I am who Who didn't find that out until you know middle school? Yeah, just very briefly, um Echo a lot of what has been said. I think, um There are resources and traditions outside, I mean within I don't want to just only uh critique the sort of dominant philosophical tradition, but some of the sort of um I don't know marginal voices in the um dominant sort of european philosophical tradition are Also voices that resonate with other traditions that have different ways of thinking about multi-generational justice. So like communitarians for example um So like um, our de chelite has argued for conceptualizing sort of an intergenerational human community. Um, I'm right now finishing up Uh an article a chapter that focuses on confucianism and intergenerational ethics And the confucian tradition also very much understands Community is something that's not just extended spatially but extended in time. So looking backward to ancestors and Looking forward to future generations and the sort of conception of a common like shared multi-generational project of figuring out how to Flourish and develop sort of harmonious relations among people and between people in the broader world So those resources exist and I think there's this kind of unlearning almost that needs to happen For some Some of us like I'll just speak for myself, you know who have been And also within our you know, the institutions that sort of tend to focus attention in a very proximate narrow way Okay, thank you for your questions. Let's thank our panel one last time Good afternoon everyone Welcome and thank you for your presence So i'm uh sarah brill chair the department of philosophy here at fairfield And on behalf of my department and of my fellow ethics symposium subcommittee members Chris sealy and toby's phoboda It is my very great pleasure to welcome you to the keynote panel for the first ethics here and now event A daylong symposium on racial justice reproductive justice climate justice The ethics here and now initiative was conceived as a forum for fostering innovative dynamic thinking about the most pressing calls to action of our time We have been fortunate and blessed to have the support of multiple areas of the institution I'd specifically like to mention the generous support of the humanities institute in the college of arts and sciences Now in its 35th year of supporting research and teaching in the humanities We're joined by the director of the institute dr. Nails pierson who would like to offer a few welcoming comments Thank you very much sarah and thank you all for coming out Certainly the efforts of toby's phoboda and sarah brill and chris sealy really should be recognized. You've done a fantastic job It's taken a lot of work to put all this together and uh, you know Also my hats off to the philosophy department for coming up with this idea and bringing everyone together here to discuss these really pressing issues So thanks a lot for for that So i'm nels pierson professor of english and director of the humanities institute And I did want to just take a few moments to Say as I did this morning A thing or two about the institute and our support for this event 2019 marks the 35th anniversary of the humanities institute Which was founded by a challenge grant by the national endowment for humanities in 1984 And since that time our aim has been to create a hub for national and international study of the humanistic disciplines And also to promote the study of humanities as central to a fairfield university education both within and beyond the Traditional classroom setting and we do that by Supporting faculty and student research in established and emerging fields in the disciplinary and the interdisciplinary humanities And as well as by sponsoring public programming and community initiatives So as I mentioned this morning, I think that this symposium really couldn't be more timely or more in line with the kind of Goals that we're trying to achieve in the institute And not just because of the three issues it addresses but also because of it's aimed to highlight the call to action That's inherent in their intellectual study And you know the need to translate the insights that are afforded to us by critical reasoning and speculative hypothesis And to translate those into action and practice or to think about the call to action and practice that those Give to us is really, you know, there's a long history of that throughout the humanities But I think with these these issues in particular There's a tremendous urgency for those to come together for us to think about the ways that Our intellectual understanding leads to questions of action and practice And so I've been very, you know, very interested in hear what I've been able to hear so far today I did have to go home in between to take care of a couple of Beagles who demanded action themselves And so I didn't make the the afternoon panel But certainly what I've been hearing is really impressive and I look forward to hearing the rest in the keynote tonight So we'll turn things back over to you, sir All right So we've also seen generous support from the College of Arts and Sciences Common Grounds fund And I'd like to thank Dean rich richard greenwald who would hope to be here today, but unfortunately was called away to a meeting We have also seen a groundswell of support from over 20 departments and programs And I'd like to go ahead quickly and read them now to you. They're printed on the back of your program We've been supported by the departments of anthropology sociology communication history English modern languages and literatures politics visual and performing arts And the programs of applied ethics black studies catholic studies classical studies environmental studies international studies islamic world studies judaic studies Latin American and Caribbean studies peace and justice studies and women gender and Sexuality studies. So thank you very much to those departments and programs But I also want to issue a huge thank you to all 12 of our panelists and to our faculty affiliates who have committed their time and energy We're so very grateful for all of you to be here and to think carefully with us In keeping with ethics here and now commitment to the here and now We would like to begin with a call to both thinking and action By recognizing that our presence in this time and place is a direct function of the violent action and logic of the united states settler state in its ongoing history of colonization And thus our obligation to educate ourselves and others about this history and to act in light of that education To that end we invite all in attendance today to consult materials posted through organizations like the mashantucket piquot museum and research center The akimot educational initiative and native land digital We'll begin our discussion this evening with uh See i have to find The order of panelists with uh, dr. Maisha cherry from the university of california riverside Followed by dr. Ashwini tambe associate professor of philosophy at the university of maryland And dr. Kyle white timnick chair of the humanities and professor of philosophy and community sustainability at michigan state university The conversation will be moderated by our own dr. Chris sealy Associate professor of philosophy Director of the black studies program coordinator of the social justice signature of magis core and associate director of the humanities institute Please join me in welcoming our panelists So i would like to echo uh comments that were made by previous presenters Thank you so much for this opportunity to come and share work and also engage in the work of others Also looking forward to just questions and comments from the audience Thank you all so much for coming out. I know it's late in the day. I know it's friday. I know it's 4 30 So thank you to everyone who had a choice and those who did not have a choice Thank you so much for for for coming out. So one of the most popular questions that academics asks other academics Is what do you work on? So i want to answer that question in ways in which i will respond to other academics and then i kind of break that down So what do I work on? So i'm a philosopher and usually what I say is that I work at the intersection of moral psychology And social and political philosophy So what does that mean? So by moral psychology, I simply mean that I am concerned with emotions and attitudes I'm concerned with emotions and attitudes such as love and anger such as hope and despair But i'm also interested in those emotions in the context of the social and the political domain So more particularly i'm interested in emotions and attitudes arising from oppression And emotions and attitudes responding to injustice All right, so so what has bought me to this work? So three things in particular The first thing that has brought me to this particular work has to do with identity For those who cannot see I am black and As a result of being black in the united states Some might argue that I am marginalized. I have experienced oppression And so I am just naturally inclined and interested in looking at racial injustice But i'm also, you know connected with that identity In being black. I remember Just being very young and just being obsessed with black thought and black thought being a way of You know kind of looking and thinking through liberation um Thinking critically about oppression and also just taking seriously the material world And I think a lot of I experienced that very early on given my particular identity More connected to the work that i'm working on has a lot to do With being a witness So one of the things that I would just always remember growing up Is just witness and my mother and her affect our emotional response to the world So my mother was a was a woman who embraced her emotions So I saw her angry at discrimination. I saw her saddened about the world I witnessed her disappointment in her children not me my sister I witnessed her joy at service her hope in in people But one of the things that I I also experienced as a result of witnessing that for several years in the household The odor that I got and I experienced a real world I learned That some emotional states were considered virtues and vices Depending on who you were And what you were responding to So my mother who was a woman my mother was also physically handicap. My mother was also black, etc I recognized that a lot of times her emotions were not taken seriously They were dismissed They were judged unfairly. They were stereotyped and I also saw that in the world And so as a result of that I became outraged but also motivated to see why emotions Worn by some were picked on and seen as threatening so A third thing that kind of brought me to my work has to do with what I call kind of philosophical investigation And one of the things that specifically got me interested in my work on anger and forgiveness arises from two particular events So About I think the year was 2000. Okay. I'm not going to say the year because it's going to kind of reveal my age So a few years back Um, okay. I want to talk about the current events, which is going to date myself anyway So around 2012 2013 when some of you are all probably in middle school Um, I there was two events that kind of came out into play I don't know if you all remember Jeremy Lynn when he was playing for the new york nyx during the time of Lynn sanity. Okay and He was on a roll those were the good old times for the nyx One of the good old times for the nyx and I remember Reading the espn article In which a journalist described Jeremy Lynn using a racial epithet and there was outrage And I remember a response to that was a sports analyst whose name I'm not going to mention Who basically said in response to that people need to learn how to forgive All right And there was something about his admonishment for them to forgive that just bothered me and I couldn't really figure it out Why why it bothered me? But it just bothered me that that was his response to people's outrage over the use of the racial epithet around about the same time There was a court case That I became aware of In which a man was uh defending himself against rape charges He was said to have sexually assault a young woman in the elevator He got caught 10 years later and he's defending himself in court and he basically goes to the victim Um during the court case and asked her Why can't you just let this go? All right, um and usually forgiveness Uh definition or a counter forgiveness is letting go whether that is of anger or resentment or bitterness, right? So you had those two situations happening at the same time in which two people Are suggesting to a large amount of people who felt offended by a racial epithet and to a woman Who went justice for what was done to her people admonishing both of those individuals to forgive I was bothered by both of them And so I decided to look up what exactly is forgiveness And as I was doing some philosophical Research now mind you I had grew up in a christian household and I was familiar with the bible said about forgiveness But I was very very interested in what the philosophical literature had to say about forgiveness So I'm researching doing all this work on forgiveness and all this working forgiveness and one of the most popular accounts of forgiveness Not everyone agreed but one of the most popular accounts of forgiveness was to let and go with anger And I'm like, hmm, so people have a problem with anger And so that led me down a rabbit hole of anger anger anger and I've been in that rabbit hole for the last Six years. All right, so that's what brought me to my to my work on anger and forgiveness So here are some of the the philosophical questions that I've been interested in That I have attempted or tried to to answer at least partially concerning concerning anger So one question That I that I ask is is what is it? I think all of us have it have experienced it at one time or another And I think a lot of us take for granted what we think it is And so I've been very interested in and trying to figure out what it is Is it a kind of a family result resemblance? Is there several types of of anger? I've also been kind of interested in trying to answer the question Is anger necessarily or conceptually bad? And there are philosophers who suggested that is the case so the ancient stoic sinica says yes It is necessarily or conceptually bad. So get rid of it. Don't even try to experience in it experience it Philosopher Martha Nussbaum she talks about how it's conceptually bad You may have it but you want to transition out of that angry state and to another attitude such as generosity and love I do not think that it is conceptually bad And if you want to read more on that we can you can take a look at some articles so we can discuss that in the q&a Another another question that I've been very interested in is is what is the the role of anger? In the fight for justice. Is it productive? Is it counterproductive? How might it be productive? Another question. Are we always competent enough To judge the anger of other groups or certain groups How should we manage anger not as a way to eliminate it? But in ways that will strengthen it so that we can use it for transformation Um, another question i've been interested in and this is a question that I address In a chapter in a book that i'm working on What is the obligations of angry allies? And how might white supremacy manifest itself in it? And so I call allies who have anger in response to the oppression of people that they are in solidarity with I call them rage renegades But I suggest that one ought not to to think that they deserve a ribbon for that rage But they can also kind of reinforce kind of white supremacist ideas Even with that anger at racial injustice and I talk about how that is indeed the case Another question in the domain of anger And that i've been attempting to answer is what is the connection between love and anger? Are they compatible? Are they incompatible? I argue that they are compatible More importantly, I argue that anger can be an expression of love particularly agape love And I kind of lay out how that is indeed the case and then another question that i've been interested in that I also address in a chapter in a book that i'm currently working in On is how can it be That by being angry in response to racial injustice One can break what I call racial rules making them a resistant figure And so we always have a tendency to think Um that in order to be kind of a resistance figure one must take that anger do something with it But I want to suggest that before even anyone goes through the protest Just having that angry anger on your couch makes you a resistant figure indeed So that's in the domain of of anger So I've also done some work on forgiveness And i'm not really concerned about When we should forgive But the the what i'm kind of interested in forgiveness concerns the rhetoric of forgiveness And also the myth of forgiveness the discourse of forgiveness Particularly forgiveness in the context and in in the context of racial injustice particularly responding to to race based Um violence so so For example, I i'm interested in these particular cases. I'm interested in Critically analyzing instances of racial cases in which a black judge Judge hugs a murderer Or a secondary victim Acknowledges his forgiveness for A white woman who killed his brother The ways in which that is disseminated in the news But his mother's Admonishment that the system fixed their problems is not right So i'm just obsessed with like the discourse when we utilize When forgiveness comes up in the news in the media What kind of myths or kind of discourses or narratives that we try to paint through that Who are the actors that are usually involved in that particular discourse? So i'm also interested in and how and why it is That a ritual is created Out of publicly asking black victims of police violence To to forgive so that's discourse. That's the myth of forgiveness. That's that's the retigraf forgiveness And so I wrote a dissertation That I thought was amazing when I defended it and now it's been like 375 days and I don't want anyone to read it. So don't google it because it's not online Um, I want to get over it, but my dissertation Um looked at the nature And the appropriateness of forgiveness Request Particularly requests in the aftermath of of race-based violence. So some of the questions that I take a look at in that dissertation Is I kind of asked a question. What are forgiveness requests? I think that's something that we've kind of taken for granted And so I kind of divide forgiveness requests and two kind of categories request for forgiveness Which has several different types of requests and then request about forgiveness Which also comes with very different kind of types of requests I also tried to to answer the question. How do requests thing forgiveness or forgiveness requests differ from apologies Um, I also asked a question Who has the standing or the right or who is in position to make these particular requests? Why and why not? And then I kind of asked a question at the end of the dissertation How does things become more complicated when race enters the picture? All right, so, you know the main argument that I kind of make is while it would be appropriate And let's just say into personal context for some people to make particular forgiveness request I argue that it will show race-based disrespect to black victims of race-based violence All right, so that's that's what the dissertation in my work on forgiveness focuses on So more recent work. So um lately I've been looking at emotions and attitudes Particularly found in kind of social movements or responses to racial injustice Beyond those emotions and attitudes that are primarily Directed at or in response to the oppressor. All right So i'm interested in emotions attitudes that people who are who are responding to racial injustice have But those emotions or attitudes are primarily directed at themselves are directed to those and which they are in solidarity with So two particular works that I want to mention and then I sit down So one work that I have been currently working on Is trying to give an account of what I call value-based protest slogans. I have an acronym for it. It's called vps um and and value-based protest slogans are simply slogans that affirm value in the world And in addition to that In doing so it also Protests against social norms that says that one shouldn't hold or have such value So some of the slogans that i'm thinking of that I categorize as value-based protest slogans are the slogan black is beautiful Right, it expresses a value an aesthetic Value of black folks, but in doing so it also protests against a social norm that says that black is ugly And only white beauty standards or white aesthetic standards is is should be the standard i'm also interested in Black labs matter be an example of what I call value-based protest slogans So some of the questions that i'm seeking to answer is what kind of values Are these slogans affirming? And emotions they are expressing and exciting Who are they directed to who are they for? And a lot of this comes out comes out of my response from a lot of philosophers of language and also Epistemologists have been looking at the slogan black labs matter Trying to figure out why people misunderstand it and trying to give an account of people's misunderstanding Particularly outsiders particularly people who are non-users of that particular slogans And one of the things I want to respond to and I think that this argument What make room for is we it's overly focusing on trying to get other people to understand it As opposed to focusing on what is the value of it for people who are using it, right? What is it doing for people who are articulating it? And what is it doing for those who in which it is focused on? And then lastly another work that i've been thinking about is a notion called solidarity care In and in doing this work i'm thinking about ways that those who are struggling together Can take care of each other And so some of the questions that i'm thinking about is what does it mean to actually do that? What does it mean to actually care for each other care for a person that you are in solidarity with? And in that i even problematized the whole notion of self-care as well, which we can talk about if you're interested All right, thank you Thank you, dr. Cherry for that invigorating talk. I wish I had as systematic and rich A research agenda with so many exciting questions It certainly sounds a lot more unified than my trajectory. You have a powerpoint. You have a powerpoint So yes, I forgot I have a powerpoint how should I just Turn it on over here So thank you to sarah brill and the committee In the philosophy department This has been a really wonderful day. It's been such a meticulously planned symposium I really appreciate the care and thought that you have all put into it When I first looked at the array of topics that you were going to consider I just thought to myself my goodness. That's ambitious and You know, I still think it's really ambitious But at the same time I'm recognizing that even though it may be analytically ambitious To connect this range of topics at an experiential level It's entirely sound to draw connections across these various topics climate change racism sexual and reproductive injustice and indeed poverty are problems that are faced Simultaneously by large numbers of people Framing these problems in analytical isolation from each other as single issues that can be You know, discreetly distinctly and perhaps sequentially addressed Is a luxury of perspective Enjoyed by those who are not affected by all of them at once Right too many marginalized people experience them at once and in interconnected ways And addressing them together is for them an urgent need Right. So justice then what is justice? I think it involves not tugging at the single threads and actually seeing the fabric clearly So, um, my presentation is called drawing through lines and uh, it's because You know, sarah issued a challenge saying, you know, tell us about what you work on and I thought oh my god Now I have to connect all these things and I don't have the series of questions that are so beautifully connected So I've been trying to draw some through lines Between the kind of work that I've been doing But I'd also like to use the opportunity to draw a few through lines Between the presentations that I listened to today So I want to just start by noting that, um, you know in our last panel There was a really important remark made about how climate change Does not have any instant solutions, right? This isn't something that we're going to solve overnight with a magic bullet In fact, we're going to have to live with it We're going to have to generate new solutions that may create new problems So it's going to be a constant challenge and a constant adaptation I'd like to propose that The conversation about racism and racial injustice that we had in the morning also deserves a similar kind of framing that the history of colonialism And anti-black colonialism as my colleague put it Is also something that we need to address on an ongoing basis that it isn't something that we'll be able to resolve With a really smart intervention or a really sensitively framed You know reconciliation effort I think those efforts have to be ongoing and so it's a challenge that will not be That's not going to go away And so really sitting with the pain is an important lesson that I think I'm absorbing And I have been absorbing for a while now, but I think today brought home its urgency I understand first of all, I'm not a philosopher. So I'm an interloper here I'm associate professor of women's studies with an affiliation in the history department and Asian American studies department And I've been sort of under the radar all day sort of not making that clear But it's been wonderful to be among all of you today and to get a sense of how you frame your conversations around these topics that we all care about I think you invited me mostly because of the public writing that I've been doing And for that reason I circulated a recent article that I wrote About the relationship between academic feminism and public feminism in the context of the me too movement Today I won't be talking so much about that, but I'll be sharing some of my recent recent scholarship as I was asked to and then link it to a piece of public writing that I did about it I'm offering this example in the spirit of thinking about how to make the scholarship that we all produce More accessible to social justice ends Earlier this morning a panelist. I'm not going to name specific people because I'm worried I might get the names wrong but You know one one of my colleagues observed that it may not be easy to define activism for us and we may actually be Sort of doing ourselves a disservice by defining it in a particular way And instead to think about how the various things that we do in our professional lives can be activist Um, I am going to also sort of I agree with that I'm going to note that for many of us. It's really difficult in the academy to have public facing And simultaneously have professionally accountable identities, right? Because we are speaking to completely different sets of audiences and most importantly the time horizons are so different, right? I'm about a book of mine is about to come out in two weeks. I've been working on it for 10 years Right the time horizons for the kind of scholarship we produce are different The audiences are different the language is so different. And so my approach to speaking to these two worlds My academic world and my public facing world has been to translate my scholarship Whenever I feel it's relevant But to recognize that the scholarship itself Cannot be conducted within the same time horizons and should not be subjected to the same instrumental sort of framings But the public Facing world calls for It just means we have to remain constantly open to drawing connections To ongoing public conversations when they arise. Okay, so to my scholarship I'm a transnational feminist scholar of south asian history with a focus on law and sexuality So for the past two decades, I've been focusing on How sexual practices have been regulated in south asia And my frame of vision includes imperial circuits of influence My first monograph codes of misconduct Examine the regulation of the sex trade in bombay city And the point I made was that colonial lawmaking practices and law enforcement practices actually Fostered the rise of a red light district in bombay city My next monograph defining girlhood in india a transnational history of sexual maturity laws Which is out this month analyzes the changing age of sexual consent standards And it links them to the expansion of the idea of girlhood over the course of the 20th century So the question at the heart of this book is who gets to enjoy girlhood, right? Who gets to be a girl? I came to this topic while studying colonial prostitution laws for my first book uh, I frequently found that Laws that defined an age of consent to prostitution were quite distinct from statutory rape laws and marriage age laws And that really pushed me to ask how girls were being imagined in each context In the us as well for instance in the night in the 1890s The age of consent for so-called unchaste girls was lower than the age of consent for so-called chaste girls So basically legislators thought that unchaste girls Were less in need of state protection I was struck by what these discrepancies signaled that age itself Right as a category merited further analysis and girls Were imagined quite differently depending on context not everybody got to be a girl So this who gets to be a girl question Was one that led me to look at how racialized geographies Informed and continue to inform the imagination of scholars and legislators One of the notions that I Trace in the book is an idea that circulated in the early 20th century medical textbooks That girls in tropical in so-called tropical countries matured earlier than girls in other parts of the world This idea that was harbored in 19th century scientific racism Confirmed the broader imperial narrative of the sexual proclivity of colonized people Early sexual maturity was coded as a sign of fecundity and it was equated with moral lassitude Let me share a specific example of this idea. So in 1921 When the League of Nations was formed Interestingly, they took on the question of harmonizing age of sexual consent standards around the world And the proposal that they made was that at age that 21 was to be the minimum age of sexual consent for engaging in prostitution And this was an idea that actually got quite a lot of traction but one person stood up and opposed it and that person was Stephen Edwards who was the representative of British India And he declared that So if you look at the second square Mr. Edwards standing for India so far as European countries are concerned I'm in favor of the proposal, but with regard to India. My objection is covered by the statements. I've already made to the conference What were his objections that climatic conditions in the tropics result in early maturity? Even though there were many counter examples at the time such as research showing that the average age of puberty was lower in the West Indies than India or research showing that nutrition rather than climate played a role in shaping the age of first menstruation describing tropical colonies and eastern countries as sites of early puberty affirmed this link between Sexual precocity and Civilizational inadequacy, right? So differences in age standards for sexual maturity served as a kind of code for race in this context and in this liberal internationalist Order that was emerging. It served as an acceptable way to frame racial differences and hierarchies between nations So geopolitical hierarchies have shaped understandings of adolescence as well When the idea was first conceptualized in the early 20th century by psychologists such as Stanley Hall Adolescence was described as a sheltered life phase that was assigned to those highest on a civilizational hierarchy Access to adolescence was a marker of modernity Modern adulthood was so complex that it needed a separate life phase that was set aside to achieve it So I had been writing this chapter on adolescence for a while and then around September last year I certainly realized I might need to bring some of this history to a broader audience than I have intended for the book Why it was the lead up to Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation for the supreme court position And I was really disturbed by how his alleged actions that included drunken unrulyness and assault Were being discussed and excused as teenage behavior right Typical teen behavior So I decided to write about how historically recent the idea of the teenager was and how historically recent it was to assign This group of traits such as being rebellious or engaging in unruly behavior or experimental behavior right How recent it was and how a racialized geography informed even the articulation of this idea so unpacked what the concept of adolescence meant and also How it had been differentially applied So that such behavior was not inevitable Right because it was assigned only to some people right For instance black boys and working class boys even At the time that this concept was first introduced Were not Seen as being able to lay claim to this life phase because they actually underwent Premature adultification right they had to be respond. They had to work in their teen years often support family members So adolescent turbulence right was something that was reserved for white Economically secure boys as a phase of growth Historians such as robin Bernstein and lakisha Simmons Have focused on how girls and girls of color have also specifically been denied this sort of This set of excuses and how they have also had to experience premature adultification My point in the op-ed Last year was that our social expectations for behavior are what permit and indeed elicit specific types of acts such as drunken behavior This column which translated work from the chapter on adolescence in defining girlhood in india reached nearly 50,000 readers Which is many more than my book will right? So it's really got me thinking about audiences and numbers and I'd love a chance to actually just discuss that Maybe in the q&a about how we as academics are thinking about Numbers and the number of people that we reach Particularly in the humanities I'd like to now turn to me too, which I have written about quite a bit so just as I posed the question in my book who gets to be a girl and In my column who gets to enjoy excuses for their teenage behavior The question that I posed in the column. I mean in the article that I circulated was Which women's pain is being centered? In u.s news media coverage of the me too movement Cases such as roi moore or larry nasser Really focus on young white girls The pain of young white girls and their pain garners the most attention and sympathy but The sectors that we have focused on so far media entertainment politics Are really not the sectors where violence and harassment have been studied by feminist scholars to be The most endemic sites of violence and harassment Right the threat of violence and harassment is a much more constant feature in sectors in the service sector so think about it if you're a restaurant server for instance or if you work If you do domestic work right where you're in a household where there's you know, you can scream but not too many people No one will hear you right so sexual violence is obviously not a problem that's restricted only to the people Who have been covered? And indeed as i'm exploring now, I think it's worth broadening how we've even framed the narrative around me too We've thought of it as something that was sparked by a hashtag and that like that sort of spread like a wildfire around the world But I think we can also think about the wider antecedents preceding the hashtag Various kinds of protests that have taken place in other parts of the world So for instance for several years since 2015 in latin america The ni una menos movement, which you mentioned Has focused on poor women who've been assaulted killed or disappeared In 2016 the south african student movement against tuition hikes also simultaneously protested campus rape culture In india in 2012 there were street protests for days in the wake of the murder and gang rape of jyothi singh pande So the thing that i'm sort of increasingly Realizing and writing about is that me too did not so much Generate a new movement as much as feed into an ongoing Sensibility and agitation That was also digital in many parts of the world. So something is clearly going on but we didn't start it So this is the kind of vigilance that a transnational feminist approach sort of It's something that i have had to practice and it's something that i'm applying to this context as well i'm just going to close this fear So in my remarks today, I have centered exclusions right which girls get to be girls Which teenage boys get to enjoy excuses which women whose what whose pain has been centered in the me too movement The problem of the excluded other is a central question to think about When examining ideas that function as universals And i'd like to close my remarks today by just drawing together a few more threads that have emerged in today's symposium There are two distinct ways to frame the problem of the excluded other or those who are left out One way is to think about universals as unfinished promises, right? They are promises that we aspire towards This view is common in thinking about locky and liberal universals such as liberty Right popular understandings of history for instance view it as one long march of expanding and franchisement Right and liberty is something that is being dispensed slowly to increasing numbers of people Since the moment of the declaration of independence Another way to view it is to examine how universals can actually be Constitutively exclusionary So post-colonial feminist theory has really underscored this point that legal universals are rarely straightforward instruments of redress and actually that They frequently embed hierarchical social relations So it's not that Philosophical liberalism fails to live up to its ideals Which is how people sort of who espouse the first approach tend to think of it, right? It's a promise that's not yet but met We're just working towards it. We'll just have to keep working and work harder But the this alternative perspective says the tradition itself was set up Right with this flaw this constitutive flaw, right? So it has constitutive failures And another panelist earlier today also focused on how these exclusions these These constitutive exclusions actually work to make That system function because the excluded other actually increases the sort of homogeneity and the sense of Belonging for those who are in the in group Let's think actually for a moment also about the fact that philosophical liberalism Arrows historically alongside the growth of empires, right? So it's not an accident from the point of view of post-colonial theorists that the savage excluded other Is so clearly a feature of so many liberal principles that it's in fact they argue a part of liberalism's intellectual infrastructure Around the world there were large numbers of people who were defined as subordinate Whose consent was never sought To colonial rule and over whom domination was naturalized For those people whose subordination has been naturalized They have an understandable suspicion about liberal ideals such as liberty and freedom of contract They see this language as illusory The first approach that I mentioned, you know holding on to the faith in the promise of these universals Is really comforting to those who hold power Right because it presents a vision of the world where the power that they hold is fairly earned Right from this point of view. There's a seat for everyone on the bus Even though not all the seats are all are occupied The second approach raises more fundamental questions about how and why power is distributed the way it is Those who are excluded are not simply en route to catching up Their marginalization actually is part of the order. It's part of the infrastructure of the order and the order depends on their marginalization I think the distinction between these two approaches is a really important divide And I see it as a motif in our political moment right now. It's playing out in a number of Contexts so it plays out in the way new social movements such as occupy wall street black lives matter and standing rock see the world Versus you know in in relation to social justice movements that preceded them I'm Really interested in the context of your call The organizers You know if we want to advance social justice conversations about really having a robust Discussion about the distinctions between these approaches and really asking about whether or not they can be reconciled I've been really excited by the way that some of the debates have played out in today's panels I think it was actually a question that was at the back of many minds in all three panels right how these Two different approaches actually frame people's orientations both analytical and affective right so well from on the one hand, there are those who seek healing and solutions and Seek hope and then there are those who say hang on a sec We haven't even actually sat with the pain yet right there are those of us who've had to have You know develop our capacity for psychic pain because we and we had no choice We were forced to do so where they're whereas there are others who are just in pain avoidance mode right and they are Being allowed to sort of dictate the terms of the conversation by saying let's reconcile. Let's forgive. Let's heal right, so I'd like to end on that note and I will Also mention as a plug that So i'm the editorial director of the journal feminist studies, which is the oldest Interdisciplinary journal of women's studies scholarship in the country And we're about to come out with a special double issue on indigenous feminisms in settler contexts And our recent issue was also about staging a dialogue between decolonial And post-colonial feminist approaches And I'd like to urge you to sort of take check them out because I think some of the material in these issues also Speaks to some of the conversations that you are having as philosophers. So thank you again for the invitation and Look forward to the conversation Hello, babe. I'm coming in on deshnakas Bodoad me in doubt. She's a kind of them. She's a bank to bend a waste Lansing michigan dospia. I'm kyle. I'm a member of the citizen pado admi nation And I told you a few other things About me too, if you know the the language and it's awesome to uh to be here in the park territory And with so many algonquin folks in this area, you know, I used to go to graduate school out here And when I first moved to this area, I was pretty doggone lonely And right about the time I was moving in just before the school year started That's when the piquas have the scumets and powwow and went out to that and I met so many folks that I knew And then met a whole bunch of piqua and other algonquin rooted folks There and got involved in their struggles and realized I had a profound responsibility at the grassroots level To support the native folks in this region while I was living here including their fights for political recognition and economic Sovereignty and cultural resurgence and revitalization and maintenance in this region And I'm really impressed with what the folks have done here, especially because what uh I was reminded of why I appreciated that when I was listening the earlier presentation by dr. Murdoch who mentioned that in this region The white folks are actually proud of their colonial heritage And so that's a hell of a fight if you're native to be in that context where people aren't even ashamed about it In fact, when they see some of those old buildings, which were the ones directly associated with genocide And they see them like next to the ocean or by the forest they get a pleasant feeling Oh man So a shout out to the the folks from here and and also just a few remarks that you know There's a tremendous philosophical heritage For all the gongkwin rooted people actually my tribe the pot of water I mean we're part of the larger nishinaabe group and actually our old story is that we're actually from out here And we consider the folks in this region to be our elder siblings Uh, and I find it ironic that actually if I think of all the professors who teach Algonquin philosophy You got to go pretty far from here actually to learn that and how come you've got to travel really far away to study Philosophies that are right here in this region That's something for the folks at fairfield, especially the administrators at control hiring and things like that to actually consider Because that's pretty shameful and it's not just this campus. It's it's all the other campuses in this region Right, how dare you have a region where it's easier to study philosophy from thousands of miles away Then it is to actually say the philosophies that have been here for hundreds and hundreds of years And so part of what motivates the work that that I do as a Potawatomi person is Reflecting on the experiences and survival of my people in community both specifically potawatomi, but the larger nishinaabe people United states they've tried to do everything to us They tried to make shady deals They tried to create and break treaties that were absolutely not in our advantage They smashed us into pieces so instead of one group There's like 15 of us and a whole bunch of different states and provinces The largest potawatomi tribe which is the one i'm a member of they sent us all the way down to oklahoma on the trail of death In the 19th century and we had to rebuild our society from scratch In an environment that had a completely different type of biodiversity And in land we knew There were native folks that were there before us and we still have to respect their presence Even though they'd also been displaced And oppressed and sent elsewhere by the time that we were forced to arrive in that region And so in the work that I do I've very much been empowered to do my part To support our continuance as potawatomi people and to highlight both our ancient wisdom But also what we've picked up along the way as we've had to deal with this entity called the united states It hasn't been very nice to us And this is why my own work has gravitated toward climate justice and the topic of climate change and climate science And one of the things that I found out in my work, especially when I was thinking philosophically and historically Is almost every form of power Against native folks that I can imagine involves a very harmful infliction of climate change And think about that for a second So for potawatomi people one of the first things that united states did to us was they stuck us on Reservations which were little tiny areas of land Now historically we lived across millions of acres and we actually had A system of politics a system of energy That was based on flowing with the seasons people lived in different places throughout the year To harvest the plants and animals and fish that were right to be harvested about that time of year And so we were diverse. We were everywhere across the region And we had designed a society that knew how to be adaptive to constant seasonal change And we also knew how to anticipate Similar to how we think about climate change Trends that were happening in the region trends that might occur over the course of a decade Trends that might occur even longer out. And so we were a society That had an entire system of how to live That was based on thinking through how best to adapt to constant environmental change that was happening Around you. So when united states shrunk us exponentially into tiny reservations Where we had to deal with different types of biodiversity where you couldn't move around That meant that literally we were living in a different climate system from the ones that our ancestors enjoyed When the united states relocated us to oklahoma We were originally from the great lakes region Like michigan, wisconsin, ontario. That's not similar ecologically to oklahoma and kansas And so if you were up there and you move down there That's literally a completely different climate system and we were forced to adapt in fact in a very short period of time We had to go from harvesting hundreds and hundreds of different species To literally Harvesting a completely different types of species And that's a profound change in climate And so if you look at different points of power and oppression They're almost always associated with the infliction of harmful forms of climate change On other people and not just for indigenous people when I think of other communities who have suffered in the context of the united states You can very much see those similar types of inflictions of dangerous forms of climate change And so in my work, I have covered a lot of different areas to try to empower native people to take leadership In relation to addressing this topic of climate change I've been a big advocate of supporting the advancement of native folks in climate science And have been part of starting a number of groups and networks That seek to support especially younger native folks in their capacity to share their knowledge about climate change As well as to protect our indigenous knowledge from theft By other people who seek to exploit our knowledge And so a chunk of my work is related to climate science And I've been an author for some time with the u.s. National climate assessment, which is one of the only major Global science reports on climate change that has had for many years a chapter just focused on indigenous issues and on indigenous knowledge of climate change I do a lot of work in education I've had about a 10 year relationship with the sustainable development institute at the college of monomony nation Which is one of the early indigenous research institutes that seeks to Make it possible so that native folks don't just have to come to a university like fairfield or michigan state to do their research But you can actually do your research the old-fashioned way, which is from your own tribe And working on priorities and topics that matter to your tribal community And not have to navigate these awkward institutions that make it really really hard for us to do the work That we are focused on and that matter to the continuance of our peoples into the future And in the work that I do whether it's in science or education Or policy There's a couple of questions or a couple of points that I've tried to cover and I wanted to talk about them super briefly So the first one is that Oftentimes at least the folks that I deal with maybe you all deal with folks that think differently the folks that I deal with They oftentimes act like it was just a couple hundred years ago that humans Discovered how climate change worked and that climate science is a relatively new science I've tried to turn that on its head for us as native folks At least for Nishinaabe people, but I found some common points of dialogue with other native folks Actually climate science is our oldest form of science Because we were people who were obsessed with how you adapt to environmental change like I talked about before And this goes to the fact that we had our own energy system oftentimes when you know people talk about native folks And extractive industries mining oil and gas and so on they just talk about like the united states energy system And our native folks are exploited in it and that's absolutely true. We're completely exploited in it There's a very good history that tells that tale, but a lot of folks forget to ask like what was the energy system before like And so I've also tried to advocate for the idea. We did make our own energy too prior to the united states britain france and spain And the dutch and other groups hold on a whole bunch of european groups came here, didn't they? Um our energy system was a little bit different We chose to work collaboratively with rivers with winds with plants and animals We believed everything had energy at least for nishinaabe people and we believe that if you wanted to make your own energy That what you had to do is build trust With the non-human world you had to build reciprocity You had to build relations of mutual self-determination with the non-humans around you whether that's an entity like water Or something living like a plant or an animal And so kinship which refers to us oftentimes as relationships of trust and reciprocity And responsibility and accountability We believed that that's how you made energy the more trust you have with a plant or an animal Or the more reciprocity there is between you and a river that is you know the river gives you energy But you have to do your part to maintain the riparian habitat For the river to be able to do that so we knew that actually that's how you made an energy system So unlike this awkward energy system where it's already non-consensual and non-trust worthy because people want to extract stuff from the ground and then Accountability consent trust and so on come up as a topic later to be built back into policy We had a very different conception of energy And so part of my work has been able to overturn a lot of those assumptions and present our views on our history and heritage With relation to energy and to climate science Another thing i've tried to argue against is there's folks who want to say that climate change is worse If you're already a community who suffers oppression That's true If you're impacted by poverty if you're impacted by racism if you're impacted by reproductive injustice Then absolutely climate change is going to be horrible, but this is again not the first time that we've experienced climate injustice against us So to actually say that this is the first time that potawatomi people have had to deal with Climate injustice ignores the fact that the united states relocated us over 150 years ago And still hasn't done up done its part to make up for that relocation So actually when we think about climate change, it doesn't occur on top of other oppressions It's a repetition of the same types of oppressions and the united states and canada and other countries Still haven't done their part to rectify the injustices caused by previous inflections of dangerous climate change Another topic i work on is that people oftentimes say there's climate justice and there's reproductive justice How do we bring them together? For native folks, we've been very much at the forefront of actually showing that whenever you talk about climate justice What business are you and if you're not talking about reproductive justice at the same time? when folks were advocating for The resistance to the dakota access pipeline A lot of the white folks just thought that the focus was on the pipeline but as colleagues Rebekah nagrel and sarah dear showed in their study the place the oil came from was an area where there was rampant Rampant trafficking of native women girls boys two-spirit people And so native people were fighting against the idea the entire energy infrastructure Is one that is rampant with sexual violence and we know that historically they undermined Our own non-binary gender systems as a way to further undermine our leadership And our cultures which didn't just privilege men in the diplomatic positions and the leadership positions But privilege a variety of genders Actually, we expected people other than those who today would code as men to be our representatives And to be our diplomats and to be our leaders But the united states in a very calculated way did everything they could starting with the very dawn of that nation To undermine that and expose many people in our communities whether it's through boarding schools through horrible legal policies to immense amounts of sexual and gender-based violence And the last couple of questions i've looked at recently are I've been very concerned about how people are phrasing climate justice as an issue of urgency Because it seems to me that folks are like how do we urgency urgently protect the environment that is Right here right now that we enjoy in different ways But think about the environment around here on this campus and the environment didn't always look like this actually right The buildings everything around you that's a product of genocide and even the parks and the supposed natural spaces Those are all areas where indigenous people had to be displaced murdered Burned out incinerated to get to those lands and they're still contested today So if you're about protecting lands that have those natural features If you're really concerned about them, they are actually hyper concerned about protecting lands As they have been in the absence of indigenous stewardship and depending on the region as they've been in the absence of Black stewardship or latinx stewardship and the stewardship of other people of color communities And so when folks get really urgent about Climate justice and wanting to mitigate climate change Oftentimes they focus on lands that we know are the product of genocide And they're actually not concerned with the idea that for native folks We have a very different vision of the lands that actually we want to see And the lands that are going to be resilient to the challenges of a constantly changing environment And so in this way, I've been looking very closely at Why this issue of urgency is particularly problematic Because if you're a environmentalist and you advocate for things like clean energy I mean, I would hope that clean energy systems solar Geothermal biofuels wind forest conservation I would think that wouldn't all of those things seek to try to make it so that those new energy systems Instead of just centering elite white people and other elite populations as the primary people making money and the primary people producing those energy systems Isn't it supposed to be that like native folks and black folks and others their communities their neighborhoods Would be the ones that would also be central to those decentralized systems But of course in the literature and I've been writing about this recently on clean energy You know what we've actually found out That efforts globally to initiate solar power To engage in forest conservation All of them just commit the same old crimes against indigenous people They cut us out of financial markets. They displace us They degrade our own environmental management systems for the sake of ones that White people and others have determined to be the most valuable. I think other communities of color Have been experiencing the same thing And so actually and the burden of the literature supports exactly what I am saying Is it every instance that you see a clean energy solution experimented with Not only is it like really really bad for native people But it's actually probably worse than the situation that any of those communities would be in If we just let climate change run business as usual and so for this reason When I think about the history Of us colonialism us seizure of indigenous lands all the way up to today Where by the way for us colonialism is on abstract Concept even though tribes are considered the third sovereign in the american system The land that we are sovereign over is called trust land. It's held by trust for us by the united states There's a bureau of indian affairs still so actually colonialism is the situation undeniably But for us then right when I think about this particular situation Every phase of colonialism has almost always been one in which the settler population the white population Thought that there was a crisis There's even been environmental crises before That were perceived in the united states. There's been spiritual crises family crises gender crises All of those crises when people got hyped up about them. It motivated them to do bad things to native people And to think that it was okay to do that because you had to solve the crisis And what I think is shocking for a lot of environmentalists is that when I started my career I thought there was a chance that today's environmentalism was going to be different than historic environmentalism and historic types of crisis response But in the last couple of years, especially now that we've seen what the clean energy industry does I think it's just the same thing and a couple generations from now People are going to be ashamed at what environmentalists did And this is the topic that I want to Reflect on and I want to think carefully on Because even if climate change is mitigated even if the temperature is lowered If that means that the clean energy solutions that were needed to do that have put us as native people in a worse situation What kind of solution is that? And so first in some ways I don't think there's enough time to address the climate change issue unless we engage in a massive massive reconciliation process To create the relationships that would be needed to actually have climate change solutions that achieve justice Miigwech nice to meet you all No Can you ah, I can hear me so you can hear me. Um, thank you to all of you Um, so we have this room until 6 30 I believe Um, and it's 5 45 right now. So What we were sort of whispering about before we officially started Was that before we officially turned things over to you the audience? To offer your questions and comments if perhaps we could give The three of you sometime to engage amongst yourselves In the spirit of generating the kind of synergy that you know, this day was Designed to generate in the first place. Does that sound like a good approach? So we'll take a couple minutes to do that. Um, and then we'll invite everyone to ask questions. So So I was intrigued by your question that you posed to us about public About public and and and so I wonder if you want to kind of think about that with us Well, it's so troubling to me because you know You spend years and years of your life and most of the academic work that we produce is often read by You know at the most dozens if we're lucky hundreds You know if it's assigned in classes We like to comfort ourselves by thinking well, it's the quality not the quantity and you know, how much Of an effect it has on the way people think But I I really feel like We have Such important ideas that actually have That are consequential and that are meaningful and I think I have learned today Much more and I have a better sense of how much philosophers Can contribute to public conversations about things that are You know a part of a sort of shared public discourse right now that are Crises in some senses So I would like to think about opportunities for us to actually get our work out So one of the things I'm doing with the journal feminist studies is we have a forum that's called news and views And because we are autonomous and not run by a university press We actually can turn things around very quickly And so my goal is to create something called teachable articles where academics are actually writing analytical pieces on things that are Sort of that have a sort of current news value that we all want to teach about So we were the first journal to come out with A forum on the arab spring We were the first journal to come out with a forum on the gang rape in deli. We were we brought out a teaching You know after furgusson there was a beautiful syllabus that academics came out with but we also came up with A forum called pedagogies of furgusson So this is the kind of thing that i'm trying to do But at the same time I also know that that's not going to compete with the news cycle where literally it's what's the news story this hour Right, that's what we have a beast that we're feeding Um, I just I don't think that we can fool ourselves by thinking we'll somehow change the world by inserting ourselves into it but I think It's much of the conversation can be very unsatisfying to me and it would be really good for us to think about opportunities to Do more and I think you're doing that kind of work with your podcast, right? Yes. So so what was what was Something that I had to think about was coming from a background in which So I don't come from Academia home or anything like that academic home. I'm the first person in my family go to college But what I did see is my mother put theory into practice, right? And I saw a whole bunch of activists a whole bunch of people doing actual work and before I came back to get my PhD I spent several years working in the nonprofit sector, right? And so I had to really think about oh, I'm about to go into the academy And but still having this heart for justice and doing kind of work on the ground and trying to reconcile with that and one thing that I uh didn't feel comfortable with is I was going to say sell my soul to academia But I didn't feel comfortable doing just that or thinking that that's my only place and I just felt and this is me I'm not saying that this is something that everyone ought to have But I felt that what I was If we could use kind of theological language is that what I was called to do in the world Was not designated to certain people who had the money to go to college, right? I still felt that I was called to people on the ground People who were outside of academia normal folk lay folk. And so one of the questions that I had to deal with was how do I Be in both worlds and so immediately. I mean it wasn't rocket science to me is to try to make my work as public as possible So before I even started the podcast Um, I was writing for a certain outlet such as huffington post or or salon Um, and then I decided to start start the podcast while I was in graduate school So it was the first year of graduate school. I decided to start the podcast And the podcast is called unmute And it's where I interview professional philosophers about the social and political issues of our day And I try to get them to talk like they were talked to a fifth grader Or maybe a eighth grader And we you know kind of try to get out of with that kind of jargon and out of that particular world to try to see if Our work can apply to the real world. Um, I've had you know fortunate to to to have interviews with dr White and not to dr. Sealy. So if you want to enter, you know, uh, listen to those interviews They are they are online. And so that's what I've done with the podcast and then Kind of another way to make it more public is that recently turned into a book this year called unmuted conversations on Prejudice oppression and social justice published by oxford university press And then I continue to write for outlets. I I'm a contributing writer for new philosopher magazine I've also written additional pieces for los angeles time. So that's just something that I just feel is what I should do And if I'm not doing that, I feel that I'm not being a good steward Over my phd And so that's that's just that's just me and making sure that I say yes to public stuff public events So at a different kind of arena So not just saying yes to universities, but saying yes to community organizations, etc, etc But it's a struggle, right? Um And it's a lot of work, but that's just what I feel compelled to do Um, and I feel that my mother would turn over in her grave if I did not Yeah, I mean some of these um, you know when I was thinking about the type of work that I would do, um you know if you're Wanting to advocate for something for your community for your people You know none of the institutions that can give paychecks are particularly great for that You know whether it's non-profit. I mean even for like say in my tribe tribal government You know universities, uh, us government You know all of these have their their drawbacks And you know For me it was sort of a matter of which one do I for whatever reason Tolerate the most, you know, which one doesn't um, you know drive me to the brink as quickly As the others might and they tried out some of the other ones and often as I talked to a lot of native folks They talk about well, they tried, you know tribal government for a while They they tried non-profit for a while that wasn't their thing So now they're in academia or or now they're actually doing their own entirely You know community-based thing that doesn't require a paycheck for many of these institutions, right? You see people that have thought about this And so I thought like when I got my my job that I was just going to get fired because I was pretty secure in what my values were Which meant that I had to do a lot of things even when I didn't have job security The people, you know in a pretty unethical way told me we shouldn't you shouldn't do until you get, you know tenure like actually calling out issues of power and oppression that were occurring in the university context But what I find is that if you are focused in your your impact You're focused on what you want to accomplish on behalf of the people who have asked you to do so On the people have called you to do so and if nobody's calling you to do anything I think you do have to think hard about what it is you're doing in the university or another environment But when you're working on behalf for the people who have called you To take on a particular responsibility Then you know You have to stick to those values and if you're firm with those values in advance Then you'll be prepared for some of the consequences But in my case actually folks, especially at my institution came to respect The fact that that's how I was doing business in that context And it has been something that's empowered me to Expand the amount of people that I've been able to support within the academic environment Including the freedom to do a lot of the public work that I'm able to do I love both your talks and I have two Questions that are really requests for clarification Dr. White in your presentation You know I I was struck by You know the moment when you talked about the land we're standing on and you know the genocide from which It emerges And I am curious about how you see the relationship between land and labor Because in a lot of the conversation around reparations around slavery The same argument about sort of the legacy That you know that we have inherited Focuses on the labor that was unpaid that has resulted in the wealth of the institutions So i'm just curious about whether land and labor Have been connected in interesting ways that you've seen because I think that it would be To my mind a really fruitful Way to frame the question of reparations Inheritances, you know what what we owe to whom we owe things And I had a question that was also a clarification That really interesting phrase that you used about rage renegades and allies I would just like to hear you say more about do not take it It's going to be like a year before it's actually published. Oh, I won't use my eyes on everyone in this room. Do not take it Just what what do you mean? That's all So you guys Thanks for your question. Yeah, I appreciate your your thinking through a lot of the The different issues that we've been discussing You know going back to kind of a Nishinaabe philosophy if you look at the Nishinaabe language, it's pretty different than English It's a language that almost every single word is actually a verb Uh, so you just speak in terms of action. In fact, there's no standardized grammar. You get to choose the order of Words so to speak that you use based on your own self-determination. So it's a language It's extremely flexible and uh, sort of tries to obliterate rules as much as it it can And because it always speaks in terms of of action, what types of actions does it, you know, speak to and so You know in terms of issues like labor, I think it's important to consider You know some of the differences between our philosophy and some of the ways in which we've You know come to think about it today, which I think is part of the answer to some of the points that you were making And some of the things that you were getting at So in terms of our connections to the the land, the language mostly speaks about mutual responsibility And so that's how people refer to what they're doing. That's actually how people's identity is constructed So like historically and we do this today too. It's just not as complex But historically if you introduced yourself to somebody you actually told them what your responsibilities were You gave them codes that would explain in short what your responsibilities were And so in fact a lot of terms that we have even terms like kwe which are translated as woman We're actually terms that refer to particular constellations of responsibilities that people had which is actually what allowed us to be a gender fluid society Because that's how we understood the world right people were constellations of responsibilities and we're constantly trying to deepen The kinship relations they had with others In order to create more networks of responsibilities And so if we're used to word labor to describe the work that we did it was the daily work of focusing directly on kinship And so kinship one way to kind of understand it is it's a type of work, but it's pervasive in everything that you do It's where you're constantly trying to find relationships of mutuality But you realize that relationships of mutuality only matter if they're laced with trust, consent reciprocity accountability And that those relationships over time become strong. So just like your very best family relationships Those are the people you call on when you're in emergency When a huge change is happening because those are people if we're referring to the best ones I know a lot of us don't have some of the greatest family relations. We've thinking about your best family relationships They're the people who can adapt with you They're the people who you know that even if you call them quickly So you need a hand with something that they respect your consent you trust them There's reciprocity. You know, they'll be there for you in the future And so in this way when I think of of of reparations or what's next for us as native people, especially if the united states gets itself in gear I think of how the u.s. Transformed what for us were kinship relationships into financial assets And for us native people have been tremendously resistant to financial restorations because it's not just the The land and the assets that we want back, but we want the openness to be able to reestablish the kinship relationships And so people have gotten frustrated at times when the u.s. Has created settlements for us They were primarily seen as such as as financial and we're seen as ways of understanding the labor that was lost because those solutions actually are not even in the same universe of what we've been advocating for Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Oh, I'm so cold. I didn't want to say anything, but Shake your head if you're cold with me Okay, um rage renegades. Um so, uh I was motivated to write this chapter by um after giving a talk at penn state pixie program Brilliant students asked some very interesting questions and kind of challenged me to kind of think about this concept so, uh rage renegade so In a society that is that is capitalistic capitalistic white supremacist patriarchal society There'll be a certain Values that one ought to have and social social social norms surrounding those particular values and also punishments are rewards If one connects or have those particular values and follow those particular norms Uh, so an example is in a capitalist white supremacist patriarchal society When um a white man is challenged for his adolescent behavior One ought to value His future in his white life Um and one ought to just get with it um and support that But it also kind of has kind of an emotional norm that one ought to be angry in response when one someone challenges or hold him That hold him accountable, right? so, uh to to go rogue Which is to be a renegade is to say i'm not going to get with that particular picture And one responds by having a kind of different um affect so in relationship to racial injustice Um that in that particular society one is expected for example to be indifferent to the suffering of other people So particularly if one is in a dominant group say a white person Your emotive response should fit with the white supremacist capitalist society So be indifferent to the suffering of indigenous folks Um and you go rogue by being angry at their suffering So that's what i mean by rage renegades, right? Those are allies Um uh particularly white folk who refuse to allow their values to match up with a white supremacist society and therefore their affect So one can go rogue or become a renegade in that response, but one ought to not uh be proud of that thinking that that's enough And one of the things that i argue is that there are several kind of uh normal uh normative and also kind of political mistakes That one can make um in regards to being a rage renegade and so i kind of lay out some cautionary tales To make sure that one is still staying in solidarity and not centering their whiteness by being a rage renegade so But i say more in a book that will come out very very very soon Okay, can you hear me? Yes. All right So we're right at six or three, which i think would be a good time to open things up for questions from You are a lovely audience So we are recording this event so it'd be really helpful if um You do want to ask the question or offer a comment that you wait for me to get the mic to you so that we can Hear what you say and record what you say. So um and i'll try to keep um ordered by a show of hands. So If nobody else is going to um so This kind of ties with the reproductive justice panel as well Um as i was growing up the philosophy and the paradigm that i grew up in is that um things like abortion were um Necessity dependent on environmental factors And so my tribe watched and observed the animals around us and could Uh depend on them and their actions to tell if it was going to be a hard winter or to tell if uh food would be scarce or There was disease coming And so in particular deer um are very um Our guiding factors for being a native woman and so we would watch them and we would watch the deer and the elk And the buffalo abort their calves dependent on the environment so that relates into Uh a question for you is when we when we talk about these things so that is is deemed as abortion is like evil, right? and then um when we tell other truths uh were radical and um or angry and so When we talk about these injustices It doesn't seem to matter what our delivery is or how we package it. We're just put in one of those categories and so I guess this would be for dr cherry um what would be like what is this end game like how do we uh push back against um just being dismissed as um Evil angry or radical Push against it So so so one of the things I want to say that that that those kind of destinations are are very strategic um and they are Uh ways to dismiss a ways to have one self question their own judgments or the evaluative judgments about an injustice Uh, they're also ways in in which uh Uh marginalized people are are policed Um in silence So you have to look at those kind of designations also those kinds of stereotypes assailants and practices Also as police and practices Um And so once you begin to see them as such what you try to do is not push back against what they're saying And what I mean by pushback is try to correct them try to convince them that you are not that um So one of the things that I am Have been focused on lately is that usually when people think about anger for example It's kind of like oh, I'm going to use this anger anger to protest and to bring about change Thinking that the angry protests will persuade Or even move Right, and if you think that that is the goal um I'm not going to say that that's naive But If persuasion is your goal, you're never going to persuade anyone with with with anger, right? um, but I would I would say that Expect the strategic pushback because that's what it's all about But once you recognize it as pushback, then you'll see that there's power in this, right? So just as those responses are strategic One of the things that I'll argue is that one's anger One's angry practice one angry solidarity also ought to also be strategic But one ought not to have as one's strategy to do any convincing that one's anger is pure in the eyes of the oppressor Um, I don't think that even matters to them, right? It's a silence and a police syntactic Um, and so trying to convince them that's not not the case trying not to live up to the stereotype of the angry black Like all that is just given in um To kind of the the strategy of the oppressor I think that one ought to focus on using that anger to motivate oneself and one's group to bring about change However way we conceive of that particular change one ought to take that having that emotional state Without the uptake or people's response just having that particular anger is breaking rules is being a renegade Is fighting against oppression or the dominant kind of values So see seeing the value in it without having to convince That it's not bad like you think it is or I'm not an angry black. That's that's just going down Anger has much more power and what it wants to do is not do that It wants to rapidly change the world. Um, and it can do that in other ways without trying to Persuade the oppressor that you're not that angry or you really care about not being dismissed I think that's that's a Red herring and I think it's a waste of time and energy Kind of what algae lord talks about And I try to offer ways in which we can use it for other purposes other than persuade against those strategies We're we're trying to prioritize students. So Um, this is me trying to prioritize students and I see a student Oh, and if you can say your name and um, what your affiliation is um If you're a student or visiting or faculty Um, hello, my name is Madison. I'm with the English department here at fairfield. I'm a junior undergraduate student Um, and I have a far less deep rooted question But I was so inspired as a young person to hear A little bit about what drives each of you and to use some of the terminology that was used what what you feel Your work calls you to do So I was wondering if each of you could speak a little bit more to Some of those signs in your life or the passions that you really took hold of and thought you needed to make change for so one of the the I guess indicators, um For me as far as what I Feel called to do. How do I know I'm It's so loaded even me saying this it's like, what do you mean by that? But um, what do I feel called to do? So one of the things that I can tell, um What do I need to be thinking about or writing about seriously? Um because I work on emotions is usually by how did something make me feel? Um and and and and judging how intense that is lets me know that's something I need to be working on So if you go back to what I kind of said before about oh, I hear that people are asking people to forgive And I'm bothered by that and not just bothered for that particular day, but I'm bothered for six years Right and like with the last with the last five days Like I have not I've I've been trying not to pay attention to that courtroom situation But it's calling me in ways in which like what is happening like that's usually like an indicator for me When I get fired up about something. Oh, I need to that's an intellectual calling as much as it also is However, we define activism all that stuff. I'm being intellectually called to kind of think about this a little bit more Um, so that's how I kind of know I I listen to my emotions um, and what I'm what I'm fired up about what I'm bothered about and Um, not just in that moment, but what I can't let go of that's usually is the thing for me or is a sign for me What a great question. Um I became an academic feminist really because of the environment I was in I was in a phd program in international studies And I just found myself enraged all the time by the material that I was encountering And it just pushed me to want to develop arguments that would be effective And my first job was in a political science department and I found myself Tired of explaining what I did And so I switched to women's studies teaching in a women's studies department since then I've been doing this work But I'll also just add that you know, I feel a tremendous sense of responsibility as somebody who is an immigrant from south asia to both Pay a debt So I'm a beneficiary of the subsidization of higher education by the state in india my college education in india was It it cost barely nothing compared to what college costs here. I am an upper caste person I'm a beneficiary of generations of wealth that's been extracted But also the fact that knowledge was valued the way it was in my family is also something that is a consequence of my caste location So I come to this country with a sense of I came to this country Because that was what everybody of my generation and class background did the u.s. Was that kind of a magnet? I came in 1992 But then since then I've been trying to think about what my location Does and can do and particularly in this moment when there is Truly ugly and horrific Hindu nationalism in india. I mean I find What's happening in india scarier than what's happening in the united states. So that should say something I feel a responsibility to be able to speak to Speak from this particular location to diasporic folks here Who have also been similar beneficiaries of the indian states largesse, but don't really acknowledge it and of caste privilege So I write for a I write a column for scroll magazine, which is a an online publication that is primarily for south asian south asian readers in this country and other parts of the world and So I just wanted to sort of bring a fuller sense of what I feel but I don't think I don't find myself Always Moved and with a clear ear to my calling I will say that the profession has bored me down where I often find that It's the next step that I'm looking at and even the feminist work ends up often feeling administrative So thank you for that question because it's a reminder Of what matters Yeah, thanks for your question Yeah, a couple of reflections on that, you know because so much of what I do is education, especially with With native students of all walks of life through a lot of the camps that That I do over the summer as well as other Mentorship relationships within higher ed You have really been motivated to support the next generation of native folks working within environmental justice working within environmental stewardship And I think it's been important when thinking about what does it mean to prepare people for You know the road ahead And that distinction is important that that there is a difference between What do what do I call myself to do and what am I called to do by others by a community? And I think in the united states society It conditions us to always be obsessed with like what do I call myself to do? And oftentimes though this is not maybe causally related But it's associated with people getting hyper concerned about being recognized and thanked for the work that they do And there's a really ridiculous system of recognition within the us and within universities where People do great work. They don't get credit for it. They don't get thanked and the people who do get thanked or get credit You're like what? why them And and um, you know in a lot of native societies where things were very public and open and where people were Very closely watched in terms of the actions they afforded and were ceremony and very detailed ceremonies played a role all year round It was actually to make a long story short very difficult for somebody to be Accredited with something that they didn't deserve just the society operated very differently And what I found especially for women for for people of color for native people In higher education that were very frustrated with what happens to Our labor and how it's interpreted and so one thing that was useful to me is that I I asked myself well, what are the things that I can do that I can focus on I actually don't care if anybody Thanks me for it You know what I mean, and if you actually specify, you know If I never got credit by anybody if I ever got any of these Recognitions to get bestowed upon people if I never even got tenure or promotion or anything distinctive Would I still be doing these things? um, and why that might sound like a little bit of a maybe a Kind of a a negative way to to go about it It's actually trying to capture saying very positive about the work that we do that if you're motivated by your responsibility and building relationships that enable you to Be even more responsible and to support and power other people if that's what makes you Feel that you're exercising a kinship relationship, and that's the path that you should That you should take because I've seen too many people really just thwart their impact because they've gotten obsessed with with recognition Um, and that's very poisonous I must also say I want you know just to add on to that. Um uh How can I say this uh So one of the things that the balance of being called right? Um Can be taken advantage of in which? One may recognize that you feel a sense of of calling in a way in which we've been been talking about and therefore Overwork one's self one's labor in that domain. Um, so that's kind of an external kind of over over late, you know, kind of laborious kind of Um exploitation, but then there's ways in which we can do that internally with ourselves and in the case in which we think that Because we were called to do this particular work. Um that we ought to Speak all the time and speak at every moment um In ways in which not only uh overworks us uh physically, but also emotionally and mentally I mean this work is difficult. I mean it's not just academic or theoretical for me. Um a lot of this stuff hurts to think about um And so even you know, I mentioned kind of the recent situation in the courtroom and I have refused to to to to Even go down the rabbit hole as much as I I've could have Because at this point I'm seeing this happen so often. It just hurts to see it hurts. Um It hurts to see and to think about um and uh so much so I posted something on on facebook, uh, I think yesterday and I said well, I have I have a lot of thoughts on hugging forgiveness Uh white supremacy white women's tears dot dot dot And what I wanted to say after the dot dot dot was like I just care for myself too much to speak about it So I just left it like a dot dot dot and people's response was oh, I've been waiting for you to say something And I don't feel called to say anything. Um, and so just recognizing That one even with the calling that one ought not to speak or should speak or should feel like they always ought to speak at every moment in time Other questions So I see brian. I know dr. Havis has a had a question Dr. Drake, okay, so your second Sorry for those who may want to ask the question in relationship to that but So thank you all for your remarks. Um I wanted to ask, um Dr. Cherry, uh I don't know if it's clarification question, but i'm i'm interested if The notion of race renegades is in any way Related to um contesting this idea. Uh, that was popular a long while back of race traders um And secondly just an interesting observation since we are at fair field this idea of Of being moved by emotion Has a lot to do with Ignatian spirituality and i'm struck by that that sort of That one needs to attend to the way they're moved by what they call consolation and desolation and that's kind of a nice synergy And finally can I throw in another one? In all of you can I mean whoever wants to respond to this I I think anger is important But i'm always concerned about the distinction between Transgression and resistance because just because something is transgressive Doesn't necessarily mean it's also resistant or productive for liberatory practice, right? and sometimes We conflate The two it's transgressive sometimes transgression re-inscribes the very stuff. We want to unsettle. So however you want to Yes, I guess I answer Starting with the last one. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Um, I think there's differences in in those things um, and I think there's ways in which There's cases in which anger in that moment at that particular time is transgressive Um, there's also moments in which that can't be productive There's also moments in which it is rebellious. It can do a whole bunch of things Maybe at the same time, maybe not um But I don't want to say uh that transgressive is always counterproductive or like, you know, those kinds of things making those kind of necessary claims Etc. It can be a variety of things. Um And I think several of the claims that I make in the book is pointing out those particular those particular things Um In relationship to the second question. I I I'm not familiar. Uh, don't judge me. I'm not familiar. Um, uh um So it makes me want to consult kind of that moved by It makes me want to consult that uh, when I was talking about being moved by the emotions, um Moved by in the motivational sense, right? So we know, uh The particularly anger anger um is is very much motivational But we also know compassion and a lot of um, a lot of emotions have what we call kind of action tendencies in which they do Uh move you Um, then one can have the choice But the it has a tendency to move you in a particular direction whether that is to retreat in the in this case of fear Whether that is to approach an object in the case of anger. So emotions just move you hence emotions They most you know, they it's motive. Um, so it it moves you and uh, it it moves me to do the work that uh That I do but I haven't looked at that that that connection um, the first question, um So how I wish I remembered it. Um, what is it again? Race trader. Yeah, race trader. Yeah. So so it's rage renegades is no doubt Uh That race trader had a Had an influence on that. Yeah, um, but after the fact, right? I think like I said students at pixie. I don't know if you remember even that question in did you remember our response to him? So I remember it was a guy who asked a guy from Howard. He had asked me and my mealy He was like, so what about kind of the the rage of like allies or something like that? A white allies and my immediate response to him was but I'm not I'm not talking to white people Um, or he thought well, I think you shouldn't or something like that and I thought about it for a minute And I was like, yes, I am Let me make a chapter specifically for them And other nine, you know, whatever So it it originally came out of those kinds of that q&a At pixie pin state, which is a diversity program That happens at pin state every year in which dr. Sealy's a director Which undergrads come for 10 days or so To get more familiar with the profession and hopefully we will encourage them to apply to grad school But they motivated that that that reflection on that thought But as I began to do the research, I remembered. Oh ray street. Oh, yeah, this is this is this is yeah, this is familiar This may or may not be the last question We'll figure it out after dr. Drake asks this question I'd like to thank you all for uh, your presentations today It's been a wonderful way to end what I think has been a pretty wonderful symposium on the day And I've had a lot to think about so far, but I keep coming back to uh Hope this doesn't sound effective. I keep coming back to my mom Not in a Freudian sense, but in the sort of in the sense that uh, so We skipped quite a bit, uh, and I try to sort of uh, I I try to not edit her comments because she's from a different generation And she's from a generation That now looks to me quite clearly like a generation of privilege And so, you know, each one of you has the sort of A kind of philosophical special specialization, you know or specialization for your discipline in which we can all sit around and we can sort of Use the precise terms that we're used to and we can sort of take for granted that we all sort of agree on a lot of pretty sort of We we have shared values. I guess we could say But there's a move when we become public intellectuals. There's this sort of move to try to appeal or speak a kind of language That that is a language of privilege. I suppose. So for example I see this a lot if I'm if I'm watching Fox news, for example, one of those where someone will say why do you watch the cherries you watch fox news? Oh, uh, religiously. No, I'm just kidding But so for example, dr. Cherry, why why do you have to make everything about race? Why do you have to stir up trouble right or why can't we just let Like uh locker room talk be locker room talk, right? uh, why do we uh, why do we like Why or why should I have to why should I have to press two? That says that I want spanish or english So how do we sort of how do you move from the sort of the work that you do or how do you understand yourself? Moving from a discourse that is specialized in your discipline where you were in a way you're speaking a language of and representing marginalized folks to trying to sort of appeal to This massive resistance that we have that is essentially a language of privilege How do I I despair sometimes of actually trying to sort of get my points across to people like my own mother, right? Who just wants to she wants to be like her father who whenever he said something racist at the table Everybody just silently accepted it and moved on and now she wants that kind of privilege too and she's just discovering that she feels like she needs that around me So, uh, it's so by language of privilege What you're referring to is having the privilege to say what one wants to say in essence. Yeah, okay so when uh, when trump got elected, right, there was this sort of notion of like All this identity pox's politics is dividing us and like we used to think that and this is often white people saying this We used to feel like we were all in this together, you know us And the blacks as they would say and these sorts of things. We're all in this together even though that wasn't true And now they see a lot of the work that you're doing is sort of representing a kind of divisiveness and so on So, how do you understand or do you ever despair? That you can't actually bridge that gap between the kind of language that you use in your research And appealing to sort of the broader sort of person in the street That is how do we make our perspectives relevant? Do we need to speak differently? Do we need to sort of change our language in a particular way? Do we need to sort of allow them a particular amount of Uh space or flexible flexibility. I'm not sure if that that sort of amounts to one articulate question But how do you understand that process? There's like five questions there. Uh, so let me let me try to let me try to answer I mean five questions that I kind of kind of see there. So in one way I'm thinking is um Going back to the fox news example of the questions that you were talking about Um, I would just say those are just the wrong questions to ask So I would do what philosophers do when they go to panels and respond to q&a's they'll say well, I think the the real question is Right And so one of the the the goals at least as a philosophical thinker is I'm challenged to not only ask questions But ask kind of like different questions and and kind of challenge assumptions, right? And so that's that's one thing. Um, I had another thought but I kind of forgot. I think the express was one and out Um Because you had like 16 questions So you move from five Um Yeah, the thought maybe the thought will come back as as my other co-panelists are responding to that We have time if you guys want to Please so I can come back Well, I often You know, you know people I think a focus on emotions is absolutely the way to go and to think about what emotions you're eliciting in that person In the way you frame what you're saying and particularly if it's a loved one I have found it helpful to make clear that My love for them is not in doubt or at stake But that I am deeply pained by what they are saying Because I believe it is harmful in the world and to sort of focus on things like pain and harm And to not sort of think about them as bad people or paint them as bad people Because the problem really right now is that politics has become a brand, right? We're all sort of we're liberal or we're conservative and we're sort of Affiliating with them like we do with sports teams. I mean, it's we really have to disrupt that way of thinking about politics and to think about you know What what in the in the case of someone you know Well, what might be an effective way for them to see you fully as a person That they know and for you to see them as a person Um, I won't say that it's been Wonderful, but it's the only thing that I found that helps me at least Navigates these conversations with family members. Yeah So it came back to me. So let me get it out before it leaves. Um So immediately when you were talking you were talking about the responses So what do you say to those kinds of responses? And um, I always think back to They had a problem with Martin Luther King jr Like I know they play his excerpts and like truck commercials now and like fox news appeal to to martin Luther King But if you go back to the archive Not only did did uh, we can say conservatives kind of despise this guy But we know later in king's life liberals also turn their back on him Right. So martin Luther King was not well liked. He was constantly criticized constantly criticized on both sides Right. Um And so if they had a problem with this guy Right who didn't talk about anger talked about love Then it's hard for me to take that kind of criticism as true authentic kind of criticism Right. Um, even if it's not intentionally racist self-deception false consciousness Um Ignorance like a whole bunch of stuff is happening there. They really has nothing to do with me as a unique person So, you know, the you know, this is kind of connected to another response that I had is like just do the work Right and be used to these kind of responses, but do the work but do the work and be um be accustomed to it even, you know There may not be an ultimate strategy to respond Just keep doing it work. Keep doing the work because those responses are going to come Um, and if they have if it happened to martin Luther King I feel like I want to say Jesus if Jesus was crucified Then like why should we feel like we're special? You know Dr. White, do you want to add anything? Okay. All right, so, um I think we should bring ourselves officially to a close and thank our three panelists with me