Doing Fieldwork

Last weekend I was at the APSA (American Political Science Association) in Washington D.C. I am currently working on philosophy of science issues in political science and so I was doing "fieldwork". Actually, the quotes probably don't belong there as it really was fieldwork including interviews and participant observation! My primary goal was to talk to political scientists about methodology, particularly about varieties of qualitative methodology and the use of case studies. The trip was very worthwhile on that front. Those working on such issues were very open to talking about philosophical aspects of the questions and I made some great contacts.

But there was a very interesting and unexpected aspect to my experience. I attended four sessions, two of which were Theme Panels on Qualitative and Multi-method research. What was interesting about these theme panels is that political scientist who work in the qualitative tradition clearly feel marginalized. They have concerns about getting their work published, getting tenure, being looked down upon, and so on. In other words, they have many of the same concerns that feminist philosophers have. On one panel, statistics on publication in journals were discussed and it was noted how few publications in the top journals were qualitative. The editor of APSR reported that they had only received 8 submissions that were qualitative and so it was not so much a problem of the reviewers screening out qualitative work as it was submitters self-screening. Three years ago, I sat on a panel at the APA where a nearly identical discussion took place about publications by women - with a very similar conclusion - that there were very few submissions by women to the top journals in philosophy. Another startling similarity was the advice given to graduate students who wanted to incorporate more qualitative methodologies into their work: wait until you have tenure. Again, I have heard senior women given this similar advice to junior feminist philosophers - wait until you have tenure before you reveal that you are a feminist.

So what does this interesting similarity reveal? I suppose the obvious - that the experiences of marginalized academic researchers are quite similar. But it also reveals the way in which the dominate views in each generation slow progress and discourage alternate views. I suppose that there is something inherently conservation about academic research in that we make demands on ourselves to meet certain standards and while some of the restriction that the standards impose may be necessary for the integrity of the discipline, they also will inevitably exclude alternative approaches, some of which may be quite valuable. In witnessing these sorts of discussions in both professions, I also see a strong belief that over time the good ideas will manage to survive in spite of these constraints and ultimately the standards will shift as well. But I think that observing this dynamic should remind us that our own standards will indeed limit the alternative hypotheses that are available (in the sense of being considered legitimate sorts of hypotheses) at any moment in time. Another reason to be cautious and perhaps, humble, about our knowledge claims.

Society for Analytical Feminism conference

Forgive my very late reporting, but even though it was almost a month ago already, I still think that it is worth saying something about the wonderful Society for Analytical Feminism conference in Kentucky at the beginning of April. You can see the program on this blog or at the SAF website. I came away with the strong impression that feminist philosophy is indeed very healthy, thriving, in fact. Now, I am bound to be somewhat biased on this topic, since I was one of the organizers of the conference (as well as being a presenter), but I do not think that my bias has compromised my judgment too badly. Time will tell.

Kentucky was lovely and green, if wet. Sorry that the picture doesn't do Kentucky more justice, but it did rain rather viciously on the first day and most of that night. In my defense, however, the picture does have very green grass and horses. Still this has nothing to do with philosophy, so let me get to the interesting stuff.

The theme of the conference was Analytical Feminism's Contributions to Traditional Philosophy. The papers that were presented over the greater part of three days clearly were representative of this idea, though it was not the explicit theme of most (with the exception of Ann Cudd's closing plenary presentation). There were papers in epistemology (including philosophy of science), metaphysics (questions of gender and identity primarily), and values (ethics and social an political philosophy), all traditional areas of philosophy, but with feminist concerns at the forefront in two ways. First, the papers were embedded not just in the analytic tradition but in the feminist variant of that tradition that is now maturing. The papers reflect a conversation within the philosophical tradition as a whole but especially with feminists working in that tradition. Second, the papers point towards the contributions (as the conference title suggests) that feminist discourse can provide in the growth of the analytical tradition as a whole.

Here is an example. When Libby Potter discusses "Hybrid Values", she begins with but refines a notion of social practices that she finds in Alisdair McIntyre's work. A discussion of propositions and propositional attitudes provides a bridge to the epistemic and the work of Elizabeth Anderson and other feminists thinkers offers the idea that there are hybrid values (hybrids between epistemic and social or moral values) that we can see in practices such as feminist consciousness raising. So she engages with the tradition but at the same time offers a resource for addressing a current concern in epistemology and philosophy of science. Though using her notion of hybrid values specifically in relation to feminist work, the idea that there are practices of knowledge production that incorporate values that are at the same time epistemic and social/moral provides another way of thinking about the vexing questions that have troubled not only feminist but most epistemologists who take seriously the idea that knowledge is social.

Another example is Kristina Rolin's "Defending Critical Contextual Empiricism" in which she responds to objections raised to Longino's contextual empiricism. What is striking about this paper is that it is a conversation within feminist epistemology itself, but again about issues that are not just feminist issues. The concerns about relativism that are raised run throughout the literature in philosophy of science at least since Kuhn. The idea that contextualist epistemology might be compatible with Longino's contextualism is worth exploring. In each of these cases, the papers are embedded in the analytic tradition both methodologically and in terms of content.

I mention these papers in epistemology because it is sometimes harder to acknowledge feminist contributions in epistemology than it is to see that there are such contributions in ethics, social and political philosophy, and metaphysics (though the recognized contributions in metaphysics might be thought of as more circumscribed than in the other areas and mostly confined to issues of gender and identity). As Ann Cudd pointed out in her talk "Resistance is Not Futile: Analytical Feminism's Contributions to Political Philosophy", the role and contribution of feminist thought is more readily acknowledged in political philosophy and ethics than in other areas.

The philosophical problems that feminists are dealing with are not problems solely for feminism but they are often problems that surface in feminism because they are philosophical problems and grappling with them in relation to feminism can produce insights that are applicable elsewhere. If one is a feminist, this may well be where you want to do your grappling.

Look for more from this conference. Some of these papers are already committed for publication in a variety of venues, but Anita Superson and I hope we will soon have an anthology that will display the breadth and depth of the current work in analytical feminism. My apologies to all the authors of the papers that I have not specifically mentioned. The papers were uniformly of high quality and there were so many good ideas!

Feminist philosophers and women philosophers

There is an interesting discussion unfolding on the SWIP list over the last couple of days. It began with some questions about both the validity and the usefulness of the Leiter rankings for women and/or feminists going into philosophy. It was suggested that an alternative ranking system for feminist-friendly programs might be appropriate. By the way, there is a listing of feminist-friendly programs at the CSW website linked through the APA website, here. You'll need to scroll to the bottom of the page. Note this information is not a ranking. These are programs that are self-reported as feminist-friendly and the information here is of the sort that can help people make judgments for themselves. Anyway, as the discussion on the SWIP list has progressed a number of questions have been raised, among them the question of the connection between being a woman philosopher and being a feminist philosopher.

There is certainly some reason to think that there would be an overlap between these two. At the same time, there are plenty of reasons to think that they are not equivalent. Most particularly, it seems reasonable to think that there is no requirement for women to focus on gender issues purely because they are women. There are many women philosophers who have no interest in feminist philosophy, even though they might count themselves to be feminists. And then there are women philosophers who are antagonistic to both feminist philosophy and feminism. Being a woman philosopher does not ensure any particular attitude towards feminism or feminist philosophy.

There are a number of things that could be said about this and I am not really sure what I think about it at the moment. I began my career having no interest in feminist philosophy, though I was sympathetic to feminism. It wasn't until the early 90s, 10 years out of graduate school, that I started working on issues in feminist philosophy of science. Before that I was occasionally asked if I could teach feminist philosophy, I suppose because I was a woman. I refused to do so, because I thought it was a weird question and resented the assumption, but over the years it became clearer to me that as a woman doing philosophy, I was finding it increasingly difficult to separate my intellectual from my pragmatic struggles (what sort of jobs I had, how I was perceived by my peers, how I perceived myself, my abilities, what problems I felt capable of tackling). It is this latter set of concerns that makes me sometimes wonder whether it really is possible to completely separate feminist philosophy from being a woman doing philosophy, no matter what you are working on. I wonder this even though I know that the "proper" attitude to have is that these two issues are distinct. Still, I think I am puzzled about this because it brings me face-to-face with the question of how integral gender is to any and all human activities. I am not really sure what it means to claim that gender issues are or are not relevant in a particular case, because I am not entirely sure how I would know. I think I feel more comfortable acknowledging that they are are more salient in some cases and for some issues than for others. But whatever the salience of gender to the issues that we are working on, isn't what we want is that our gender is not a roadblock to our interests and our pursuit of those interests. Isn't this the underlying problem in the discussion about the low numbers of women in philosophy, the low number of female applicants for jobs in philosophy, and most importantly, because it suggests that women are being discouraged or even driven out of the field, the decline in the number of women who are in the profession after receiving their PhDs?

I am not sure of the answers and I think it is worth questioning some of the assumptions, but I am very happy that this discussion is taking place.