Zooming Across Boundaries: Organizing a Reading Group during a Pandemic

A Philosophy PhD program is a long and difficult experience under normal conditions. If you add a pandemic on top of that, you have a dystopian hellscape filled with lots of reading and writing about abstracta. The first several months were difficult but the world finally settled into a version of the metaverse, where every class, meeting and talk as well as social life was online. Whether it was on Zoom, Webex, or one of the many other online platforms, graduate school picked up the pace back toward normalcy. As the world opens up again, there will be many retrospectives similar to this blog post. We hope to add to the chorus by highlighting a few benefits we have found organizing a graduate reading group online.

At the beginning of 2021, the Rutgers and UPenn Philosophy of Race reading groups began jointly meeting to discuss the topic of reparations. What started off as a discussion of Boxill, McGary and more, turned into a colloquium where 20+ guest speakers would join our discussion over the span of several months. Since the reading group is pre-read, we spend a few minutes on introductions and the remainder is a rigorous and thoughtful Q&A. In the offline pre-pandemic world, we would need to schedule guest speakers when they were already in the area or seek additional funding to pay for their travel expenses. Relatedly, our attendance was affected by geographic limitations. Only graduates on campus or in the area could regularly attend. These limitations became frustrating and prohibitive. Today, the fact that the world is accustomed to web conferencing makes securing guest speakers as easy as an email and a Zoom meeting.

There are many benefits of this new state of affairs that have the potential to be taken for granted. We will highlight a few academically enriching aspects of meeting online that should not be neglected once we get back to normal. First, our group is composed of mostly graduate students and some junior faculty from North America and the UK. Of course, students from Rutgers and UPenn regularly attend, but we have participants from the East and West coasts, the Midwest, the South as well as Canada and the UK. This level of interaction between young philosophers with similar interests would have only been possible a few times a year at widely attended conferences. Now, this geographic limitation is irrelevant. The collective knowledge of people from disparate departments with diverging interests makes for a truly enriching academic experience.

Second, as mentioned already, the ability to invite guest speakers without worrying about their physical location or scrambling for funding is another valuable aspect of organizing online reading groups. Here is a list of the 20+ speakers that have “visited” our reading group since March 2021: Olufemi Taiwo, Kok-Chor Tan, Derrick Darby, Andrew Cohen, Katrina Forrester, Andrew Valls, John Torrey, Samuel Freeman, Lionel K. McPherson, J. Angelo Corlett, Martin D.Carcieri, Michael Ridge, Tommy J. Curry, Joshua Cohen, Lawrence Blum, Glen Coulthard, Tommie Shelby, Erin Beeghly, Serene Khader, Elisabeth Paquette, Jennifer Morton, Sally Haslanger and Leonard Harris. We want to thank all of these scholars for being generous with their time and allowing us to ask difficult and engaging questions. The sheer volume of guest speakers is unprecedented for any reading group to our knowledge, especially for a graduate reading group without any funding. The range of guests allowed our reading group to satisfy the numerous academic interests of our regular attendees. The additional benefit of being in “face-to-face” conversation with these scholars is the chance to network with them, wherein normal circumstances there would be very little opportunity to do so.

The main reason we wanted to write this blog is to demonstrate to other graduate students, especially those who feel geographically isolated, that community with other philosophers is possible in this new environment. We are fortunate to be at well-regarded departments that are located in a philosophically dense region of the country. However, this is not the case for all philosophy graduate students. We want to urge our fellow graduate students to embrace the technology that is now commonplace and start to overcome these place-based limitations. A move toward a more accessible and interactive discipline is to everyone’s benefit and the means are now available.

We do not want to overstate the case. There is a real benefit to philosophizing face to face, whether in the classroom, coffee shop or bar. We know this from first-hand experience. As we attempt to approximate the pre-pandemic normal, we will start to feel those old benefits return, reminding us of how graduate school used to be. But going forward, we should not neglect these new resources that we now take for granted.

We began the semester discussing reparations, since then we have shifted into a more flexible format. We largely read and invite speakers to whom we have always wanted to speak. Generally, any topic related to philosophy of race or Africana philosophy is fair game for future discussions. We met once a week via Zoom for two hours, which recently shifted to a bi-weekly meeting schedule at the beginning of the Fall semester. With only a few breaks in between, we have met consistently since early February and plan to continue into the future.

If you would like to reach out to us for advice, to join our group or to be a guest speaker, please do not hesitate to do so. The co-organizers of the group are Danny Underwood: danny.underwood2@rutgers.edu and Alexander Tolbert: altol25@sas.upenn.edu. We doubt graduate school will ever completely return to pre-pandemic normal, but, as suggested in this post, that may not be academically desirable.

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The Graduate Student Reflection Series invites current students to share reflections on their experience in a philosophy graduate program. Reflections should focus on a course taken during a student’s graduate education, a teaching methodology which the student found particularly effective, or on some other aspect of their educational experience. The Graduate Student Reflection Series strives to represent a diverse group of graduate students from a wide array of educational backgrounds. If you are interested in submitting to the series, please contact us via this submission form.

Danny Underwood II

Danny Underwood II is a 5th-year PhD student in Philosophy with a graduate certificate in Africana Studies at Rutgers University. He also has a BA and MA in Philosophy from the University of Missouri - St. Louis. Underwood’s areas of specialization are political philosophy, Africana philosophy, and moral psychology. His dissertation (chaired by Alexander Guerrero) asks whether a prosecutor’s role obligations generate a duty to discover and mitigate their implicit attitudes.

Alexander Williams Tolbert

Alexander Williams Tolbert is a 3rd-year PhD in Philosophy and Masters in Statistics student at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Kearns-Roth Research Group. He also is engaged in collaboration with the Kording Lab at the University of Pennsylvania working in Causality and Machine learning and Metascience. Tolbert’s research is in Differential Privacy, Algorithmic Fairness, Algorithmic Game Theory, Learning Theory, Causation, and Metascience. He is co-advised by Michael Kearns and Scott Weinstein with Anita Allen and Aaron Roth as committee members. He is also an Amazon Research Scientist Intern. Prior to coming to UPenn. Tolbert received his MA in philosophy and MS in Biochemistry from Virginia Tech.