Ashley Bohrer: Why don’t you start by telling me a little bit about yourself and your background in philosophy.
Rosalie Lochner: I got my PhD in philosophy from DePaul university and taught at Loyola Marymount for about seven years. I studied social and political philosophy, feminist theory decolonial thought. My dissertation was called “Arendt and Spivak: Political Worlding and Appearing.” In it, I argue that political agency should not be based on universal, ethico-political subject. I argue instead that political agency is better understood in terms of plurality, and a double bind between political agency and social determinants.
The whole question of the dissertation was, how to hold open public space for people to speak and appear? Especially when that space is in fact policed in terms of who counts and what defines a citizen. Because, if we’re counting, there has to be somebody who doesn’t count. There is an implied subject who holds open that space unless we conceptualize it in terms of imperfect mutuality.
AB: I understand that you’re no longer working in the academy.
RL: No. I, in fact, it’s really funny, I was going to go back to Loyola Marymount’s Women and Gender Studies Department, but there’s a pandemic and, as we both know, adjuncts don’t get paid enough. It just wasn’t feasible, especially because someone had to be home all day with the kids. “Women’s work”, you know?
So no, I’m no longer in the academy. A few years ago I looked into adjunct work here in Michigan when I first moved, and I realized how little people here were getting paid. As much as I miss academia, it is just really a system I didn’t feel great about participating in.
AB: The working condition for adjuncts in this country is deplorable.
RL: It truly, truly is. And so, I mean, it wasn’t going to cover the childcare that I would need to teach classes. I miss teaching a ton. I miss that side of the Academy, and I miss being around other academics, but I also don’t miss the enormous weight that sits on you as they wait for you to publish and you’re waiting on publications.
AB: Tell me what you are doing now, post-academy.
RL: I’m a co-founder of the Michigan Support Circle (MSC), which started as a result of family separation, of the Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy. Watching everything that was happening in the spring of 2018, I felt that, as a citizen, I could not stand by and allow this to happen in my name. Like, if I didn’t actively take a stance against what was happening, I was participating in it. So that’s why I started the work and that really does have a kind of Arendtian backbone to it.
AB: Can you tell us a little bit about what Michigan Support Circle does, what problem it responds to, and what you do in the organization?
RL: We were founded in Michigan as a response to Zero Tolerance. A grass roots organization. There were kids being held in Michigan who were separated from their families at the southern border. The goal was to reunite these families. We are not a nonprofit because nonprofits have to be very clear about what they do and don’t do. And as we respond to families traumatized by rapidly changing immigration policy, we needed the flexibility, especially under Trump, to respond to the rapidly changing policies.
So, back in 2018, with the changes in governmental policy, we pivoted quite quickly from working to reunite families to providing emergency shelter, transportation, and resources for the parents and tender age children who were released in early July, to being told we would have 53 families being released in Michigan who needed to be housed. At the time, they were just releasing families to bus stops without any support, without enough diapers or food to make it to their intended destinations. But then the policy changed again and the kids were all flown to detention centers in Texas and Arizona to be reunited. We pivoted again to receiving those families who were coming to Michigan post reunification. We also expanded to include other families separated by immigration policy.
We usually work with about 10 families at a time because we do in-depth work with them—advocacy work, connecting them with lawyers, connecting people with food banks, connecting people with rent resources, trying to make sure that people have support in lots of different areas so that these kids can be safe and families can have some stability while navigating this country’s asylum seeking process.
To return to the grassroots part, we’re an organization that works by creating circles of support for families. These circles are focused on individual families and we try to build a community where the families could become a part of the project themselves. So they can seek support and also become members and support other people as well. Really, we just try to help families who have been traumatized by immigration policy and create bonds across class and background while expanding asylum seekers’ access to resources.
AB: I imagine you have a pretty expansive understanding of family too.
RL: Yes, we do, absolutely. And that is one of the things that we still run up against. Families are still being separated. If they [kids] didn’t cross the boarder with a mother or father, or it’s not a mother or father who is the kid’s primary caregiver, then children who are taken into custody are not immediately given over to their family. So we are still reuniting kids with older siblings who are caregivers, or their aunts or uncles who are caregivers. These only slightly “non-traditional” families are not reunified as quick as when parents and children are separated, you can imagine where it goes from there.
AB: Can you tell me a little bit about the origin story of the Michigan Support Circle? What activated you into doing this work?
RL: I mean, it happened really fast. I was sitting at the kitchen table, looking at my young kids having listened to the news while making dinner and becoming emotionally and intellectually stuck on the fact, ‘they’re just taking away these kids, these little kids.’ My sister told me about a Facebook group that was trying to reunite a family in New York and she planted the seed that I should do the same in Michigan. So I just started calling. I called the ACLU while my kids were taking a nap. I called Michigan Immigrant Rights Center while the kids were playing in the backyard. Any chance I got I was on the phone asking people, trying to figure out how to get access to the parents of these kids. I called Bethany Children’s Services where these kids were being housed in Michigan. I got connected to Gina Katz, and we started working really closely together. Once we started organizing together, the ACLU called us, lawyers started reaching out to us, because families were just getting let off at bus stops without any support. So these lawyers called and asked, “what can you do?” Our response was, what do these families need? We’ll figure out how to do it.
We’ve got housing, we’ve got car seats, we’ve got toiletries, interpreters, people ready to help. We just started lining up things as quickly as we could. At first, there were three families. One needed very short term support in the form of a car seat, food, a ride, and plane tickets. And one needed a moderate amount of support, and the other needed long-term housing. We found housing for them, and then found out that there were going to be 53 more families. So we started getting ready for that. But then, maybe in response to our activism, they started to put all the kids on buses in the middle of the night and flew them on red eyes to Texas and Arizona, because they didn’t want them reunited here. Photos were already getting out about family separation, and they didn’t want them reunited in Middle America. They said they moved the kids to other detention centers farther south because it would be easier or better for the kids, but we think it’s because they were so worried about backlash, about visibility. So then we ended up helping the families get back from Texas, to come live here.
The kind of groundswell of support that we had for these families was really incredible. MSC started as a Facebook group and people started finding out about us and showing up to help. Really our approach is just figuring out what the family’s need is and how we can solve it.
For example: how do we get the right lawyers for parents that are still in detention? How do we get kids enrolled in nursery school? And how do we help solve these problems without taking over decision making, without further marginalizing or disempowering families? We are working with people who have been so disempowered by the system that we didn’t want to reproduce that at all. So we practice listening as much as possible, and then using our privilege to be able to work the system and pull on our connections.
We have been able to get people to see specialists months sooner than if they had to go through the clinic system. We always just keep calling. We are always asking the question ‘who knows who?’ in order to try to meet some of these needs.
AB: Wow. That’s huge. It’s like mutual aid on a totally different level than a lot of the other mutual aid projects that have sprung up recently.
RL: It is. It requires a lot of networking and in-depth work, but MSC is also really small. There are so, so many people who have been so maltreated and are so abused by our immigration system. That’s the limitation of our work. MSC is able to work with individual families, but it doesn’t create systematic change. This is the problem with individual advocacy: it makes an appeal for particular people on the basis of their special circumstances or their connections, as opposed to changing the rules for everyone.
AB: I want to go back to something you said a bit earlier about this work kind of being an Arendtian project or activating some of the insights from your philosophical work and studies. Pull that out a little more for me.
RL: Sure. For Arendt, rights only exist insofar as you actually hold them to exist. They only exist so long as they are upheld. So if you are willing to allow the degradation of other human beings, you have also degraded your own humanity and humanity in general, as a concept. And what we saw with this administration is the total disregard for the rights and humanity of the families who were separated.
Also for Arendt, responsibility is key. We have a responsibility to act. If you won’t stand up for anything, then you stand for nothing. Then, for Arendt, you actually aren’t a person anymore. It is in finding those lines that you say, ‘this line cannot be crossed’ that you find your personhood, and you only find it in moments when and where the moral “system” is broken. If you don’t respond to the way the system is broken, you give up your moral personhood. This was a big concern for her in her understanding of German society after the Nazis were removed from power. The Germans who just sort of went back to normal and normal morality meant for her that they had lost their moral personhood because they didn’t really stand for anything. They could change morals like one changes hats. For Arendt, in order to be a person, you have to stand for something—even those who stand for things we disagree with are persons as long as they can demonstrate an attempt at a consistent commitment to their principles.
And then from the Spivakian side: how do we organize this group and what were its ultimate commitments? Spivak’s work speaks to the importance of working with families directly rather than just dumping donations on them. There is a commitment that it was going to be deep on the ground engagement, and the goal was to set families up for success within the asylum system, within the medical system, and education system, and so on. And that necessarily means long-term. For the most part, our families are on year-long plans; some are on year three, because the goal is really building community and genuine support, not just benevolent charity. Not that charity and donations can’t be useful, they just aren’t enough—they don’t create a sea change.
AB: Or at least not in the same way that, for example, leveraging power and privilege to be able to build real connections and relationships where affected community are making their own decisions.
RL: Exactly. If you’re simply dumping donations, people are always in a precarious place, questioning whether they’re going to get the next handout or not in order to be able to do the next thing that they need. And that creates an anxiety that, I mean—these families don’t need any more anxiety!
So there was a commitment to deep, on-the-ground activism that was going to be organized primarily as an engagement with these families. The continual question is asking families what they want, what they need in the long term. What are their goals for the month, the season, the year, the next year.
AB: I’m wondering if you think about or relate to philosophy in a different way after leaving the academy or starting this project? Do these concepts mean something different? Do they feel different? Do you engage with them differently?
RL: Well, they have really different stakes now. So, for example, when I’m thinking about the concept of family. Philosophically, I’m interested in questions like ‘how do we define family?’ and there I can be very critical of the exclusivity or supremacy of biology. But when a biological mother comes to me and says ‘I haven’t seen my kid in two years,’ my work is very invested in mobilizing a concept of family that is defined by biology so that she gets custody of her kid.
Sometimes when you’re dealing with an individual case, you are necessarily working with the terms at hand, and that’s where I’m like, ‘Oh, Spivak would be so disappointed!’ But, even that’s not entirely fair, because she does always advocate for using the thing that gets the job done.
I’ll also say that part of the way that philosophy plays out in my work, is that in the course of this work, I’m able to speak publicly about human rights and political community, partially because I have this background and people will listen to me differently because of it.
AB: Is there anything that you think should change in academia, now that you have this outside view?
RL: It’s appalling that articles and research—the very thing that could be helpful to people outside of academia—are closed off by paywalls. It sucks that when people outside of academia want to read things that might have been useful to making an argument, they just can’t access them. Honestly, more access would expose a lot of people to philosophy. Paywalling research makes the world smaller and makes the research irrelevant.
On the other hand, when academics do engage with social movements, I think they sometimes do so in a problematic way, looking at activism as something to observe and comment on only for the sake of an academic argument, like a resource to be taken from. People’s lives and resistance just gets turned into an example and that approach is colonial. When we are talking about racism that ends people’s lives or we are talking about the separation of three-year-olds from their parents, we are talking about something that is happening to real people, and when we use it merely as an example, we are turning their lives and pain into a tool. That’s not to say that examples aren’t important or we shouldn’t be talking about the real world, but philosophy can often treat the concept as something that is already pre-formed and then imposed it on a situation, or worse, a person. Maybe philosophy has to do that, but I’m not so sure.
AB: I see a lot of that happening now, in regards to the 2020 Racial Justice Uprising. I think many philosophers are trying to talk about protests and activism and racial justice now for the first time and I see the same thing happening: making their philosophical work ‘sexy’ or ‘relevant’ by applying it to the present situation to further their own careers without being in community with those movements.
RL: Yes, exactly. I know that’s not always true, but often enough it is. This is another connection to Arendt, but also to Hortense Spillers. We are currently living in this open moment, and for her, the moment of the present that hasn’t yet been totally determined. And a lot of the determination of the present will happen on the basis of naming the moment. Will our present moment get named by a dominant narrative or from narratives that have been systematically oppressed and denied their own name and denied naming, the power of naming?
Rosalie Lochner
Ashley J. Bohrer
Ashley J. Bohrer is a scholar-activist based in Chicago. She is Assistant Professor of Gender and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from DePaul University (2016). Along with Justin De Leon, she cohosts the Pedagogies for Peace Podcast. She currently serves as the Public Philosophy Editor for the blog of the American Philosophical Association. Her first book, Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism is available through Transcript Verlag and Columbia University Press. You can read more about her work at ashleybohrer.com
