Interview with new Associate Editor of the Women in Philosophy series

The Women in Philosophy series at the APA blog would like to thank Julinna Oxley for her service as Associate Editor from 2020-2021. We are now happy to announce that Alida Liberman is the new Associate Editor of the series. In this post, the series editor Adriel M. Trott interviews Alida.

Hi Alida! I am very pleased that you are taking on this role as the Associate Editor of the Women in Philosophy series. Could you tell us more about yourself? What do you think our readers should know about you?

Thanks—I’m very happy to be involved with the blog!

I grew up in New Jersey, studied philosophy at The College of New Jersey, and went to graduate school at USC. (Los Angeles remains my favorite place I’ve lived by a long shot.) After receiving my Ph.D., I spent a year in London, Ontario as a postdoctoral fellow with the Rotman Institute at Western University, then two years as an assistant professor at the University of Indianapolis. I’m now in my fourth year at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX, where I was tenured this past summer.

My research covers a range of topics in theoretical and practical ethics. I’ve published on theories of promissory obligation, the nature of vows and resolutions, the ethics of endorsement, conscientious objection in healthcare, effective altruism, and sexual ethics, among other topics.

I regularly teach bioethics, contemporary moral problems, and feminist philosophy. I also think a lot about pedagogy, including how to make philosophy classrooms more inclusive. If you also like thinking about this, I recommend getting involved with the American Association of Philosophy Teachers; we’re a group of philosophers who want to critically reflect on our teaching practices together and collaboratively support each other in improving our teaching.

When I’m not teaching and writing, I like cooking vegan food, spending time in nature, and reading fiction.

What brought you to philosophy?

I started college as an undeclared major. I was lucky to have supportive parents who encouraged me to study whatever interested me, and a scholarship that enabled me to pursue the topics I was most excited about without being worried about being able to pay off massive debt in the future. I loved the first philosophy classes I took, and just kept taking more. Although I had no formal exposure to philosophy before college, I soon realized that philosophers were asking the kinds of questions that I liked wondering about, and was regularly sitting up at night discussing with my mom at home or dormmates in college.

I think that encouraging sparks of curiosity in students is really important. One standout moment for me was in an intro philosophy of religion class as a first-year student. I don’t recall what we were discussing, but I remember raising my hand and saying something along the lines of “You keep talking about truth. But what even is truth? How can we ever really know if something is true or not?” It would have been easy for my professor to dismiss my (admittedly naïve and irrelevant) question as, well, naïve or irrelevant. But instead, he told me that I was asking the sort of deep philosophical questions that philosophers have been grappling with for a long time, and encouraged me to sign up for an epistemology class the next semester. Other people were asking these sorts of questions too? I was hooked!

What kinds of philosophical questions interest you?

I’m most interested in the intersection of theoretical and practical ethics: the theoretical questions I find most interesting and important generally have practical upshots or implications, and the practical work I do tends to draw heavily on theoretical concepts. For example, what do theoretical insights into the nature of promissory obligation tell us about whether it is ethical for a political candidate to make campaign promises they aren’t certain they can keep? If signing up to become an organ donor involves making or accepting a promise, what implications does this have for adjudicating conflicts between deceased donors and their families?

A lot of the philosophical work I’ve done recently has been driven by my responses to current events. Seeing debates about supporting Confederate monuments play out on social media led me to work on the ethics of endorsing something with a mix of good and bad features. When police officers in Indianapolis were not charged with a crime after fatally shooting Aaron Bailey in the back—who was unarmed and had just crashed his car—because they claimed to fear for their lives, I started thinking about the ways in which acceptance of such fear-based excuses exacerbates epistemic injustice, and investigating the epistemic and ethical flaws in the legal standard that governs police use of force cases. Currently, I’ve been reflecting on how difficult and stressful everyday moral decision-making has been during the COVID-19 pandemic and what this might tell us about the moral harms involved in daily life.

Why do you think this work of public-facing philosophy addressing the concerns and work of women philosophers is important?

I think this matters in two ways. First, among an audience of professional philosophers, it’s important to highlight lesser-known work by women and to point out problems or issues that impact women in the profession. The climate for women in philosophy has gotten better in the last decade and continues to do so, but we still have a long way to go. Continuing to bring women’s concerns to the forefront encourages us to keep making progress and avoid complacency.

Second, I think philosophers have a lot to offer the public: we can use our unique methodologies and ways of thinking to contextualize and contribute to important debates. But this doesn’t always happen, and many people don’t really understand what philosophers do. I suspect that this stems from a number of causes, including a lack of philosophy education in most K-12 schools, strong institutional disincentives academics have to avoid doing public-facing work (which generally doesn’t “count” as research for the purposes of promotion and tenure and often isn’t regarded as serious or prestigious), and a lack of experience with writing for non-specialist audiences. I hope that the Women in Philosophy series can be a venue for work that pushes back against these forces, and helps bring accessible philosophy to an audience beyond professional philosophers.

I know that you are a pretty serious amateur actor. Can you tell the reader more about your theater experience and how that influences your philosophical thinking?

I was really involved in the student-run theater group at TCNJ as an undergrad; I was in a play every semester, and part of the campus improv comedy troupe for four years. I stayed away from the stage for the most part in graduate school—the market for actors is super competitive even at non-professional theaters in L.A.—but started doing community theater again as a postdoc and when I moved to Dallas. During the pandemic, I’ve been participating in Zoom readings of Shakespeare and other classical works with Plague Mask Players: shows are cast without auditions and without regard to gender, race, age, body size, etc. It’s been a great learning experience—there’s no better way to understand Shakespeare than to read it out loud with a live cast—and a ton of fun; I’ve gotten to read roles that I’d never be cast as in a traditional production, and to explore my creativity with DIY costumes, Zoom backgrounds, and experimental characterizations.

These experiences have been great preparation for giving academic presentations and teaching; I learned to speak loudly and clearly and in a dynamic tone of voice on stage, and these skills transfer directly to giving talks or lectures. When I was doing improv, I trained myself to commit to what I was saying and avoid using fillers like “umm” while thinking on my feet; this has helped me sound confident in Q&A sessions, especially when I was first starting out as a grad student (since I was often able to sound more confident than I actually felt).

My experiences on stage have also directly impacted my thinking about gendered embodiment. In 2019, I had what will likely be the best role of my life: I played Macbeth in an all-women production of Shakespeare’s play. We didn’t gender-swap the characters; we had women actors play the roles as men. I hadn’t been on stage in a couple of years, and my body was larger than it was the last time I’d performed; I was concerned I might feel self-conscious about this.

But playing Macbeth was a revelation: I was a warrior and a king, and my body was the means by which I claimed and attempted to hold on to power. Before then, I’d mostly played women on stage. Many women’s roles involve being an object of desire in relation to men. As Macbeth, I wasn’t sexually objectified at all. I deliberately took up as much space as possible on stage, and didn’t ever feel anxious or self-conscious about my body. I felt so free, and it helped me more fully appreciate the extent to which my off-stage embodiment as a woman was often more restrictive. Plus, the pockets of the men’s trousers and suit coat I wore as a costume were enormous—large enough to stash my prop dagger in!

What are some ideas that you have for the series? What would you like to see the series doing in the future?

I think it’s great that the series has regularly included the work of philosophers who don’t have the institutional support to be well “networked,” or who don’t have ready access to a public platform—such as people working as adjuncts, in teaching-focused positions, or at less well-resourced departments or universities. We should continue to prioritize including the work of such philosophers. There’s a lot of excellent work being done by people in less-visible roles in our profession. Prestige bias can lead some in our profession to falsely assume that people who aren’t working at “fancy” institutions or departments and publishing in high-profile places aren’t doing interesting and important work, and I think we should be fighting against that wherever we can.

It would also be great to find bloggers to write philosophical responses to current events that impact women, along the lines of the Philosophers On series at Daily Nous. These kinds of posts can be great for assigning to students; I think it’s important to show students how philosophical theories and concepts can have immediate real-world applications.

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The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or the Associate Editor Alida Liberman.

Alida Liberman

Website

Alida Liberman is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern Methodist University. Her research focuses on theoretical and practical ethics and the spaces in between, and she is a facilitator of Teaching and Learning workshops from the American Association of Philosophy Teachers.