One Way to Think with Precarity in the Classroom

Featured image: “A course session led by Mallory Barnosky, a second-year Philosophy student, and Alea Ortega, a second-year student pursuing a Nursing degree. They led the session on Axelle Karera’s “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics.” The board shows what they — and we — were up to.” Photo courtesy of Becky Vartabedian. 

Having discussed issues of responsibility that come up in the context of structural injustice as well as pathways towards solidarity, for this third post of the Precarity and Philosophy mini-series, I wanted to turn to how precarity can be addressed in the classroom. 

The opportunity arose to talk to Becky Vartabedian, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Regis University, about her course Precarious Bodies. I wanted to understand how precarity, which is not a standard topic in the philosophy, can be included in the philosophical curriculum. Especially since the philosophical curriculum tends to operate at a level of abstraction from the world, I wondered how Becky addressed the concrete social issue of precarity philosophically? The ensuing interview with Becky and her students (their remarks are in the image captions) allowed me to better understand a number of themes that arise at the intersection of pedagogy and precarity. 

Three aspects stood out for me in particular.

The first aspect that I found striking is Becky’s approach to the classroom. What comes through in her remarks is that reflection on the form of a classroom is crucial to a meaningful classroom that takes its relationships seriously. The classroom Becky describes is grounded in an idea of mutual accountability and community. The ethos underwriting Becky’s classroom gave me a sense of how academic life and scholarship might change when they are not structured by what bell hooks calls a culture of domination that organizes relationships around competition, as a game of dominating or being dominated. Can rethinking (academic) community be an alternative to the — at times paranoid and fearful – discussions on trigger warnings, cancel culture, and academic freedom? And don’t these discussions (marked by an often ungrounded fear of domination) reveal a more fundamental issue, a lack of trust and community?

I was also struck by the centrality of the Jesuit tradition at Regis with its emphasis on how we live in shaping the curriculum. This includes thinking of our students not only as individuals that a university education trains to excel in the narrow sense (as professional philosophers who graduate with a “skillset,” for instance) but as persons who inhabit the social world. What do they need to learn, then, to inhabit this world well? Becky’s work with her students gives us an example of a philosophical education that cares about this question, a question historically rooted in both the Western and non-Western philosophical traditions but which is now typically relegated to the non-academic realm. 

And now the final and third aspect: I found novel course themes, such as precarity, can liberate the curriculum from canonical restrictions. Alongside canonical philosophers and theorists, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Judith Butler, Precarious Bodies walks students through the work of non-canonical writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Octavia Butler, among others. This serves to erode the inside/outside distinction that characterizes so much of philosophical education, and I should add –- not incidentally — precarity as well. 

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Thanks for doing this interview, Becky. Let me begin by asking you to tell me more about Precarious Bodies. How did you come to offer this course? 

Precarious Bodies is a course for undergraduate students in our Philosophy and Social Issues course category, and it’s cross-listed in our College’s Peace and Justice Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies programs. Spring 2022 is the second time I’ve taught Precarious Bodies; the first time was in spring 2018. 

Precarity surfaced in relation to the ways the consequences of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election were playing out, both in the country at large and on our small college campus. I was especially thinking about Judith Butler’s definition of precarious lives as those that face “the destruction of the conditions of livability,” and considering the ways campus climate and community might be compromising for some of my students, especially in relation to the visibility of their bodies on our campus (p. 9).

How do you understand precarity?

In Frames of War, Judith Butler invites her reader to consider “the differential distribution of precariousness and grievability,” pointing to the effects of structures and policies that sort grievable lives from precarious ones (p. 31). A grievable life is one that can be reckoned or counted according to the specifications of the structure or policy; that is, a grievable life is one that is on the “inside” of that structure, be that structure political, social, cultural, or economic. 

For example, and pertinent to your opening post in this series, Sidra, taking academia itself as an “inside,” where structures and policies serve tenure-track and tenured faculty with precisely those things that make a career in academia livable (salary, benefits, long-term stability), it becomes pretty clear how contingent faculty’s position “outside” the purview of structures and policies is precarious. 

The distinction you make between the inside and the outside to understand precarity makes sense to me. Could you tell me more about how you fleshed out this distinction in the course?

In fact, the inside/grievable – outside/precarious distinction is how I grounded the most recent offering of Precarious Bodies.  To make sense of this distinction, we turned to our first major text in the class, Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.

This novel begins in a near-future in which successful communities are walled-off and fortified against the chaos of drugs, fire, and uncertainty unfolding outside these communities. Lauren Olamina — the main character — develops a philosophy and religion she calls Earthseed in parallel to the Christianity her father preaches in the community. When — and I guess I should say spoiler alert! here — the community collapses, Olamina and a scant few members of her community survive. As they journey northward, Olamina and her comrades use Earthseed and its commitments as ways of creating a new community and determining who is “safe” (to the extent safety is possible).

We were able to use both the text’s early image of the shielding wall as a way of understanding inside and outside, and then to see the way Earthseed serves as a “sorting mechanism” while on the road as another tool for conceiving of the inside and outside.

Another way we were able to make the inside/grievable – outside/precarious distinction concrete was by thinking about two models of agency: Merleau-Ponty’s “I can” and Iris Marion Young’s “I cannot.” In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty identifies “motility as basic intentionality,” the idea that our ability to move through and trans-act with the world is the most basic expression of consciousness (p. 159). In my favorite pithy saying from the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty says “Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that,’ but of ‘I can’” (p. 159). When we think about the “inside” or what makes a life “grievable” in Judith Butler’s terms, we are able to think about bodies that can, bodies for whom the world or others present no substantive obstacle to recognition or expression. 

Young’s explicit counter in the “I cannot” identifies bodies that experience substantive obstacles to recognition or expression (p. 36). The “I can” and the “I cannot,” moreover, allow us to take up the difference between inhabiting or shaping the world (work the “I can” accomplishes) and being inhibited by or subject to the shape of the world on the other (the situation of the “I cannot”).

The “I cannot” provides a route into concrete ideas and experiences based on gendered bodily comportment; we’re able to catalog the ways in which masculine bodily comportment allows those who inhabit the world to take up space — those phenomena of manspreading or mansplaining come in quite handy here — and to address ways in which feminine bodily comportment is marginalized as a result.  Young’s work offers us a way of thinking about the differential experiences of agency and action in gendered bodies. 

The passage from Butler through Merleau-Ponty and Iris Marion Young brings us to Frantz Fanon’s fragmentation of the “I can” according to his discussions of expectations around language in Chapter 2 of Black Skin, White Masks, where he discusses the “historico-racial schema” of the colonized, Black body and its distinction from the more neutral “body schema” of the White body of the colonizer. Fanon’s work demonstrates the ways the junction of race and colonialism inhibits agency. 

One other phenomenological resource — again, all of which seem to serve the purpose of making the abstract a little more concrete! — that has stuck with the most recent community of students is Sara Ahmed’s idea of “orientations” as described in her 2007 article, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” This reading brings our theoretical inquiries back into a contemporary conversation. 

What was it, specifically, about Ahmed’s work that resonated with your students? 

Ahmed describes orientations as “how we begin, how we proceed from ‘here’” (p. 151). This idea has emerged frequently in conversation and in written work, where students remark about recognizing — and many for the first time — their orientations toward the world. They’re also attentive to the ways one’s orientation, in Ahmed’s words, “(puts) some things and not others in our reach” (p. 151-152).

In addition to defining a trajectory for agency and action, the notion of orientation facilitates understanding a landscape for one’s own chances to inhabit it or be inhibited by it and to see the differential distribution of these chances for others. 

This gives me an excellent idea of the literary and philosophical scaffolding of your course — how did the class bring these readings to bear on their own experiences?

Through all of this, we are encountering the specific ways members of our class community have experienced precarity, grievability, and the differential distribution of attendant opportunities and pressures. Though we work with pretty serious theory for an undergraduate seminar, it becomes clear that these theorists are speaking a language that resonates with students.

In 2018, for example, what started as an academic interest on my part turned quickly to our understanding ways in which some bodies in their visibility are exposed to precarity in ways other bodies are not. It happened that our bodies and our experiences became texts in themselves. This had the additional benefit of creating a class community in which solidarity became a necessary component. Following the spring 2018 class, a group of students and I published a book chapter about our shared work that came out in a festschrift in honor of George Yancy, whose work provided an important cornerstone for us.

The course you offer is not exactly the standard undergraduate course in philosophy that follows a particular well-established canon? Can you tell us more about why you think a course on precarity is valuable for undergraduate philosophy students? 

A course on precarity is useful for undergraduates because a framework like inside/grievable and outside/precarious offers a different angle for approaching questions of experience, and especially experiences of those who find themselves in precarious positions for one or more reasons.

Precarity adds dimension to discourse around oppression. For example, the question how do we end racism gets additional dimensions like how do we address the precarity that raced bodies experience, and where did the conditions underwriting precarity originate? A course on precarity keeps history and the state of the present live and “in play” in ways that focusing on the -ism alone might not. 

Another reason a course on precarity is useful for undergraduates is that it invites voices outside a traditional philosophical canon to the conversation. When students – especially students in positions marginalized by the academy – see “who else” is doing philosophy, they have a better chance of seeing themselves reflected in work of Frantz Fanon or Axelle Karera, Gloria Anzaldúa, or Boram Jeong.

As Kristie Dotson has pointed out, and following insights by Audre Lorde, alternative canons also introduce ways of accommodating experiences and knowledges that might otherwise go unacknowledged (at best) or be rejected outright (at worst) on grounds of their incongruence with a dominant philosophical tradition.

I, too, have observed that it is more difficult to include authors and themes outside the canon when the conceptual frame of the course remains unaltered. I am now curious what you think happens to philosophy education when social issues such as precarity are treated as central. 

Treating social issues as topics of philosophical inquiry brings the discipline closer to the world. At Regis, which is a Jesuit institution, and in our department, we organize our courses around the question we take to be at the heart of the Jesuit pedagogical tradition: How ought we to live?

We design courses with the expectation that students exiting our classrooms will be able to augment their own answers to this question using the tools and practices they take from our courses.

Moreover, our department is avowedly pluralist in its approach, so students learn a range of tools and practices based on the way our faculty translate their preparation into Jesuit pedagogy. This tends to mean that our courses are built under the assumption that what comes up in the classroom needs to translate for students into their engagement with the world. 

Treating social issues as central also invites an opportunity to ask about philosophy as a discipline. Our approaches to teaching at Regis bear a family resemblance to what Kristie Dotson has called a “culture of praxis,” which she describes as an approach to philosophy that affirms any practitioner’s “seeking issues and circumstances pertinent to our living” as appropriately philosophical (p. 17). 

A culture of praxis can affirm embodied, situated thinking with and about the world (on one hand) and an ongoing attention to the complexity of issues (on another) as capable of determining problems for philosophical inquiry.

To make this inquiry philosophical, though, Dotson suggests that the practitioner forge links between an already-existing philosophical conversation which requires experience with the discipline and its modes of expression, conversations happening outside philosophy, and conversations “in our surrounding worlds” (p. 17). Precarious Bodies accomplishes this by engaging phenomenology and its tools, connecting to issues of precarity and its differential distribution, and inviting students to consider the interplay between what they’re learning in class, how it meshes with their experience (or challenges them), and how they’ll take that learning into the wider world. 

Argument and the work of learning how to make good arguments are important as a habit the students are practicing, but we engage this in service of a larger conversation between students, their ongoing ethical discernment, and the needs of the world beyond the classroom. 

Discussions of precarity can sometimes re-center victimization and re-affirm subjection rather than emphasize resistance and agency. How do you deal with this difficulty in the course? 

This points to something I thought quite a lot about between the first and second offerings of the course. The first time around, I didn’t do enough in the framework of the class to affirm resistance and agency, but the students in that class completed projects that were oriented toward a future “to come,” toward transformation in inspiring ways. They composed original songs, created artwork that imagined themselves otherwise, and developed a culture of zine creation and distribution that continues on campus through the present. Their work taught me that addressing precarity must also include an eye toward possibility and creativity. 

This time around I offered “possibility” as an explicit third term in the course’s organization, and in addition to reading Parable of the Sower for precarity, we understood the character Lauren Olamina’s religion, Earthseed, as an act of creativity and transformation that grows from an atmosphere of precarity.

We also watched Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning to examine the development of ball culture and the formations of family structures among the participants as acts of creative resistance and agency. Our readings included Glen Coulthard and Leanne Simpson’s call to “grounded normativity” as an Indigenous alternative to colonial structures of political recognition, and considered Gloria Anzaldúa’s notions of Nepantla and the Coyolxauhqui imperative as ways of thinking from precarity toward a new future. Finally, the course included two sessions of community rest, inspired by Rev. Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry.

These sessions were an invitation to pause the work of school “as usual” in favor of stillness and quiet and had the intention of interrupting the pursuit of “content” and the pace that’s often associated with this during a semester. Our understanding of creativity and possibility traversed the assigned content and our own actions, including a powerful discussion led by Jordan Werner in March 2022 (she’s quoted here) about the structure of the classroom itself and possibilities for transforming our learning inside parameters set by traditional undergraduate education. The centering insight Jordan offered was the following:

… In the classroom setting whiteness was an orientation was still the default, not because any members of our cohort had bad intentions or were attempting to uphold it, but due to the pure nature of the system of higher education.

I wonder if this is a goal that I, and the rest of our cohort, can work toward. From this new perspective and understanding of race and the concept of how these systems and ideologies orient us, I wonder if we can attempt to disrupt the classroom. I know we have attempted this with our circle (note: Jordan is referring here to the simple act of moving our desks out of the rows arrangement and into a circle) , but I wonder in what other structures can we achieve that. I think from the understanding of orientations we can attempt to orient ourselves from the perspectives of our authors rather than fully our own on every occasion. We can explore our rest sessions as a form of changing orientation, or the ability to have authority over what we know.

As in the first iteration of this class, Jordan’s work demonstrated the way our engagement with theory can be made concrete, even down to the operation of the classroom itself

Now, the material and issues you consider can be psychologically difficult. How do you accommodate your students, their sensitivities and reactions? 

A course like Precarious Bodies charges headlong into the difficult, and to address this prospect we developed a community agreement to guide our conversations. Community agreements invite us to think not just about the content of the class, but of the presence of individuals and the relationships a classroom naturally facilitates. As such, the agreement is designed for the good of the community, which meets regularly (twice each week) and for a non-trivial length of time (75 minutes each session). Our community agreement in spring 2022 included the following expectations: 

• Arrive with questions about the reading. 
• Allow people immersed in a community to speak on their own behalf. 
• Recognize that not all members of a community have the same experience.
• Use “I” statements.
• Allow for silence to include others. 
• Enter conversations with an open mind and come with curiosity, not judgment. 
• If a reading troubles you, reach out to Dr. Vartabedian for support. 
• “What is said here stays here.”
• Let’s use names! 

At one point in the semester, there was a session where members of our community thought our conversation – concerning the use/mention distinction as it pertains to the n-word – invited too much speaking on behalf of absent or under-represented communities in our classroom and not from a place of individual experience or knowledge; one member took me aside to ask that I do a bit more to invite reflection on some components of the community agreement. It was important that the student made this request of me. The student didn’t object to the topic of the conversation, but rather to the way the conversation unfolded. That we’re all parties to the community agreement required that I make amends with the community for not doing my part in upholding it. 

Later in the semester, my commitment to being accountable to it came up in class discussion as a way that other students knew they could count on our community to share their experiences, knowing that the community “had their back” in receiving their experience and treating their experience with the requisite respect. For me as both teacher and human, this is a valuable instance in which I learned more from students than I could bring to the table. There’s latent curriculum in every classroom that needs somebody/somebodies other than me to bring it to bear. Often this latent curriculum requires the instructor to be accountable to students as part of a learning community; that’s challenging for us to hear sometimes, but if we take it up there are important lessons there. 

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The interview left me wondering about classrooms I’ve inhabited as a student and classrooms I now inhabit as a teacher. What is the learning-form of our classrooms and the living relationship between the individuals that inhabit it? In the opening paragraphs of “Manifesto for Good Living/Buen Vivir,” Boaventura de Sousa Santos, describes intellectuals as inhabiting “inaccessible neighborhoods” and “fortified institutions they call universities.” I thought back to Katherine’s first post and the inside/outside distinction that characterises the university and wondered — who is left out of our classrooms?

And then I thought of philosophy. As a discipline in the Western tradition, philosophy has typically been reserved for particular social classes, those that can afford the life of the mind. With its elitism and with its emphasis on certain capacities — primarily rationality — at the expense of other dimensions of our being, doesn’t philosophy create its own precariousness?

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With many thanks to my co-editors, Katherine Cassese and Jeremy Bendik-Keymer for their thoughtful remarks on this piece.

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This is an installment of Into Philosophy.