The following is a two-part post in which Lauren Guilmette and Ada Jaarsma reflect on their experiences with the Image-Text and Experimental Writing Workshop hosted earlier this month at George Mason University as part of the philoSOPHIA 2022 conference. In the first part, Guilmette talks about her and her co-organizer Lynne Huffer’s inspiration for the conference and the generative effect of experimental practices. In part two, Jaarsma discusses her experience as a participant in the conference and the art practices of the session hosts.
Part I: Encouraging Generative Practices
by Lauren Guilmette
My Elon colleague Ann Cahill, with her co-author Christine Hamel, recently wrote about the classroom and the conference as pivotal and historically undervalued sites of philosophical meaning-making. In our present predominantly Euro-American academic atmosphere, we have been trained to see the “real” work as publications with quantifiable impact factors. Some of this traditional valuation hinges on the “disciplinary privileging of the written word,” but it also follows from the Western tendency to assume that ideas come from a solitary mind and not, as Cahill and Hamel put it, envoiced and intervocal beings. In making this claim, Cahill and Hamel are not so much privileging hearing bodies and speech as focusing on the sonorous qualities of voices. They observe it is a flawed assumption of the hearing world that D/deaf individuals live in a world absent of all experiences of this” (5-6). As Cahill writes in her single-authored chapter, “To attend a philosophy conference is to be promised a fairly rare experience in our daily lives” (170) – to be part of a process of thinking dynamically as it is happening. She details two moments at the 2019 meeting of FEAST in which feminist philosophers “challenged and disrupted dominant sonorous practices” of the keynote as an inherited format (173). First, the “Keynote Conversation” between Kristie Dotson and Brittney Cooper, “[n]either an interview nor a debate…[but] a rare opportunity to witness two scholar-friends riff off, tease, challenge, and affirm each other” (ibid); second, Talia Mae Bettcher spoke without notes, moving about with a handheld mic and “allowing the audience to witness the voicing of her ideas, not as recitation of words on a static page, but as sonorously emergent,” while also regularly checking to ensure their access (ibid, 175). Along these lines, to attend a philosophy workshop is all the more rare: an occasion in which all participants share their ideas, the process of their unfolding, to all the others.
In proposing the Image-Text and Experimental Writing Workshop this June, adjacent to the philoSOPHIA 2022 conference, Lynne Huffer and I drew from experimental workshops in recent years, some of which we’ve had the pleasure of attending together, such as the Philosophy Without Teachers Residency in 2016 (where Huffer shared from her work on fragments and Robert Leib and I experimented with photography and collage), the Wynter-Foucault Workshop that Huffer organized with Taryn Jordan as part of philoSOPHIA 2018 and 2019, the Feminist Foucault Workshop started by Dianna Taylor in 2018 and 2019, which I organized over Zoom in 2020 (featuring a panel on Huffer’s latest book), and virtual classes on moving image “pop-ups” and artist’s books led by Shawn Sheehy, which were a saving grace during the pandemic.
Huffer has been doing boundary-pushing experimental work between philosophy, gender studies, and creative nonfiction for longer than the last few years, well before I was one of her Emory graduate students a decade ago, with essays in Wild Violet Literary Magazine, Blue Lake Review, and ten other literary journals, and a collaborative artist’s book with Jennifer Yorke, Wading Pool (2019). Her trilogy of books engaging Foucault attend to the poetic discontinuities animating archival encounters. But it has been among the highlights of my early career to be in conversation with Lynne Huffer as we move together into this space of image-text and collage in our research and our pedagogy.
In Spring 2022, Huffer designed a Emory WGSS undergraduate seminar, “Experiments in Writing the Anthropocene.” She developed a series of provocative exercises for these students drawing from a workshop with Ellen Sheffield, called “Generative Measures,” Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, Anne Carson’s study and translation of Sappho’s fragments, Laurie Wagner’s Wild Writing, Lorraine O’Grady’s counter-confessional poetry, and more. We drew from these exercises in designing our inaugural workshop. We also drew on the resources I’ve gathered from co-teaching “Philosophy of Archives” with Elon archivist Libby Coyner on zine-making as an at-once activist and artistic practice of DIY publication. Coyner and I have invited some of our zine and image-text heroes to speak virtually to our Elon students, such as Micah Bazant, Milo Miller, Amanda Bennett, Maureen Burdock, and the editors of the Austin-based Silk Club, who biannually publish QUIET!, a zine featuring voices of Asian-American women, genderqueer and non-binary folks. I have been blown away by the creativity of my students as they take up these non-traditional media. Indeed, one of my students, Billie Waller (’23), presented at our workshop on a new zine project concerning pronouns, how and when we disclose them, and the demand to do so. I only hope that my collaborations with Billie will be anywhere near as generative for them as collaborating with Lynne Huffer has been for me.
Given that these practices have been so generative in our classrooms and in our own thinking, Huffer and I decided to organize a workshop attached to the 2022 philoSOPHIA conference, hosted by Rachel Jones and Rachel Lewis at George Mason University. In our Call for Proposals, we observed the rising interest in the use of non-textual expressive formats in philosophical works, especially among feminist, queer, disabled and other historically marginalized authors, e.g. Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine, and Nick Walker, and we sought out others who are exploring and experimenting with form in their own work. We asked, in the CFP:
If Plato’s dialogues and Aquinas’ arguments made sense as forms to be copied by monks onto parchment, and the treatise and later the novel arose as products of the printing press, what emergent forms might speak to this present age of print-on-demand and the hand-held screen? Further, while it is certainly not the case that images improve access for everyone, how might images welcome in some neurodivergent modes of expression? Conversely, what are some of the communicative challenges introduced by experimental forms that work with opacity or resistance to legibility?
What we received, in response to this call, exceeded every expectation, as Ada Jaarsma details above. Look for our next Call for Proposals in Fall 2022!
Part II: Engaging Philosophy and Community through Creative Projects
by Ada Jaarsma
When I first read a call by Lynne Huffer and Lauren Guilmette, inviting feminist continental philosophers to participate in an arts-based workshop at the philoSOPHIA conference at George Mason University on June 1 and 2, 2022, I was transfixed. I’d been creating philosophy-related portraits for some time but had never shared this work in a philosophy context.
I’ve long been envious of associations that make space during professional meetings for the creative work of “making.” The Society for the Social Studies of Science hosts a “making and doing” program alongside their more conventional sessions and keynote talks. This choice to foreground creative work as worthy of attention recognizes the creativity that any research program requires.
After participating in the Image-Text and Experimental Writing Workshop that Huffer and Guilmette co-organized at philoSOPHIA, I’m more fully convinced of the value of explicitly including creative work in conference programs. I am also struck by its value for feminist philosophy specifically. I came away from the workshop with a set of insights about the how and the why of feminist philosophical work.
One insight is captured by a statement made by Qrescent Mali Mason during the workshop’s second day. As we sat around a large table in the Maker’s Space on George Mason’s campus, Mason pointed out, “We are philosophizing in community.” Indeed, Mason (Haverford College) exemplified this lesson during her own presentation, spreading large paper-based artworks around the room and across the table. “Go ahead, annotate something,” Mason suggested, prompting us to engage with the artworks and then, in turn, to generate worksheets that might feed right back into her emerging project.
Another insight has to do with the somatic aspects of doing philosophy together. While the affective tenor of our work will often pass unnoticed, art and art-making can help tune us into its import. When we recognize “affective portals,” as Taylor Rogers (Loyola University Chicago) put it, these portals can become part of our own conceptual work. During the workshop, Rogers, a musician and filmmaker, shared portions of NOA: A Music Film, a collaboration with Lillian Walker and seven Chicago-based movement artists; now, reflecting back on how deeply moving this experience was, I am looking forward to teaching the film, alongside Rogers’ own philosophical account of art as a resource for shifting entrenched feelings or numbness.
This insight extends to the somatic adventures of research itself, another aspect of feminist philosophy that deserves full attention. Taryn Jordan (Colgate University) captivated the room by reading aloud a passage from a new manuscript about soul, soul food, and genealogy. Jordan’s story alongside a cookbook that Jordan discovered in an archive and their own transdisciplinary work in Black Studies cast in compelling, first-person prose whetted our appetites for more. Jordan’s writing makes me reflect on how gorgeous glimpsing someone’s own singular craft—like the skillful writing of narrative—can be.
Amanda Bennett (Duke University) brought this beauty to life in her presentation. Bennett’s creations—which included crocheted mandalas, with colors representing different writers, and a Black feminist oracle deck—make tangible the ways in which Bennett’s research involves the creation of new aesthetic and literary methods. More of Bennett’s work, as founder and Director of Creative Vision of Define & Empower, can be found here.
The generosity of bringing others into an emerging project was on display. In addition to reading poems aloud to us, Ali Beheler (Hastings College) drew us into open-ended questions about how her poetry and her project more broadly intersect with passages from canonical thinkers like Nietzsche. Not only does Beheler’s poetry beckon us into rereading philosophy, it also extends the boundaries of philosophy into the beautifully readable terrain of creative writing.
Sharing work while it is still emerging is generous and generative, given how creative processes themselves yield ideas for others. Lynne Huffer (Emory University) introduced us to and, in turn, modelled a highly generative art-practice of collage and working with visual and textual fragments. Naming this practice as thinking through juxtaposition, Huffer underscored another lesson of the workshop: how meaningful it is to reflect on form.
Travis Holloway (SUNY Farmingdale), who is an award-winning poet as well as a professor posed a query that drew us into such reflections, directly: “Is the form performing the content for us?” What I appreciate about this query is how gently it asks us, as creators as well as thinkers, to try to reckon with how we are choosing to express ourselves. We can explore so many forms, like juxtaposition or like writing lines “the length of a breath,” in Holloway’s words, as part of “doing” philosophy. Later this summer, I will be reading Holloway’s new book How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene as I keep reflecting on this lesson.
I want to close with whole-hearted support for more experimental workshops as part of philosophy events. In the past, I have related to workshops as a way to generate new work; for example, a workshop that I co-led several years ago turned into a co-edited collection, Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom. I’m realizing now that there are so many more forms that workshops can take—and that more open-ended experimental approaches might be exactly what many of us in feminist philosophy are longing for and needing, especially those who work at the edges or margins of the discipline.
While the tone of our conversations was often elegiac—in part because the theme of many presentations involved grief and grieving—there was also such joy and pleasure in sharing and bearing witness to the creativity of new philosophical work.
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.
Ada Jaarsma
Ada Jaarsma is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Royal University, in Calgary Canada where she teaches continental philosophy, critical theory, philosophy of science, and feminist philosophy. Her publications include a co-edited collection Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom (University of Alberta Press, 2020) and Kierkegaard after the Genome: Science, Existence, and Belief in This World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is an associate editor of Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy.
Lauren Guilmette
Lauren Guilmette is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Elon University. She has articles on Teresa Brennan forthcoming in philoSOPHIA, differences, and The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. She is grateful to Pembroke Archivist Mary Murphy and to Brennan’s literary executors, Woden Teachout and Steve Brennan, for their support of her research.
