During the spring of 2022, I taught the in-person P103 level class “Gender, Sexuality and Race in Philosophical Perspective” at Indiana University Bloomington. The class aimed to explore how gender, sexuality, and race manifest in social environments, both interpersonally and structurally. Students were introduced to the notions of intersectionality, oppression, and privilege, which we analyzed in class through a philosophical perspective. I decided to divide the course materials into two main sections: while Section 1 focused on what gender, sexuality and race are and how we should define these concepts, Section 2 focused on the notion and many faces of oppression, as well as the many faces of resistance to oppression. The overarching goal of Section 2 was to highlight the moral, political, and epistemological harms that people who face oppression because of their race, gender and/or sexuality (as well as class, religion, ability, etc.) can experience.
The second section of the class took place while a Campus-wide strike lead by graduate students of IU was announced and being prepared. I’ll first show how the strike aimed to address the condition of exploitation graduate students face at IU. Exploitation, as Iris M. Young has argued in her influential “Five Faces of Oppression”, is one of the many ways in which oppression is manifested. Then, I’ll turn to describing how I integrated the discourse surrounding the strike within my in-class activities.
Graduate students at IU have been asking for years that the IU Administration enter into dialogues about ending mandatory fees and raising stipends to a living wage without success. In the summer of 2021, the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition (IGWC) affiliated with the United Electrical Workers (UE) to seek union recognition. In December 2021, they submitted 1584 signed cards to the Board of Trustees expressing the wish of nearly two-thirds of approximately 2,500 graduate instructors to hold an election for the IGWC-UE to serve as their collective bargaining representative. The Board denied the graduate employees’ wish for representation on February 2022. As a result, the Graduate Worker Coalition called for a strike starting April 132022.
Together with the aim to gain union recognition, the Graduate Worker Coalition asked to increase stipends for Student Academic Appointments (SAAs) so that they would be both competitive with peer institutions and would enable students to live in Bloomington without financial hardship (i.e., without their having to take out loans, or to take on additional part-time job to make ends meet). Indeed, graduate students at IU had not had increases in their stipends since 2013-14 and average stipends had fallen considerably below what is considered a living wage.
“Union recognition” would mean that IU would have to negotiate with an elected union negotiation committee of graduate employees over wages, benefits, and working conditions. Forming a union, advocates claimed, would allow graduate students to bargain for a long-term contract that legally guarantees the end of mandatory fees, a living wage, and protection and improvements of benefits.
The strike was going to consist in a coordinated stoppage of instructional work (teaching, grading, and proctoring) as well as administrative work such as advising and office work of AIs, GAs, and RAs at IU. The effort of organizing the strike was highly successful with more than 1,000 graduate students declaring their intent to join picket lines across IU Bloomington Campus, supported by more than 590 faculty members, 1,000 undergraduates and 1,200 Alumni. As a response, IU Administration threatened student academic appointees with suspension, termination and loss of stipend.
This was a good occasion to connect the content of my teaching to the events happening within our university community. There are multiple ways in which educators can engage students around issues of oppression, starting from consciousness about particular issues to forming both collective and individual strategies of resistance. However, this latter part is often difficult to do in the abstract, and I found the strike to be a fitting occasion for getting students to engage in the process of constructing such strategies. Indeed, my aim in addressing the strike was to foster understanding of what it means to experience oppression not only by familiarizing students with foundational and recent philosophical work in philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, political and social philosophy but also by raising awareness of the faces that oppression takes within our campus community and assessing what steps one can take to help dismantling these systems of oppression.
Faced with a direct example of the exploitation of people with whom they interact daily, students
in the classroom took seriously the task of trying to find ways to alleviate this oppression by applying their understanding of the concept of exploitation.
We started with Iris M. Young’s idea that the injustice of exploitation consists in the fact that this oppression occurs through a steady process of the transfer of the results of the labor of one social group to benefit another. Thus, exploitation enacts a structural relation between social groups: as Young writes, “social rules about what work is, who does what for whom, how work is compensated, and the social processes by which the result of work are appropriated operate to enact relations of power and inequality”. Then, we turned to the situation at IU and students were asked to identify the several relations of dependence between agents occupying roles at different levels of the university system. This revealed which positions faced significantly higher degrees of vulnerability. As a result, students were able to start mapping out the various relations of power that have been structurally embedded within the university.
Having this framework in place proved useful for students to critically evaluate conflicting claims that were being made by both graduate students and the IU Administration. For instance, the IU Administration claimed that the upcoming strike would disproportionately harm the poorest students on Campus. In doing so, the Administration was portraying graduate students as the oppressors of economically disadvantaged undergraduate students. In reply, graduate students pointed to the fact that they themselves were financially struggling. To help students sort out this dispute, I asked them to apply their interpretations of Young’s claim that “bringing about justice where there is exploitation requires reorganization of institutions and practices of decision-making, alteration of the division of labor, and similar measures of institutional, structural, and cultural change”. This resulted in students recognizing how asking graduate students to remain in positions where their labor was being exploited by the University would fail to address the institutional and structural elements of oppression.
One particularly successful part of the class was an activity in which students were asked to brainstorm what they could do to help improve the existing condition within the university community. It was exciting to see the students respond by coming up with plans to express their support by participating in various strategic responses such as joining picket lines, initiating an undergraduate petition, sending emails to the provost, and even designing buttons with supporting messages to wear around Campus. My takeaway from all this is that students were better able to transition from recognition of oppression to actively constructing forms of resistance when their attention is directed to communities beyond the classroom. By applying their understanding of relations of power to concrete situations in which they were active agents, students gained a heightened awareness of their own potential to stand in solidarity with oppressed members of their community.
Martina Favaretto
Martina Favaretto is a PhD candidate at Indiana University Bloomington. She works on ethics and history of philosophy, with a special focus on Kantian ethics.
