How Intergenerational Is the Academy? Into the Planetary Project

Photos by Christine J. Winter:  Coming Home - Getting to Know My Country Again, 2022

"Now there’s an intergenerational project.
Ash from the depths of the earth, 
blown suddenly 
into the present, to linger, 
altering human lives & 
more forever more."

Jeremy:  Christine, I’ve enjoyed getting to know you over the years, first through the Human Development and Capability Association, and then through our collaboration on the “Planetary Justice Virtual Community” that was part of the Western Political Science Association’s “virtual communities” initiative in 2020-2021.  I know you to be consistently gracious, insightful, down to Earth, and well liked in every meeting where I’ve seen you.  Your work is also increasingly well-known and respected for the changes that it seeks to bring to political theory.

What led me to ask you to collaborate on this interview is that your recent book Subjects of Intergenerational Justice develops a political theory that is intergenerational, informed by your Māori perspective.  Thinking about it, I wanted to ask you about how you view intergenerational relationships in the academy.  For this series on good relationships – and on philosophy as seen through the primacy of personal relationships – I wondered about your perspective and how it might help me think about relating across time, not just dyadically in person. 

So, to begin, do you see the academy as intergenerational, and if so, how?

Christine:  This is such an interesting question. Academia is in some ways the definition of an intergenerational project. Knowledge production is iterative. Knowledge transmission is across the generations from the knowledge makers and givers down the generations to new knowledge holders and makers – onwards to fresh learners and knowledge makers and holders. The purpose is to take the knowledge we are given and the skills we gain to hold and generate knowledge for the present and the future. It’s a really interestingly generative intergenerational space.

Of course, only a few of us get to live on actively in memory as the knowledge makers – a few stars from each generation will have their names raised above the rest. Names that will reverberate off the walls of teaching institutions and sometimes in broader societal contexts for decades and centuries.

Most of us though just get to add a little something. We add a word or two, a phrase or two, a paper or two that might spark an intergenerational legacy. For many of us that will be in the classroom – in lecture halls where there is an obvious intergenerational transfer. And for the good teachers among us that transfer is two way – not just directed from the lectern to the student – back from students to faculty too.

I guess what I am saying here are a couple of things. There are multiple ways that the university is intergenerational in knowledge production and transfer. It draws from the past additively, always blending old with new knowledge, thoughts, and methods. And the transfer of knowledge is from lecturer to students and can be from student to lecturer if the lecturer makes the opening.

The intergenerational structures built into the statuses of the academy – undergrad, post-grad, junior professor, senior professor etc. all the way to Emeritus – are, I think, rather similar to the way I understand how the ancestors in Māori society worked. A youngster had to demonstrate an interest in and aptitude for a field of knowledge before they were taken under their wing by the knowledgeable member of the community – the authority on medicine, or weaving, or carving, or astronomy, or navigation, etc. Then the learner had to demonstrate mastery at one level before advancing to the next. It sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

The major difference is in things like compulsory retirement ages in the academy. What a waste of wisdom. And of course, it is done to allow more young people “up through the ranks.” But what a weird notion. That society should allocate a limited number of places for expert knowledge holders, knowledge makers, and knowledge gifters.

Jeremy:  I’m really interested in how Māori society shapes your thinking and being in the academy.  But let me ask more generally, first, what are the main qualities that you would hope academics might develop for intergenerational learning?

Christine:  Again, Jeremy, such an interesting question, thank you. Precarity undermines the integrity of the university system, the university community, student experiences, scholarship and the wellbeing and academic growth of the precarious scholar. This is it seems to me a function of the university turning from broad goals of social good, intellectual growth, and knowledge-making towards thinner economically driven imperatives. The corporate remodelers of the university system have turned away from an intergenerational project to one that focuses, like most other late liberal corporates, on quarterly and annual metrics – and that’s why I suggest these are thin goals. An institution must work within its financial limits, or it will collapse and there will be no intergenerational project. But the requirement that each individual unit is productive – even profitable – against some quantifiable measure is a problem.

What the process fails to recognize is that in communities members support each other. Sometimes we need help, sometimes we are the helper. Qualities of generosity, of reciprocal back and forth, give and take, are very hard to quantify and to track well over the short time frames of an accountant’s spreadsheets. Much of the very great thinking in the arts and humanities is slow thinking. Possibly it is the same in the sciences too – my experience does not extend into those domains.  Against this background, universities that force large numbers of their staff into precarity have no integrity. They have spreadsheets. They fail to recognize the labor of knowledge production on which their universities are founded, the intergenerational knowledge building enterprise that used to define universities as part of an intergenerational community effort. 

Those folks within the university who are secure are so because the university community supported them and/or their intellectual ancestors in some way or another over the years. To then turn their backs on that support and to force others into a state of insecurity and instability is a total affront to decency and integrity. It is to misunderstand intergenerational reciprocity. 

Here I am referring to the value that past scholars, donors (state and private) and students have contributed to the current value of the institutions we call universities. Intergenerational integrity requires us to reciprocate for the efforts of those who have gone before us, knowledge makers and institution builders, by providing a similar if not better environment for current and future scholars and students to thrive in.  While we cannot thank those who created the university system, ancient knowledge makers and instructors, or past donors to one’s own institution directly, we can indirectly thank them by passing to future generations some measure of the benefits we ourselves received – like secure income that then allowed one time to think, and grow, reflect, and write, take a mortgage, and settle down. The current late-liberal university environment fails to fulfil that sort of intergenerational obligation. 

So that is a response at a high level – a rage against the machine perhaps. I am looking for qualities that maintain intergenerational integrity and help academics fulfill their obligations.

Jeremy:  That’s so good. You know, in the last five years or so, I have become increasingly aware of how younger scholars often seem to feel the need to set themselves apart from past scholars in a manner that either ignores or discredits them.  It has confused me.

Christine:  In our field, in political theory/philosophy, to read many of the past scholars is hard, really hard. When you read with others, talk through the elements of the writings, and muse together, it’s easier. When you have a secure position with built-in research time, it’s possible. 

But precarity and full teaching loads can put that out of reach.  Or competition between staff might break down the trust required to work in tandem with others. And this leads to your point, I think: competition in a competitive labor market means it’s the new shiny thing that draws attention, that might make one’s name. With limited research time, limited thinking time, the old gets jettisoned – the precarious worker cannot afford the slow scholarship required to really engage with the “ancient” texts. 

Also, the idea of progress is deeply engrained in Western thought. If something or some idea is new, or a technical innovation, or speeds things up, or takes humans one step further away from reliance on our animal selves, it must be good (this is perhaps why so many people seem prepared to ignore the looming harms of climate change, land degradation, species extinctions and so on – a belief in the unassailable good of progress). The idea underneath is not to look back, to only look forward. That again fails to acknowledge intergenerational continuity and dependency (there are of course parallels in the consumer economy too, all those new shiny things flying off the shelves, while the slow built substantive object that will last lifetimes seems out of reach or too dull to contemplate).

I’m repeatedly amazed by the simple ‘fact’ that the hydrogen in our bodies – and 10% of our body is hydrogen – was created 3 seconds after the big bang. Human bodies include molecules and memories from the moment of creation! That’s extraordinary. Where else other than in my body has that hydrogen been over the last 4.3 billion years? What other good has it done (presuming that its presence in me or you is a good!)? What good will it do in future?  In a way I digress, but I like to think with this stardust when I think about intergenerational justice. It grounds the idea that some aspects of time are simultaneously past present and future, which challenges the dominance of presentism.

These patterns of the corporate university do an injustice to the efforts of people from the past. It discards their labor – intellectual and physical – as immaterial. It dishonors their contribution to collective and individual wellbeing. To ignore prior knowledge-making from innovative thinkers gone by is to pretend they have not influenced contemporary thought: that seems to me to be dishonest and an intergenerational injustice.

Simultaneously, the patterns do a disservice to new scholars as they are not afforded the time for slow scholarship for the time-long thinking, the sort of thinking where we need to find solutions to, pathways through, existential challenges that threaten the planetary order – natural and cultural planetary orders.  A colleague here at Otago, Neil Vallelly recently published an extraordinary book that speaks well to the sorts of wrongs I think many of us feel intuitively about neoliberal structures: they create what he calls cleverly, states of “futilitarianism.”

Jeremy:  Yes, when selfishness starts to structure the academy intergenerationally, not just intra-generationally, a part of our integrity will be lost, namely, building on the past.  

Christine:  In my understanding, intergenerational thinking involves layering.  Let me explain.

As I said, intergenerational integrity requires us to reciprocate for the efforts of those who have gone before us by providing a similar if not better environment for current and future scholars and students in which to thrive.  It seems to me that the contemporary university setting encourages and rewards individual knowledge makers. Some teams get recognition, but generally it is an individual scholar or a lead author or the leaders of the team who receive the bulk of praise and recognition. And academic epistemology reinforces that. 

In te Reo (the language of the Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand) the word that translates most closely to epistemology is whakapapa. Sometimes it’s translated as genealogy.  Many Māori can recite their whakapapa or genealogy back through the generations to the first of their ancestors to arrive on the motu (islands) of Aotearoa and back across te Moana-nui a Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean) to the originating communities, and we think back in whakapapa even further to the moment of creation – the moment when matter and light came into being.

Whakapapa literally means to set down in layers. It is a relational concept. Knowledge is relational, is “set down” within relationships.  Knowledge holders/makers (Tohunga) knew/know about plants and agriculture, fish and aquaculture, medicine, navigation, astronomy, philosophy, building and fine arts in detail.  It was/is in the ways that the details relate one to another and to the cosmos that’s important. To ignore the past then is hard because new knowledge is “laid down” with past knowledge – the layers are built up over time, and across space, within wātea, time-space.

Jeremy:  Having a relationship with an elder who teaches me things, for instance, seems a different kind of thing than how I relate to the Eastern screech owl that Misty and I hear, but never see, in our backyard these days.  And these are both different from how the details of things that I know about the world relate to each other.  Can you say more about what you mean by a “relationship”?

Christine:  We have different qualities of experience in those three settings and yet we are in some small measure changed, expanded, touched by them all. The real question here though is, I think, how a relational epistemology is manifest. If we take the question of how the details of the things you know about the world relate to each other – I think it is in the looking, listening, thinking. Critical studies, decolonial work, feminist work, multispecies justice all point in this direction.

A relational epistemology looks for the connections, the effects of small changes on the whole, the links between the elements of the system. Earth system science is an obvious parallel in the West. The provocations of our mutual friend Dipesh Chakrabarty also point us in this direction. The roiling horrors of climate change induced (un)natural disasters tell us that national borders are inconsequential. And we view responsibilities to mitigate, adapt, respond as national responsibilities. The unifying body, the body charged with taking a planetary responsibility, UNFCCC is hampered by national self-interest; by thinking within borders for thirty years, nations have failed. Failed to halt the rise in greenhouse gases, failed future generations, failed our ancestors, failed the biosphere, the waters, soils, everything that interlocks to make this globe habitable. Looking at the complex relationships beyond borders, between politics, capitalism, extractivism, colonialism and neocolonialism, poverty, and natural systems – in other words, by constructing knowledge and politics relationally – might well have meant quicker and more meaningful action.  

In the singular discipline or world view, it’s easy to lose sight of existence within an intergenerational planetary project, in something at once much bigger and bolder than the knowledge, or discipline, or modernity, or whatever, and simultaneously something that exists within immeasurably fragile nests of relationality and relationships. Māori knowledge-makers don’t: one of the features of the epistemology, of whakapapa, is the connection to all time back to the creation and into the future. The planetary project, relationality, is the underlying value.

Jeremy:  This makes me think of what and how we study.  The academy can be quite fragmented across disciplines, not just over time.  Does that figure into your way of criticizing how we relate to learning across time?

Christine:  The ideas that the act of disciplining raise are interesting and an inheritance of the Enlightenment. In some ways, disciplining has worked. It’s produced knowledge about all sorts of fascinating and useful minutiae. Digging deep, as it were, is exciting and has been productive. 

But disciplining has also been a curse. It seems to me the construction of discrete disciplines, breaking knowledge down (even there we hear a sense of violence) into smaller and smaller units has done damage. Society has been done damage because the same individualising philosophy has taken hold in politics and with people more generally. Then there are things like the artificial hierarchy of disciplines (which we see now being weaponised by governments and university governors to eliminate the arts and humanities from their institutions), interdisciplinary point scoring, silos of knowledge. All these sorts of things deny the interconnections, the relationships of knowledge with history, with the future, with the planetary, and with constant reflection on what it is to be a good institution – and to be a good human being.

Also, with all the connotations of violence that word holds, “disciplining” has wrenched asunder the interconnections earth beings and Earth being requires for good health, for wellbeing, to be fully functioning. And it is this the next generations of interdisciplinary scholars in the academy are beginning to rekindle.

One of the connotations of the word “discipline” is of violence, of enforcement. Intellectual rigour and discipline connote (among other things) what I think of as a violent separation of the knowledge and knowledge-making from its relationships – relationships to other disciplines and knowledges and communities. How much more generous it is to think with other knowledge systems than to stay within a safe silo. How much more curious is the thinker who listens with others – human and more – who expands their horizons beyond the methods and foundations they know into some other realm. Irreparable harm has come of not doing this, of forcing a single world view on the academy and knowledge more generally: to people, Peoples, the planet, and knowledge itself.

The automatic, knee-jerk dismissal of scientific methods and transmission within oral traditions is changing as people begin to understand the environmental damage and existential threats that loom. Environmental damage and existential threats that are a product of the epistemology of science – the atomised hubris of Western thinking. Yet many are still seeking solutions within that same framework or frameworks that have caused the problems: within the philosophy of human/nonhuman, nature/culture dualisms, within disciplinary silos, and so on.  From an intergenerational perspective, disciplinary isolation and ranking, cultural isolation and ranking, have done a disservice to generations of non-Western knowledge makers and knowledge holders, to Indigenous Peoples, people and cultures and to all people of the future. 

Let’s come back to the point I made earlier about disciplines isolating humans from the web of being a being on earth. Humans are Earth beings and we are completely reliant on other elements found on Earth to survive, to be well, and healthy. Disciplining epistemology into discrete units is one way in which interconnectivity and relationality between Earth beings and Earth’s elemental processes have slipped to the margins. It’s allowed for economists to label pollution an externality for instance, for engineering to imagine domination without respect for the infinite ripples such domination sets off in the environment, allowed chemists to revel in the intellectual delight of manufacturing “new materials” without fully accounting for their impacts on the nonhuman/more-than-human realm. Without a conscious attachment to earth processes and other Earth beings, and with a focus on human beings, the immediate future is the field of vision. That is, the long-term future and responsibilities to tradition and traditional contributions to this time slink to the sides of consciousness.   

Jeremy:  So, you think of academic thoughtfulness differently than through the figure of discipline?

Christine:  I’m reminded of one encounter I had with an economist. We were both on a committee discussing academic workloads. I suggested it was important to keep an ethic of care in mind. “Ethic of care?”, they said. “Ethic of care? I don’t understand this thing called ‘an ethic of care.’”

This left me flummoxed to say the least. What had the economic discipline done to this senior academic that they were unable to parse “ethics” and “care” and combine them to have some meaning? To be meaningful?  It seems the discipline has separated knowledge from the core of what it is to be human – humans must have a capacity to care to survive as a species. 

There was a real sneer in their voice. An implied superiority. I suggest it may be interpreted as a disciplinary superiority; maybe not, but there is no doubt that some folks rank disciplines. And types of knowledge, knowledge-making, and knowledge makers are ranked.

Disciplining has led to epistemic hubris and epistemic violence. I say “epistemic hubris” for two reasons: the first is the illusion of rationality, the idea that academic rigour is devoid of values, that it’s above emotion and the personal. While I am very comfortable with the idea that humans can be rational, that is not all we are. The very choice to study something indicates a preference that sits with the researcher’s positionality and personality. The questions asked are always withing the context of the questioner’s values. So, there is a pretense, and inauthenticity undergirding knowledge production. 

However, it’s the other aspect of this hubris that’s been really destructive: the idea that the only knowledge of any value is that produced within Western knowledge systems.  That hubris has led to enormous violence against Indigenous and other Peoples. It was, after all, only last year that Richard Dawkins railed against Indigenous knowledge. Indigenous myths, his claim is, cannot be understood as knowledge alongside science. 

Quite clearly, he has not bothered to engage with the knowledge held in Indigenous archives – that which the West labels “myths” but which bear a different purpose to the “myths” of Europe. While the latter might be seen as stories of things that may or may not have happened, that which European settlers labelled (disparagingly) as “myths” of indigenous peoples were and are the archives – oral records of knowledge delivered in a form that makes them readily passed from generation to generation so that knowledge is not lost, so experiments and observations that inform agriculture, fisheries, silverculture, astronomy, navigation, medicine, birthing, boat building, philosophy, psychology, music, and so on, are retained, are not lost, so that there would be no “dark ages” for Indigenous societies. 

Folks like Dawkins do not recognise that modern science is one exemplar of knowledge-making. That there are other traditions that observed, hypothesised, tested, and formulated results – just in different ways. It might be the Dawkins definition of “science” is narrow. So, he could say something like “the methods by which this knowledge is generated are different from Western scientific methods, and it nevertheless tells us something about how the world works, about the properties of things, about uses, etc.” But what Dawkins is doing is perpetuating the colonial violence (and Euro-centric arrogance) that applied the label “myth” to Indigenous knowledge, science, philosophy and so on. In doing so he’s saying there is only one intergenerational project worth pursuing. While we watch the ecosystems collapse around us, he is unable to think beyond the epistemology that is at the root of ecological and climate destruction. 

Unutterable violence has been done to Indigenous knowledge systems and makers. From outlawing the transmission of the knowledge (for instance the Tohunga Act (1907) in Aotearoa banning the use of traditional medical knowledge), to the mislabel “traditional wisdom” which is ranked lower than Western “science.” Like Dawkins, many misunderstand the mode of knowledge transmission, the intergenerational project, with the means of generating the knowledge. Scientific methods create or generate knowledge, and either print media or oral “stories” are the mode of sharing – of ensuring its longevity.

I come back to a point I made earlier: the planet is roiled in a weekly cycle of cascading climate change induced un-natural catastrophes. Human beings are faced with destruction, and the aftermath: of clean-up, repair, relocation and so on.  Words like “adaptation” a vanilla term that hides the trauma, and “resilience” that inject hope into folks’ prospects are bandied around in climate change circles. And simultaneously, the people deputized by the global community to address climate change – the scientists and technical experts attached to the UNFCCC – are by and large trained in the Western epistemic traditions that are at the root of the problem. I think our students need to know there are other traditions; there are relational methods and worldviews from which climate change is unlikely to have resulted and which can offer alternative means to address what seems to many young folks so devastating that they wonder whether there is a future worth them stepping into. As educators, we have a duty to show them alternatives for them to use as they craft their futures.

Simultaneously, in our classes there are students who are Indigenous people. Students whose world view is relational, multi-species, non-extractivist, and so on. We have a duty to those students to let them see themselves in what is taught. In acknowledging the legitimacy of their knowledge traditions – not as the “same as” but as “and also” – there arises a potential for them to find acknowledgement in the course, and for us to avoid perpetuating the trauma that comes with forever being told you are inferior or worthless because you are otherwise to the Western traditions. Furthermore, we have a duty to all our students to equip them with a range of knowledge traditions. Otherwise, we are left with more of the same siloed thinking. We won’t have equipped them with a range of tools to address the chaotic natural and social conditions that seem likely to frame their worlds. We will have narrowed their prospects, not opened them. 

Jeremy:  I agree with where you are coming from.

Christine:  The sorts of intellectual virtues, the scholarly integrity I value, have flowed through this piece: open curiosity; modesty; generosity; authenticity; kindness; reciprocity; and a kind of hospitable invitation to work across “disciplines” and across knowledge traditions. Each of these contributes to the quality of our relationships. 

I see the academy as a long, and sometimes difficult, intergenerational relationship.  Intergenerational integrity within the academy means we owe our intellectual forebears an incalculable debt: and to repay it means maintaining open engagement with living knowledge makers, gifting their knowledge and our own small contributions to future generations. 

We owe those who have financed the institutions in which we work an intergenerational obligation too; they are part of the community. They contributed to the university because they believed in the good that knowledge does, the incalculable good in many cases of slow scholarship: of the time to think unpressured by manufactured (and largely artificial) targets and goals. 

In relation to our students, what I am talking about here is not simply a financial transaction: students pay tuition, I am paid to teach them. That, to use the word I chose earlier, is a very “thin” model.  The early 2020’s is likely to be seen, I think, as the pivot years, the years of crossing tipping points – social and environmental. We owe our students, all future generations, a society and an environment better than the ones we inherited. If we do not act accordingly, we will not have fulfilled intergenerational obligations to the ancestors, nor to future generations.

---

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.

ge·ni·al | ˈjēnyəl | adjective friendly and cheerful: waved to them in genial greeting. • literary (especially of air or climate) pleasantly mild and warm. DERIVATIVES genially | ˈjēnyəlē | adverb ORIGIN mid 16th century: from Latin genialis ‘nuptial, productive.’ The Latin sense was adopted into English; hence the senses ‘mild and conducive to growth’ (mid 17th century), later ‘cheerful, kindly’ (mid 18th century).