APA Member Interview, Zara Anwarzai

Zara Anwarzai is an Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University whose work sits at the intersection of Philosophy and Cognitive Science. She focuses on skill and expertise, joint action and collective intentionality, collective intelligence, and labour and skill in the workplace.

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/zaraanwarzai/home

What is your favorite thing that you’ve written?

I had fun writing my recent paper, “Does effort matter for skill?” In it, I reject the idea that there’s a generalizable scientific relationship between effort (or effortlessness) and skill. It’s not clear that effort is empirically tractable, but even if we grant that it is, we have good evidence showing that it’s highly variable within and across domains of skill. While researching, I couldn’t help but shake the idea that our well-entrenched aesthetic and normative ideas about effort (and effortlessness) had trickled into our science and metaphysics of skill. To tease out these commitments, I watched movies such as Rocky and Moneyball and read non-academic publications such as Vogue to understand everyday notions about effort and effortlessness. It was an interesting and dynamic writing process.

If you could wake up tomorrow with a new talent, what would you most like it to be?

I have trouble remembering important names and titles. Restaurants I liked, songs I enjoyed, papers I found important—all that regularly escapes me. So, I’d go with photographic memory.

What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?

I’ll highlight one academic and one political achievement, both of which I count as professional achievements. I’m at an early career stage, so my greatest academic accomplishment to date has to be landing in a supportive department, in a position that offers the resources I need to (hopefully!) make many more accomplishments in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. It’s the accomplishment that keeps on giving! As for a great political achievement, I helped to organize a massive strike of graduate workers at Indiana University. Over 1000 grads went on strike, winning 40% raises in the base stipend. I count this as a professional achievement because raising PhD stipends makes academia more accessible to working-class scholars, in turn helping to make disciplines like Philosophy more diverse.

If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know?

My first thought was that I’d want to know how bad things will get—climate change, the consolidation of state power, the widening gap between the richest and everyone else, the absolute suppression of political speech. Behind this first thought was a sense that knowing these things would tell me what my place in the world should be now. However, on second thought, I’m not sure a crystal ball would give me that roadmap. Worse, it might inspire pessimism and inaction. If anything, looking backward might give me a better sense of what to do.

What is your favorite book of all time? Why? To whom would you recommend them?

I’m a huge fan of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. It was recommended to me by a friend when I was going through a lot (the toll of the Indiana strike, a breakup, uncertainty about my prospects as an academic). I cannot understate how much reading this book helped me, both because of its relevance to what I was going through and because it put me onto Doris Lessing, an incredible writer and storyteller.

I’d recommend TGN to anyone with writer’s block, socialists, divorcees, fans of psychoanalysis, and parents struggling with the political education of their children. That list may seem random, but I’m sure the Venn Diagram of those sets would reveal substantial overlap.

What are you reading right now? Would you recommend it?

I just finished Lessing’s The Fifth Child and would highly recommend it as a beach read for fans of De Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed or Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. It’s good for anyone who reads stories about the complicated inner world of women grappling with the simultaneous mundanity and intensity of womanhood, motherhood, family life, and so on.

I’ve also been slowly working through Bertrand Russell’s autobiography. I’d recommend it to any philosopher. It’s funny and honest.

What cause or charity do you care about most?

I’m most committed to building working-class power. For anything I care about (as a philosopher and simply as a person) to be possible—a free and fair society, the end of race or gender based discrimination, dignified working and living conditions, adequate learning and thinking conditions—we have to address growing class inequality (e.g., the consolidation of wealth by a small group of people, the exploitation of workers everywhere, the stripping of public resources through the misdirection of tax dollars). I’ve tried to do my part supporting this cause through organizing unions and strikes in higher ed within the US, but also in supporting and participating in other popular movements. I’ve recently moved to Canada, so now I’m reconfiguring my political place in the world.

If you were an ice cream, what flavor would you be?

A new flavor of ice cream recently came into my world: ube honeycomb. It’s so strange (yam?! With raw honeycomb?!) but delicious. It’s aspirational—that’s what I want to be.

What advice do you wish someone had given you?

Within academia, I hear people distinguish between two aspects of the job: there’s doing what you love, and then there’s the stuff that hinders you from doing what you love (e.g., the bureaucratic tedium). I think this framing is unhelpful, and it’s important to adopt a productive attitude about the latter. I’ve come to recognize that many of the unenjoyable parts of the job help me navigate the institution I’m working for and the infrastructure that enables me to teach and research. Getting to know this apparatus is so important: you can understand how students move through the classes within your department, you become positioned to competently and successfully make demands of the administration for adequate resources, and you learn to sort out the real bureaucratic tedium from the stuff that might matter—the stuff that enables you to do the things you love.

This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.