In 2021, the Diversity Reading List (DRL) conducted research on the teaching provision of the top 10 UK departments. It showed that very little attention is given to issues of class (among other usual suspects: colonialism, race, gender, disability…) in undergraduate philosophy courses. This omission is not limited to teaching: no category or sub-category is solely dedicated to the concept on the vast PhilPapers category tree (under the sub-category ‘Philosophy of Race’ one will find a sub-sub-category ‘Topics in the Philosophy of Race’, which contains a ‘Race and Class’ tag with 31 entries), and no SEP article addresses the concept head-on (other than one article on Feminist Perspectives on Class and Work).
A lot can and needs to be said to diagnose this state of affairs in analytic philosophy fully. But pending a full investigation, the DRL took it upon itself to offer students interested in complementing their philosophical education Reading Group Blueprints on precisely those topics marginalized in teaching. The Blueprints are essentially structured, ready-made reading lists accompanied by running commentary and discussion questions, available for free on the DRL website. While the project is primarily student-facing, the usefulness of these Blueprints to teachers is undeniable. A Blueprint can inspire a course, and a course with the relevant focus can easily become a Blueprint.
I initially developed the Reading Group Blueprint ‘Class, Status, and Aesthetics’ (funded by a small grant from the British Society of Aesthetics) with my colleague Quentin Pharr to promote the DRL project and develop my teaching portfolio. The aim of the Blueprint was to explore “how class and status structures might shape our aesthetic preferences, as well as how such structures might be challenged or reinforced by our interactions with various aesthetic objects,” and to bring in disciplines such as sociology, critical theory, cultural studies, or art history in conversation with philosophy.
When it came to renewing my teaching contract at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, I was asked to contribute an Honors-level (3rd and 4th-year undergraduates) course to the curriculum. Adapting our Blueprint into a full course was both a time-saving measure, which is not negligible if one is in precarious academic employment, and an important step towards curriculum diversification.
The course itself retained most of the readings and structure of the Blueprint, with a couple of weeks of material added. It started with some key concepts and distinctions both in aesthetics (e.g. art vs craft, ‘high-art’ vs ‘low-art) and in social theory (e.g. class vs status, economic vs social and cultural capital). The latter parts of the course covered more niche topics, such as the ethics and socio-politics of curating, working-class culture and cultural appropriation, revolutionary art, and creative resistance.
From the get-go, I informed the students that the readings would be drawn from a variety of disciplines, traditions, and eras, which could make for some difficult reads, and that they should remain methodologically open-minded and flexible. They really took this in stride. When they reported on their favorite texts at the end of the course, I was delighted to find that they resonated equally with A. W. Eaton, bell hooks, Thorstein Veblen, or Herbert Read. And as I’d hoped, Pierre Bourdieu was a big hit!
The scope and aims of the course also allowed for some experimentation in terms of assessment. In addition to the standard final essay, for which students set their own research questions, I asked them to complete a critical reflection—a short piece where they would take a personal approach to a specific reading or topic seen in class. This was an especially rewarding exercise for both the students and me. I read beautifully written pieces about the unintentional social signals sent by a work jacket, handed down from a father working in construction, which gave the wearer an unexpected privileged status on their liberal (and not very class-conscious) university campus, or about a student’s relationship to their native Korea and their family through their practice of collecting ceramics. I found that many of these personal reflections fed into their final essays, which in the best cases blended sophisticated and innovative philosophical thinking with richly researched examples. Best essay title prize went to “This meme is your meme, this meme is my meme: Epistemically accounting for internet cultural appropriation.”
Already, this shows how these topics connect deeply with students. Participation and engagement were also encouraged and assessed via weekly blog posts. The students would post a response to a prompt on the week’s reading and courses, and engage with each other’s posts. Often, the prompts encouraged them to find examples of what we were discussing in the real world, to illustrate the complex theoretical ideas of our authors with examples close to home. Again, this exercise made the material fun (I’m forever grateful to my students for introducing me to Grand Theft Hamlet and Roblox: Hamilton The Musical), and importantly, personal.
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks writes that one path to self-actualization, and ultimately freedom, is through what she calls “engaged pedagogy.” This is of course an ambitious goal, that we fell short of, but one step towards that goal is excitement, which for hooks is generated collectively. I certainly felt excitement in teaching this class, and I think my students did too.
The Syllabus Showcase of the APA Blog is designed to share insights into the syllabi of philosophy educators. We include syllabi in their original, unedited format that showcase a wide variety of philosophy classes. We would love for you to be a part of this project. Please contact Series Editor Cara S. Greene at cgreene6@luc.edu, or contact Editor of the Teaching Beat Dr. Smrutipriya Pattnaik at smrutipriya23@gmail.com with potential submissions.
