Teaching To Transgress

Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World

This book has so many great quotes that made me think, reflect, scream and cry. Here are some of them in the order I read them, rather than in an organised way alongside my thoughts.

Sáenz, B. A. (2021). Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World. Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers.

They want us to read, but they do not want us to write.

This applies to so many different areas and aspects that it is almost universal. It is even more relevant in the current political climate in far too many countries. It's frightening and it all starts with banning books, restricting access to information and preventing people from gaining knowledge.

I don’t want you to live in the prison of my thoughts. I’m the only one who should be living there.

Ouch. That one hurt.

Happiness. What the hell did that mean? It had to be more than the absence of sadness.

I'd argue that happiness can't exist without sadness being around as well.

A lot of things happened outside the world of words.

Communicating without words is as much an art as communicating with words.

But here we are, we’re in it, this world that does not want us, a world that will never love us, a world that would choose to destroy us rather than make a space for us even though there is more than enough room.

Some people want queer people to disappear, but we're born this way, so there will always be queer people because people are born every day. You cannot make us disappear.

I wonder if people like me ever get to know what peace is like.

Not long ago I was full of hope that we could. I'm not as hopeful anymore.

[...] we will always live between exile and belonging.

Rarely have I read a better depiction of the range of emotions described by many members of the LGBTQIA+ community. The sense of exclusion versus the sense of belonging to a community. And the state of floating between the two.

Sometimes we have to be able to speak for those who can’t. That takes a lot of courage.

I always felt that it was much easier for me to stand up and speak for others than for myself. But it takes courage to do both.

We were both learning words and their meanings, and we were learning that the word 'friendship' wasn’t completely separate from the word 'love.'

Of course it isn't. Platonic love is just as strong and important and meaningful as romantic love.

It’s a beautiful thing to let the people you love see your pain.

It's just so damn hard.

How can we make them change if we’re not allowed to talk?

It's not just about banning books, restricting access to information and preventing people from gaining knowledge. It's also about banning people from expressing themselves, preventing them from telling their stories, and preventing people from passing on empathy and knowledge, because love and empathy are contageous.

Maybe we think that the value of our own freedom is worth less if everybody else has it. And we’re afraid. We’re afraid that, if someone wants what we have, they’re taking something away that belongs to us — and only to us.

Some people certainly think so.

But not everything we need to learn can be found in a book. Or rather, I’ve learned that people are books too.

Have you ever heard of living libraries? This is an amazing description of the idea behind them.

We were in this world, and we were going to fight to stay in it. Because it was ours. And one day the word “exile” would be no more.

Hope.

Hate is an emotional pandemic we have never found a cure for.

Hopelessness.

Queer Spawn Point

Spotted in Amsterdam

Knowledge

intellectual work, such as research (the creation of new knowledge) and learning (the creation of new knowledge within oneself)

Jonsson, B., Nunnally, T., & Cuir, G. D. (2001). Unwinding the Clock: Ten Thoughts on Our Relationship to Time (Unabridged Edition). Audio Literature.

A New Meaning of the Ivory Tower

This kind of turn can begin anywhere, anytime — like right this moment, here and now — wearing the mask of pragmatism and accommodation: let’s not make waves, let’s not use words or make speeches that draw attention, let’s make friendly connections to state legislators, let’s rename that program, let’s quietly defund that one center. Let’s not grant tenure to that person. Let’s encourage that professor to retire. Let’s look for a leader who is acceptable to interests that really hate the university and its values. Let’s take the money for an independent institute that pushes far-right economic philosophy. Let’s take away some governance from faculty, because they tend to provoke our enemies too much. Let’s compromise. Let’s be realistic.

Burke, T. (2022, Juni 30). Academia: Waiting for Heideggers. Eight by Seven. https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-waiting-for-heideggers

We think it's necessary, that not much can be done, that it's just this one little thing, that it's not that important, that we're just protecting our people, at least most of them, forgetting that it won't stop there. We are gradually eroding our freedom one tiny step at a time. We are leaving people behind one tiny step at a time.

To understand what happens from the perspective of those we leave behind through compromise, we should consider the concept of slow violence.

By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. [...] a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674061194

So what can we actually do? Well.

Watch for those who will come forward with the aim of making us easier to deliver on a platter to some future monstrosity, and block their path whenever they step forward. Start building the foundations for a maze, a moat, a fortress, a barricade, for becoming as hard to seize as possible. Time for the ivory tower to take on new meaning.

Burke, T. (2022, Juni 30). Academia: Waiting for Heideggers. Eight by Seven. https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-waiting-for-heideggers

Touch Grass

Lesson 13 got me thinking. It has a lot to do with physicality. Snyder summarises it as follows:

13. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

I'd summarise it more like this: Touch Grass.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons

Which lesson would you like to know more about?

Do not obey in advance.

Defend institutions.

Beware the one-party state.

Take responsibility for the face of the world.

Remember professional ethics.

Be wary of paramilitaries.

Be reflective if you must be armed.

Stand out.

Be kind to our language.

Believe in truth.

Investigate.

Make eye contact and small talk.

Practice corporeal politics.

Establish a private life.

Contribute to good causes.

Learn from peers in other countries.

Listen for dangerous words.

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.

Be a patriot.

Be as courageous as you can.

Snyder, T. (2017). On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Crown.

Mimicry of Marginality in Soft Authoritarian Identity Politics

In the past few decades, far-right parties have successfully implemented their authoritarian and nativist ideologies in the center of public discourse (...) In this process of normalization, the lines between far-right and mainstream discourse have been blurred (...) to the point that »ideas and viewpoints once considered deviant and morally repugnant« are »confidently asserted as the new common sense« (...).

Everything has shifted. With every word, with every tweet, with every provocation, the things that can be said and considered moderate shift further to the far-right.

Steinhauer, H. (2023). Mimicry of Marginality in Soft Authoritarian Identity Politics. Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung, 2. https://doi.org/10.3262/ZFD2302143

The Message that goes unheard

Science and scientists are not the enemy. We're on the same team.

We scientists are servants to society. We are here to serve you. We're supposed to find, share and defend the truth. We're supposed to listen to your concerns and investigate them rigorously. It's our job to serve you. We are your servants, not your enemies.

Policymakers and government officials are supposed to consult us, scientists and experts so that when they're making decisions they do so in ways that benefit society that protect you. That doesn't always happen and it wouldn't be the first time in history that we scientists have had to take governments to task for their failure to protect you, for their failure to take decisions that benefit society.

The scientific community, independent academic scientists are completely distinct from pharmaceutical companies who hire scientists, they need people with scientific training, but they are distinct. The independent academic scientific community is its own thing. We, scientists. Regulators.

We are here to protect you from those companies. Think about Francis Kelsey in the 1960s who refused to approve thalidomide because there was a lack of evidence to support its safety. Think about the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 when the Soviet state tried to hide the scale and danger of the incident, not just from its own citizens but from the world. It was we scientists, independent scientists, both in and outside of the USSR, who exposed the truth. We gathered data, generated evidence and shared it so that the global community could respond to the crisis and contain the destruction to the best of our ability.

We academic scientists spend most of our early career earning less than a minimum wage. And we do not benefit financially from producing one outcome over another. Private companies do. Politicians and policy makers do.

Science, like all human institutions, is not perfect and it is not entirely immune from corruption. However, the scientific method and the academic system is built such that it's pretty well insulated from corruption. Much better than private business, politics, which are environments in which corruption not only happens freely, but is specifically rewarded. The system is stacked such that those behaviours are rewarded.

Scientists are your servants. We stand with you. And this is precisely because we are among the most powerful weapons you have in your armoury to push back against corruption and exploitation.

It's precisely for that reason that you are being led to believe that you cannot trust scientists and experts. That was deliberate.

Dr. Rachel Barr

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdYxJSW8/

Good Research Practice and Academic Freedom

There's a lot to discuss about what's going on in the United States, but we all have limited time and capacity, so it's important to focus on some aspects that you feel you can address or help mitigate. It's also important not to judge others on which aspects they choose. Anyway.

Scholarly and Science Communication

I'm an expert in scholarly and science communication, so I was particularly alert to the news that not only future, but also already submitted and even accepted manuscripts by CDC researchers would have to be reviewed and cleaned of certain terms.

"CDC Researchers Ordered to Retract Papers Submitted to All Journals — Banned terms must be scrubbed from CDC-authored manuscripts" https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/faustfiles/114043

The Terms

Unfortunately, the terms in question did not surprise me. They are all related to trans and gender diverse people. There are so many layers to unpack and be outraged about. I want to focus on two and end with a third.

The Aspects

The first is good research practice. Censorship aside, it can be argued that, at the very least, it is not good research practice to replace accurate and medically correct scientific language with language that is very likely to be inaccurate or at least ambiguous, leaving room for misunderstanding. This is highly dangerous and damaging to the global scientific knowledge base. I must therefore question whether these articles can be accepted for publication or published at all.

Without ignoring censorship, the second aspect is that this is the beginning of the end of academic freedom, not just for the CDC, but for the whole country. They're restricting language and science.

The third is just to make it very clear that this is harmful to so many people. They're erasing people.

The Importance of the Act of Reading

First, I would like to reaffirm that I always saw teaching adults to read and write as a political act, an act of knowledge, and therefore as a creative act.

Freire, P. (1983). The Importance of the Act of Reading. Journal of Education, 165(1), 5–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/002205748316500103

Researching the Code of Laws in Civ7 feels so ironic at the moment.