Asymptotic Philosophers

A philosophy of science blog

Learning to talk

Posted on Author KinoPosted in Life in Academia, Scattered Plot1 Reply

Earlier today, during my Twitter procrastination from writing a proposal, I saw this call for response from the organization Minority and Philosophy (MAP), which is a student-run international nonprofit aimed at advocating for diversity and inclusion within academic philosophy:

I thought I’d send in a response. Since my own research involves thinking about how surveys work, I try to be thoughtful when I answer other people’s surveys. Being thoughtful about this one turned out to be not as straightforward as I expected. I was procrastinating, so here’s a blog post.

Sometime around high school and especially during undergrad, I acquired the description of “quiet” and “shy”. My mother couldn’t get her head around it — “you were so outgoing as a child!” she’d say, and recount that time when I was five, I volunteered to go up to a stage to perform at her company’s end-of-year party along with a few other children, and that everyone backed out last minute except for me. But I was too busy being upset about her fatalistic judgments of me to really think about what it was that she has communicated. Besides, “quiet” is a good word.

What actually happened was that I had accurately learned how little other people are interested in what I have to say. I still possess this superpower: within three sentences, I know exactly whether you actually want to hear me talk, what you want to hear, and for how long. It really is a power — it’s not that I’m insecure; I’m not. There have been quite a few times when I’m chatting with a friend, and mid-my-sentence, the friend says “oh sorry I gotta go” and we just end the call. Zero fuss, zero drama. Because I *know* that they *are* interested in what I have to say; I don’t need reassurance. I’m not insecure.

I not only know when people are not interested, I also know how long they would tolerate my voice, if I were to insist. It’s usually not very long — usually one to one-and-a-half sentence, though I did have a colleague who gets up and leaves at my second word. If I want to say something to other members in the group, I need to fit it into the timeframe that I’m given by people who set the terms of these conversations. This is difficult work. It’s great practice for when you need to write something under tight word limits, though. I never have problem with word limits.

Unfortunately, if you don’t speak your thoughts, you don’t get feedback on your thoughts, and I’ve written about how important feedback is to academic confidence. What is more unfortunate is that, because I’m very good at telling when other people are interested, the positive reinforcement that I get for talking is not whatever is good, as judged by the standards of the discourse at hand, but whatever people who don’t want to hear me talk are willing to allow. So even when I do get to voice my thoughts, I don’t voice my good thoughts.

For this reason, my engagement within philosophy throughout my undergrad, and sometimes even now, has been from the perspective of a curious outsider. I always look forward to hearing someone else voicing my thoughts and seeing how others respond to them. I sometimes imagine whether others would respond differently had it been put differently. But this was it.

I sometimes read or hear people express their frustration for not being seen and valued as individuals and I’ve always had a hard time relating. This isn’t because I have always been valued as an individual, of course. (As anyone educated in China can tell you, this isn’t a thing we do.) It’s just that being seen as just another member of the group feels like such a luxury and achievement. I was never seen as a “philosophy major” throughout my 5 years of undergrad as a major, and I’m happy to be “just another grad student”. I see no benefit in being seen as an individual, since I offer no extra value as an individual. But that’s a digression.

My master’s years came as a cultural shock. My undergrad was big — even its philosophy program was big. I managed to get a degree without having to seriously talk philosophy with anyone. Obviously, that was not gonna fly in a master’s program.

I don’t think “I struggled” is the accurate description, because I phenomenologically did not. Thinking back, other people probably struggled with me. I didn’t have opinions. Except I did, but I wasn’t gonna tell you. I held my tongue. Except holding one’s tongue is not how one does philosophy.

At some point towards the end of my first year there, I found myself in a variety of social situations with Nic, who later became my official supervisor. I say “a variety” in that the occasions differed (colloquia, conference, holiday gatherings, etc.), but the situation was always the same: it was him and I, in a pub, surrounded by a group of guys.

I still don’t know where all those guys came from. I know philosophy is full of guys, but our department at the time was actually very balanced. I think most of those guys were undergraduates, but I never asked.

My sense of what constitutes enjoyable times is probably unusual, but I was fascinated by those times. I was used to being surrounded by guys with no interest in what I had to say — this part wasn’t new. What was new was Nic’s insistence in seeing me as someone legitimate. If someone interrupted me to start a new thread, he’d withdraw from that thread to hear me out, which happened a lot. He’d ask follow up questions, offer his own thoughts, and allow me to respond.

It was disorienting, to say the least. I wasn’t used to getting more than one-and-a-half sentence of airtime. I had to quickly scramble to reassess what the next best thing was that I could toss out. If I say X, that’d open up another 5 minutes. Would that exceed my allocated time? It did not, of course, as many of these conversations ran late into the night. Slowly and surely, I learned to talk philosophy, for the first time.

Another interesting observation surfaced. Since he was often the only faculty member present, he generally constituted as someone who gets to set the terms of the conversation — we talked about what he wanted to talk about, dropped a thread when he wanted to drop it, etc. Except when we didn’t.

We, meaning the entire group composed of mostly undergraduate guys, talked about whatever Nic the professor wanted to talk about, except when Nic the professor chose to talk about what *I* had to say.

Time after time, we would start out as a group of people sitting around Nic talking about something Nic said, only to quickly descend into him and I in a 1-on-1 conversation while undergraduate guys loosely said philosophy things around us. They probably wondered why they even bothered to come if they didn’t get to keep Nic’s full attention. (“Full”, of course, means not shared with me.)

I had a blast.

I was still just slowly learning to talk then, so I’m sure most of the things I said were unintelligible. Nic, if you are reading this, I hope you were entertained by at least some aspect of the situation, if not my then-newly acquired conversation ability.

One question in the MAP survey linked earlier asks whether testimonial injustice has led me to think about leaving academia and, “[i]f so, please share why you stayed”. Thinking about this question made me realize that, in fact, being ignored has not made me want to “leave”, because I rarely consider myself as already in it. What Nic showed me was that I could “go in” to academia. With enough people like him, I could probably do it, I thought. I did not think I was already doing it. Nobody told me I was already doing it.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that similar things have not happened now that I’m definitively “in” academia. A couple years ago I was at a graduate student conference as a presenter. I was the only woman on the program, and one of two PoC. “We were so glad we could get a woman on the program,” an organizer told me, “I mean, it’s all blind-reviewed so we couldn’t control it.” To be clear, I was not (and am not) offended by this remark. I was just glad that she told me it was blind-reviewed since I for real thought I was the “diversity speaker”. I wonder what other presenters thought.

So I was at a graduate conference, as a graduate student from a very good program, who had passed a blind-review process to present a paper. You don’t get more “in-group” than this. I had mastered the art of conversation. I had made philosophy friends. I even knew people from this school. I got this.

The conference dinner was at a small but cozy restaurant which, apparently, hosts many event dinners for this department. When we got there, the tables were set and arranged in a C-shape in a space that was clearly designed to encourage informal small group discussions the way academics liked. I chose a spot strategically — somewhere that doesn’t make me look as if I feel self-important, and yet within “inclusion range” were a group of students to naturally sit down mid-conversation. That’s another skill I’ve developed throughout the years.

A group of students came in and sat on the other end of the table. A group of speakers came in and sat next to them. A group of organizers joined.

An old white man professor noticed me and sat next to me. He had kept me company during the earlier beer hours, which was held outside a bar. I was stuck in between two groups of conversations happening on both sides of me. I faked interest for a little while but decided against it. I had felt “in-group” enough to not wanting to bother to do this anymore. I had known how conversations worked by this point and knew that I wasn’t going to have one, no matter how much interest I faked.

I was “picked up” by this old professor back then, who entertained me for two hours. I tried my best to not cling onto him at dinner so he didn’t have to feel obligated to entertain me for two more hours, but he did anyway. He tried his best to get more people to join us, but failed. I think he felt partly responsible, since he was an old man and thus less approachable. I wish I could tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that Nic tried the same thing for two years without success, and Nic was definitely not unapproachable. Instead, I just indulged him. I had him tell me long and detailed stories about his career and I asked the right questions at the right times — something I had been good at even before I learned to talk. That was my way of showing appreciation.

I think these things don’t bother me because my identity as an academic philosopher was never built on other people being interested in what I had to say, and so being confronted with people who are not does not take this identity away.

It is liberating in some sense. My opinions count so little that I can really think whatever I want. In fact, I make this mistake sometimes, I think, now that my opinions count a little more than they did before.

It is liberating also because people rarely feel the need to hide their lack of interest with me. There’s the colleague who gets up and leaves whenever I open my mouth, the colleague who refuses to look me in the eye as he answers my question at my own house party, the speaker at a “diversity camp” who brushes me off, etc. It saves me time, really. A friend once complained to me that he regularly encountered people at conferences who seemed interested in his dissertation, only to reveal, after 30 minutes in, that they really just wanted to schmooze with his supervisor. That sounds like such a waste of time. Most people who bother to talk to me at all are genuinely interested in hearing me talk back. I much rather have my problem than his.

I hope I have written this post in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m mostly complaining about being mistreated. I have found entertainment in numerous occasions both at the time and afterwards. It has always been clear to me, that I cannot make others interested, and I don’t want to try. Whatever wrong you think is with these stories, they are symptoms, not causes.

What I do want to convey is this: these stories partially but significantly make up who I am today as a scholar, a philosopher, someone who talks. If none of these stories resonates with you, recognize that you don’t have them. You have something else — a perspective that comes from someone with different stories.

Kino
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1 comment

  1. Thanks Kino for your post, and for the nice things you said! It was a lot of fun to have those conversations, and I definitely miss them! Let’s hope to do it again post-pandemic! 🙂

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