Ahmed, Sara. “Hearing Complaint”
2021, In Complaint! Duke University Press, pp. 1-26
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Added by: Tomasz Zyglewicz, Shannon Brick, Michael GreerPublisher’s Note:
In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.Comment (from this Blueprint): Sara Ahmed is a renowned critical phenomenologist who resigned from her job at Goldsmiths over sexual harassment in her department and the university's handling of it. In this 2021 book, she draws on an interdisiplinary corpus, and her own ethnographic skills, to research and theorize complaint against power abuse, broadly conceived. Important are her own experiences and supportive relationships with students that led to her resignation. One thing this book argues is that complaints, and the process of complaining, are an important part of changing the university, and are in themselves useful political tools, since they challenge (and hence illuminate) hidden parts of institutional life.
Ahmed, Sara. “Institutional Mechanics”, and “Mind the Gap! Policies, Procedures, and Other Nonperformatives”
2021, In Complaint! Duke University Press, pp. 27-68
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Added by: Tomasz Zyglewicz, Shannon Brick, Michael GreerPublisher’s Note:
In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.Comment (from this Blueprint): Sara Ahmed is a renowned critical phenomenologist who resigned from her job at Goldsmiths over sexual harassment in her department and the university's handling of it. In this 2021 book, she draws on an interdisiplinary corpus, and her own ethnographic skills, to research and theorize complaint against power abuse, broadly conceived. Important are her own experiences and supportive relationships with students that led to her resignation. One thing this book argues is that complaints, and the process of complaining, are an important part of changing the university, and are in themselves useful political tools, since they challenge (and hence illuminate) hidden parts of institutional life.
Beauvoir de, Simone. The Second Sex
2010, Translated by C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
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Added by: Zoé Grange-MarczakAbstract:
Published in French in 1949, it is usually considered the foundational book of second wave feminism, characterized by a shift from the conquering of political rights of first wave feminism (franchise, basic emancipation) to a concern for general equality, at home, in the workplace, etc. Beauvoir's (1908–1986) first question is the very definition of a woman, and her core ideas draw from phenomenology. She elaborates an existential account of being a woman: womanhood does not consist of fixed characteristics, but is a project carried out by a free agent in a material, collective situation, creating meaning through action in a given context. Understanding the category of woman as a collective construction and the result of a series of actions and representations allows for the re-actualization of the Marxist notion of alienation, where women are stranger to themselves, operating on values imposed by men rather than found in a lived practice. In two volumes, Beauvoir seeks to highlight both the cultural, historical and economical background of genders ("Facts and Myths") and the "Lived Experience" resulting from it. Through a reading of Hegel, she rethinks gender categories as a dynamic and unequal process, and from there traces the possibility of a liberation from the perceived secondary character of women. Groundbreaking in feminist and continental philosophy, placed on the catholic Index of forbidden books, it remains a revolutionary work until today.
Comment: Beauvoir's work is lengthy but pioneering and foundational, and is a necessary reading for feminism, phenomenology and existentialism. Its critics and surrounding debates are almost as important as the book itself, and thus is serves as a great introduction to contemporary discussions. Some passages can easily be used for close reading, without necessarily having to cover the entire book—the introduction, for example. Suitable for classes on feminism or continental philosophy.
Guenther, Lisa. Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives
2013, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Added by: Rochelle DuFordAbstract: Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons - even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today's supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners' sense of identity and their ability to understand the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. -/- Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused - when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being.Comment: This text serves as both a clear introduction to the history of punishment and imprisonment in the United States, as well as a clear introduction to phenomenological method. Portions of the text on the experience of social death in solitary confinement would make excellent additions to introductory courses on prisons and punishment. Some chapters would also be fitting on classes concerning race and mass incarceration.
Guenther, Lisa. Critical Phenomenology
2019, In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, ed. Gail Weiss, Ann Murphy and Gayle Salamon. Northwestern University Press, pp. 11-16
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Added by: Tomasz Zyglewicz, Shannon Brick, Michael GreerAbstract:
Phenomenology, the philosophical method that seeks to uncover the taken-for-granted presuppositions, habits, and norms that structure everyday experience, is increasingly framed by ethical and political concerns. Critical phenomenology foregrounds experiences of marginalization, oppression, and power in order to identify and transform common experiences of injustice that render “the familiar” a site of oppression for many. In Fifty Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, leading scholars present fresh readings of classic phenomenological topics and introduce newer concepts developed by feminist theorists, critical race theorists, disability theorists, and queer and trans theorists that capture aspects of lived experience that have traditionally been neglected. By centering historically marginalized perspectives, the chapters in this book breathe new life into the phenomenological tradition and reveal its ethical, social, and political promise. This volume will be an invaluable resource for teaching and research in continental philosophy; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; critical race theory; disability studies; cultural studies; and critical theory more generally.Comment (from this Blueprint): Lisa Guenther, author of the 2015 book "Solidarity Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives," gives a quick overview of "critical phenomenology" and how it is different from classical phenomenology. The boundaries of critical phenomenology are still being drawn, but Guenther's concise explanation has already become canon. Understanding, in broad brush strokes, what critical phenomenology is will be important to engage with many conversations on feminist philosophy, especially in the continental tradition, since feminist theorists (inspired by Simone de Beavoir and Frantz Fanon) often appeal to lived experience in their theorizing of oppression.
Nida-Rumelin, Martine. Grasping phenomenal properties
2006, In Torin Alter & Sven Walter (eds.), Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism. Oxford University Press.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Nora HeinzelmannAbstract: I will present an argument for property dualism. The argument employs a distinction between having a concept of a property and grasping a property via a concept. If you grasp a property P via a concept C, then C is a concept of P. But the reverse does not hold: you may have a concept of a property without grasping that property via any concept. If you grasp a property, then your cognitive relation to that property is more intimate then if you just have some concept or other of that property. To grasp a property is to understand what having that property essentially consists in.
Siegel, Susanna. Which Properties are Represented in Perception?
2006, In Tamar S. Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual Experience. Oxford University Press: 481-503.
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Added by: Andrea BlomqvistAbstract: In discussions of perception and its relation to knowledge, it is common to distinguish what one comes to believe on the basis of perception from the distinctively perceptual basis of one's belief. The distinction can be drawn in terms of propositional contents: there are the contents that a perceiver comes to believe on the basis of her perception, on the one hand; and there are the contents properly attributed to perception itself, on the other. Siegel argues that high-level properties should be attributed to percception itself. That, high-level properties can be the content of perception.Comment: This paper is interesting to consider in the cognition/perception debate, since high-level properties such as being a natural kind, or emotions and intentions, are normally taken to be features of cognition rather than perception. It raises interesting questions about the relationship between concepts, the content of perception and perceptual experience. It would be good in a third year module on perception.
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