Engaged Philosophy and the Public Philosophy Network are partnering to present a special interview series that highlights the work of public philosophers who will be presenting at the 2019 PPN Conference Oct 17-19, 2019.
Joseph Stramondo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at San Diego State University. His work shows how systems of power work through narrative to oppress disabled people by distorting their identity and agency—and challenges that oppression.
What type(s) of public philosophy do you do?
I have worked to be publically engaged throughout my adult life. Some of that engagement might be described as philosophical and all of it has focused on challenging the oppression of disabled people, bringing my philosophical skills into the service of several advocacy organizations and activist communities. I have used a variety of strategies, including nonviolent direct action, negotiation, petitions, program development, and op-ed style writing to further causes such as accessible public housing and affordable community supports for disabled people who don’t want to live in an institution or nursing home; greater equity and inclusion for disabled students in higher education; a more accurate portrayal of little people in pop culture; a ban on the practice of “dwarf tossing”; and a more honest, nuanced conversation around informed consent for clinical trials for a new drug that aims to normalize dwarf bodies. However, I plan to focus this interview on my participation as a subject in the documentary film, Far From the Tree.
Give an example of a successful project.
The Far From the Tree documentary is probably the most far-reaching public platform I’ve had access to, so far. It is a film that is based on Andrew Solomon’s book of the same name, investigating how relationships between parents and children develop as their social identities and, consequently, life experiences take very different trajectories. Part of the film chronicles some of the journey my spouse and I took to becoming parents, focusing on our identity as Little People born into average-size families who may ourselves have average-size kids. I’m very interested in philosophical issues around social, narrative disability identity and so participating as a subject of the film gave me a chance to discuss some of my views in very concrete terms.
For instance, one of the biggest points of friction between many members of the disability activist community and the parents of disabled children revolves around the presumption that disability inevitably and severely diminishes a person’s well-being. The philosopher Elizabeth Barnes calls this the “bad-difference” view of disability and many disability activists argue in no uncertain terms that a child’s ability to accept and take pride in their disability identity is severely damaged when their parents hold this belief. For me, much of the film was about my family’s rejection of this view and testimony that, if one understands disability as more of a “mere-difference,” a person’s life possibilities are enlarged. By abandoning the quest to normalize a child and “fix” the problem of disability, a parent gives that child the foundation they need to imagine a future for themselves that does not rely on changing who they are.
The film promoted these ideas explicitly with the words of the subjects, including myself, who made the case for disability pride. It also, hopefully, opened up the viewer’s imagination regarding what counts as a good life by showing how disability is not a life sentence of doom and gloom.
What benefits does doing public philosophy offer to the public(s) you engage? What benefits does it offer you?
I do think Martin Luther King, Jr. was correct when he claimed in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” To me, this means that, when we accept an injustice as inevitable or even legitimate, our community is made weaker and we are all made more vulnerable to oppression. So, in my view, any political work that tries to be sensitive to intersectional oppression and reaffirms our common humanity makes us all better off and that includes public philosophy of disability.
What role does the PPN play in your philosophical work? What role do you play in the PPN?
I am new to fully participating with the PPN and will attend my first conference this year at my alma mater, MSU. I have been doing what might be characterized as public philosophy throughout my career and it was something that was largely encouraged in grad school. Many of my mentors who worked in applied ethics did public philosophy themselves, even if that language wasn’t always used. However, while public philosophy was modeled for me in grad school, it wasn’t really something that was part of the curriculum per se and so it wasn’t something that I thought about very critically. This is why I’m so excited to be a part of the PPN. I’m interested in doing some of this work in a more reflective way and anticipate my engagement with the PPN being a means toward that end. It’s through the kind of discussion with the larger philosophical community that happens at a conference like this that I can become more deliberative and, thus, more intentional about the public nature of some of my work.
What’s the philosophical grounding of your public philosophy?
I think one interesting way to think about some of the public philosophy that I do is through the lens of my mentor Hilde Lindemann’s work on relational, narrative identity. In her book Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair, Lindemann argues that a person’s narrative identity, the descriptive story of who they are, is always fundamentally relational and always deeply connected to their agency. The basic idea is that a person’s identity is never solely determined by their own beliefs about who they are, but also by the stories others tell about who they are. Further, this relational narrative about who a person is largely determines what they can do. Lindemann argues that this can be a serious problem when oppressive master narratives constrain who a person can be and what actions they can take. Master narratives are the “stock plots and character types that we borrow from the familiar stories embodying our culture’s socially shared understanding.”
One oppressive master narrative about disabled people that philosopher Anita Silvers wrote about is the presumption that our defining characteristic is that we are in constant need of care from non-disabled folks. This presumption unjustly constrains who disabled people are allowed to be and what they are allowed to do in all sorts of ways. For instance, it makes it harder for a disabled person have a romantic relationship and start a family because it is assumed that they will always need and never provide care. The antidote to an oppressive master narrative is what Lindemann calls a counterstory—a liberatory version of the narrative that replaces the oppressive threads in the fabric of identity, opening up a person’s options to exercise their agency. I’d like to think that the portions of the film Far From the Tree featuring my spouse and me provided such a counterstory of two capable disabled people caring for each other and preparing to care for a child as parents.
EngagedPhilosophy readers: If you’d like to nominate yourself or someone else for an interview, email us at info@engagedphilosophy.com.
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