Jeanne Proust has studied Humanities, Philosophy and Visual Arts in Bordeaux, Berlin, and Paris. She has been teaching Philosophy for the last 12 years in the US and is currently the interim director of the Center for Public Philosophy (UC Santa Cruz). Her PhD dissertation (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) focused on the pathologies of the willpower, both in philosophical and psychological perspectives, but her interests are wide: among many fields, she does research in Ethics, Philosophy of Technologies, Bioethics, Feminist theory, and Aesthetics. While teaching at different universities in New York, Jeanne is advocating for a widening of philosophical education beyond the Academia frontiers by participating in different events open to the general public. She taught at Rikers Island as a volunteer, and regularly gives public talks in philosophy, leading her to recently produce her own podcast, “Can You Phil It?”. She also collaborates with artists on her photography, drawing and painting works.
1. What type(s) of civically engaged or public philosophy (CE/PP) work do you do?
Where should I start! At the beginning, perhaps: I started getting involved with public philosophy about 15 years ago, when I participated to the first Night of Philosophy (now widespread under the name Night of Ideas) to present, at 5am (..!) a book I cowrote with C. Ramond about the Feeling of Injustice in Popular Songs. Frankly, I mostly remember my beatitude at the croissants’ arrival at 6am!
I was then hired, pretty randomly, by a public school in Miami, that had incorporated a French program. Freshly landed in the US, I realized that the American program didn’t have any philosophy classes for the students in 12th grade, which sounded astonishing to me, given that it is a mandatory class for all 12th graders in France! I started incorporating philosophical content in all my classes, from 6th to 12th grade, regardless of the linguistic program my students were in.
The Alliance Française, there at the time (about 13 years ago!) asked me to also lead conversations with small groups of children in elementary school.
Fast forward: when I moved to New York, about 7 years ago, I became very involved with ThinkOlio, a great organization that offers public talks and conversation throughout the city, and in the Hudson Valley. I gave many talks and weekend-long seminars in great spaces, with eager-to-learn audiences always willing to socialize.
Parallelly, I volunteered for the People’s Education Initiative (formerly Prison Education Initiative), leading philosophical discussions at the Rose. M. Singer Center on Rikers Island, riding my bike over there from Brooklyn.
During the Pandemic, I created and co-produced my own podcast, Can You Phil It?, dwelling on many topics while trying to provide an immersive sound experience.
I joined the Center for Public Philosophy a year ago to develop my professional trajectory in that very direction. I organized an interdisciplinary public event, judged in the Ethics Bowl, and led some workshops to discuss ethical issues surrounding new technologies. I was glad to be able to judge an Ethics Bowl with incarcerated persons participating at San Quentin.
Meeting people like Mo and Ramona at the Public Philosophy Network Conference hyped my great hope to promote even more civil, informed, and empathetic dialogues with broader audiences, in a society that increasingly promotes performance and expeditious efficiency over patient reflection.
2. Give an example of a successful project.
Recently, the public event I mentioned above seemed to have encountered a genuine success. Santa Cruz is a small town (I tend to forget that fact after 7 years in NYC), and I also knew that the relationship between the university and the town have not always been easy. A good amount of people, in and out of Academia, came to the venue (off campus on purpose) and spent the whole evening with us, from 6pm to 1am, listening to talks from various professors and performers, but also from Watsonville Taiko and the Santa Cruz Chorale. Informing the public on the local public radio might have helped. We sure were crossing all sorts of borders (as the name of our event went) that night!
3. How does this work benefit the public(s) you engage with?
Well, it really depends on the “public” – which, far from referring to a homogeneous general audience of relatively privileged people, includes persons who rarely have the chance to engage in abstract reasoning due to living conditions, complex vulnerabilities, hierarchies, threats and distrust – issues that most inmates have to face constantly. Regardless, teaching Philosophy cannot be unidirectional, from a master to an audience in a vertical way. Philosophers are not experts who simply deliver answers; they have to learn from communities and individuals who might have no background in philosophy, and who cannot be perceived as mere passive listeners. There is a great call for empowerment in that. People feel that their opinion counts, since they are listened to – but they also feel that they have to think twice before making any judgement. They are invited to contribute to a collaborative reflection that gives them both liberating rights (freely express their point of view) and responsibilizing duties (rigorous and respectful reasoning).
4. In what ways does the work inform your philosophical reflection?
Engaging in philosophical inquiry with young children was a fascinating pedagogical experience for me. I learned how to shape our dialogues in a way that was adapted to various levels of intellectual maturity, and that has benefitted enormously my teaching – and, shall I add, empathetic – skills. This lesson of humility I am still pondering to this day, echoes the one I had when I started volunteering for the women’s prison on Rikers Island. Our philosophical education at university doesn’t prepare us to adopt a language that is both accessible and relevant to people who are not trained in an academic way. The socio-economic parameters of the situation philosophical inquiry appears within greatly affect the feasibility of its very emergence. Incarcerated persons won’t necessary feel the privilege of having mental space to dedicate to deep critical thinking. They can’t necessarily afford to even be interested in the first place. “Situatedness” began to be at the center of my epistemological reflection since then!
5. If someone wanted to take on CE/PP work like yours, what steps or resources would you recommend?
There is still so much work to be done before Public Philosophy can receive all the professional recognition that it deserves… Career paths are not clearly paved, to say the least! But that shouldn’t discourage you – reach out to the PPN, reach out to Mo and Ramona!
6. Have you had a silly/unusual/interesting experience with students or the public as a result of your CE/PP work?
In the women’s prison at Rikers Island, I was asked to rename my class “debate” instead of philosophy in order to make it “more attractive”: PEI even thought I would find it easier to teach French, or Art – but I stuck with “philosophical debate”. One of my classes started with the question “What is a woman?” – One person, interestingly enough, explained that it is the identity they needed to adopt in order to not end up again in the men’s prison! The discussion in our classroom became so animated that the guards ended up coming in and participating too – a problematic, yet pretty comical moment…
7. What is your favorite quote and why?
“Choisir, c’est renoncer” (“to choose is to renounce”), from André Gide. I wrote an article targeting a wider audience hinting at how I spend my life dealing with FOMO…!
8. Did you have an experience as a student or in your life that lead you to embrace your CE/PP work?
When I first entered NYU’s philosophy department, I couldn’t help feeling that I didn’t quite belong. I had been hired as a TA, while I was writing my dissertation for my Doctorate at Paris 1, Panthéon Sorbonne. To make ends meet, since I didn’t get any financial support from my home university, I was also a waitress in a restaurant in Brooklyn. I was later selected for several adjunct positions, at CUNY, Pace University, and Marymount Manhattan College. I taught all the classes I could – luckily, teaching is one of my passions. My social life revolved around my eleven roommates, flight attendants, waitresses, hairdressers, all from very different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. My entire life, I have been used to a lively mix of cultures, races, languages: born in Guadeloupe, from parents whose door was always open to all sorts of people (who sometimes they barely knew), hitchhiking all over Europe, visiting my family in Cameroon, traveling to South America from Miami where I lived for 5 years. Speaking four languages, among friends of all ages with all sorts of cultural upbringings and radically differing social and professional lives, I have been described as a queer social chameleon.
Yet there I was, feeling unusually intimidated as I walked into the NYU Philosophy department. While I didn’t feel ostracized, I sensed that the PhD students (and faculty alike) wondered who I was – a TA, but not in our graduate school? – and how I got there. I assume the unorthodox aspect of my circumstances made it harder for me to identify with them as a (seemingly) very homogeneous group: most of them came from privileged backgrounds, and their life seemed entirely dedicated to building a career in Academia – already mastering the rules and tricks of a complex game of which I was then just becoming aware. They mastered the specific methodology expected from future philosophy professors; I didn’t. They knew which journals were acknowledged for their research statements to look appealing; I didn’t. They knew which APA-approved ropes that any participant in the tenure-track arena needs to grab; I didn’t. I was slightly older than the graduate students; I had to work after completing my master’s and became a Humanities teacher in a public high school for 5 years, before starting my PhD. I haven’t had the perfect trajectory that (I then thought) was implicitly required from future university professors. Since the age of 17, I did all sorts of odd jobs to finance my studies: aside from working in the restaurant industry, I had been selling crafts in street markets, cleaning houses, taking care of children and of people with disabilities back in France. Looking at my “peers” back when I was a TA, I often wondered what propelled them here, at NYU, with (what I considered) a generous stipend every year for them to be able to focus exclusively on graduate school. I felt like an oddity: I was a bisexual French woman, freshly divorced from a dangerous Peruvian husband, living below the poverty line, and there I was – parachuted into the world of Academia, the mechanics and culture of which I felt simply oblivious, be it in France (from where I lived abroad since I was 24), or in the US.
Even as a postdoc fellow at Fordham University, after obtaining my PhD with great recognition from the jury at La Sorbonne, I still had moments when I couldn’t help feeling quite out of place. While my gender might have had something to do with this unfortunate impostor syndrome, it took me some time to become better acquainted with various faculty members and students in order to realize that many aspects of their life didn’t quite fit into the mold; some had to do odd jobs, some knew forms of violence and abuse; many had interests that they had to put aside to enter the harsh competition of the tenure track job market. The constricting expectations from most eminent Philosophy departments are mainly structural – very few faculty members would deny that there is a need for diversity, yet somehow, philosophy remains a field notoriously reluctant to change. The tenacity of this status quo bias is responsible for perpetuating a set of hiring practices that has, until very recently, systematically prevented—implicitly or explicitly—people with unconventional profiles from gaining recognition within the ivory tower of Academia. We are now thankfully starting to recognize, so it seems, the value that the variety of personal experiences and worldviews that arise from different cultures and circumstances, can bring to philosophy. This constant preoccupation for equity and inclusion definitely led me to engage in the public philosophy activities early on in my career.
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