How do you describe your work to people who don’t work in your field?
I am a philosopher, specializing in the politics of gender and sexuality. I work out how people think about these topics, and make arguments about how to think better. I’m especially interested in how the possibilities available to us as individuals who can act and make choices interact with all of the social constraints on the kind of people we can become.
What’s one big problem you want to solve through your work?
My current project addresses the cultural politics of sleep. I want to provide compelling reasons why sleep has inherent value – not just value as a process of recharging, or as a necessary biological feature of human beings. I think we are not sufficiently aware of the limits of social injunctions like “be productive!” Not everyone can be a special individual packed with value and growing the economy into climate oblivion. Maybe we shouldn’t be. Getting more rest might not only be good for our health but might also point toward a different shared future.
What does the word “innovation” mean to you?
As a rather loaded word taken from business-speak it can be hard for those of us in the humanities to see ourselves in this term of art for the contemporary university. Perhaps we could reclaim it to describe our emphasis on always showing how to do things with education, and what learning critical skills can do for all of us living in democracies. Because it’s not training for a job, everyone uses their university education in different ways, so in that sense all of my former students are innovators.
What’s been your biggest a-ha moment — in life or work — so far?
There have been so many that it’s really hard to pick one! Doing philosophy is basically a lifetime of a-ha moments. In my current project it’s perhaps the moment when I realized that being anonymous is just as important as being noticed; that our emphasis on the cultural value of vigilance and attention also comes with disdain for daydreaming, sleepiness and even just doing nothing. The person who does stuff – almost no matter what they do – is a better person than the person who does nothing. But this really doesn’t stand up to ethical or political scrutiny.
How do you or your team come up with your best ideas? (Do you have any rituals or habits that trigger your creative spark, for example? What do you do to create space for innovation?)
A necessary luxury for creativity in the humanities is time. Although my best ideas often come to me seemingly randomly, in reality they are preceded by long periods of reading, trying (and often failing) to write or talking to other thinkers in shared spaces. It can be very hard to find time for that, but all good ideas come from a long period of tilling the intellectual soil, only finally to see a few sprouts pop up!
What’s your favourite thing about working at the 海角社区?
That’s easy. It’s the array of incredible, internationally renowned colleagues that the university has been lucky enough to hire. For every question I might have, there is someone to talk about it with. Because we are all here together in this far-flung place, most of us very far from our origins, we have extra incentives to form close communities.
Do you have a role model at the 海角社区? How have they influenced you?
My role model is our provost, Verna Yiu. Our research has nothing in common, but she has been tenacious and brave in the face of political abuse, and although I don’t agree with all of her policy directions, she has definitely modelled how to have integrity, be a real person and get things done.
In Shape: The University Strategic Plan 2023-33, the 海角社区 commits to having a positive impact on our students and staff, our communities and the communities we serve here in Alberta and around the world. How does the work you do create impact?
Philosophy doesn’t have to be about very complex and distant ideas. As with any discipline, there are very specialized and technical debates, but I am also very interested in how people with no training in critical humanities reason and form opinions. My research has always been very close to the everyday. I often start from ordinary cultural objects (like an ad, a self-help book, a movie or a news story) and show how they embody assumptions about the kinds of people we are and the worlds we inhabit. We could call this skill “critical thinking.” My students (and the popular audiences I engage) are often surprised by what, it turns out, they actually believe. Knowing what you believe is a precursor to justifying it – or changing your mind! This kind of research has enormous impact, if we only support it.
What’s next for you? Do you have any new projects on the horizon?
I hope to use the dual platforms of my academic research and my to write a popular book version of Sleep is The New Sex. After that, maybe something about the vagaries of the university in an age of management consultants and innovation?
