From Black Lives Matter’s efforts to defund the police to the pro-democracy protests in Tahrir Square, these social movements have appeared to spark significant change. But after a few years, many worry that we have simply returned to the status quo. What unites my three projects is an attempt to explore the mechanisms of enduring social change from different methodological frameworks than is often used in political philosophy.
Islamic Feminism/Virtue Ethics (Dissertation)
Saba Mahmood’s work has been hailed as a strong pushback to any feminist theory that denies agency to oppressed people in order to justify paternalism and interventions. Despite this, her work is taken as purely critical, as merely a warning or worse as a philosophical dead end for feminism. My work on Mahmood has been firstly, in my article in Hypatia, “From Opposition to Creativity: Saba Mahmood’s Decolonial Critique of Teleological Futures”, to defend her work as a positive feminist theory. But secondly to think with Mahmood but move beyond her initial framework to think through decolonial social change. These projects stem from my dissertation and is an attempt to think about Islamic feminist social change.
My earlier work entitled “Change Your Look, Change Your Luck: Religious Self-Transformation and Brute Luck Egalitarianism” in the journal Res Philosophica begins this exploration by arguing that Mahmood’s ethnographic subjects, the Muslim women’s dawa group use of Islamic virtue ethics, force us to rethink not only luck egalitarianism but religious exemptions by the government. I show that this kind of religious self-transformation through changes in habit is located neither solely within the agent nor totally caused by their automatic actions and which makes it impossible to judge exemptions relying on the rule that we only exempt that which is unchosen. This shows the relevance of Islamic virtue ethics is not just located in the past but in its uptake through the women’s dawa movement is vibrant and can be used to think through many contemporary philosophical problems. This is a central theme in my chapter in an edited collection on Temperance under review at OUP.
In my Hypatia article I make two claims. The first is that feminists studying women in the Global South only look to practices that register as acts of resistance. Mahmood argues that this focus on resistance both obfuscates and misses out on practices and agency that could build different, but not resistant new norms. Secondly, Mahmood shows us that merely resisting oppressive norms as a tactic is a trap that yields no enduring norms. For enduring social change to happen, not only must we get rid of old norms, but also create new ones. Feminists often worry about trying new norms out because they may end up being oppressive too. Mahmood gives us a “reparative” reading of norms, that we must risk this danger if we are to create norms different than the way we are now.
In a working paper, I argue that Mahmood finds herself in a theoretical dilemma. The first horn is the fundamentalist who argues that any change in Islamic practice as inauthentic. The second is a colonial kind of feminism that sees tradition as antithetical to feminism and Muslim women as essentially oppressed. Using Talal Asad’s work, Mahmood shows Islam to be a capacious, vibrant, heterogenous and internally variable tradition. Mahmood uses ancient Islamic virtue ethics and contemporary Muslim women’s practice to show that the average person can become an expert in piety with embodied practices and training. In both trying to answer the fundamentalist but also push back on the colonial feminist, Mahmood shows the incredible agency women can assert, not when they resist norms, but by “inhabiting a norm”. For Mahmood, these women prescriptively and descriptively inhabit frozen, unchanging norms. Feminists such as Serene Khader have criticized this idea of inhabiting a norm as unnecessarily surrendering to conservatism. I argue that Mahmood misses that resistance is not the only way to change a norm. I use Mahmood’s own ethnography to show how social change can happen while not resisting but inhabiting a norm. This work is not merely a solution to a scholarly puzzle but shows how Muslim women can enact liberatory social change since other Muslims will see this social change as endogenous to Islam rather than inauthentic.
The Meso-Level of the Political (Current Work)
Rasmus Birk and Nick Manning have noticed that while there has been work in ecological psychology on social affordances, there has been a dearth of work in ecological psychology engaging the social sciences. Part of this project is begin work on what Birk and Manning call an “ecological social science.” On the other side of this interdisciplinary coin, since the death of Iris Marion Young and Pierre Bourdieu, phenomena that fall below the structural but above the interpersonal, what I call the meso-level of political life, has receded from philosophy. The torch has been kept lit by a few like, critical phenomenologists such as Lisa Guenther and Alia Al-Saji and political theorists behind the ethnographic turn such as Bernardo Zacka and Lisa Herzog. But no one has more formally and methodologically explored this level nor have they explicitly connected it to social change.
Two methodological frameworks have emerged in philosophy trying to describe the engine of social change. One position argues that we must concentrate on individuals and moral change, while a second position argues that we should focus on political and structural change. Alex Madva, for example, diagnoses the problem as one of individual implicit bias, and so his solution becomes moral education; Zoë Johnson King argues that social change would involve people subjecting their own beliefs to critical scrutiny; and Robin Zheng argues that change happens when we morally criticize people and hold them accountable. On the other side, Sally Haslanger and Amia Srinivasan argue that this concentration on individualism is wrongheaded and that any real social change must focus on social and structural injustice. Much empirical and conceptual work has gone into showing how structural power works and therefore also what tools and tactics we can use to fight or change this power. Whether through changing the law, protesting, changing the composition of the supreme court or even revolution, we understand how to make structural change. But the phenomena in the meso-level present us with a different kind of problem. John Dewey accuses those who appeal only to structural changes as short-cut revolutionaries. What they don’t understand is that in merely overturning institutions, this leaves the habits of the previous way of life intact. Habits are deeply engrained within us, and no single act can turn this historical and developmental momentum around. But if we focus on the meso-level of politics, we see that social change requires ongoing, everyday, small but iterative acts. As one prison abolition activist, Ejeris Dixon argues, “we must practice community safety as we would practice an instrument or a sport”.
The tactics we use to fight structural problems are mismatched and therefore not effective against meso-level problems. So a larger point of this work is to give us the tools to even “see” phenomena in the meso-level that impact us so that we may begin to construct tactics and tools to tackle these problems. This becomes a central theme in an under review paper, “Askesis in Action: A Foucauldian Solution to the Problem of Social Scripts on Sexual Consent”. Manon Garcia frames consent as a way that women might combat the influence of patriarchal social scripts. I argue this fails to recognize that social scripts influence us in ways that bypass our conscious ability to critically deliberate but is instead a kind of bodily training. I argue that instead, Foucault and the s/m lesbian community give us the meso-level tools involving self-transformation and retraining the body that might allow to combat dominant social scripts.
In the rest of this section, I show two papers, one published from work on my dissertation highlights the origins of my research on the meso-level, the second an unpublished manuscript, charts the future path of my work on ecological social science and social change.
My first paper on this meso-level has been published in the journal Inquiry and is entitled “Proposing an Islamic Virtue Ethics Beyond the Situationist Debates”. It has been shown in psychological experiments that moods induced by our external situations, such as smelling cinnamon buns, have more effect on our behaviour than what is “inside” of us, our character. In this paper in particular, I focus on the worry that our actions can be manipulated by the situational mood. On one level this paper is about using ethnography of the Muslim women’s dawa groups to show how they are able to tackle this problem of the situation’s influence on them. On a secondary level, this paper shows off how these women use meso-level phenomena to help do this work. In this paper I concentrate on three concepts within the meso-level, embodiment, habit, skill and affect. I show how these women train to control their moods by retraining their habits and how they break and create new habits using ritual spaces such as mosques. More interestingly I argue these women counter the manipulation of their moods originating in the environment by scaffolding their own, more virtuous, affects into the environment. Though seemingly mundane, the effect is powerful. These women use others to regulate mood, use what’s called the “Islamic soundscape” in Egypt to anchor their mood, and finally, use their hijabs (veils) as a portable mood-altering technology.
This second paper on the meso-level is under review and is entitled “The Affordance Account of Relational Autonomy”. Over twenty years, the relational autonomy literature has had two entrenched positions, internalism and externalism. Internalism claims that psychological factors, are sufficient as the standard for autonomy while externalists argue that an enabling social structure is also necessary. On one level, this paper uses affordances as a tool that connects the internal, skills and capacities, with the external, the material environment and ways of life, to argue that inside and outside are necessarily connected and therefore the external is necessary for autonomy. But I also criticize externalists for assuming that the political structure exhausts what is “external” in order to draw attention to phenomena in the meso-level and their effect on autonomy. On a second level, this paper shows the schema of concepts that make up the meso-level which center around affordances: embodiment, practices, skills, capacities, habits, moods, ways of life, ontogenesis (early development) and ecology. The variety of work these concepts can do include connecting the meso-level to the structural to give a finer grade explanation of phenomena that often get easily glossed over. Iris Marion Young shows us how something mundane as the difference between men and women’s throwing ability is actually connected to larger structures like patriarchy but also habits, skills and capacities learned in differential developmental environment for girls. Importantly the meso-level can also shine a light on phenomena that a focus only on structure misses. This includes a level of resources that might allow people to be autonomous even when structurally oppressed. Another is to point out that even when there are structural enablements such as the ADA and subways are built accessibly, that our ableist habits might shrink affordances and autonomy for disabled people.
New Book Project
This project aims to show using the meso-level that the transformative justice (TJ) movement is not just oppositional, a reaction to police brutality, but also a positive project. Miriam Kaba, echoing Kwame Ture argues that we should be suspicious about movements that only talk about destroying but not creating or building. If we gather our normative bearings by opposition to something bad in our society, rather than building toward something truly different, we tend to preserve the same frameworks we should be breaking out of. Many TJ advocates argue that if at this moment, all the prison doors were opened, it would be a disaster. This is because we as a society do not yet have the habits and skills to support structural abolition.
More controversially, I claim that this positive project is an affective one of moving from the feeling of individual security to the feeling of community safety. The question is: why are so many, even those who are targeted by this violence, so loyal to the feeling of security? It seems clear to those who focus solely on structural explanations that the fear underpinning the feeling of security is stoked by the media who benefit from sensationalizing crime. I argue that while this tell us parts of this story, we do not get the full picture without looking at the meso-level. I claim that the reliance on 911 has trained and habituated us to seeing it as a ‘one stop shop’ to outsource all our problems. Our reliance on calling the police also enervates our community-building muscle and the skills we once had to solve these problems ourselves. Here, focusing on the meso-level allows us to see the centrality of mutual-aid and the connection between self-transformation and social transformation. A single act is infinitesimal and insufficient. But if practiced reiteratively, like a skill, one can, over the time of one’s life in concert with others, help one’s community to rely less on outsourcing its help. Less outsourcing to 911causes lower budgets for the police. Here we can see how self-transformation is social transformation.
Through mutual aid we can see that TJ is mundane in a normatively good way and works on a timescale that allows people to see the results of their actions in the world. In trying to push for structural change, people often feel that political interventions can only be effective if the “objective conditions” are ripe. What was attractive for my students was that a mutual aid group with some close friends can be started now. A second problem with focusing only on structural change is the time scale. Instead of making tangible change here and now, we are often asked to act now for changes that only future generations will see. While it may famously take ten thousand hours of practice, tangible change at the meso-level can be seen within one’s lifetime.
This last point leads to my concluding claim, that the different goals of groups in the meso-level leads to a different view of failure for political movements. As a backlash to the protests against the police in 2020, we have seen police budgets rise rather than get defunded. This is failure if we concentrate solely on tangible goals expressed in budgets and changes in policy: the framework of structural politics. But if we look at this within the framework of the meso-level of politics, success is not an upward line but reiterative and cyclical. Through communities of practice, skills that were considered very hard or impossible, such as the double somersault was in 1908 in diving, is considered standard for novices today. Instead, success means making sure elders are involved in skill transmission so that one does not continually reinvent the wheel but instead pushes one’s habits and skills to new creative and virtuosic performances, such that what was considered impossible in the past becomes routine.