Redistributing attention and authority in political philosophy

On Tuesday, I discovered that the Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy has 23 chapters (the introduction included), of which 20 have been written by political philosophers based in the USA, 2 by political philosophers then based in the UK who have in the meantime moved to the USA, and 1 chapter by a duo of political philosophers based in Oxford. And while this is a pretty striking case, in many if not most handbooks authors from the USA and the UK are numerically dominating.

I’m not going to argue why this is undesirable. If you think this is not a problem, then you don’t have to read on. I have very little time right now, so I’m going to focus on solutions, rather than trying to convince those who haven’t been part of this conversation before on why this is a problem.

But for those of us who think this is a problem, the question then is what to do.

Most of the time, editors of such overview books are based in the USA or the UK; most of the time, they get asked for those roles. They face many barriers in knowing what political philosophers do who are from/based in countries outside the Anglophone academic centre – the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The philosophers that are not based in that academic centre are less often published in the journals that those editors read. They are less likely to (be able to) attend the conferences that those editors attend. They are less likely to be among the seminar speakers. And, as we can infer from the above pretty striking example, they are less likely to be invited to contribute to standard works in their field.

Edited volumes, conferences, seminar series with only speakers from the academic centre of philosophy transport an image: that ‘good’ philosophy is done in the USA and other Anglophone countries, and that if one wants to be successful, that’s where you have to be. This image, however, narrows and impoverishes philosophy, as it excludes valuable knowledge produced elsewhere – see, for example, Bryan Van Norden or Katrin Flikschuh’s work if you want to read the arguments.

I have my own ideas about what may explain these forms of underrepresentation of scholars who are not based in the Anglophone academic centre. But I’ll follow the strategy of the feminist philosophers who, years ago, launched the Gendered Conference Campaign. I will not try to come up with explanations, but rather focus on the effects of these forms of underrepresentation and ask what we can do.

It’s clear that we’re witnessing a vicious circle here. If editing roles (being instances of academic power) are given to political philosophers based in the academic centre, and if the (writings of) philosophers from outside the academic centre are not known to editors (or more generally to those who have an influence in the distribution of attention and opportunities to gain authority), they are less likely to be invited to contribute to books and conferences, do not have an opportunity to gain that experience and grow in academic status — and off goes the vicious cycle of ignorance and exclusion.

A few months ago, Filippo Contesi pointed out and argued for something very close to what I’m arguing here – but his focus was on those not being native speakers of English. But I think the problem is not primarily with the language, but with the fact that there are, in terms of authority and status, geo-academic inequalities; they overlap to a large extent, but not entirely, with those who speak English. If your mother tongue is, say, German or Hindi, but you moved to a UK or US elite institute, you become part of the academic centre; if you were raised in India in English, but stay in India and do not make frequent visits to the US/UK, having English as a native language won’t help you much; the chances are very big that American political philosophers will not know your work.

What are then solutions to break this cycle of ignorance and exclusion?

We need something like the Gendered Conference Campaign, but then not for women but for scholars who are not based in the Anglophone academic centre, and modified to take into account that inviting people long-distance for physical meetings is expensive and bad for climate reasons. And it seems to me that there are degrees of being at the centre or at the margins, with our colleagues in the global South, who publish often in languages other than English, and who often have the least access to material resources, being most overlooked.

The first thing to do is to read (more often) the works of those who are not working at universities in Anglophone countries. Read their papers and books. Make sure your library has a subscription, e.g. to the South African Journal of Philosophy. Invite political philosophers from outside the academic global centre to give talks at your department. Invite them to be visitors. Attend their conferences (which is now often even possible without travelling). If you’re involved in running a journal, try to free up fonds to help papers originally published in languages other than English to be translated.

I also think we should not be afraid to admit to ourselves and acknowledge that there is much work by political philosophers outside Anglophone countries that we do not know because there are barriers to knowing them, as long as we make steps (whether small or larger) to do something about this. I have friends and colleagues who have strong networks among political philosophers in Asia, Africa and among Indigenous thinkers and they have several times advised me on what to read and whom to invite.

For those of you who do not have such friends, I hereby open the comments sections in which you can give recommendations for the names/writings of political philosophers from outside the Anglophone centre, whose work you think of highly and should be read more widely. I’m writing this post with a nasty deadline staring at me, but will join that conversation over the next days in the comments section.

NB – Thanks to Dorothea Gädeke and Serene Khader for comments on a draft of this post.