Gatekeeping, Class, and Applied Epistemology
Show notes
In this episode, Élaina interviews Louise Durham, a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Louise talks about the three “lightbulb moments” that motivated her decision to pursue academic philosophy. This episode is for all those who have been told to give up and who kept going mostly out of spite. It’s also for everyone who ever failed a logic class. You’re in good company.
You can follow Louise Durham on Twitter @louderlh and out Instagram @philosophyreads.
Book mentioned in this episode:
“Miseducation: Inequality, Education & the Working Classes”, by Diane Reay
Buying the book from this link will generate a small percentage to support the podcast.
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Find the transcripts at https://www.elainagauthiermamaril.com/philosophy-casting-call-podcast
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Philosophy Casting Call is hosted, edited, and produced by Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril
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Transcript
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 0:04: This is Philosophy Casting Call.
Hello, and welcome to Philosophy Casting Call, a podcast that features underrepresented philosophical talent. My name is Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril and I’m your host and resident casting director. Today, we’re staying local to Aberdeen, Scotland. I first met Louise Durham on Twitter before we realised that she was just starting her PhD in philosophy at the University of Aberdeen as I was finishing mine. This episode captured our very first speaking conversation and since then we have become friends and continue to share our love of books, philosophy, and musicals. As you will hear, Louise is working on the epistemic injustices against working class adolescents and I ask her some questions about how this research fits in with institutional appeals to “diversity, equity, and inclusion”. It was a bit funny editing this episode just as I finished reading Sara Ahmed’s book “On Being Included”, which is very critical of EDI policies and practices in higher education in the UK. So I hope my conversation with Louise encourages you to think on this topic and on gatekeeping in general. Without further ado, here is my interview with Louise Durham.
Hi, Louise, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Do you like to introduce yourself to the listeners?
Louise Durham 2:04
Yes. So I'm Louise, and I'm a new, very new PhD student at the University of Aberdeen.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 2:12
And what do you study?
Louise Durham 2:13
Philosophy.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 2:14
I wanted to interview you, because I think it's very important to talk to young postgrads, or I shouldn't say young, because you can be a post grad at any age, but like an an early, early postgrad, because I think it's good to have that conversation in between the generations, so to speak, and to also understand why people keep wanting to do philosophy at an advanced degree and what prompts you to do that. And I actually found you on Twitter, like I find a lot of my guests, because you were commenting on some kind of classist responses or comments that you've been having as part of you, you know, working for a living and to fulfil your your duties as as a philosopher, and I really wanted to ask you why you chose philosophy, how you came about here and how you got to the PhD.
Louise Durham 3:17
Alright, so I like to think of my philosophy career, and like three sort of lightbulb moments. So I've not even been doing philosophy very long. We didn't have it when I was at school until the very, very last
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 3:32
And you did school in Scotland?
Louise Durham 3:33
Yes, yeah. Just outside Edinburgh. Yeah, we didn't have like a philosophy department or anything like that. And then we had one student teacher who came in for about six weeks, and did philosophy with us and our Religious, Model and Education. And we were doing the Cosmological Argument and it just, it was like, it just all made sense. I was like, "This is what I can do. This is like forming arguments, defending them. That's what I'm good at. It finally makes sense". So I changed my uni application last minute to do philosophy as well, which was a bit stressful at work. Yeah.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 4:12
I mean, I think it's so interesting that that's all it took, in a way, like you had these two weeks snd you're like, "Let me change the course of the next fours years of my life!"
Louise Durham 4:23
Yeah, change everything. I was applying to study French, and then I changed all of the universities I was studying, I was applying to so because there was only five that like joint French philosophy degrees. And then by second year of uni, I dropped French and committed to philosophy. That was fun.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 4:43
And you said like, when you discovered the kind of argumentative structure, had you, had other activities or places in your life where you could do that? And it kind of just oh, this is a discipline I could study?
Louise Durham 4:57
No, really. I don't think like we did moralarguments very, very vaguely in like RME, but we never did any sort of depth to them. Like we never didn't even like even like the "premise, premise, conclusion" like format. We never went through anything like that. So it was just something I was a wee bit good at.
And so now you've changed your applications applied to completely different unis got into it, and then what's your second lightbulb moment.
So the second one's a little bit more bitter, but it's more of a fun story, I think. I was not amazing at all aspects of philosophy to begin with. I was doing really, really badly in logic.I think I took it four times, by the time I finished my undergraduate. I knew you were allowed four resits and I only had two attempts at this exam at this point, and I was getting all these emails from the university and that, like I wasn't good enough, Iwas just going to be like removed from the uni wasn't gonna come back. So many battles with a lot of admin staff. It was very, very stressful. I was getting like A's and B's in every other philosophy course. And it didn't seem completely fair that I wasn't really being heard. So I had a meeting with a senior tutor who told me that I wasn't going to be very successful in philosophy, so I should drop out and get a full time job, which made me want to do philosophy harder, because I knew I was good in other courses. So I was eventually allowed another resit and eventually got through everything. But a lot of it has been trying to prove a lot of people wrong. Yeah.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 6:29
I mean, I can't believe people still say this, like in my very first episode of Philosophy Casting Call with Shelley Tremain she said something similar. And I mean, she went to grad school, like many years ago, and they were just like, "Yeah, you know, you're not cut out for this, you should just quit."
Louise Durham 6:45
I think a lot of that is sort of helped form the basis of my PhD project as well. Like the fact that this still happens, because I very, very vividly remember that meting because helooked at all my grades and he did seem a bit confused that I was doing really badly in this like one course, but doing quite well in everything else. And then he saw what school I went to. And he saw that I was like a Widening Participation student.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 7:07
What does that mean?
Louise Durham 7:09
So Widening Participation is a thing in unis that they provide, like other access routes into universities for loads of different reasons. But I think the main ones are sort of like underfunded schools, low progression schools, people with like lower income backgrounds, people who are care experienced. I think there's options for people with like parents in the armed forces, and things like that as well. So it's sort of a different like support system for people who've not, have gone from like non traditional backgrounds, in academia anyway. So when he saw that I was one of those students who'd come from a non traditional background, his whole outlook in the meetingchanged and he told me to get a job instead.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 7:49
Yeah, because at first, when you said like, "Go get a job", usually lecturers will go be like, "Maybe you should change your major, or maybe you should, like, tweak the degree so you get like a slightly different degree". But the fact that he told you to go get a job, for me rang alarm bells, in my mind.
Louise Durham 8:09
So now I'm getting a philosophy job, whether he likes it or not!
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 8:15
Well, good luck with that, for different reasons, not because of you, but because of the market. I mean, but good for you for seeing that, "Hey, I'm, no I can do this. I'm just struggling with this one subject. And that's not worth throwing away my entire degree." And I speak to this as someone who also failed logic, and who has now a PhD. So I mean, the more and more I explore, let me say, alternative kind of philosophies, the more I realised that the obsession with logic, as it is construed in kind of Western history of thought, is very arbitrary. Like, there's no reason that you must go through this in order to be good at philosophy, we just decided that this is what it is.
Louise Durham 9:08
When I was doing my undergraduate, I think it was quite off putting for a lot of people as well, because our logic class was like the very first semester of first year, and you're easily in a class of 500 people at the lectures, and maybe half of that went through second year.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 9:23
I know that in in other disciplines this happenes, so I wouldn't be surprised, but it could be a culling method. Like, "Well, if you can't cut it, then you shouldn't continue." I mean, I've had friends like who are a bit older than me and this was quite common as a pedagogical tool. Like I don't know if teachers or universities are still doing this, but it used to be fairly regular that you know, you would have this one core course in your first year that was intentionally made so that it would reduce the number of students in second year.
Louise Durham 10:01
Well, makes a lot of sense.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 10:03
But you made it, you made it through logic! And one day you will dedicate your, your dissertation to this lecturer.
Louise Durham 10:13
Got a note of all these people somewhere.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 10:16
It has a very Legally Blonde moment. We just like those who thought I'd fail, who taught me to prevail? It's like, yes. And so you said it informed what you want to work on now. So what are you working on now?
Louise Durham 10:33
Yeah, so my PhD project is based around epistemic injustice, but I want to look at it from a working class teenage learner perspective. So ultimately, I think what I'm trying to say is that people experience epistemic injustice as teenage learners. Those are like 16 to 18 year olds, when you're not quite an adult and not quite a child. People experience epistemic injustice as being working class. So our working class teenage learners get a really harsh helping of that, which has an immense impact on their sort of ambitions and aspirations to apply to universities or colleges or any sort of further education.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 11:15
And was discovering epistemic injustice your third lightbulb moment?
Louise Durham 11:20
Yes, yes. So it was until about halfway through my master's, that I'd even heard of epistemic injustice. So so that's when I was starting to put together like PhD projects, I was trying to think about what I was most interested in and what I wanted to work on and write about. And then someone mentioned epistemic injustice, we did a course on it. And it was like, that's, that's the one, we're going to do that.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 11:44
And for people who might be unfamiliar, how would you define epistemic injustice?
Louise Durham 11:49
The way that I like to explain it is, it's like a prejudicial misattribution of knowledge. So based on some sort of characteristic someone has, whether it's like race, gender, sexuality, anything like that, you're not given them the credibility that they are do. I think when this first sort of came out and philosophy, it was predominantly from like a feminist perspective that they were looking at. So women being attributed less credibility in what they're saying, because of the fact that they're women. It's branched out a lot more more recently, there was a paper I just read this morning about like epistemic injustice and healthcare. So how the people's like status as patients undermines their credibility to talk about their own pain, and things like that, or their own knowledge of medical issues that they may or may not have.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 12:50
Yeah, that's my bread and butter. Do you relate this directly to your own experience of kind of experiencing that epistemic injustice of you as a student, and then because of one characteristic that you have, not being believed or not being afforded a certain amount of credibility?
Louise Durham 13:13
I think so. Going the school that I went to, and having the experiences that undergraduate that I had a "No, that happens." And I think the point of this project is to look at, like the scale of how much it happens and to see what we can do to try and stop it. You don't need to look very far other than like a student newspaper to see all these quotes from working class people who have said things like their classmates tell them is weird to hear something smart and like a regional accent, and things like that. Yeah. So it's, it's a bit intense.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 13:46
That whole like, "Oh, you're so eloquent!" backhanded compliment.
Louise Durham 13:50
Yeah. Yeah. Or we get a lot of like, "You're trying to be middle class." There's a paper I read another day about how the goal doesn't need to be aiming for the middle class. You can still like excel as working class people. I guess. There's also weird, weird things going on in social class.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 14:10
Like in the sense of you don't have to shed your working class identity?
Louise Durham 14:15
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 14:17
Good. You don't have to work to, quote unquote, pass.
Louise Durham 14:20
Yeah, yeah.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 14:22
Yeah. It's interesting because I spoke to another, another guest Danna who's in the Philippines and she works on epistemic injustice relating to survivors of sexual assault on university campuses. And, again, it feels like people who are drawn to epistemic injustice as a topic or a theory are really interested in kind of doing practical applied philosophy because they're answering something that's happened either to themselves or around them in their community. So going forward, have you thought about how your philosophical practice will have maybe applied possibilities?
Louise Durham 15:05
A wee bit, a wee bit. I don't want to get too ahead of myself! But I'm sort of hoping that it can be used, at the very, very least in colleges and universities, either like their admissions departments, or they're waiting on participation departments, because I feel like this sort of knowledge, injustice is something that they're just not really notice that, like you notice, people from low income backgrounds, you notice people who are catered experience, but we're not know as soon as that all of them who come from certain types of schools, or certain decrees of schools are all having this sort of impact on their knowledge that they don't deserve?
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 15:45
And have you had people in your academic career who have encouraged you? Or what's the counterpoint to the things that we shouldn't do when we interact with young people?
Louise Durham 15:59
Oh, this is what I'm not sure of yet. So there have been people for me especially, there was like one teacher at school, who, like helped me get through those exams. And there was one lecturer undergraduate who had a bit of a, an email war with the other tutor who told me to get a job. So there were like, individual peoples are looking out for me. But I don't think it should be down to like one person looking out for one shouldn't I don't think the experience should be that we've got a whole group of people not doing well, let's choose one and run with them. I'm hoping that what we can do is we can look at the ways that we talk to young people in classrooms. And in schools, I tutor secondary school pupils as well, just now, not that so much this term, but last term, there was a lot of them who are coming to sessions and that their teachers were telling them they're not teaching them a certain aspect of the course, because they know they're not going to pass it anyway. So you're giving up on them before they've even tried. So I think if I can have like a full project that says this is what's happening, this is the impact it's having. Stop it!
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 17:16
But this makes me so angry!
Louise Durham 17:18
It's so heartbreaking. Because the thing is, when we do it in our sessions, they get it.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 17:23
But it's this idea of projecting kind of this defeatist attitude onto young people. And where my parents live, it's quite rural. And as a teenager, I would work in the day camps. And it was very, you know, working class, low income families, a lot of unemployment. And they would tell like the five year olds "No one from here does anything good". Like if you're from here, you're going nowhere, like they would tell this to five year old children. So do you situate your work within equity, diversity and inclusion? How do you position your own scholarship within these overarching goals that institutions like universities have?
Louise Durham 18:10
So I think I've only just find out applied epistemology is an area that was those that's quite useful to find out, because I think that's pretty much exactly what I am.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 18:23
I'm asking because everything you're saying is kind of jiving with both what I've been involved in for the uni, but my own work with philosophy of disability, and kind of empowerment, and autonomy and healthcare. But also I've been teaching, this is my fourth time teaching the feminist philosophy course. And it has all of those things that you're used to hearing with discrimination against women or based on race, and based on sexual orientation and things like that, and the call for more kind of systemic changes and systemic actions as opposed to only individual attitudes, as you were saying, and I mean, in my own experience, when I was asked to first reflect on my experience as a disabled student, I came up with a similar answer to you, like I had specific people that were in my corner, and that allowed me to get to where I am. But until I got to the PhD level, I wasn't exposed to any kind of disability support disability services, any of them. So there was no kind of structural institutional mandate. I was at the mercy of, you know, kind people who took time and interest in me. So I'm just asking because I'm okay, we will... let's get political because I have not hidden it: you know, class, gender race, you know, Angela Davis had something to say and I feel like we've kind of compartmentalised a lot in institutional language and in policymaking. So I guess my question is more: do you see your research your topic as intersecting at all with those kinds of other feminist or philosophy of race?
Louise Durham 20:22
Yeah, I hope so. I hope it, well, I've been reading a lot of more like sociological things. And there's a book that I'm on just now on miseducation by Diane Reay, which is a really like comprehensive study and to the inequality in state education in England.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 20:41
I guess it's more of a personal question, so feel free to not answer it if you're not comfortable. But as I mentioned at the beginning, you know, you have multiple jobs to put you through a postgraduate school, and do you still feel slighted or discriminated against within the uni itself?
Louise Durham 21:06
Oh, no, so much within the uni itself. Because I think by the time I've got here, you know, two degrees, and less and less people are looking at where you came from. So that's all right. Yeah, not so much by the uni itself. And to be honest, with the uni, with a lot of things still being online, I've not been in person very much like there's not been a massive amount of events or like the welcome and orientation stuff is open online. So I've not really had too much like exposure to the university, I guess it's all been over email where no one can hear your accent. So as you know, right, it has been mainly what I, what I tweeted about, which was, I work in a bar as well, was there one of my jobs and a customer came in, mentioned that they were doing a PhD and I was like, "Oh, cool. Me too." And they did not believe me. It took, it took a while to convince them that I was actually studying a PhD as well. And the only information that they had on me was that I worked in a bar. So there was some sort of disjunct.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 22:09
Do you also feel on the flip side, that as you say, your two degrees in taking Beyonce is the best revenge? Is the paper. Two papers? Do you feel a disconnect from people back home? Or like other people who haven't followed your academic journey?
Louise Durham 22:34
A little bit? Like I'm from a very big town, and a lot of people do like move out to cities, like become incredibly successful. aAlot of people do find it a bit bizarre that I'm still in university, like, it's not like a one and done, like, sort of degree. So it's a wee bit, a wee bit bizarre for them, especially when I talk about how, like, I don't have funding for this year, so I had to fund it myself. And a lot of people's first reactions back home was, how did you do that? How, how did that happen? And how is it going to keep happening? Just the next question.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 23:11
Yeah, because I just find it sometimes, like, especially philosophy is hard to explain to people and they're like, "So you're doing this instead of working? I don't understand..."
Louise Durham 23:25
Yeah.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 23:25
Because that can be the thing as well of the the double bind of never feeling welcome within academia, and then kind of not feeling understood by your community of origin. And that can happen like generationally with one's parents or can happen with one's peers and one's friends. So I just thought I'd ask.
Louise Durham 23:49
Yeah, it's, it's a weird one. Because I think a lot of people are like, when I tell them that I'm doing a PhD, they go, "Oh, that's great. What are you going to do with that?" I think if you're not like on it, you don't just like a lot of people necessarily don't get why you're doing it or where it's gonna go until you're there. At my first graduation, my brother said something very similar to a lot of other people that grew up with it was my undergraduate graduation. And it made some sort of comment about how, like, we made a big deal of it, and it was great. And he was like, this is like your one day and I was like, "Well, I'm not gonna have at least two more graduations!", and he was like, "You're the most work shy person I've ever met, because you wouldn't just get a job." He does not know how much work is going on.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 24:40
So obviously, usually, I ask my guests what you're working on right now and what you're working on right now. And I won't ask you like, how long was the dissertation because that's the worst thing you could ask someone. But I will ask you what you're reading right now that's giving you life.
Louise Durham 24:59
So I'm reading just now Miseducation by Diane Reay. It's less philosophy and more sociological. It's like a investigation and to working class, state-maintained English schools. I only heard of it about maybe two months ago. And it's really, really fascinating. And it's really like thorough, and the research that goes into is incredible. It is only English schools that she's looked at. So a lot of it's very like, like, if there's like an interesting bit that she's mentioned, there's not like a Scottish counterpart to it. So everything that she said, it's very likely that it also happens in Scottish state skills. But it's, it's not like exact.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 25:50
Yeah, and just for the listeners, the UK doesn't have one educational system. So every like nation in it. So I think maybe Wales and England are the same thing?
Unknown Speaker 26:03
So I think Northern Ireland is maybe a bit different?
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 26:06
But definitely Scottish... Yeah, Northern Ireland and Scotland are different. But if there are any Welsh people here, please correct us! So there won't be the same policies or even the same curriculum.
Louise Durham 26:20
No, no, we don't do the same. We don't have the same like qualifications as the English state-maintained schools. A lot of the Scottish private schools do the same qualifications as the English skills which can sometimes make a bit complicated, but Scottish state-maintanted schools have a different curriculum and self-assessments.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 26:43
So where can people find you on the internet?
Louise Durham 26:48
Everywhere? So on Twitter I' @loudurhl and I also have a super fun, super dorky Instagram philosophy book page. If people want to find me there as well, that would be fun, which is just @philosophyreads.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 27:12
Alright, well, good luck, and maybe we'll do a check in in a couple of years, see how you're doing. But thank you so much for joining me today!
Louise Durham 27:23
Thanks!
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 27:24
And yeah, have a lovely day. Bye!
Louise Durham 27:26
You too! See you later.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 27:34
Thank you so much Louise for joining me and thank you to you all for listening. If you would like to reach Louise, I will put her details in the show notes along with the title of the book she is reading. I hope you will continue to follow @philoCCpod on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. If you have any questions or if you would like to suggest future guests, you can email me at philosophycastingcallpod@gmail.com. The best way to support the podcast is to subscribe wherever you are listening right now and rate and review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, but you are also welcome to leave me a tip or to become a monthly supporter on ko-fi.com/philoccpod. Keep smashing those gates and, until next time, bye!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai