Body Knowledge
Body knowledge and 4E cognition
Elena Clare Cuffari is a Professor at Franklin and Marshall College. Shay Welch is a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta. In this episode, they discuss embodied cognition and participatory sensemaking in relation to marginalized body epistemologies. They share insights from a recent conference that brought together diverse perspectives on how embodied cognition intersects with issues of race, gender, and activism. Welch emphasizes that she never separates her scholarship from her personal life, seeing philosophy as inherently connected to her lived experience. Cuffari highlights the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of her work with colleagues, which seeks to challenge traditional philosophical boundaries. They address the challenges of integrating marginalized voices into academic fields and the importance of recognizing the body's knowledge. The conversation also touches on the discomfort that arises in both academic and social contexts when established norms are challenged, and how this requires responsibility beyond blame.
00:00 Building a Community for Philosophical Dialogue
02:02 Introduction to Embodied Cognition and Participatory Sensemaking
02:22 Exploring Personal Philosophical Interests
04:11 Defining Embodied Cognition and Participatory Sensemaking
08:08 The Roots and Relevance of Embodied Cognition
15:14 Challenges in Academia and Marginalized Philosophies
28:51 The Concept of Normalcy in Philosophy and Society
37:17 Addressing Misunderstandings in Philosophy
39:34 Inclusivity and Change in Philosophy
43:18 Discomfort and Openness in Philosophical Inquiry
49:44 Marginalized Body Epistemologies
01:01:43 The Intersection of Philosophy and Personal Experience
01:05:57 Reflections on the Conference and Future Directions
Shay Welch: https://spelman.academia.edu/shaywelch
Read Rebecca Todd's post about Shay
Elena Cuffari: https://www.elenaclarecuffari.com/
Women in embodied Cognition: https://women-4e.com/
Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-04936-2#bibliographic-information
Linguistic Bodies: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547864/linguistic-bodies/
The quote Shay reads is chapter 8 of this book:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/oppression-and-the-body-christine-caldwell/1126641713
Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.
TRANSCRIPT
Shay and Elena on Love and Philosophy
[00:00:00] we need to have a community where we can talk to each other about doing these things. And when we all came together for the conference, it was so enriching and energizing
Shay Welch: I've never separated my scholarship from my life.
Philosophy comes to my life. My life doesn't come to philosophy.
Elena Cuffari: what you are afforded who is afforded what, who designed the space for who, and I think that that space can be a physical built designed space, or it can be a socially built normative space like academia,
and so I'm really interested in how the discomfort becomes, becomes my discomfort, or I have to deal with that discomfort, or I have to mitigate that discomfort. And that will depend on how have I been socialized?
Shay Welch: there is no either or for either of us. It is everything all at once. It is this and that and the other [00:01:00] and nothing is right or wrong. There's richer understandings or more, more rigid understandings or So, so the binaries for us don't exist
so it's, it's not that something is normal or not normal. It's not something is right or wrong. It's not something that it's either or it is all
Elena Cuffari: people pleasing is very important, right? like, it's taken a lot to deconstruct this very basic, obvious, thing that is nonetheless psychologically harmful if you don't ever pay attention to it and, like, excavate it and figure out, I'm not here to make you feel good. that is a basic message that I've had since childhood. So I'm really interested, I guess, in the co responsibility of what we're doing to each other in interacting and just having these reactions of what's comfortable or not, or what's normal or not, which are not, to be blamed for necessarily, but must be, I think, examined.
And as a liberatory resistant process, I'm going to actively make people uncomfortable [00:02:00] until they recognize that they are the source of, of the expectations that are oppressive.
Shay Welch: what it means to act like a girl changes in different contexts. What it means to act like a girl at a nightclub is not the same thing as what it means to act like a girl at a philosophy conference. There is no expectation about what girls are supposed to do because different communities have different gender expectations.
Elena Cuffari: I'm working to relate personally to my work at the like at something even close to the level of what she draws on and does. The closest thing to me was like Interview study life world interview study on hope trying to deal with my paralyzing climate anxiety as a parent I'm still working on that, but I definitely tend to operate on a slightly more abstract level.
I will say being so immersed in participatory sensemaking has led me to very collaborative, a very collaborative style of work
Shay Welch: I would just say that I don't think anybody is wrong. I don't think anybody is wrong. And I invite you to join us in our shenanigans. [00:03:00]
Andrea Hiott: Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott Today we're talking with Shay Welch. And Elena Cuffari, and
we're gonna talk about body knowledge, or body epistemologies is another way of saying that, and four e cognition, which I will explain later, or which we explain in the conversation.
This conversation came about because of an email list I'm on called Women in Embodied Cognition. And through that list I learned about a conference that Shea Welch was organizing, and Elena Cuffari was going to be helping her organize, and she was the keynote for it in Atlanta at Spelman College about bodily epistemologies and 4 E cognition.
So that's what we're discussing here Shea Welsh is the associate professor of philosophy at Spelman College. She's currently the scholar in residence for the City of Atlanta's public art project She's written a lot of books. Shea's also a dancer by the way. She [00:04:00] wrote Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System dancing with Native American Epistemology. Elena Cuffari is a professor at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.
Elena is also well known for her writings and papers and philosophy, and also a book she wrote that's very well known in the inaction or inactive cognition called linguistic bodies, the continuity between Life and Language.
She wrote that with Ezekiel DePalo and Hanne de Jaeger two very important people in the field, which you'll hear more about in other episodes.
So body knowledge, bodily epistemologies. To put it in a very two short sentence, it's about the body as a source of knowledge. So we're thinking about the body itself as a way that we come to know the world and to know ourselves as well.
And four E cognition is very connected to that. I will post a separate little video on YouTube about what four e cognition is with a whole bunch of resources of all the [00:05:00] amazing people who've been working on that. But for now, I'll just say that the four E's. Like the letter E stand for embodied, embedded, extended and inactive.
And that's not quite true either because sometimes instead of embedded you hear ecological, which maybe you recognize from some of the conversations we've had about ecological psychology and JJ Gibson, but also the E is sometimes environmental or ethical at least. Uh, that was brought up in this conference.
I also think of the E as emotional sometimes because we don't think of cognition as emotion, but actually it is, at least in my opinion, and I think others agree with that too. Although others I've talked to recently such as Tim Ingold doesn't even like to use the word cognition anymore.
Maybe because it, it sounds maybe like it's in the head or it reminds you of some other discipline. I just mentioned that because these are controversial terms and there's a lot of scholarship about it, and I [00:06:00] will put links to those on the substack in the
in the description of this episode, and you can also look for that YouTube video, but the conference we're talking about is about how the body knows, and it's looking at it from a first person perspective, which is another theme we talk about often on this podcast, taking it seriously, trying to listen to others express their first person perspective.
All of this in this context of the body embodiment and knowledge
Often in philosophy, it's just an assumption that cognition is in the head or in the brain, and this is saying it's in the body, and it's also in the dynamics of the body within its encounter, it's ongoing encounter with the environment, with people, with everything you encounter in your daily action.
So if you just think about as you move through the world, how you come to know that world, it's. A bodily process
and though we don't talk about love directly here in this conversation, maybe we will at a later date. I do [00:07:00] think this idea of embodied cognition and feeling as a form of knowledge is an important. Connection to the idea of love. It makes me think of Audre Lorde, for example, right now. I think in an interview that she gave, she said that our most genuine path to knowledge is feeling.
And I can definitely see where that's coming from and I think a lot of us can in in our life, if we really think about. How we understand life and what, what we know about our life. There is a very real connection and orientation to understand the world and the body and one another in the writings of both of these scholars. So I hope you'll look for some of their work. And I'm sure you'll find it inspiring.
it's great to have Shay and Elena together here. They're a really good combination, as you'll hear, and I'm happy to bring you this conversation today. We had a little internet issue here. I think it was Elena's internet went out, which I somehow didn't really notice as we were talking, so there's a few, fluttering moments . I'm still learning with all the audio and people are helping me, but, this is mostly just a volunteer [00:08:00] effort of a lot of different people who help out. So I really appreciate your support and I hope you'll join the Substack and the YouTube or go to the website and join there so we can build this up and make the quality even better and continue on.
I really do appreciate your support. I really do appreciate all your comments and emails and anything. This is a project that's bigger for me than just trying to do a podcast. It's really about the research and the things I'm thinking about every day and the connections that I'm trying to make and trying to do something good and find a way to connect love and philosophy.
So. Thank you for being here. I hope you're doing well wherever you are out there, and I wish you a beautiful day.
Hi. Thanks for having us. It's very fun. So I just thought to start for people who don't know about the embodied cognition and the woman's embodied cognition group with your, which you're both part of, and we're going to talk about today and a conference that you recently put on
maybe you should just introduce yourself. Just give a little. say what you're [00:09:00] interested in at this moment,
Shay Welch: Okay, I am Shea Welch. I am a professor at Spelman College, which is a small liberal arts college for black women in Atlanta. Do a lot of different things, but currently I am writing in two separate areas, um, both on embodied cognition.
One of them is on the role of public art in democratic participatory sensemaking, and then the other one is on embodied cognition related to madness.
Elena Cuffari: I love Shay's work so much. I wish I could say I was
Andrea Hiott: doing this. It's a very cool
Elena Cuffari: yeah. I'm Elena Cuffari. I'm a professor at Franklin and Marshall, which is a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. I, I support primarily the CogSci moral psych programs, which are a blend of philosophy and psych, but I'm in the psychology department. I also teach psychology courses. Um, but I like Shay and philosopher by training.[00:10:00]
And I am working on a lot of things to sort of elaborate and extend the linguistic bodies paradigm. But right now, primarily, I'm engaged in stuff on, what linguistic autonomy might mean vis a vis interactions with, um, AI or non human agents and Gesture work and how the gesture methodology continued work.
And I would say also, more non non human animal stuff. Not to not just robots and AI, but also animals and humans and interactions. So basically like interaction dynamics. And that's also what. What I brought out in the conference, or wanted to try to do, is explore human human interaction dynamics in, um, unjust and oppressive situations, and what that might mean for participatory sensemaking and linguistic bodies.
Andrea Hiott: Okay, so for some people who might not have heard any of these terms, embodied cognition, and participatory sense making. You both said both of those terms and they're very important, so [00:11:00] maybe you can both, say what they mean for you
Shay Welch: I cheat off Elena. I use her work. So honestly, the, my work is more of an application of her work. So I'm gonna let her take this one.
Okay. Oh, thanks.
See what I did there? See what I did?
Andrea Hiott: I just want to say too, because both of you do have an interactive Interesting relationship in the text, but and also in life. So feel free to ask each other questions or bring things up because that can happen too. we don't doesn't have to be me always saying things. Okay.
Elena Cuffari: Okay. No, I like I like that. I like that a lot. Um, so, okay. Well, I mean, 4E, we use that language in the conference and embodied cognition is like really decades long movement in cognitive science or philosophy of mind or philosophy of cognitive science. Or cognitive linguistics. So like lots of different fields pertaining to mind studies that tries to bridge mind body separations [00:12:00] is how I would say it in the most general, way.
And it looks really, I also say, but just the embodied cog term looks super different for different theorists and applied folks. Um, so yeah, just any kind of exploration of how cognition comes out of our, Bodily life, and it can take different levels of radicalness, as people will say, um, I, and I think she also work a little closer to the inactive vein of this, which is a little bit deeper in its commitment, maybe to cognition as sense making cognition as the non neutral activity of living things to continue to live.
Andrea Hiott: So that's two of the E's of the 4E that's part of the conference is called, correct me if I say it wrong, but Marginalized Body Epistemologies and 4E Cognition was the name of the conference, I think. Is that right? Mm hmm. So two of those E's we have, embodied and enactive. And for those, is it, is it fair to say that instead of thinking of [00:13:00] cognition as in the head and in the brain too, we're thinking of it as a bodily process just to be really general?
Is that okay? Is that for both of you? Okay. Yeah, and then enactive, we, it, that gets to the participation and the interaction side of it, right? So that it's not just that cognition is in the body sitting there, but there's this ongoing interaction, continuous process of being alive, that whole process, everything that's going on with your body and the world around you. You want to add or change that? That's good.
Elena Cuffari: I would just, yeah, I would use that as a segue to participatory sensemaking. So I mean the other E is extended ecological. You know, came into the conference a bit are part of this story. But if you go from that sense making in the environment to the fact that we are not just humans, many kinds of creatures are really social environment.
So your environment isn't just stuff around you, but other beings. Participatory sensemaking is an inactive idea of social cognition. So how do we talk about [00:14:00] meaning making with others and traditionally in philosophy and psych, like social cognition means how I understand someone else's cognition or mind.
And in the participatory, so it's a lot of like thinking about others minds and participatory sensemaking is focused a lot more on thinking with others minds. Right. So how do we. actually intervene in or start making systems with others such that like our cognition can't be talked about without their cognition and the dynamic between.
Andrea Hiott: So that can get into the animals that you already brought up and AI that you already brought up and there's a lot of questions about where the lines of all these subjects do or do not cross or end or begin. But Shay, so you organized this conference so maybe you could talk a little bit about Why you had the idea for this and what it meant for you, where it was coming from, why you saw a need for
Shay Welch: Well, the interesting thing is, is like this conference stuff happens everywhere. This stuff happens everywhere all the [00:15:00] time, the problem is it's not done in the embodied cognition language.
And a lot of the things that I, I fuss about and the reason why I made the group is because, um, one, so many people have been working on this all along. And so it's important for the people who are doing embodied cognition and especially in activism right now to recognize that the true roots are in, you know, feminist and specifically a lot of indigenous and black feminist epistemologies of the body.
And also that, um, you don't see a lot of women and people of color writing in, in activism. even when they are, they're not really cited or included that much. There are a couple of big names, obviously, like Elena and [00:16:00] Hannah and, um, Michelle, right? My ace are really popular. Um, and I think Miriam
Andrea Hiott: Kyselo is in one of your papers uh, yeah.
Shay Welch: Yeah. And so like, even Right, uh, Maxine Sheets Johnstone was doing this a long time ago, but like she's not considered an embodied cognitive. person. Um, she's just kind of hijacked in a certain kind of way by certain kinds of people, it's, it's sort of interesting, right? So I'm before this, I was prepping my class notes and I want to read this to you.
So the book is called oppression in the body. I'm using it in my intro class and the author. Her name is Carla Shirell, and the title is called The Oppression of Black Bodies, The Demand to Simulate White Bodies and White Embodiment. And so she says, My somatic [00:17:00] experience of on and in as I write these words is very different.
I have the embodied sensation of racism on the surface of my body and not wanting to let it to be in and absorbed into my skin. My skin forms a barrier that racism can be scraped off. If I can catch it fast enough, I can do this removal with objects that do not damage, but smooth, but soothe and refresh.
My precious black skin, perhaps a loofah or freshly laundered washcloth. The racism that makes it past the permeable boundary of my skin requires a different removal process. In the writing, it often shifts, sequencing to smaller size and lighter weight, then out of my hands and feet. I am aware that some of it does not leave my body.
It is a pattern somatic marker that I have learned to meet and greet without demanding its removal or exit. I wish to transform it rather than strengthen its initial wounding purposes that entered from outside my body. It [00:18:00] may have entered 400 years ago. Yesterday, while I was sitting at the coffee shop down the street from my home, or a minute ago, as I was looking out the window, she says, I shouldn't have to be doing all of this work.
This is not mine. My anger has arrived, heating my ears and buzzing my upper chest. So, so, affective participatory sense making in an embedded, ecological, environmental, ongoing, dynamic, systemic process. Has been being written by women, you know, and women of color specifically, since we have been writing.
And I just felt, I'm sorry that I took the time to read that passage but I literally just prepped the notes on like right before we got on here and I was thinking like how explicitly relevant it was to our conversation and that honestly gets a little tiresome reading all of this work and embodied in activism [00:19:00] and knowing that I'm coming to it with a full sense of understanding because I have been doing all of this work on body epistemologies my whole training learning from these kinds of and working with these kinds of women.
like, that's why it was such an easy transition for me to use this language is like, I already knew it. I already knew it. I just kind of had to pick up the language that the men were using in a certain sort of respect. So like when I read Hana and Elena's work and all of that stuff, like the way that they write it, it's just a natural, more technical scientific articulation of, of these body knowledges itself.
So I just was like, We're already doing it. Why don't we make it more explicit and why don't we get together and and have these conversations together because while this stuff doesn't exist in the upper echelons and the older, more maybe prominent generations above us, maybe a generation or two above Elena and me, the younger, [00:20:00] especially the graduate students are doing this work.
They're blending and applying this work. And I was like, we need to have a community where we can talk to each other about doing these things. And when we all came together for the conference, it was so enriching and energizing and it was great. And Elena was there as like our expert and you know, it was just a wonderful time and like all of the papers.
And, and so that's, that's why I was doing it. And then I think that when I was talking to Elena about it, she was just so incredibly supportive that it became. you know, sort of a collaborative venture. And I think we're looking into pursuing more versions of this in the future.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's great that you corrected that, that it's, these ideas are, are out there in a lot of, It's just, I wouldn't see them normally in this philosophical world, so that was really [00:21:00] refreshing.
But, yeah, do you, did you want to say something to that, Alina, what she just said? I saw you kind of, no? Okay. Um, yeah, okay.
So, there's so much in there, and then that quote you read, and I guess to try to make real, I mean, because I can tell you really feel passionate about this. I think you've been at Spellman for over ten years or so, have you? Fourteen! Okay, so this is not like a new subject for you, and you've been teaching these subjects, and I looked your classes, you're even teaching Native American philosophy and things.
You're doing a lot of things that like, That just doing this show people often ask where can I find these things? Are people teaching classes on this? You know younger people who want to learn philosophy. So it's great that you're doing it. I do hope it's starting I do hope this becomes more normal in academia.
However, i'm just saying that you've already been doing this and I wonder about when you were both learning philosophy, did you encounter any of this at all? Because I remember studying it like cultural theory, but we have all these [00:22:00] little boundaries and categories we put each other in, which is why it's even hard to sometimes say you're this or that in, in this world of philosophy, because then you're supposed to be associated with this whole collection of, of things that maybe put you into a certain box.
So Yeah, I wonder how you developed your own views, if you felt like you were being put into boxes, if you've resisted those, or embraced those, or, or whatever, both of you.
Elena Cuffari: Okay, I'll start. This is an interesting one for you. Well, I was thinking when Shay was even speaking so wonderfully about These other traditions that infuse, especially some of our approach, some people's approaches to my own like very unique grad school experience at the University of Oregon, where I went to study with Mark Johnson to continue cognitive linguistics and embodied language work, but did a whole like side masters piece that was really on feminist phenomenology.
Um, and it was a place where I could study [00:23:00] feminist phenomenology. With Bayardas Tavarska and Bonnie Mann, but I also was in a philosophy of race and Latin American philosophy reading group way back. This is like years before 2010. I'm dating myself. But like, um, you can see that in the talk I gave too, because I went back to some of that literature.
But with Naomi Zach, Jose Mendoza, Grant Silva, George Forless, like we, there was the whole community studying. Those kinds of philosophies at the same time that I was studying philosophy of cognitive science, and it was like really unique to be able to blend that. And I think, um, yeah, so so I got to experience.
like this very pluralist philosophy environment. And then I remember going to conferences, I would often go to like hardening the linguistics conferences and still do, and those are always happy for me. But I would go to philosophy conferences outside of this Oregon bubble. And I'd be like, I do not, I do not know what is happening here.
Because this was a department where half the faculty were women again, before. [00:24:00] 2010 and everyone had to take two feminist philosophy courses and everyone had to take two American philosophy courses. And some of the American philosophy professors were starting to do indigenous philosophy a bit. So it was, I think, actually really unique.
And there were some, there are other programs like that in the US, but they are their own. And I know that, yeah, when you then interface with larger bodies, especially in the US, um, it is a different. And so I went to Europe after that as my next step and found it very smooth and continue to have a lot of connections there because it's just a different world, I'll say, for now.
Both for linguistics and for philosophy, that was my home.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. It's still rare to find. Actually, I was going to ask, is there some kind of resource where you could find, for example, a list of phenomenological feminist philosophers to study?
Elena Cuffari: I mean, I think Shay would even probably know better. She is the queen of the [00:25:00] list and the listers and the communities. Yes.
Shay Welch: So I don't know, you do neuroscience, so I don't know. Do you know Beck Todd? Rebecca Todd, she's like huge in neuroscience and so she just asked me for a bunch of these resources and I just sent her as, as I did some of the embodied cognition guys, I just sent her my bibliographies, right? So, historically, I have always written. I have always renowned.
So sort of like there are a couple of bubbles that do what we do. And so I went to a program called, um, at Binghamton University called SPEL, which was, stands for Social, Political, Ethical, and Legal Philosophy, which also requires, um, it's both analytic, continental, and phenomenological. And it was majority women.
Um, and you had to do non Western philosophy as well. So, so I didn't I originally [00:26:00] started at Florida State, which was a philosophy of science action theory department and I had to study. Um, Latina, Indigenous, and Feminist philosophy independently, and then so I made the move to go over to Binghamton. So, it's sort of like, I'm sure Elena's work and my work just, like, bibliographies that has all of these.
Um, like nonhuseral phenomenologist in it. So I think that that we could easily share those bibliographies. There are resources all over the place, but honestly, like finding people who write on this stuff and like our recent. Our recent work, so like, a lot of my, my last two books have an equal amount of embodied cognition and inactivism and feminist embodiment phenomenology in it.
So those would be easy to, to just share out.
Andrea Hiott: So why is this so hard to combine academically? Why is [00:27:00] this so hard to talk mean, I don't want us to sound like we're, oh, we're so great, we know all these resources and we know all that we've been reading these things forever because it's not about that.
It's about having a lived experience and then needing to find people who've experienced something like that who are also trying to work through it philosophically. It's actually about trying to understand these lived experiences in philosophical life and the things that we're experiencing every day. So why does that get somehow, extracted when we go into academia do you have any insight, from your experience with these, with working in this way? I mean, I guess you've encountered pushback, or you've just seen how people think they know everything and they've just excluded, Whatever, uh, in their worldview.
it's a
Elena Cuffari: complicated question. I think it's a really complicated question. Um, because I think a lot of it, I don't, I don't want to sound too cynical here. I think one answer is just like, who is doing the work at the highest levels? Who's editing the journals? Who's Putting on the conferences that everyone wants to go to, who's hiring people, who's getting hired, [00:28:00] like that's part of it.
Um, who's getting hired into having grad students and then having like their work continue. Um, and so there's that side. And then I think it is also Hard maybe particularly in the U. S. to do more than one thing. So I I think Shane I have have bonded over both getting this message as we go through reviews as faculty.
Why are you doing things that don't fit together? Why are you doing so many different things? You can't possibly be doing them. Well, if you're doing different things, um, or combining things, I mean, we know that interdisciplinary programs get a heart have a hard time. People love to advertise them. They don't like to fund them.
They don't like to do the work of integrating. People, um, and running more programs always takes more more human power. Uh, so I think there's like the kind of, you know, it's like a network of distributed power that no one person's responsible for that is generally making it always a battle [00:29:00] to work at the edges of things.
So I always worked at what I felt like were marginalized philosophies and marginalized theories of language and linguistics and marginalized theories of mind and cognitive science. And so I'm right. I'm used to it, but it doesn't mean that there's not costs, frequently costs, actually, of, and, just a very basic example, like journal reviewers, and one person will be like, Yes.
The other person will be like, Yes. What the fuck?
Andrea Hiott: What is that? That's because they're just coming from completely different. They come
Elena Cuffari: from where they come from. Yeah. Of course.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I think it's, you're right. This is so hard to talk about, but I also feel like it's the thing we need to talk about. This whole beyond dichotomy idea, like it's very hard to understand that we are coming from different paths and when, so we have different perspectives,
have you found that just, can you just address that, and that it then opens people up to look at it differently? Is there any kind of switch that happens to where, when people realize that's the process, they [00:30:00] might, like this reviewer number two, for example, rethink? What do you think, Shay?
Shay Welch: Yeah, I mean, so, there's an interesting sort of thing where, like the reason, so, kind of like Alayna's pointing out, she's always been working on marginalized philosophy, and that's because she's working on women and people of color who are marginalized in philosophy.
And so, if you don't have accessibility, experience to people who've been writing about their bodies forever, then understanding how to think about and write about your body philosophically is going to be a difficult thing to do. Having surrounded yourself With people who do that, and who live that, and who talk about that, and who you can train with, it's a natural progression, right?
But most people, these are marginalized groups in philosophy already, so being able to work and train with these people and read their work is a [00:31:00] marginalized experience. And so, historically, philosophy, Right, rest on the mind body dichotomy where the mind is superior and the body is a hindrance and Right, so all automatically if you have, you know, women and people of color writing about the body They are already deemed as not doing philosophy or not doing thinking rationally about the world, right?
You know, their phenomenology is embodied which means they can't move past the body to the rational mind so there's that and then that sort of persists, especially in STEM, right? And so then you have these people coming in with embodied cognition. And so they're marginalized in STEM because they're trying to say the mind body dichotomy doesn't exist as if it's a new idea, but they're marginalized in STEM.
So the thing is, is you've you've got a bunch of guys, usually white guys who are working, you know, in philosophy of mind and [00:32:00] STEM discovering that the body knows these things, and then they get marginalized in these fields. And then when you have people coming in from the area where they're like, This is obviously true.
Where have you been? Then, that is sort of marginalized, because it's just a habit to marginalize marginalized people in philosophy, especially, especially philosophy of mind. So then when you have a marginalized group of people writing about the body, and then you have these other marginalized people coming to it, then they're like, oh, you just don't understand the body the way that the body is supposed to be understood.
Again, you don't understand the body rationally. Or scientifically, you know, in this sort of way, so then it's kind of pushed out as not real embodied cognition work. And so that's that's just a problem of marginalization and systemic exclusion within philosophy and STEM generally. Um, and so it does become incumbent, incumbent upon people [00:33:00] to actively search this out and actively search these people out and actively support these people.
Because when you get reviewer number one and reviewer number two, you have to argue to the editor that reviewer does, reviewer number two is just not reading new work, right? So reviewer number one sees it, and so you don't have to convince number, reviewer number two, you have to convince the editor. That reviewer, you have to be able to say reviewer number two, I'm sorry, you just haven't read enough of the literature to understand where we're coming from, and your work isn't as extensive as, as say, reviewer number one in my work, and then make the argument Indirectly to the editor about why reviewer number two shouldn't be considered.
And this is gonna, this is gonna piss off reviewer number two. And reviewer number two is gonna fight back to the editor. And so then it becomes again, who's reading, who's judging, who's hiring, who's doing these journals to make the decision about whether or not people doing [00:34:00] these marginalized topics are worthy of being included.
Right? So it's, It is the similar problem of, of just marginalization within the field of philosophy and STEM, and also the problem of who is the gatekeeper of letting in these people who are adding marginalized voices to these properly technical fields, right?
Andrea Hiott: I said we were going to talk about fractals and in a fractal way, and I think that this is a great example of it, of how, know, we're talking about marginalization, which is a word we could think about, or the center or, the margin, the edge of the, you know, getting, there's also words like, um, disorder, and there's all these words that as you just kind of expressed, Get defined differently by differently by different people. So yeah, this, this fractal thing, I think it's very hard to talk about where is the margin, where is the [00:35:00] center.
So to get into that a little bit, I wonder about this question. How many people do you think, think of themselves as normal? As have had, having had a normal experience. I mean I I find this a very hard question, we might not be able to answer it, but, because I think this is some of the confusion and why we always end up fighting each other in a way, because there's, and you guys correct me please, and I'm sorry I keep saying you guys, please, you know, correct me. But I feel like we all, I don't feel like normal, and most people don't feel normal I would say, and yet we assume there's this normal world out there, And then at the same time, for that same reason, depending on how easy life has been for us in terms of the regularities we've encountered, uh, there is a kind of like protection of what we think of as normal.
So I don't know. What, what you, do you think most, do you think people in general consider themselves normal and [00:36:00] how is it versus the way they define themselves and the way they think of the rest of the world thinking of themselves as normal? I know that's kind of hard to talk about, but do you see what I'm trying to get at?
Shay Welch: Elena, I'm going to let you answer that one, but I'm going to throw in a useful term to get rid of you guys is y'all.
Andrea Hiott: Y'all is good. I am, I
Shay Welch: like y'all. So just go right on to y'all.
Elena Cuffari: Yeah, y'all. Do we need, do you, I said y'all so much when I came back from Atlanta. Do I need permission to say y'all by someone who has?
You do not. Okay. Okay, because I love y'all, but then I'm like, and I love y'all, but I, and then I'm like, am I allowed to just say this? I'm glad we clarified that. We can all use y'all. We can all use y'all. I think this is really a question for Shay's work, which is so like, so on the nose about, um, being take, you know, being interpolated as not normal, being, being normal or not normal, like the way that this shifts in different contexts.
I, I don't really know how to start answering it. I will [00:37:00] say that. As we were talking about the gatekeeping and the power structures, and, um, I always wrestle with how much of this is myth and how much of this is real, and how much of our believing in the myth is part of the problem, um, when it comes specifically to academic cultures, uh, and there is, there is room, there is change in them, for sure, I don't think there's like a dark secret society of People in robes being like we shall keep out like this and this.
I don't I don't think it's like that. Um, but there's much broader question of how do people see themselves as normal? Um, that's I mean, again, a theme of our conference was first person perspective. That was actually a really big theme of the conference. And maybe was in one of the titles initially, um, or was in the invitation that she put out for the kind of work.
She was looking to have done and I mean, I, I think that even just that question of like what is the lived experience of first person perspective needs more [00:38:00] study and maybe do you feel normal as part of that. And what we talked about in a lot of the papers and talks was about how other people have a role in the first person perspective so I kind of tried to introduce this notion of like an impure first person perspective because of.
The, uh, the other that's always involved, and this is an old idea in existential phenomenology, but I think it has a very different vibe when we're taking it through the lenses of, um, race or gender, uh, Neurodivergent. So yeah, I mean, I don't, I think that there are going to be times and people with whom we feel normal and then times and places and people with whom we don't feel normal.
And I think that the proportion of those shifts is something has something to do with oppression and has something to do with who the world is built for, right, socially and physically. But I want to hear what Shay has to say.
Shay Welch: Well, I'm thinking of it from a different sort of perspective. So, right. So like, if you would ask anybody, if they feel normal, everybody would say, no, [00:39:00] nobody feels normal.
And also to say that you feel normal is to assert in a world where marginalization is so, um, buzzword that they would be like, no, I'm normal. Like nobody would say that. No, and also, if you would, if you would ask a lot of like, what, if you would ask a lot of dudes in philosophy, if they think they're normal, they would say, certainly not.
Either I got beat up in high school because I was a nerd, or I'm so smart, I'm so smart that I just can't communicate with the normal people, right? So even, even if you ask people that we might consider in academia, if they're normal, everybody would have a good reason why they're not normal.
Elena Cuffari: In academia, I totally agree, but I'm thinking about, like, what about all my neighbors and their political signs of the recent winning party?
Don't they take themselves as, like, No, because I
Shay Welch: think that this, if you're going to relate it to this, like one of the things that I was thinking about [00:40:00] in philosophy is like, no, like if we're thinking about gatekeeping, nobody says like, this is normal philosophy. What they're going to say is this is good philosophy
or this is
real philosophy.
Right? So, so when I've done Native American work, and submitted for grants, the work didn't, the comments didn't come back from reviewer number two, in fact, um, that it wasn't normal. What they said was it wasn't real. So one of the comments was like, there's no such thing as Native American philosophy. It was never sophisticated enough as a system of thought to count as a philosophy.
This would count more as Native American, like the best The best category for this is Native American religious thought, right? And so I'm doing, I was doing Native American epistemology in an analytic sense, and reviewer number two says this isn't real philosophy. And so that's another thing is like, it, or [00:41:00] it's just not good.
It's, it's messy, right? It's not clean. You're talking about, affect and somatics in a way that doesn't, you know, bring in molecular neuroscience, right? And in somatic markers, right? When you're talking about intergenerational trauma and body memory, like this is body memory for trauma is a different sort of thing from body memory in terms of embodied cognition.
It's just not, it's messy, right? So, So nobody's going to say this is not normal. They're going to say this is not good. Right. And so that's sort of the thing. And then I would think that when we think about politics and I have a pretty unique, as a raging leftist, I have a pretty unique, um, perspective on politics, because what I tell my fellow leftists is like, you're half the reason why we lose is because you say, I'm better.
I have the [00:42:00] morally right position. I am morally superior to these uneducated, unthoughtful, uninf right? So there's always this sort of like, it's the same thing with like philosophy, like They just don't get it. They just don't know. They don't have the real understanding of what, you know, history is and they don't want to know it, right?
And that's, it sounds the same thing in academia. So I just don't think, and I don't think I've ever heard anyone say, I'm normal. And I just don't think anybody would because it, it institutes a sort of privilege that nobody would want to step into that position and say, I am the norm.
Andrea Hiott: So are you saying you, you tell them this is this is to their detriment to, to sound elitist or something?
Because I think right now, if, if just a, like a man who is interested in philosophy, I'm thinking of someone on YouTube who's really interested in watching a lot of videos and learning a lot about trying to understand [00:43:00] mind and consciousness and these things and then they come. And they listen to us talking like this, wouldn't they also feel that we are, saying, um, everything that they've been watching and learning is wrong, and they're kind of wrong that they don't know about phenomenology?
I'm not saying we're saying that, but I'm saying from their path. They would perceive it
Shay Welch: that way, if they weren't genuinely sincere about wanting to learn, they would perceive it that way. What we're saying is, is that the exposure isn't there.
That's, that's all we're saying, is that we're talking from a
place where it means so much to us, that it can sound Like we're, because there's something like hurt involved in it, right?
I guess it's important to say that we're not saying anybody is wrong.
Andrea Hiott: We haven't
Shay Welch: really gotten into any
Elena Cuffari: arguments here.
Shay Welch: Yeah, the only time we would say they were wrong is if they read the things and they were like, there is no body, body doesn't know.
Then we would, then we would say you're wrong, but then that's just a whole philosophy of [00:44:00] mind saying like you're wrong or, you've read Husserl and you don't think that, or Merleau Ponty and you don't see body knowledge. You're wrong. Like, you probably didn't pass that class.
Andrea Hiott: But, or maybe just that you've always thought phenomenology is only about Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau Ponty or something, right?
Because most people might just not have any idea that there's a lot of women doing it and involved in it. Yeah, and
Shay Welch: then you don't say that they're wrong, you just say like, No, no,
Andrea Hiott: they might feel wrong, I guess, or accused or something.
Shay Welch: Well, that's just fragility, right? So that's what we call white fragility and masculine fragility.
That's, and that's on them, right? So if we're very specifically saying, Oh, No wrongness, no judgment, and we, this is a woman's thing too, like, and there were like black women in philosophy who get to graduate school and well into graduate school and have never read black women in philosophy because they don't [00:45:00] go to a program that does, you know, one of my students is in a program that doesn't have any black women philosophers and I'm assuming they don't read black women philosophy, so she's having to find it somewhere else.
And not, know, being a black woman and not knowing that there are black women doing this work is, doesn't mean that we're saying, we're just saying that's unfortunate. We can help you find those resources. And if anybody wants to learn anything about this, because they didn't have the exposure, just because traditionally it doesn't exist in, you know, philosophy of mind, then come, come on over and we'll teach you all about it.
And then it's very
Andrea Hiott: rich, honestly, for everyone. No,
Shay Welch: I feel attacked. Then that is fragility. And then that's just on them. Right,
Elena Cuffari: Elena? No, 100%. And I want to go back to what you're saying about normal and good, like when people, so once I think about that, and then. Also, relatedly, this inclusivity bit. So like, yes, they'll say this [00:46:00] isn't good or this isn't real.
But what does that mean? If not, this isn't what I'm used to. This isn't what I was taught. That this is right. And I run into that. Certainly the sense of like, we cannot possibly change our assumptions about what philosophy is about what disciplinary boundaries are. So there is a sense where like, Yes, I totally agree with Shane.
They're going to say it's not good, but they mean it's not normal. And we if we're trying to have any message here, it's about change. It's not about rejection. And that actually includes like, I am not here for analytic, like knocking down other people's arguments. So even the way that I like to do philosophy and I know Hannah doesn't even conferences and even panels and events is, um, about building community and dialogue and embodied interactive experience.
It is not about telling people that they are wrong. That is actually the old game. And that is maybe so like if you feel Like that's what's happening, that might be like Che's thing coming from, [00:47:00] you know, what you've experienced previously. It's not about And agility is fine,
Andrea Hiott: precariousness and being I mean these are all part of life too, but I think what I'm trying to do here by by pushing at this is What I think we have a stance that we either our way has been the right way or we're wrong.
We, it's an assumption that people bring to things and so if sometimes when you hear things that are counter to what you've been hearing and the way you just brought up, you want to reject it or you think it's wrong because you think you have to choose and that. That whole initial stance, I think, is what is being called into question by a lot of these texts that you have been supporting for the past decade and what I think we all need to learn, but until we get over that stance where it's rejected, just offhand because it doesn't fit with what came before, we can't open up to that practicality and nestedness of all these other ways, which I think everyone's hungry for.
It's just that there's something about the stance we take where we have to reject immediately. And then, and [00:48:00] that's what I'm trying to bring up because that hurts me a bit that, that, that, that happens because a lot of these stories and the, what's in your bibliography, for example, I think a lot of people, no matter how they've developed, are hungry for at the moment.
It's, it's really, really rich with, uh, a lot of that. So I'm just trying to get over that initial. If you've never heard of this before, then, um, everything you know before is wrong, kind of.
Shay Welch: I guess I would just say if somebody's already hungry for it, that they just wouldn't have that assumption. And I've just not been around anybody who carries that assumption.
So, I mean, there are the older, the older people. Like, I would say, like, scholars in their 60s. Would be more like I reject this because it's not where I'm coming from, but I just don't think that I've ever interacted with anybody academically who has [00:49:00] at least interacted with me, but I guess I just nobody would come to me with that assumption.
I think they would just know better or I would just they just. They, if they had that assumption, they would just have no desire to talk to me or to read me. But I just assume that if somebody is hungry that they just wouldn't have that assumption. They would be like, I'm hungry for this. I want to hear this.
Where can I get this? If somebody's hungry for it, they wouldn't already assume that they were being told that they were wrong. Um. I guess it gets
Andrea Hiott: to those layers of what's the self and what's the body that you bring up in your paper and, Elena, and your talk too. I think it's really wonderful the way you're looking at the difference between the I and What that really means because what you say Shay is right at the same time We it's not a lot of this isn't done in a metacognitive kind of sense I guess what I was trying to get out with the reviewers.
It's there's something going on there. That someone's thinking through something and then rejecting it There's [00:50:00] some kind of stance which just orients us towards things or away from things in a way that's a little bit different than That we've rationally thought it through or, or or whatever, we might say we're perfectly open to it and, and talking that way, but when it comes down to really letting it, you know, penetrate that part of us,
Shay Welch: I think that most people say that that's discomfort.
Andrea Hiott: But that's a big, big thing. People hear it and they feel it. You have to embrace discomfort, .
Shay Welch: Yes, but that is, as you're saying, like, it's a, it's a hard thing to do. So even if rationally you're open to it, the discomfort that you feel is going to have an influence.
Andrea Hiott: Which, I'm glad you said that, because I think you, you, many people who write from this perspective have understood that, in a way, right? What what discomfort is, what it means to embrace it, um, maybe that, is that connected at all to your philosophies? Or, or to, uh, the, you know, marginalized bodily [00:51:00] epistemologies, do you see any connection to that?
Shay Welch: Talk about your eye, Alayna. She, she brought up your eye in the self. Oh,
Elena Cuffari: yeah. But then the discomfort part, I don't know how how to tackle that part as, as much, um. So I'm thinking about that. I was thinking about Shay's, Shay's recent papers actually when you asked that question about discomfort and informing philosophy.
I, I do want to, I don't want to keep going back to the reviewer question, but I think like it's so hard to get into a place of openness. And reviewing articles for free when you're like overworked to hell is not that place, probably. So I, I also, you know, I mean, there are a lot of conditions we need to have in place if we really want to pursue truth together, whatever that looks like, as opposed to just like doing the jobs that we've inherited in a sense.
Um, What was the part about the I? Or do you want to talk about the confliction? Sorry, but you, well I'll come back to
Andrea Hiott: it, you, do you think there's a kind of orientation of we have to choose the right philosophy? Or this is [00:52:00] the right way? Is it, is there any orientation like that?
Or is there, overall, in academia, um, do you feel any sense of that there's, you have to choose one way or the other? Or do you feel there's a sense of openness, like we can have all kinds of many different, uh, sorts of, Epistemologies or ontologies, uh and they, they could all be beneficial or is it like this, you have to choose one and one has to be right or wrong, just in general?
Personally? Yeah. Or just what do you, not, not for you, but do you think there's, do you think what, yes. No. What did you
Shay Welch: I don't personally, I just assume that, that some people, and I mean you just have to be a plural list. If you're training, it depends
Elena Cuffari: on your training. Yeah.
Shay Welch: Yeah,
Andrea Hiott: but then there's cow. can you be a Realist and a pluralist at the same time and there's all these kind of I think you can I guess what I'm interested in is do you think or have you seen it change [00:53:00] over time that we can incorporate many different For example the I many different ways of thinking of what the I is philosophically And that it doesn't only mean if your paper gets sent to the people who think of the eye the way that you think of the eye, whether or not that paper gets through or not.
Is there, is there a widening of, of that? Or is it still very much, you call yourself a certain kind of philosopher and you need your papers reviewed by those kind of philosophers to get them through?
Shay Welch: I just had, I swear, I always am opposed to this, but didn't you just have an immediate thought of Marie Lugona's impure, the impure eye?
Yeah, no, I mean, I just Like the world traveling, and is it possible? Is that what you're thinking, Shay? Well, no, she talks about that impure eye, about the eye having so many different ontologies, about I mean, I guess it would be as a result [00:54:00] of world traveling, in a certain sort of sense. Um, but it's in that, it's in that book, right?
Um, it's a different article, I think. Um, it just, I guess it just, like, it's, it's really a training thing. Like, to me, I'm just like, who, who wouldn't? But then there are people who do, where they're just like, Oh, you have to be consistent, and then the thought of a pluralist is that they're, the fact of multitudes is, consistency.
And so we might think that somebody who thinks that you have to pick one thing and stick with it, what I think is like, how, how unfortunate, how unfortunate and narrow and unenriched, but. I mean, if somebody felt like it's, it's hard to just say, I don't know, to just be like, you're wrong. [00:55:00] You know what I mean?
Whereas, you know, as a pluralist, I just say, oh, you could just, there's so much about the world and the universe that you can get from, from recognizing pluralism as a, as a realism. Um, but you're going to have people in computer science being like, uh uh.
Elena Cuffari: Yeah. I feel like an almost obsessive need when I talk to someone and they're saying something interesting to like collaborate with them or find the points of connection and I, and I just don't, I don't, I can't speak to beyond that.
I also am in a really, like, I'm a philosopher in a psychology department. I don't think I can anymore talk about the field of philosophy and like what it's up to these days for people who are entering it. Like, do you know what I mean? Like it's, I've sought out niche places, my whole, from the beginning.
Um, so I can't speak to the non niche, I guess.
Andrea Hiott: So the point I'm trying to get at, the bigger point is, here I'll cartoon, [00:56:00] maybe this is going to sound terrible, but, I just want to try to get into it, because, so, marginalized body, body epistemologies, uh, for example, I grew up in a certain way, We don't have to name all of these things, but because of that, when I'm interacting with people, I realized that they don't, what I'm doing doesn't fit to what they expect a girl to do, right?
And so, over time, you realize that you're not normal, and just because people are not, you're you're not meeting with what their expectations, uh, what they expect. Those kind of situations where there's kind of regularities in the way people act whether they really feel that way or not And when you don't act that way you feel that it's different And I think those of us all of us probably have this at some experience, but there's degrees of it there's degrees of it to where it really affects every moment of your life and there's something about that if you're [00:57:00] gonna learn how to deal with it and live with it and be in the world that You're not in the center, at least not in terms of what's regular, and you have to feel the discomfort, and you have to learn how to deal with it, and I feel like a lot of the literature that you both discuss, and your own writing, comes out of some kind of understanding of that.
It's very rich, and that's what I'm trying to open up here, so, yeah, I don't know, what does that bring up, either of you?
Shay Welch: I think that most of the stuff that I work with doesn't talk about their own discomfort, it talks about the discomfort of others.
Andrea Hiott: can you tell me more?
Shay Welch: So, it would be the idea of, My, my gender expression is my gender expression, and it makes other people uncomfortable, and that is a problem with the other people.
So, like, and you would, you would recognize that, like, what it means to act like a girl changes in different contexts. Right? So what it [00:58:00] means to act like a girl at a nightclub is not the same thing as what it means to act like a girl at a philosophy conference. Whereas one of them is going to expect very high femme and the other one is going to be very anti high femme.
Right? And so like, so like Elena and I are going to be more on the margins at philosophy conferences with our, you know, cute hair and glasses. Right? Because that's not, that, that's girly, and that's not how girls in academia act. Whereas, you know, if you're outside, or like, girls in ballet are expected to act a different kind of way than girls who do pole dancing.
There's just There is no expectation about what girls are supposed to do because different communities have different gender expectations. And so that's the point about recognizing that other people have the discomfort because your gender expression doesn't really change unless you're code switching.[00:59:00]
Right?
And then you're just like, well, this is my gender expression and it's so unfortunate that other people are a discomfort and as a liberatory resistant process, I'm going to actively make people uncomfortable until they recognize that they are the source of, of the expectations that are oppressive.
So I don't think it's been a long time, right? So when she's talking about the oppression on her black body and white spaces. She's not talking about her discomfort. She's talking about the discomfort of white people who are exposed to black bodies that aren't conforming to whiteness. In white spaces, so at least where Elena and I come from, the discomfort belongs to the oppressor and not the oppressed, because the oppressed refuse to think of their body as wrong. shouldn't She have to be either or
Andrea Hiott: there? I think that's a really good point you make, thank you, it is about the discomfort of, but does [01:00:00] that mean also that it's not uncomfortable or
Shay Welch: difficult or challenging? One of the things that's going on here is that, like, you, you are kind of
So there is no either or, and I don't think Elena would ever, either of us are going to say either or. There, there is no either or for either of us. It is everything all at once. It is this and that and the other and nothing is right or wrong. There's like, there's richer understandings or more, more rigid understandings or other kinds of things, but that's so the binaries for us don't exist, and we're not going to implement any sort of binary standards either on being or, or reviewer number two, right?
So it's, it's not that something is normal or not normal. It's not something is right or wrong. It's not something that it's either or it is all it is all [01:01:00] and that's what makes lived experience. I guess in a certain sort of way. I mean, Elena, or do you do you see what I'm saying?
Elena Cuffari: Yeah, I mean, I think so. I wanted to ask you what you think about, um.
I mean, oppression is wrong, right? And you would say this, and we are wrong in that certain kinds of things. We still want to fight them. Um, but I, but you, I think that's something you so deeply take for granted that you don't. I feel like you have to say it. But I think, um, it's the other's discomfort. What I've been trying to track and figure out for a while is how that discomfort would feed the system that we're both part of.
And then that will come back, right? And, and, and affect and constrain the next moves. Or the next act or the next expressions or what is, um, what is withheld or what is self silence like we talked a lot about Dotson's testimonial smothering and self silencing in the conference. Several people were working with Dotson's work on that.
Um, so, [01:02:00] and I also think about, um, when you were asking your question, Andrea, Hendren's amazing book, What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, I think it's called, which is something I've been teaching at the end of Embodied Cog. And it really uses. Another ecological psych and affordances, but it's talking about, um, very big, actually a very basic idea from disability studies going back decades, but.
But new, maybe in this context of writing about design in a philosophical way and writing about design and autism and neurodivergencies, um, is her take that, like, what you are afforded is all about who, well, who is afforded what, who designed the space for who, and I think that that space can be a physical built designed space, or it can be a socially built normative space like academia, um, And, but I usually work actually at a much more micro level of like an interactional dyad, uh, because of working on multimodal languaging stuff.
And so I'm really interested in how the [01:03:00] discomfort becomes, becomes my discomfort, or I have to deal with that discomfort, or I have to mitigate that discomfort. And that will depend on how have I been socialized? How have I been gendered? Right. So I am, was gendered very normal, normal. It's coming up sort of like this hetero.
woman, origin, like, middle class, very, like, this is appropriate, this is not appropriate, and, like, people pleasing is very important, right? And like, it's taken a lot to deconstruct this very basic, obvious, sort of, like, privileged thing that is nonetheless psychologically harmful if you don't ever pay attention to it and, like, excavate it and figure out, I'm not here to make you feel good.
Right. But like that is a basic message that I've had since childhood. Um, I don't know quite how I got there, but I think that like that is so I'm really interested, I guess, in the co responsibility of what we're doing to each other in interacting and just having these reactions of what's comfortable or not, or what's normal or not, which are not, you know, to be blamed for necessarily, but must be, I [01:04:00] think, examined.
I think that's so It's got on the soapbox out of nowhere. No,
Andrea Hiott: it's not, it wasn't a soapbox. It's just real. these are hard things to talk about and I guess when discomfort gets to this body thing again and the difference between the body's reaction and what we think of as self or what the eye is, those aren't always the same and, but they co create each other in a sense.
Because I wasn't saying by being discomfortable you aren't strong, or that it's right for you to feel uncomfortable or that, know, but sometimes that situation is that You're made to feel uncomfortable, and then you have to recognize that discomfort in the I, in the self, and then you have to fight against it and, or, and change.
So this is a whole process, isn't it, of, of the body coming to know itself. Having an eye, then addressing how others see that eye, changing their own definition of the eye, changing, yeah, pushing against what others are trying to [01:05:00] impose of the eye.
Elena Cuffari: Yeah, and I want to say, I want to just jump in, because the discomfort and how we relate to it was such a theme in some of these amazing papers that were at the conference on, um, Menstruate like interoception and menstruation and endometriosis and pregnancy and childbirth and um, Sophia Jepson's or your, um, am I saying her name right, Shay?
Sophia Jepson. Jepson's paper on like, where do you feel emotion and what's normal about where you and you feel it in the head you feel in the body like this was a theme throughout this question of like how important it is to pay attention to what you feel but how dismissed it is in an institutional setting to pay attention to what you feel or who are you when you're paying attention to what you feel and that we're not feeling things the same way like that was a really I went back over it because we're you know we're thinking about some kind of publication eventually and I wanted to be prepared for this and I was just like there were some very clear themes and threads and so like working with [01:06:00] Discomfort or sensation or like sensation that is not, you know, maybe certainly informative.
Maybe, maybe it's what we want to call it pain. Maybe we don't depending, you know, like, what's a really important theme. And that's exactly the kind of like source for knowledge for embodied epistemology that has been. dismissed and left out and dismantled, you know, and I think or not just like sort of like not included and People were bringing it in and like all sorts of ways across I can think of at least four or five talks
Andrea Hiott: Well, that's what I love about Shay's or I don't know who decided for the title but bodily epistemology Right this is really rich if you think Especially if you look at what you wrote in your paper, Elena, and what you presented , of the body, not necessarily being the eye and overlapping always with the self.
There's a lot of nuance in there to figure out, but the sense of feeling is a kind of knowledge. Right? And, and, but that doesn't mean that the eye knows or has recognized the body's knowledge and what
Elena Cuffari: would it mean for that to happen and like, what does [01:07:00] it mean to build build on that build treatments on that build theories on that
Andrea Hiott: or even in our own life I guess that's what I was trying to get at is we come to this that the body is In the world in a particular way It has a knowledge of the world, and it's being treated in a certain way, and that's an ongoing and active process.
And then the eye gets created for us, or we create the eye, this process is going on. And all of this is bodily epistemology at the same time. It's not ever not that, I guess.
But, tell me a little more before we have to go about the conference itself, and we're talking about feeling and the body, and because you know there's so much stuff online now, but you actually were there in person, most of you, right? What was the feeling of it and relative to these themes of women and different stories?
Did you learn something yourself, from the coming together there? Sounds [01:08:00] like you did.
Elena Cuffari: I guess. Oh my God. So, so much. Yeah. Shake.
Shay Welch: Yeah. No. I mean, I guess like being in that environment and having those conversations is not different for me. It is what I've been doing my whole academic career, kind of my whole life.
Um, what was fun and exciting about it was seeing the way these different kinds of things were being mixed. We're being mixed in with the inactivism, right? So, so inactivism would say that the body is the knower, is the I, always. And so when people separate those things, they just, they just misunderstand or have been taught that the body isn't the I.
So that's, that's just sort of the, the basis of inactivism is the body is the knower. And so the eye doesn't come to know the body. The body has always been the [01:09:00] eye. Um, but people have been taught mind body dualism and you have to undo that, that mindset. Um, which is why inactivism is so, uh, appealing.
To people who have been doing marginalized body epistemologies all along. Because the notion of body epistemology doesn't come from embodied cognition. Body epistemology has always existed within the literature that we've been doing. So I took marginalized body epistemologies from All of the things that have been done forever.
I specifically used the term body epistemologies from all of these things and then added it with 4e and body cognition. So it's showing that two separate worlds are coming together.
And so
like we had so many things on pregnancy and indigenous philosophy and, um, marathon running and like all of these different first person perspectives [01:10:00] that was being like very technically blended in with an activism.
And so it was just, it was cool to see other people doing what we had been trying to do and then doing it well and doing it on so many different topics. That we were like, aha, this is not something unique, this is something that is growing. So it's not something that has, it's something that hasn't existed before, but it's coming into existence and people are coming together to do those things and that's what we were doing.
So it was, it was fun, right? It was fun to see all the different ways that people were doing this. So, you know, what did you think?
Elena Cuffari: Absolutely, just what you said. And when you said inactivism, the body is the eye and the knower, I mean, we were really pushing and problematizing that for inactivism, too, with these perspectives.
And that has to happen in that conversation. Right? It's not that these things will come together and nothing will change, and they'll just perfectly add up, but actually I think [01:11:00] there's like a deepening and a challenging, specifically for theories that have been talking about the body or the organism in a broad sense.
Even while being open to scale and open to different lived experiences and open to difference. There's a way to being open to difference. In the abstract and then dealing with it in the concrete in particular, which I feel like was really being brought out in the conference, and it was definitely fun.
And it was amazing. Vibe shades. Students current and past are amazing. And it was also just amazing to see so many come back, like, and be like, yes, I'm going to I'm keeping on with this work and I'm going to bring it back home. It was really cool to see that too. And really an honor to get to be there for that and to meet them.
Andrea Hiott: Well, that's beautiful to hear. Before we go, I was going to ask both of you, I was going to ask if if you're living this, if it's really your life and it matters in the way that You're living your life, and Shay has already answered that.
I [01:12:00] think, yes, because it doesn't seem there's know, you seem confused even if that there would be a distinction, uh, between these, these things, which is wonderful. But I do wonder about that because, you know, it's not, I wonder how this is for your daily lived sense of self in the world, interacting with the world.
If you just, if you see your philosophy as your way of being, or if you separate it still, or I don't know.
Shay Welch: It is my way of being. Especially if you notice, I write about everything that has to do with my life. I don't write about anything that doesn't have to do with my personal life. And I'm never going to write about anything that is not immediately coming from my life.
So I've never separated my scholarship from my life. And my life has always been the basis that philosophy is. Philosophy comes to my life. My life doesn't come to philosophy. If that makes sense.
Andrea Hiott: Has philosophy been helpful for you? mean, We can't get [01:13:00] into it, but you write about borderline personality disorder, and I hope at some point you'll talk about that, because these papers are just incredible now, but I guess I wondered, does it
Shay Welch: I feel like I'm doing other people a favor.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Shay Welch: I don't
feel
like philosophy has given me anything. I feel like I'm bringing philosophy things where I'm like, Look, doesn't this make your life better by knowing this stuff?
But how do you
Andrea Hiott: know that? Did it make your life better? Or it's just
Shay Welch: I just, I, I just, I'm like, Oh, look. I like this way of thinking. Now I'm going to take things about my life and give it to other people and be like, cool, huh? And it's going to be in a shared language of analytic philosophy. Because that's, that is the thing.
It needs to be in a shared language for other people to understand it. So I'm not using analytic inactivism to understand my experience. I'm using analytic inactivism to help other people understand [01:14:00] my experience.
Andrea Hiott: But in the way we've been talking about it, that even seems collapsed because you're living it.
I guess it's almost confusing in a way because it is your bodily epistemology. And so even when we're talking about it, we're separating it a bit because With language, but you're living it, right? And yeah, and so I'm just not only that you're showing other people But of living it in a way that's hard to talk about.
Shay Welch: Yeah I mean, it's I think it's easy for me to talk about I don't think it's for me I'm not confused about it, and I don't think it's hard to talk about it might be hard for other people to take up But then again, that's that's their discomfort or hard to not hear it
Andrea Hiott: through our perspective, other perspe another perspective.
Because there's something very radical about what, the way you're living and the way you're writing. That when you try to fit it into the way Other people might be living and writing, which is sometimes removing self from the process in order to be able to process it. It's different. So it can be, it can feel very [01:15:00] striking, but for you, it's what you're doing, is what I'm saying.
Elena, why don't you, what do you think about all this? Yeah,
Shay Welch: maybe Elena doesn't feel like it's as natural as I think that it is.
Elena Cuffari: No, I mean, I think it's great to hear shay's account and method and I meant to ask Shay when we were together how she writes so many books. I still plan to ask her this and get get advice on it.
Um, but I think I don't. Yeah, so I am not. I don't. I'm working to relate personally to my work at the like at something even close to the level of what she draws on and does. I think it's a very implicit for historically it's been very implicit for me like why I have an abstract and intellectualized.
Why I have the interest I have why I work the way that I do it's something I'm still trying to like reflect on and explore the closest thing to me was this kind of like interview study life world interview study on hope trying to deal with my like paralyzing climate anxiety as a parent but it was a it was certainly work that [01:16:00] is Messy and bringing a lot of things together in a way that I'm not sure makes sense yet, and so I'm still working on that, but I definitely tend to operate on a slightly more abstract level.
I will say being so immersed in participatory sensemaking has led me to very collaborative, a very collaborative style of work, I guess. And that's important to me and that's also something that doesn't always translate well in, in philosophy, although I think that's changing quite a bit.
Andrea Hiott: I think so too.
And I would love to now to ask you about language, but I'm not going to because we need to go, I hope we can put it on pause and talk in another time and talk about your, your specific writings.
But for now, I think we at least introduced a lot of the themes of the conference and Talked about them in a way. And I just wanna say thanks to both of you for your different approaches, both very, moving and effective. I hope everyone will go read your stuff now. uh, Is there anything in the end that, thank you, you wanna say , that we didn't make clear?
Before we go?
Shay Welch: I would just say that I don't think anybody is wrong. . I don't think anybody [01:17:00] is wrong. And I invite you to join us in our shenanigans.
Andrea Hiott: Wonderful .
Elena Cuffari: Thank you. Thanks Andrea. And thanks Shay.
Andrea Hiott: All right. Stay All right, thank you both. Okay, thanks. Talk soon. Thank you.
THIS CONVERSATION WAS RECORDED A MONTH OR SO AFTER THE CONFERENCE IN 2024.