Notes from the seventh session (Adam Ferner)

This Wednesday, we restarted our work group at the Institute of Education. Over the last few weeks, Zara Bain has been working with Kristie Dotson to devise a reading list to parallel the course that Kristie's running at Yale, on Black Feminist Philosophy. The readings for this session were primarily taken from Beverly Guy-Sheftall's anthology, Words of Fire:

• Sojourner Truth – Woman's Rights
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper – Woman's Political Future
• Anna Julia Cooper – The Status of Woman in America
• Ida Wells-Barnett – Lynch Law in America
• Claudia Jones – An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!
• Lorraine Hansberry – Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex: An American Commentary
• Kristie Dotson – Between Rocks and Hard Places: Introducing Black Feminist Professional Philosophy

Zara and Kristie ran the session, which was well attended (around 22 people). We were particularly lucky to have Kristie joining; many of us (certainly at the IoE) were unfamiliar with the literature and the general intellectual context – and it was incredible to have her input and insight, and generous of her to take the time to help us get our bearings. In relation to this, the point was also made that while the first session may serve as an orientation, there should be greater sharing of intellectual labour in the later ones.

This was also the first time we used 'Zoom.us' to live-stream the event (at Kristie and Zara's suggestion). Despite a couple of small, teething issues, it worked very well – and we were joined by a satellite group in Bristol, and a number of individual researchers from the States and the Netherlands, as well as elsewhere in the UK. The system allows for greater participation from online attendees – and also allows us to side-step many of the usual obstacles faced by reading groups and work groups restricted to specific spatial locations. It also has a 'break-out' room function, which we deployed during Wednesday's session to generate questions about Kristie's introductory remarks and the readings.

• What do you [Kristie] mean when you say everything is reduced to ontology and is there an underlying critique of analytic philosophy?
• How can we meaningfully engage with Black Feminist thought without appropriating it or flattening it?
• What is the relationship between Harper's work and current philosophy and thinking about the epistemology of ignorance being (potentially) redundant?
• Do existing tools for critical engagement – such as ideology critique – contain the resources to provide solutions to the problems black feminists are trying to solve?
• How do we balance the theoretical virtue of intellectual diversity with the potential political utility of intellectual unity?

If you would like to contribute your thoughts, or comments – on the session, or the readings – please do so below, or email them over to applebaumreading@gmail.com.