#academic ethics

British Museum WHO???

Steal as Much as You Can

When I saw an October 2019 book by Natalie Olah entitled Steal as Much as You Can: How to Win the Culture Wars in the Age of AusterityI assumed that it encouraged privileged people to get ahead by stealing as much as they can from the educated poor before their unique insights and perspectives fade back into the intellectual bottomland from which they came. The tongue-in-cheek message would be…

Rummaging through the Association of American Geographers website, I saw a mention of something called the Bowman Expeditions with reference to ethics and the militarization of research. What I found in my casual googling completely flabbergasted me. As geographer Joel Wainwright put it “US military is busily rebranding ‘human geography’ as the way to know where to put ‘boots on the ground’.”

In particular, the Mexico Indigena project (part of the larger Bowman Expeditions and funded in part by the U.S. Foreign Military Studies Office) was egregious. It disguised militarized research intended to dispossess indigenous communal lands as a participatory mapping of indigenous lands by indigenous residents. The screenshots below are from a 2010 documentary about the project.

Oaxaca has the most communal land. In 1992, the Mexican Constitution was changed to eliminate communal land tenure in favor of federal land. This legal change was also accompanied by an effort to regularize and title land in order to facilitate the sale of such lands. Why? For one, a key U.S. military researcher asserts that “places with informal property are doomed to violence” and that correlating “land data and military strategy” is essential. The author, Lt. Col Demarest goes on to say that “a democratic society must know in detail who owns the land and how much it is.”

The Oaxacans roundly rejected this logic and rejected the mapping project once it became clear that the purpose was “map the culture of the people to understand how they resist.” Activists asserted that communal land is is “how a communal system gets recreated every day and continued being the core of the community’s life.”

The full film is below.

The Demarest Factor (55 min) 2010. 

I agree with a lot of what has been said: it's important, I think, to realize that these folks seem to be Lit folks and they found themselves in Anthro territory out of, well, stupidity and naivity. That said, as Lit folks they should have really known better than to have their students leave "reviews" on fics, where all of the accepted fannish jargon actually says "comments." This is not a minor semantic faux pas. a review to lit students is a pretty specific thing, and implies a level of academic crit that isn't there in the word "comment."

But all this has been said, and better by folks in the comment thread linked here: http://waldorph.tumblr.com/post/111860590008/whatre-we-calling-this-theoryofficgate-i-like

What I want to to talk about here is the idea of getting permission to use publicly available works in class. And it is, on some level an argument about semantics. But I'm a lit person, so i like semantic arguments.

A lot has been said, but the debate that i'm interested in is the notion that these instructors should have gotten permission to study those fics in class. 

I think that's the wrong way to say that. See, you don't have to get permission of, say, Neil Gaiman (well known, living author who is pretty available to chat with over the internet), to study his works in class. His works are publically available, and anybody can study them. So you don't need permission to study works of fanfiction that are publically available.

What would be INCREDIBLY RUDE and probably unthinkable to these instructors would be to study the works of Neil Gaiman and require the entire class to email him directly with their reviews of his work, and pinpointing specific lines they had issues with, and thought they could write better, and also criting his spelling and grammar. 

A better way to say it would be: these instructors needed to get permission to interact with these authors. 

See. you don't need permission to STUDY works that are publically available, but you DO need permission to accost the author in their own space and shove your lit crit in their face. If you don't want to to get permission to study a work, you MUST keep your students from intruding on an authors space willy-nilly.

If you want to require students to interact with an author, you need to ask permission. You wouldn't just have an entire class show up on the front lawn of an author's house and conduct class there if you wanted an interview with the author. You ask authors if they are willing to come into your class on their work to talk about it. You cannot force interaction between the author and the reader.

But printedsoot? lots of authors have crit or bad reviews published about their works. right? this is the same thing, right?

Hahano. See, those are published by folks who are not insisting that the author read them. They aren't emailing (at least if they are good journalists/writers who wish to work in the field for a long time) the authors of the books that they are reviewing and telling them to their face what they thought of the book. They are leaving the review in a public place where the author can choose to ignore it. A lot of authors do. 

The comment section on a fic is not a public place. It is a direct link to the author, and as such, it is not something that can be ignored easily.

If you want to study fanfic and ENCOURAGE interaction with the authors, you probably don't need permission, but it would behoove you to let your students know how not to be rude. Like, I know that Neil Gaiman is pretty awesome at answering folks' questions on his tumblr, so I might encourage folks to ask him about specific questions they have regaurding his work, but I would also tell them that before they did so, they sould read some of his blog, his FAQ, and stay away from things like his personal life that isn't with his equally famous wife, non-specific questions that sound like you are asking him to do your homework for you, and anything that they wouldn't actually say or ask to his face. Don't, for example, tell him his use of fragments in American Gods is terrible grammar, because he will a) ignore it, and b) he uses grammar very deliberately and, most importantly, c) its a finished work. this type of comment has no use, because whats there is there. its not going to be revisted or revised.

As with fanfic, if you wish to encourage some amount of interaction and you don't wish to get permission for some reason (though you will likely get better interactions if you do, since you will be working with people who, y'know, are actually interested in interaction) you NEED to talk about what the community considers a "comment", how to figure out if the person is looking for crit, and if they are, what kind of crit is considered polite. You do want to have students who do not make you and your class look like particularly belligerant and horrible childeren, right? That won't reflect well on you. 

If you want to REQUIRE interaction, you NEED permission. Period. Because if you don't get permission, and the person you are trying to have an interaction with is offended, unwilling or doesn't notice (I only check my folder for ao3 notifications like once a week, at best, if I remember to) you are going to have issues with a) your students, who will not be able to prove they did the work, and who will DEFINATELY get upset at thier grade point being docked for something they cannot control, b) anybody who has that author's back, and on the internet, anybody who decides to hop on the bandwagon, and c) your supervisors who will be hearing about this from multiple sources: and if its bad enough to actually get viral legs (hi, TheoryOfFicGate), it might damage the SCHOOL'S credibility, and then things get really ugly for you. 

Look, I'm a tutor who works for a school. And I still get to ask that professors of the school that I work for get permission to require their students to see me. And I get to make those students my last priority. Because students who are required to see me are a pain in the ass who take up time that I sometimes don't have for students who want to be there. Running a tutor session is hard enough when the student KNOWS they have something wrong with their paper. 

I don't see why you wouldn't think to give fic authors who are not getting paid, nor working for your institution the same courtesy.

tldr:

In two recent articles I've read about trigger warnings in academia, the concern has largely been about academic freedom, with James Turk being a mega drama queen and a group of faculty justifying why the won't use them with false assumptions and poor reasoning.

While I do understand that the current discussion was precipitated by Oberlin saying that triggering, but non-essential, content should be removed. I can see why people have a problem with this but they rarely stop at this. It is a general, dig-in-our-heels "no one can tell me what to do, you're the boss of me" reaction1.

There are really two distinct things happening here: one is a real-world event where faculty were actually asked to remove content and one is a more general debate about the use of trigger warnings in academia. But these aren't the same discussions and the conflation of the two by pretty much critic I've seen significantly weakens their argument. In the case of the professors' piece, their sections on the trigger warnings themselves and the relation to disability are pretty much either factually incorrect or depressingly uncaring and unwilling to accommodate.

Triggers are not restricted to PTSD. Their point about PTSD triggers being unpredictable (and thus unable to be forwarned) is a good one. And it would matter more if triggers were something that only impacted people with PTSD. This is neither true of the academic literature on triggers nor of the current discouse about triggers. Triggers for people with anxiety, phobias, depression, etc. can, in actual fact, be predicable. This is why there are (informal) standards about what sort of things are commonly warned for.

Moreover, triggers do not only impact people with psychological/mood disabilities. Outside of higher ed, trigger warnings are commonly used on the internet to also warn people about things like moving or flashing gifs (for people with photosensitve disabilities like epilepsy). Saying outright "we will not put trigger warnings on anything" includes situations like this.

Perhaps the most laughable (but also heartbreaking) point the professors make is when they note that PTSD is a disability and should be handled in a systematic way by the campus' disability services. This might hold more weight if these services were better funded and better supported. And this includes faculty. I can't even count the number of stories I've heard from disabled students who do all the right things (get their 'certification'2, accommodation plans, etc) only to have the faculty member outright refuse to accommodate. And acting like the marginalized person here has any real recourse against the institution is counter to reality.

One of the things I find most interest about the article is the ways that the faculty so clearly distinguish themselves from the university as institution. This might be my 'unpopular opinion' moment, but I really want to be clear here: if you are a faculty member, you are the system. Particularly when it comes to something like disability accommodations.

The reason why I'm highlighting the accommodation/disability aspect of this is because it is the important and salient point being lost in the panic about academic freedom. Academic freedom isn't a human right. However, accommodations for disability are a human right. What you say, when you say academic freedom matters more than disability accommodations, is that your privilege3 matters more than someone else's human rights.

In so doing, you really are the embodiment of institutional oppression. Because this is the message that society at large tells disabled people.

And in the hand-waving over trigger warnings, people really seem to mistake their actual purpose. Warning people about certain content that might trigger an adverse response it part of it... but it isn't the only function. One thing they serve to do is allow people to engage in certain discussions and materials in an informed and consensual way. It is a way to add context to something that may not otherwise have it (eg, a journal article in a reading list will usually just have the citation and titles aren't always descriptive).

Yes, in some cases trigger warnings serve as a necessary shelter for people who need them, but they also empower some of those same people to engage in the classroom in a healthy fashion. It isn't about avoidance.

If a person sees that a particular day/reading will have something that might potentially trigger them, they can make an informed decision concerning their current state and whether or not they can engage without significantly damaging their health. And/or they are able to prepare in advance any extra support or self-care they might need to recover from the experience (ie, booking an appointment with a campus councellor, asking a friend to meet them afterwards, etc.).

Part of the problem with this, is that most people (again) are only thinking of themselves. With adequate warnings students might also be able to make arrangements for classes they have after the potentially triggering one. Without any systematic approach to this, how easily do you think a student could get a professor from a different class excuse their absence if they, say, had a panic attack and needed to take medication rendering them unable to attend the rest of their classes that day? What if they have a test on the same day as the class and that they may not be able to do both a potentially triggering class and a test on the same day?

While trigger warnings do serve an important function of protecting disabled students, traumatized students, etc. from additional harm, they also empower those same students to make good, informed decisions about their education. It creates an environment where their agency is considered real and respected. It gives them an active role in their educational experiences.

But I guess the real solution is maintaining a hostile and unsafe learning environment for disabled students because ~academic freedom~.

Although, for the article written by the professors, points 7,8, and 9 are good and really worth considering. But only if the conversation remains in the realm of actually removing material from courses, as with the Oberlin decision. ↩︎

To be honest, the fact that they even mention certification lets me know that they are woefully out of touch with critical disability discourse. Particularly since they are presenting this as coming from marginalized people themselves (ie, the professors are marginalized in some way). Getting 'certified' for a disability (particularly psychological ones) can be very, very difficult. Particularly for people of colour. Are we really trying to pretend, here, like the medical industry is outside of the same structurally oppressive context as the university? ↩︎