By Nick Ward
Philosopher and Professor of Sociology (Cross-appointed with the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Department of Philosophy), Alexis Shotwell, believes writing can be an exercise of illuminative justice that exposes the truth, unlocks meaning, and fosters connections.
Although our current pandemic moment has Shotwell asking existential questions about writing and its contemporary function, she remains steadfast that it holds the imaginative potential required to create a kinder, more equitable world.
The Covid-19 health crisis has also spurred Shotwell to reorient her ongoing interrogation of our unjust systems, and she has taken note of the commonalities between this pandemic and the AIDS epidemic which she researched in great depth for her (and her co-anchor’s) heralded AIDS Activist History Project.
In a recent conversation with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Professor Shotwell spoke to many of the issues laid bare by the health crisis, from policing to intensifying virtual dependency. She also discussed the virtues of writing as both a teacher and a learner. As you will see, this interview covers many seemingly disparate bases, but features several distinct throughlines. These include (among others) reflections and ideas on collective care, self-knowledge, and the boundless power of creative expression.
Shotwell is currently writing a short book titled, Collecting Our People, as a highly anticipated follow up to her influential Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (University of Minnesota Press).
Additionally, Shotwell is in the midst of preparing for her online writing group ‘Writing Anyhow’ to host their third Writing Camp on February 15, 16, & 17. Everyone and anyone is invited to attend Camp with the caveat that they are “committed to not being a jerk.” More info here.
What, in your opinion is good writing?
Good writing connects – it brings things together, it allows us to understand things about our own lives and other people’s lives that we did not, it helps writers see what we think about things that matter to us or the world. One of the technical terms for that is that writing can be a practice of “hermeneutic justice” – building the collective capacities to express meaning and have it understood. I think of good writing as a kind of truth telling, but also always in the mode we see in science fiction – writing helps us understand the world, and once we have some interpretive traction, we have a better chance of imagining how to change the world. So, having more people writing in this connective and meaning-making way is of tremendous benefit today; we need it desperately, I think.
That said, I spend a lot of time as a teacher of writing, to both undergraduates and graduate students, trying to help people lay down their orthodoxies about what good writing is – whether those tenets are that complex sentences or esoteric terms that are specific to a discipline are bad, or that simple sentences are bad, or any of a million other things. If I could wave a wand and get rid of the “is my writing good or bad?” question that a lot of people ask right away when they’re writing, I would – I think that question really shuts people down and produces a lot of twisted, tortured prose.
Does being a good writer come naturally or through practice?
I think kids have a predisposition towards telling and sharing stories, and wanting to write books, and recount to us things that they have seen or thought about – so in that sense I think of writing as natural, as available to everyone. My friend Hector, who is four, just gave us a book, titled and bound, with illustrations and letters that he did himself. I love it! It’s really clear that pretty quickly, and I would say as soon as people start conventional schooling, they lose that sense of possibility and joy in writing and they stop giving their friends artisanally-crafted single edition books. And this seems to be as soon as an authority figure is evaluating their writing and giving it a grade. Obviously, there’s a lot of just structural stuff about this – which parents have time to read to their kids and supplies to let them make books, who is literate, and then whether grade schoolteachers have the resources they need to be present with kids. Writing is shaped by social relations of oppression as much as anything in this world, and that’s terrible, because the people who are told that they have nothing to say are being denied the basic human dignity of expressive possibility. So, by the time people come to university, we see some really deep patterns around writing which are much more difficult to shift than just teaching people parts of speech and how to express themselves, and that has everything to do with justice.
When teaching writing, what are your guiding principles?
When any of us are teaching, we’re always teaching writing. A lot of us professors don’t think this – we think we’re just teaching some specific material. But at every level we’re really also teaching expressive possibility and assessing whether people have understood the material at least in part through assessing their writing. So, we should always think about that in our approaches to teaching and learning: How, as we’re teaching other things, are we also teaching writing? What lessons are we giving, implicitly or explicitly? I was trained in a “writing without teachers” approach, which shaped a particular lineage of writing teaching in the US – so I try to start from the point of view that every student is interesting, has something to say, and is uniquely worthy of attention. I know this seems pretty basic, but actually once you start taking this approach the entire structure of grading and assessment at universities starts to be a bit hard to work with. The kinds of surveillance that professors are encouraged to take up, and the ways that writing is reduced to grades, and the sort of aggressively defensive approach to grading papers, as though we need to head off any future complaint from students – all of these things make it hard to have a good pedagogical relation. And, of course, it’s not like I can just magically have this great space in which to teach writing - I teach big classes, I am very frustrated when I discover students have bought papers or plagiarized things, and it’s really hard to have nourishing work around writing when I only know people for one term at a stretch. So, I try to build in at least one assignment in every class where I can give student responsive rather than evaluative feedback and to talk about writing not as punishment but instead as a specific kind of pleasure and goodness that no one can take away from them. And as a general approach I try to teach the student to build their own capacities to write and to evaluate whether their writing is doing what they want it to do; this is the only way to have a relationship with writing after they’re through with university and being in a formal teacher-student relationship.
Do you feel a responsibility to support other writers?
Well, I have had a strangely large number of extremely generous teachers, none of whom had really tortured relationships with their own work, and all of whom modeled for me a kind of gentle, relentless curiosity. I didn’t understand until I finished my PhD how rare they were, and once I really saw what a rough go of it others have had, I guess I did feel a kind of responsibility to try to share some of the bounty I had received through no particular virtue of my own.
Obviously as a supervisor of graduate students I have a core responsibility to do my best to mentor and teach them as writers, and it’s been a great honor to also teach this new graduate thesis writing class – well, actually, it’s not new anymore, I’ve been teaching it for four years now! That class draws students from all across the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and it’s a really lovely thing to see how people can very quickly and effectively build writing community together as graduate students. They are so smart and generous with one another, and those relationships carry forward and have helped a lot of people finish their degrees and get interesting jobs where writing continues to be important. And we’re planning in the Sociology program to have a similar “craft of writing” class directed at first and second year undergraduate students. Last year, I had the pleasure of working with a wonderful undergraduate, Felicity Hauwert, as part of the Students as Partners Program on research to support that course. We ended up postponing running it because so much of what we found as best practices I wanted to try first in the in-person classroom, not through Zoom.
Given how often professors have really dysregulated and dysfunctional relationships with writing, it’s pretty amazing how much of our job really is about nourishing the craft of writing, in ourselves and our peers – whether that’s through doing manuscript reviews or reading grant applications. So that commitment to helping others write in a way that we can read and helping them connect with their thoughts and feelings, that goes all the way along wherever we are in our careers.
Then I have for a long time hosted or coordinated various kinds of writing groups – at my last job, we started a Friday afternoon writing group that was still going last I checked, eight years later. When the pandemic started up, students in our department were looking for more writing community, and so I started an online space using a program called Discord; we’ve had two “writing camps” there, one in the summer and one over fall break, and people meet up there to do silent collective writing. It’s a really nice way to have some accountability and community and to see that others are also working on this hard work.
What are your personal writing rituals and processes?
Sadly, in the context of the pandemic, my happiest writing is with a group in a café. My parents ran a used bookstore/café, and so growing up I spent many of my waking hours doing homework there, and it’s always been an easy space for me to drop into writing mode. Without that kind of exoskeleton I have to be more deliberate about setting up an internet blocker, turning off my phone, and ideally finding at least one other person who’ll work remotely with me. I need to close off habitual “off-ramps” like interesting conversations, doomscrolling, or books I don’t actually need to read that suddenly seem incredibly interesting; if I can do that for three minutes then usually, I can write for a 45-minute chunk. The pandemic is helping me ask existential questions about what writing is for and why I’d do it, but honestly the most important thing I’ve found is just having a practice, a process, for writing. Then various products emerge, and they can be tinkered with and shared.
How is your knowledge and research on AIDS shaping the way you are thinking about the Covid-19 virus and its momentous implications on individuals and communities? Perhaps now is the time for a reorientation of what we each deserve as human beings?
It was such an amazing good fortune to co-anchor the AIDS Activist History Project; we’ve just recently put up the last of the transcripts of interviews we did. We had five years of funding, but we could have gone on collecting interviews and ephemera much longer. This was the first sustained collection of interviews with people who were activists in response to the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the Canadian context – and there’s so much more work still to do since, of course, AIDS is not over, and neither is the political work that activists continue to do. But hearing from some of the people who were working on HIV and AIDS in the years before there was effective medication, so, before 1996, has definitely shaped everything I think about now. The Covid pandemic has manifested, tragically, that the people who have power to make decisions about health didn’t learn the lessons AIDS activists have always been trying to teach: That disease is political, that the conditions for people’s lives matter to whether they live or die, and only through listening to the people most directly affected can we build adequate medical policy and practice. So, in Covid times we see, as we saw then, that social supports are vastly inadequate to the needs of ordinary people, that prison is a death sentence, that it doesn’t make sense to talk about medical care if people are being evicted or can’t get enough food to eat.
So, yes, I’ve been arguing that strategies of containment and policing this virus are failing us now as they failed us in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. There’s been a lot of focus on individual behaviours without a corresponding attention to who is able to manifest those behaviours; it’s easy for me, as a continuing professor with no kids and good internet access, to work from home and self-isolate and so on. It’s impossible for many of my students, who are working in restaurants and grocery stores and single parents, or my neighbors who live in rooming houses, to do these things. So, taking a cue from AIDS activists, I think we should think about this pandemic as a social situation, and something that we could vastly transform through changing the social supports we give to people. We could start by releasing people from prison and immigration detention, stopping evictions, and providing access to the basic necessities of life.
In Against Purity, you advocate that settlers claim their bad kin – could you explain this concept?
I started thinking about how settlers, and white settlers in particular, can take responsibility for our inheritances in Against Purity. I realized after the book was published how many holes there were in my own account of working with history as a piece of resisting ongoing colonialism. This happens to me a lot, that gaps in one piece of writing opens up the next work. So the short book I’m writing now, Collecting Our People, starts from this idea of claiming bad kin. Kim TallBear, Audra Simpson, Zoe Todd, and other Indigenous feminists have helped articulate the idea that it doesn’t matter what identity we claim – rather, what matters is who claims us as part of their relationships. Like a lot of white people, I have family stories about having Indigenous family, many of them narrated to me by my racist grandmother; many people like me turn to these stories when we begin to understand how awful racism is. Or, we white people harken back to the parts of our families who resisted slavery, or who experienced an earlier iteration of forced migration – such as some of my ancestors who left Ireland because of famines there. If we want to resist racism and colonialism, it can be pretty tempting to claim to not be white, or to only claim relationships with people who stood against oppression. But I’m interested in the ways that white supremacists and people who are invested in Canadian nationalism claim a relation with me, as a white person. They make all kinds of decisions about how this world should be organized and who should thrive in it based on protecting whiteness, normalizing land theft, and prioritizing the wellbeing of the wealthy. These are our bad kin, people who violate the basic possibility of caring relationality. In the book, I’m arguing that we can claim our bad relations in order to transform them – we can be the kinds of friends who make our friends their best selves, build comradely communities that advance political transformation, and actively resist white supremacists wherever they manifest.
Your thoughts on purity politics in the age of the internet?
As I use it, “purity politics” is the idea that we can be individually innocent, that we should be perfect before we try to make the world better – two impulses that tend to make people defensive, obsessed with pointing out other people’s flaws or mistakes, and incapable of organizing collective changes. So, I’m tempted to say that the internet changes nothing about purity politics!
But of course, that’s not true. Among other things, as soon as we’re on the internet we’re participating in material relations of terrible harms – from using extractively mined rare earth minerals in our phones to the heat sinks of the computers holding the clouds we access to the future obsolescence of our devices. And then our behaviour doesn’t just intensify but rather may transform in response to online spaces; so, the purity politics impulse to not be contaminated, or complicit, can manifest online perhaps more than offline. But I’m interested too in the ways that being very online helps us perceive our collective situation and helps us get more real about being noninnocent, co-produced, and connected. I mean, the internet is a relation, like everything, and so we have a chance there to reflect on what kind of relation we can hold with others. For me, the internet is always what social theorist Stuart Hall used to characterize as “without guarantees” – the form itself doesn’t reliably or necessarily produce any specific social relation. In my own life, I love and rely on online spaces not only for inspiration but for taking strategic cues from others about the collective, distributed project many of us are working on, which is, more or less, trying to create a world in which everyone has what they need to live joyful, dignified lives.
Prof. Shotwell's interview in The Atlantic, The Folly of 'Purity Politics'