COVID-19 has been a major obstacle for motivation this summer. I imagine this is the case for many of us, as we juggle family members and friends getting sick, and we adjust to the new workspaces. It has been difficult not having access to the library for checking out physical books and doing work in a space conducive for my productivity. Furthermore, it has been hard to move forward with the new developments of my research topic without ruminating on “what could have been” had I not been in quarantine.
George Floyd’s murder has been an important distraction from my work that I am now reflecting on in light of my summer research focus. I have dedicated my time these past two weeks to engaging in difficult conversations with family members and friends about police brutality and racism, even though I am not an expert on facilitating dialogues on anti-racist work and I myself, as a white person, have a lot to learn as well. These conversations bring me back to a re-centering of why my research topic this summer matters to me. I take seriously the fact that there is important anti-racist work that must be accomplished in the form of noticing and altering our racial biases. Because my research relies heavily on affect theory, I consider this point specifically with attention to how our implicit racist habits reside, in large part, in our unreflected and unaltered feelings and attitudes. I want to pair this with contemporary work on critical theory to determine how I can adapt my research to the current climate.
I do worry that calling in Michel Foucault as a central figure of my work can be ironic, as I risk reinvesting attention to another white male figure in the traditional canon of philosophy. However, I think this adds further nuance to my research question this summer, which broadly asks, how can traditional figures in the canon be used in new ways to support a re-imagining of what scholarship can practically do? I really wonder what Foucault’s conception of ethics as a relationship to oneself and his attention to practices of self can provide for conceiving of (part of) anti-racist work as a daily practice of assessing and transforming the self for the other.
