Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

December 2, 2024

Abigail Arnold | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Geeking Out With…is a feature in which we talk to GSAS students about their passions. You can check out past installments here.

Antares Brown is a first-year master’s student in Philosophy. Their research focuses on the philosophy of disability. They joined “Geeking Out With…” to talk about how they came to this topic, the questions they are exploring, and why the university is an important place to think about disability.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

How did you come to focus on the philosophy of disability?

I was very naturally drawn to philosophy. I think we often think of philosophy as a very high-brow academic discipline that is very unfriendly to laypeople, and that can be true. But I also think we all do philosophy whether we know it or not. Asking big questions and trying to sort out the answers is a big part of how we navigate our lives. It seems distant from most people’s day-to-day, but nothing could be further from the truth. We all have these thoughts and inquiries, and we have them about every topic imaginable.

For me, I have big questions about my own disabilities. I have both physical and mental limitations, and I found that, as a result, navigating academia works differently for me than it does for most people. When I was in undergrad and thinking about what area to specialize in, this came to the forefront. My mentor took me to a philosophy conference, and, for the first time, I saw a panel on disability. My mind was blown – I didn’t know that was an area I could dedicate my research to in philosophy! I had already been thinking about questions of disability, and having it shown to me as an area I could specialize in was really a game-changer.

What questions are you interested in when it comes to disability, and why explore them from a philosophical perspective?

There are a lot of questions I’m really curious about. I’m especially interested in what mental disabilities can tell us about how our minds work. Philosophers put a lot of weight on the idea of attention in cognition – we talk about perception and what things we notice. I think that the situations of people with neurodivergences like ADHD or trauma disorders can tell us something about the way our minds prioritize information: what things are important to notice first, what we build on what we first notice, and what tends to escape our notice. I’m also interested in how we define the boundaries of disability from a social perspective. How do we decide that a person is or is not disabled? Is there a sharp boundary, or is it vague? How does the category function in the world, and should we change it?

Most philosophers of disability believe that disability is inherently social, and that’s something I have spent some thinking through. Even if we agree it’s an inherently social category, there’s a lot of competing views of how best to model and understand it. The goal is, broadly speaking, to explain how a mere idea like disability has influence and causal power in our day to day lives. This intersects with questions of how our concepts of disability interact with other social categories like gender, race, and sexuality. If you can’t remove all the relevant social factors from consideration, you have to take them into account when you set out to define and explore disability.

Certainly we should look at disability in a variety of ways. People in sociology and related fields are doing things that inform what I do, but I look at it from a more theoretical perspective. Rather than directly investigating things that are happening on the ground, I take what others have generated about those circumstances and ask why do we do it that way, whether we should do it that way, what disability can tell us about the way our minds work, and what things we know and how we know them. So it’s a give and take when it comes to studying disability in academia – some of us ask how things are, others ask how they should be and how we can change them, but any scholar doing related work benefits from research done in both areas.

You mentioned that you began exploring this area as an undergraduate. What did you focus on in your research then?

My undergrad thesis had two parts. The first part had to do with the question of attention – what things we notice and why. This is a big question in philosophy with a lot of ideas, and I think looking at certain experiences of disability can inform and enrich our understanding of how we learn about and interact with the world. The second part had to do with how the category of disability gets constructed, and it’s admittedly a bit of a controversial take, according to some. We have a tendency in lay discourse to say that what matters about our social identity factors (e.g. race, gender and sexuality, disability) is how an individual identifies, but some philosophers think there’s more to it than that. For example, philosophers of race are skeptical about whether race is the kind of thing which can be decided based solely upon a person’s self-identity. I think disability is a similar category – it seems like a person can be disabled even if they don’t self-identify as such, but it also seems like a person can be disabled even if no one recognizes them as disabled. There are people who are dealing with life impairments but are functioning in society in such a way that others have no idea. This seems like a slightly different phenomenon than someone who is very visibly disabled. This leads us to think that there is some key role played by other members of an individual’s social community in deciding whether a label like “disability” applies to someone and then to question what that role is.

Glasses are a paradigm example of this kind of “social conferral” – we typically don’t view people who need glasses as disabled (though certainly there are exceptions). This leads us to think there might be features of the relationship between an individual and their environment that inform our concept of disability: maybe needing glasses usually doesn’t count because it is very common and because they are generally easy and reasonably inexpensive to get. Thinking deeper than that, we might also ask why 20/20 vision is the line for what is considered visual impairment. It seems like there is nothing intrinsic to being able to see objects clearly from twenty feet away (as opposed to fifteen, perhaps, or twenty-five) that tells us this should be our standard, so why do we use it? All of these questions go into trying to understand the social nature and role of disability.

Where do you plan to take this topic as you move forward in the master’s program?

I have a pet thesis that I’ve been playing with that will probably come out in some of my writings. When I say it, it sounds obvious, but, still, many people may not think about it. It’s important for us to get diverse perspectives in academia – we benefit from diversity of thought. If we all think the same, it’s harder to make progress. Part of what creates diversity of thought is diversity of experience, so the more diverse the backgrounds of people who come to universities are, the more diversity of thought we will have to enrich our scholarship. But, socially, we don’t construct our institutions to make this very easy. Even if we are taking some steps forward, we rarely look at the underlying infrastructure of academia itself, especially the social infrastructure, and ask why we do things the way we do pedagogically or if they serve the purposes we want.

Up until 1990, there was no Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). With the ADA, we started to think about physical access; we are still learning to do that when it comes to more abstract parts of our infrastructure that might disproportionately affect disabled people whose impairments are non-physical. For example, someone who might otherwise be very well-suited to academia might struggle to meet an attendance policy for reasons beyond their control and be impeded from contributing; if we don’t have a well-grounded reason for such a policy and are just keeping it because it’s traditional, we might be inadvertently perpetuating social injustice. At the same time, we want to ensure that university degree-holders are appropriately prepared to perform well in their social and career roles and that the accommodations we make for disadvantaged students do not undermine this goal. Balancing academic rigor with accessibility is very complex and requires more analysis than it’s given and than people realize. It’s easy to say we should accommodate disability because it’s ethically the right thing to do, and that’s true! But there are many questions we need to consider about the best way to do that.

How do you incorporate your thoughts on accessibility in universities into your own teaching?

I am a course assistant, and because I’m cognizant of this topic, I think of the ways many students, whether they identify as disabled or not, face limitations. For example, we have many students for whom English is not their first language, and they may be strong speakers but struggle with writing or vice versa. This doesn’t mean they’re unfit for the class; it means there is a gap between where they are and where we want them to get to. If all goes according to plan, I want to be a university professor, so this topic is something I think about and play with on a small scale now but that I will build on.

As just one example, we rarely think about how accessible our emails are to one another in academia. It’s difficult to advance very far in the academic echelons if one experiences difficulty with reading comprehension, so we have little reason to consider the way we present information in text and not just what information is presented. Speaking for myself, a student and scholar with ADHD, this can make it more difficult to extract key details in email communications, as often I am confronted with a solid wall of text that is unfriendly to the way my brain processes information. One thing that is very easy to do and helps students like me is to bold or italicize key details and to write in very short paragraphs of no more than two to four sentences when possible or to include bulleted lists. This is something I do with the students I serve as a course assistant for by default – even those who don’t need it tend to benefit, and I know how much easier it makes things for those who do.

There are innumerable details like this about the way we do anything in academia. Most of them are totally inert and benign, but some of them matter far more than we realize. Of these, many require little or no effort to change, but because these challenges so easily escape our notice unless they directly affect us or those we love, we just never think about it. One of my goals going forward is to challenge these unspoken norms through actions like the way I write emails to students, not just in theory and writing.

Why did you choose Brandeis as a place to explore these questions?

In addition to being located in what might be the best city in the US to attend a university and having rather immediate access to so many philosophers doing work at other institutions, Brandeis has a strong tradition in feminist philosophy. There’s not a lot of work being done on the philosophy of disability as a whole – it’s a niche and emergent subdiscipline, probably not older than the 1980s at best. Things can move very slowly in philosophy, so things from the 80s are often very new for us! Since it’s only slowly becoming more fleshed out, people who are interested in it often gravitate towards feminist philosophy, which laid the groundwork for a lot of philosophical subdisciplines that look at social categories such as race, gender, and disability. Studying feminist philosophy and other related ideas here gives me a solid foundation for developing further thought in the subdiscipline. Since I have this particular focus in my field, I get to participate in a very exciting period of rapid and vigorous development; there are relatively few writings in my niche as of yet, but many more in related fields, and Brandeis has great expertise in many of those disciplines.

Brandeis also appealed to me because of the quality of the philosophy program and its track record of getting people into good PhD programs—philosophy is outrageously competitive, and if you’re hoping for a career in academia, you have to study with the best! There’s a good mix of various lines of thought among the faculty here, which is such an asset to me and the other students in the philosophy department. I get a really robust set of varying and often contradictory viewpoints to explore and see what fits as I work towards building a more coherent and cohesive theory to toss into the ring and let other philosophers rip to shreds!

When you’re not working on your research, what else do you like to do?

I really like sitting around with my cohort on campus and discussing the ideas we have. There is a grad student lounge on the third floor of Rabb that I have come to think of as Brandeis’s little agora. We have a seminar with the whole cohort and sit around in the lounge and talk after, which is one of my favorite parts of the week. I also love how beautiful Brandeis’s campus is – it’s nice to study outside! When not on campus, I am often studying very hard at home. I love to cook, play video games, and hang out with my cat, and I used to read a lot of fiction before constantly reading for school. I also sometimes go outside with friends – we recently went to Walden Pond to catch all the colors.

What advice do you have for other students exploring their passions?

Be critical about what advice you accept. I think sometimes people give really well-intentioned advice that might not not necessarily apply to you and your interests. Often in philosophy, you have to confront mentors and instructors who staunchly disagree with all of your ideas. You might meet someone from a very, very different theoretical camp who will tell you your work makes no sense and has no value. But sometimes the person just doesn’t see your vision, which doesn’t mean that it is wrong or bad, just that they don’t get it. I think it’s important to be able to accept criticism, as that’s a big part of how we all learn and improve, but it’s equally important to stand by your convictions when it comes to what you’re passionate about. When someone says your ideas make no sense, ask yourself, “According to whom? Who says so, and why?” In philosophy, it’s almost as likely that 3,000 years or more of human tradition is wrong as it is that you are! Have faith in yourself. Just because others don’t see the value in your ideas doesn’t mean it’s not there.