AICRE + Philosophy—Picking up a Dropped Stitch in the Humanities

Note: Launching today, the Miami Institute’s forum on philosophy has been co-curated with Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) President Hanétha Vété-Congolo and AICRE+Philosophy’s Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Annalisa Coliva, and S. Ama Wray. The CPA is a philosophical organization founded in 2003 at the Center for Caribbean Thought at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, while AICRE + Philosophy is an initiative launched in 2020 and based at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Here, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard presents the ongoing work of AICRE + Philosophy at UCI.

The Africana Institute for Creativity, Recognition and Elevation  (AICRE) was founded at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in 2015 by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard and S. Ama Wray. Wray explains that AICRE is

“an interdisciplinary entity encompassing theorists, artists and practitioners spread across the Diaspora and the continent. The UN’s International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024) was the catalyst for actualizing AICRE with a view to bringing agents together to advance African peoples’ self-knowledge. AICRE’s collective resolutions aim to destabilize overwrought narratives of lack, focusing instead on contribution, innovation and opening the vista toward Africana ways of knowing and problem-solving.”   

AICRE + Philosophy is a collaboration with UCI’s Department of Philosophy. As faculty members who acknowledged having very little knowledge of scholarship in this adjacent field, they have undertaken a process of discussion, reading, and accountability supported by AICRE. “The aim,” explains Chair of Philosophy, Annalisa Coliva, “has been to engage in a process of self-education, fostered by participation in reading groups, and engagement with distinguished scholars during three workshops sponsored by AICRE and the Department of Philosophy.”

 AICRE + Philosophy has highlighted our interest in future partnerships with the Collegium for Black Women in Philosophy, the Azanian Philosophical Society, the Caribbean Philosophical Association, and the Pan African philosophical organizations of the Nordic States, among many others.  These groups are led by African, Black, Caribbean scholars in their respective subfields of philosophy: ranging from analytical philosophy, European philosophy, linguistics, logic, the study of culture, human rights, and histories of the Haitian Revolution.

Such learned societies and academic professional organizations emerge both in part out of a long history of legalized and normalized racial segregation in higher education globally that has positioned these scholars in particular ways as outsiders even in areas where they have the most information. These organizations do not exist because these scholars wish to "self-segregate"--rather they exist because said scholars had to create a pathway into higher education outside of the major/regional learned societies and associations where the legalized history of racial segregation, racial violence, all bolstered by the mythology of white supremacy was normalized into shabby treatment or racial discrimination in the various disciplines. When higher education and graduate education, in particular, creates the barriers to recognizing excellence and contributing to the expansion of democracy, learned societies and academic professional associations have been created to correct for these obstacles.

Being treated as a scholarly outsider shows up in undergraduate and graduate admissions to majors, in academic-refereed publishing, in awards, placement after completion of the doctorate, access to opportunities in higher education, and whether or not the scholarship of such persons ends up on academic curriculum.

The legacy of still-actionable forms of legal discrimination in higher education has been covered extensively in scholarly works. Noteworthy among these include:

Joy James and Ruth Farmer, eds. Spirit, Space, & Survival: African American Women in (white) Academe (1993).

Louise Marley and Val Walsh, eds. Feminist Academics: Creative Agents for Change (1995).

Lois Benjamin, Black Women in the Academy: Promises and Perils (1997).

Linda Martín Alcoff et al. Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy (2003).

Mabokela, Reitumetse Obakeng and Zine Magubane, eds. Hear our voices: Race, gender and the status of black South African women in the academy (2005).

Jessica Lavariega-Monforti and Melissa Michelson, “Diagnosing the Leaky Pipeline: Continuing Barriers to the Retention of Latinas and Latinos in Political Science,” published in PS: Political Science and Politics 41.1 (2008).

Nikol Alexander Floyd “‘Written, published, ... cross-indexed, and footnoted’: Producing black female Ph. Ds and black women's and gender studies scholarship in political science" published in PS: Political Science and Politics 41.4 (2008).

Amina Mama, "What does it mean to do feminist research in African contexts?" published in Feminist Review 98.1 (2011).

Nadia Brown, ed. Me Too Political Science (2020).

This body of path-breaking scholarship has exploded across disciplines globally in ways that have directed curriculum and its relationship to workplace equity and national economic development.

In 2016, the Association for the Study of Black Women in Politics hosted a historic national conference at the University of California, Irvine. The “Scandal in Real Time National Conference on Black Women, Politics, Oral History” had two components: 1) presentations of reminiscences on the scholarly impact of senior scholars and 2) oral histories conducted with those scholars. Materials are archived here, building on nearly a half century of systematic policy change in higher education. Such interventions were catalyzed by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, the National Council of Black Studies, and the African Heritage Studies Association, the Association of Black Women Historians, and the African American Intellectual Heritage Association among dozens of other learned societies and academic professional associations and academic departments. Key scholars in politics and political thought—including Jewel Limar Prestage, Ronald Walters, Hanes Walton, Cedric Robinson, Mack Jones, Mae King, Shelby Lewis, and Robert Smith among others—continue to be essential to the founding of key journals and the expansion and founding and sustaining of new academic departments and modes of inquiry.

AICRE+Philosophy models itself on and leverages the relationships that African, Black, and Caribbean faculty members currently on campus at the University of California Irvine have to such vibrant learned societies and professional associations across the country, and world. We hope this year-long investment in public workshops and candid closed door conversations in Philosophy with leaders of these organizations signal to these organizations that their networks of senior scholars, their pathways projects for developing younger scholars, their modes of inquiry, and their scholarly formations will be well regarded at UC Irvine’s Philosophy Department.

AICRE + Philosophy supports UCI’s Black Thriving Initiative to prepare the way in advance for the scholars who are certain to join us in the future and the scholars that are here now. Affirming ourselves and changing our campus culture requires deep reflection, new forms of professional development, and educational opportunities that can change humanities. Moved by the heinous killing of George Floyd and the global protests from Pretoria to Brixton to Baltimore to Toronto, UCI is showing up to the challenges of a much needed racial justice reckoning, supporting the expansion of its faculty, staff and student body to comprise a demographic that is at least representative of the state of California. We wanted to put in the intellectual work to make sure that the institutional barriers that pervade higher education do not disadvantage our future colleagues. We understand that being the first (and typically un-tenured) African, Black, or Caribbean person in a given department can inhibit progress and retention through full rank. With existing faculty, new faculty need to be welcomed to share: literatures and modes of inquiry, senior peer institution evaluators, and audiences and research formations that may not be hegemonic or may even be invisible in disciplines across the humanities.

It is important that our current senior Humanities faculty meet with, get to know, and be able to engage with their African, Black, and Caribbean peers and their work on equal footing--in ways that a junior un-tenured person simply cannot muster given their institutional rank and vulnerability. When surveyed globally, new faculty from under-represented minority groups and historically discriminated groups describe the challenges they face in simply speaking up and leading on curriculum change and other key decision-making when they join academic departments.

Then we have the even greater challenge of majority faculty members being unwilling to recognize that interpersonal communication styles or just plain old bias are preventing them from believing when minoritized faculty actually express that they experience shabby treatment. Most under-represented faculty simply will say nothing and will plan an exit strategy that they will talk about with their trusted colleagues in the discipline. It creates a pall that makes the work of affirming the value of under-represented scholars and students that much harder.

Without the kind of discussions we are prompting in AICRE + Philosophy, we end up with lots of energy expended on bringing people in and then we have retention problems, or problems of misalignment because the receiving department faculty are not able to welcome or engage seriously with the incoming junior un-tenured faculty members. Sometimes the disciplinary ties are not enough to create a welcoming intellectual atmosphere that fosters belonging and modernization of curriculum and admissions processes.

AICRE + Philosophy uses what the university (as a learning organization) is best at—teaching and learning—to create vibrant futures.

-Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is Associate Professor of African American Studies, a Faculty affiliate of Gender, Sexual, and Queer Studies at the University of California, Irvine. During her time at UCI, she has received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research through her contribution in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and Division of Undergraduate Education. Willoughby-Herard works on comparative racialization in the South African and North American contexts, Black political thought, and African feminisms. In her recent book, Waste of a White Skin: Carnegie and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability, she uses black feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical tradition, to explore the effect of politics of white poverty on black people’s life, work, and political resistance. For a list of Willoughby-Herard’s other works, please follow this link.