Spotlight On…Leonie Smith
You’ve recently been awarded the Humanities Postgraduate Researcher of the Year in the Distinguished Achievement Awards. What does this recognition mean to you?
Philosophy at Manchester is very strong, but philosophy departments around the world come under periodic threats. Sometimes this is due to very mistaken ideas about their economic value (as in the recent announcements relating to philosophy at Hull), despite philosophy graduates having excellent job market prospects and high profile philosophers such as Onora O'Neill winning £1m awards. And sometimes this is just as part of wider threats to academic freedom in the humanities, as we’ve seen with the shocking closure of CEU in Hungary. Against this background it’s great to know that philosophical research continues to be recognised and valued by The University of Manchester.
On a more personal level, I didn’t realise until I received the medal that Manchester alumna and former Cabinet Minister, Ellen Wilkinson, is represented on one side of the bronze. Wilkinson advocated for social justice her entire life and was a prominent player in the Jarrow March against unemployment and poverty in the 1930s – she is well worth looking up if you haven’t heard of her! Seeing her image on the medal is a great reminder that I am carrying on in her footsteps with my work into the epistemic and ontological harms of modern-day poverty in the UK.
Please can you tell us a little more about your research?
I'm intellectually drawn towards puzzles about what makes up social reality, such as ‘what are groups and what are their responsibilities?’ and ‘how do we collectively create common knowledge?’ (social ontology and epistemology), but what drives me is a desire to address injustice through naming previously hidden problems and investigating the ethical considerations behind various forms of resistance and defence. In doing this, I think of myself as a social philosopher - what matters is what works, rather than working within any particular philosophical field. This often means considering the epistemological, metaphysical, ethical and political aspects to a problem.
My PhD project – Epistemic exclusion and epistemic self-defence: collective and individual responsibilities, rights and harms – is a collection of papers which brings these themes together. In the collection I identify and examine how very excluded social groups, such as people living in poverty in the UK, are prevented from being part of knowledge generation and exchange in our society.
After identifying the problem, the question is, what should we do about it? This type of question is often analysed in the philosophical literature from the perspective of what those who cause the harms ought to do about it. However, as the problems are often structural (rather than caused by the intentionally bad epistemic behaviour of ordinary individuals) and difficult to prevent, I am more interested in what those experiencing the harm might do to defend themselves. This has led me to examine the moral permissibility and practicality of various forms of what I have termed, epistemic self-defence. I also consider a range of conceptual issues in broader theoretical questions about collective responsibilities for global poverty and the proper focus for restitutive justice.
Pursuit of answers in this way has taken me all over the world to present research and discuss ideas with philosophers from a range of different disciplines and backgrounds (you can find out more here: http://stirlingbus.com/leoniesmith/).
Please can you tell us about the value of continued philosophical research?
I may be very, very biased, but the value of continued philosophical research is nothing less than its ability to understand and change the world - the big wide one and our own smaller ones.
By this I mean that there are, I think, at least two things worth answering: 'what is the value of further philosophical research?' and 'what does studying philosophy do for you?' On the second question: if you ask most good philosophy tutors what they actually hope to achieve when they teach philosophy, it's rare to hear that they just want to pass on facts and theories (Aristotle said this, Anscombe argued for that) or to help students pass exams. Instead, along with other humanities-based subjects we want to help students learn how to construct a well-reasoned argument, how to sort through sources, and how to form evidence and reason-based conclusions for themselves. But even more than the other disciplines, good philosophy tutors want our students to develop intellectual virtues and skills. And by this I mean skills like the ability to think and read critically but charitably, to see the flaws in our own and others' thinking, to have both the humility and confidence to engage with intellectual, political and social opinions and ideas well, and to approach their own worlds with an intellectual curiosity and excitement. We all are bombarded with news and media information, we all participate in the social world, and we all are affected by politics: being able to engage respectfully and critically to find the truth, to understand why others' opinions and arguments might be different and how to make sense of them, to ask what's missing from what we hear and what a better answer might be, can help us all achieve so much more.
And this is also part of the answer to what the value is of continued philosophical research itself (aside from the 'for its own sake' or ‘for individual continual development’ responses, both of which, by the way, I think are entirely valid). Bertrand Russell famously noted that whenever philosophers come up with anything particularly good it just becomes a whole new discipline in itself and there is more than a little truth in this (think: physics, logic, the scientific method, computer programming...). I don’t think that all researchers have to be coming up with entirely new fields of research for philosophical research to have value. But even when we’re not, we are using our intellectual training to both contribute to important questions – ‘how should autonomous cars be ethically programmed?’, ‘what should the limits of press freedom be?’, ‘is populism democratic?’ – and to examine them from entirely different perspectives – ‘what are the ethical considerations if corporations really are persons?’, ‘what if knowledge is not something we can analyse through individual interactions?’.
What do you do in your spare time?
In the first year of my PhD I co-designed and built the PhD Researcher game with a group of colleagues on the University Developing Intellectual Leaders Programme. It’s a game that lets players navigate the experiences, perils and joys of working on a PhD and the University is looking into a non-commercial use licence to allow them to use it in future training programmes. This must have given me a bit of a taste for board gaming as I’ve lately found myself infiltrating philosophy conference social spaces with any games that will fit in my suitcase and attending multi-day gaming events with friends in Manchester and beyond. I also currently have plans on the back burner for designing a new game, connected to my research that puts the player in the position of someone navigating poverty in present-day UK. Maybe when I finish the PhD I will eventually get on with it!