Peter Shea is an independent scholar who received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Minnesota. He produces a long-running interview series, the Bat of Minerva, and has taught with innovative pedagogies and several colleges and universities.
1. What type(s) of civically engaged or public philosophy work do you do?
One thing I have been doing for 22 years: interviewing thoughtful people—one per week—and showing the one-hour interviews on regional cable in a series called “The Bat of Minerva.” Interviews are usually an hour of airtime, starting with the guest’s basic intellectual autobiography and then exploring topics that come up within that life. Many interviews are posted to a University website.
2. Give an example of a successful project.
I did an intellectual geography of a rural area in southwest Minnesota, talking to farmers, retail people, artists, social workers about their thinking and their lives. I was able to do a comparable project in two areas in rural Austria. All the results are posted online here and here. The southwest Minnesota project came after a long experience of working in that community. I knew that the intellectual leaders there were doing interesting social and moral thinking and experimentation, and I wanted to explore and document the kind of opportunities that rural communities offer to thoughtful people. The work in Austria started out as an effort to juxtapose farmers and gardeners at the edge of the corn and soybean economy of Minnesota with the much more mainstream and small farms typical in Austria. I discovered in Austria deep reservoirs of intelligence and invention and broad social thinking that suggested a community of interest among the thoughtful people of these two, quite similar regions. This in turn provoked an interest in introducing thoughtful people in a given area to each other, and also in showing what intelligence looks like in its various dimensions and contexts.
3. What motivates you to do this work?
For me personally, interviews are a way of having the conversations I want to have. The project also allows me to do the work I want to do in the world. At the beginning, I wanted to model civil conversation in which topics were pursued at length—what I valued from my philosophy discussions. Later, I came to think of my public work primarily as making lives available to people so that they could think about their own lives in relation to interesting alternatives. Now, as streaming archives have emerged, I entertain the hope of creating a research archive about the development of thoughtful people, about the cultural and educational ecosystem that maintains thought and exploration, and about the particular dynamics of this period (1995 to 20??) in human history. This period will be remembered as a time when irrevocable decisions were made, and I want people to be able to trace how things worked in 2015, from the academic conferences to the community colleges to the little galleries and book groups. My archive is not comprehensive, but it contains many clues.
4. In what ways does the work inform your research (or vice-versa)?
My thesis, “The Arguments of Their Lives: The Role of Lives in Moral Reflection and Moral Teaching,” is basically an attempt to ground this interview project (and teaching with story circles) in the tradition of western philosophy, to give lives the place they deserve in moral thinking. That idea arose out of doing this show, and it shaped the way the show developed. (The show gradually became more about lives, less about conversation and issues.) Since the idea behind the thesis is still important to me, the show is the main place where l study the twists and turns of that idea, as I think about the lives I see in relation to my own, in relation to other interviews, and in relation to the lives in my community.
5. In what ways does the work inform your teaching (or vice-versa)?
I use some of the interviews as part of my ethics courses, especially online courses, which need a lot of video material. Teaching in person, I always try to do interviews with students, sometimes on camera, and, as often as possible, I try to do paper conferences instead of written comments. I find the one-on-one exchange very comfortable and productive. Also, the basic idea that has emerged from the video interviews, the idea that we think by locating ourselves with respect to other lives, has shaped my basic ethics intro course at a structural level. I start with Confucius’ idea that a decent life requires that one appropriate the traditional wisdom contained in the rituals and ways of life of one’s home community, and take Socrates to be a special case, a moral thinker born into a community so disrupted that tradition was not working as a trustworthy teacher, so that people had to think basic matters through for themselves (rather than as the founder of the discipline of ethics.) I would not have done that, except for my engagement with this material.
6. To what larger justice issues do you connect your projects?
If fascism is the fascination with domination, oppression, power, and violence for their own sakes, “The Bat of Minerva” is anti-fascist education. It makes thoughtfulness and an exploratory attitude both normal and attractive, and it shows people who are trying to be thoughtful, engaged, and exploratory who their allies are. This is particularly evident with local intellectual geographies in rural areas. One helps to constitute a club of awake people. The show also maintains a point of view about what media can do for a community when media is conceived in the public interest, as public television has often been conceived.
7. If someone wanted to take on work like yours, what steps or resources would you recommend?
Get a camera and a Mac computer and start. (iMovie works.) Don’t intrude very much, especially at the beginning; people will tell their stories just fine with a little reminder now and then. Invest in decent lights and a card camera, and make sure the sound is good. Work alone, if you want to do very much. Sooner or later, the help will set limits on what you can do. Don’t try to select the perfect guest; you can’t know in advance, most of the time. Keep the whole thing contained and limited. Don’t let it eat your life. Be sure to get video permissions that are very broad and legally good, including permissions for streaming. Follow your impulses and your opportunities: the person in the office next door, the reader you liked at a reading, someone you read about in the paper. Go to your guests. Don’t agree to take less than 90 minutes and don’t generally take more. Find a way to keep doing it for a long time, through many disruptions. The work will teach you how to do it.
8. What advice do you wish someone had given to you before you started doing your work?
Do short things along with the long things and learn how to do short things well. That advice would not have applied 22 years ago: streaming and Facebook changed everything. Now, pieces at 45 seconds to three minutes get astonishing numbers of views, and people have learned how to do very good work within that constraint. We need to do both long pieces and these tiny things. They work together beautifully. Also, say almost nothing early on in an interview. I soon took myself off camera. I learned to ask my first question before turning on the camera. If you start out making it about you, you will never give it back. Don’t be afraid of rich people or smart people or glamorous people. Also, don’t be afraid of ordinary people, in any sense of ordinary.
9. Are there any cautions or warnings you would give about introducing this work into the undergraduate classroom?
I do this work myself and bring the products to teaching. I have tried some limited experiments with passing the work on to students. Surely, they can process interviews in various ways once they are done, can edit, combine, condense, add pictures and graphics, etc. However, one needs to be careful in involving students in interviews. They need to be trained to do their homework and then to not let the homework take over. Above all, they need to be trained to let their guests speak at length, in their own ways. This is not natural or obvious. The problem, if people without enough training or experience do this stuff, is not just that it is done badly. An interview is an important event for the guest. It is undeniable recognition that the guest’s life and work are important. Messing that up is psychologically awful. Also, the first interview someone does, ever, as a guest, is very important historically. The initial responses are clean and clear and spontaneous, and one can see how the person’s mind works. It is a tragedy when that is done badly. It cannot be redone. One other thing: people are always tempted to do audio interviews. It seems easier and less intrusive. But it isn’t really much easier, and I have never found the camera to inhibit anything important. So much information is lost without the video, the play of gesture. We know just a little bit about how that information is encoded; as we learn more, the tragedy of audio-only interviews will, I think, become more apparent.
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