Paul Tubig is an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgia Southern University. In his traditional and public philosophy he works to make philosophy accessible to all, especially historically marginalized people.
The author, Paul Tubig.
What type(s) of public philosophy do you do?
My current public philosophy work is centered on extending philosophical education, engagement, and discourse to incarcerated publics. For the past five years, I have been working with incarcerated students at the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW) in Gig Harbor, Washington. I taught college-accredited philosophy courses at WCCW as part of the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS) in-prison college program. My teaching at WCCW has largely been collaborative, working in the past with amazing instructors, Blake Hereth and Sofia Huerter, and most recently with Anna Bates. In summer 2021, Anna and I taught a course on philosophy and incarceration, exploring the role of incarceration in the history of philosophy, as well as works that examine the ethics of incarceration itself.
Teaching at WCCW opened a variety of opportunities to do other engaged philosophy with incarcerated students outside the classroom setting. This includes organizing an intercollegiate ethics bowl in prison, which I will further elaborate below.
The University of Puget Sound team competes with the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound team at the first Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl in the Washington Corrections Center for Women.
Give an example of a successful project.
One successful project that immediately comes to mind is the intercollegiate ethics bowl at WCCW. An ethics bowl is a competitive yet collaborative event in which teams of students engage and argue about contemporary ethical issues by presenting arguments, raising questions, and addressing concerns from other teams and a panel of judges. This project came about through my discussion with incarcerated students who wanted to do more philosophy beyond their intro classes and deliberate with other people on timeless and timely issues. This project was inspired by the works of other philosophers and educators who organized ethics bowls in prisons, such as Kyle Robertson who organized an intercollegiate ethics bowl in San Quentin.
With the support of so many individuals and institutions, I spearheaded the first intercollegiate ethics bowl in WCCW. College ethics bowl teams from Seattle University and the University of Puget Sound came to the prison to compete with the college ethics bowl team of incarcerated students associated with the FEPPS program. Prior to the event, the FEPPS ethics bowl team spent their Saturday evenings for six months preparing for the ethics bowl, studying major ethical concepts and theories and developing arguments about cases that might be asked in the competition. We held a mock round with the Seattle University ethics bowl team to help them be more familiar with the mechanics and dynamics of the competition. And in the official competition, the FEPPS team competed with the University of Puget Sound team, from which ensued a lively dialogue on various ethical issues, such as the morality of China’s social credit system and whether “love drugs” should be developed.
The project was hailed as a complete success. To the best of my knowledge, the FEPPS ethics bowl team is the first collegiate ethics bowl team inside a women’s prison. The FEPPS team had such a great experience that they wanted to participate in other ethics bowls. In November 2019, they participated in the Northwest Regional Ethics Bowl, competing remotely via Zoom before Zoom became a common mode of communication.
Given its success, we aim to make the ethics bowl in WCCW an annual event. If it wasn’t for COVID dramatically upending daily life, we would have held the 2nd intercollegiate ethics bowl in WCCW in 2020 with the FEPPS ethics bowl team competing with teams from the University of Puget Sound and Pacific Lutheran University. With the students, we hope to resume this project in fall 2021.
Paul holding the final score of the first Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl at Washington Corrections Center for Women. The teams traded wins in two rounds.
What motivates you to do this work?
I am motivated to do this work for several reasons. For one, I am committed to making philosophy more open, welcoming, and accessible to everyone, especially historically marginalized communities. I consider philosophy to be a deeply meaningful and worthwhile enterprise, given its emancipatory and transformative potential. Yet it is troubling to think that the goods of philosophy are limited to traditional college settings and accessible only to those with the privilege to attend their classes. I am sensitive to the exclusionary norms that have historically shaped philosophy, both in terms of the canon and who gets to sit at the table and participate in its discourses. I want to challenge these norms. It will not only improve the discourse of philosophy by including a broader range of perspectives and voices, but also it would make the benefits of philosophy more available to a broader range of publics, not only people who are socially privileged.
Second, I am committed to helping incarcerated people attain their college education. Philosopher Christia Mercer wrote in the Washington Post that some of her best students are in prison. I share the same view regarding the students at WCCW. Many of them are admirably dedicated learners. They are invested in their education not only as a requisite for social mobility and greater participation in civic life, but also valuing education for its own sake. Many students embrace education as both enriching and dignity-affirming, especially when one is confined in a context of deprivation, degradation, and restriction of their mental and expressive freedoms. I believe college education should be accessible to everyone, especially those who turn to education to reconceive and transform themselves in positive ways.
Third, I always admired philosophers who practiced philosophy as a form of activism, engaging with not only ideas but also the people, places, and practices that make these ideas relevant and poignant. I am turned off by philosophical engagement that feel unsettlingly disembodied, insensitive, lacking a sense of accountability in their theorizing about others, and narrow-minded in who is considered a valuable contributor of philosophical discourse. Rather, I love philosophy that is on the ground, where philosophers engage with ideas in ways that are informed by their interactions with relevant publics. And more importantly, they seek to exemplify these ideas through how they live in the world and how they practice philosophy. This is an ideal that orients and motivates my public philosophy work.
Freedom Education Project Puget Sound team shaking hands with the University of Puget Sound team after the first Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl at Washington Corrections Center for Women.
Did you have an experience as a student or in your life that leads you to embrace public philosophy?
My work to make philosophy more inclusive and accessible to everyone, especially the historically marginalized, is grounded in my own arduous experience of striving to claim a space in the discipline of philosophy. I am the son of working-class Filipino immigrants and a first-generation college student. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgia Southern University. This latter fact still feels anomalous to me, given that philosophy oftentimes seems reserved only for those with prestigious educational backgrounds and born with built-in financial safety nets. My philosophical pursuit started out at a small community college in San Diego, California. I was a high school graduate with a 2.0 GPA, spending my weekdays and weekends in my Dad’s barbershop working behind the cash register and sweeping floors while clippers and lively conversations buzzed and Filipino soap operas played in the background. I never really aspired to anything beyond the limited horizon of possibilities presented to me. But this attitude was unsettled when I took my first philosophy class in my second year of community college. I was really drawn to philosophy for its liberating and transformative potential, and its fundamental pursuit to better understand the world and ourselves so that we can live and act in ways that align with what is true and good.
The path that led me to Georgia Southern is a long one, but I would describe it as a path full of delays, overwhelming financial insecurity, and foreboding signs that this path, regardless of how much I wanted to walk it, was not meant for me. Low-income students, especially low-income students of color, face a number of challenges, not only economic roadblocks but also social expectations, presuppositions, and stigmas that can alienate us from considering certain life options. It is hard to dream outside our current moment and its horizon of possibilities. My experiences make me acutely aware of the diverse, contingent realities that shape people’s range of choices, their self-conceptions, and the possible storylines that they are confident to author. This sensitivity drives my research and public philosophy work. I am committed to expanding access to philosophical education and engagement to marginalized publics beyond the traditional academic setting, making philosophy more open and welcoming to everyone.
In what ways does the work inform your research (or vice-versa)?
Although I have always been deeply committed to prison education, I never really engaged with the practice of incarceration as an object of philosophical inquiry prior to my public philosophy work in prisons. But now I include the ethics of incarceration as a major area of research. My interactions with incarcerated students made the issue more concrete, immediate, and forceful to me. It also informs my own research by helping me become more cognizant of the ethical aspects of incarceration. It is crucial that philosophical discourse on incarceration should be responsive to the perspectives and narratives of people incarcerated. And I have learned so much from students in WCCW about the value of philosophical education in prisons and the personal and social consequences of imprisonment as currently practiced. These are valuable contributions that should be recognized and integrated to any discourse on the value of prison education and on justice and incarceration.
Team Freedom Education Project Puget Sound competing via Zoom in the Northwest Regional Ethics Bowl.
In what ways does the work inform your teaching (or vice-versa)?
My public philosophy work in prisons has deeply informed my own teaching. For example, the intercollegiate ethics bowl at WCCW have made me think more carefully about how to foster respectful philosophical discussions between diverse students more effectively. The intercollegiate ethics bowl at WCCW involved having philosophical discussions between students from dramatically different social locations. This project made more apparent to me the challenges of fostering a philosophical discourse characterized by mutual respect when such discourses take place within a complicated context of social inequalities, stereotypes, and imbalanced power dynamics. And we confront this challenge in any classroom marked by pluralism, where background conditions of inequalities and injustice could shape the relations between students and affect their learning experience.
What has been your biggest obstacle in doing public philosophy?
Doing public philosophy requires a significant level of time, energy (physical, mental, and emotional), resources, and extended commitment. This can be extremely demanding, especially when one is a graduate student whose time and energy are already allocated to teaching classes in their home institution and trying to finish their dissertation, or a professor who has similar teaching and writing obligations.
The process of doing public philosophy in prisons is arduous. It includes doing the long commute to prisons, going through training and gaining clearance, preparing for classes and activities, dealing with the limited resources of students and prison protocols, adapting to the unpredictable circumstances of prisons, and the accumulated emotional toll of being in a prison setting.
When public philosophy is treated as an extracurricular endeavor, then one is more so vulnerable to burnout. Thus, the challenge is to find a healthy, sustainable approach where one can still do public philosophy work while meeting the expectations attached to their role as a graduate student or professor and still make space to have a robust life independent of these roles.
A cartoon Immanuel Kant wishes the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound ethics bowl team good luck at the Northwest Regional Ethics Bowl.
How does your department or institution support your public philosophy? How would you like to see them support you?
I was very fortunate to be in a department (Philosophy Department at the University of Washington) that values engaged philosophy. The ethics bowl at WCCW project was funded for two years through the department’s Melvin Rader Summer Grants for Innovative Philosophical Projects. Many members of the UW Philosophy Department have also participated in the ethics bowl as moderators and judges. And previous colleague Anna Bates will help continue the ethics bowl project while I’m in Georgia. My public philosophy work in prisons has also been supported by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities through Mellon fellowships.
Yet it is ideal for institutions to provide more support to students and professors who wish to do public philosophy. Doing public philosophy, in this moment, requires much sacrifice and that is not helpful in increasing, or at least sustaining, public philosophy work. Support, such as providing a course release, a reasonable stipend, or reimbursement for gas and materials to do such work would help immensely. Also, support for students to do research or dissertation work oriented around public philosophy would relieve the dilemma of treating public philosophy and research as incommensurable goods in which one might have to be compromised for the promotion of the other.
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