Tiffany Tsantsoulas

Tiffany Tsantsoulas is an assistant professor in the department of philosophy and religious studies at California State University, Bakersfield. She is on the governing board of the Public Philosophy Network. 

What type(s) of public philosophy do you do?

I am drawn to projects that allow for collaboration with historically unrepresented communities in academic philosophy. For example, developing community materials on food ethics with Food PLUS Detroit or discussing philosophical literature with incarcerated women at Centre County Correctional Facility (CCCF). I’m not sure I know what “public philosophy” means, but I am a philosopher who wants to think with members of the public in ways that I hope will produce some form of public good. 

It can be hard to do this kind of work as a graduate student or junior faculty member. Very often you are discouraged by well-intentioned mentors who do not want you to get distracted from more traditional priorities (dissertation, job market, making tenure). But I always knew that I wanted to do philosophy outside of the traditional confines of the university classroom. I was fortunate to find like-minded people in my Ph.D. program at Penn State like my advisor, Nancy Tuana, and Christopher P. Long, who both led me to get involved in organizations like the Public Philosophy Journal and Humanities Without Walls. During that same period I helped to start the Restorative Justice Initiative at Penn State in collaboration with Efraín Marimón and fellow graduate student Romy Opperman. We began in 2015 with a small prison education program in two correctional institutions. Under Dr. Marimón’s leadership it has since grown to include more facilities, outreach, and advocacy, and continues to work toward our initial goal of offering credentialed courses to incarcerated students interested in earning a degree.  

Now I’m in my second year as a faculty member. I’m lucky to be surrounded by colleagues who have been active public philosophers in the region for years. Our Kegley Institute of Ethics (KIE), for instance, is a well-established bridge between CSUB and the community. Learning from my colleagues, like KIE director Michael Burroughs, I have come to realize the importance of tailoring public philosophy projects to the particular publics that you plan to engage. This cannot be done without collaboration and humility. I am deeply invested in breaking down barriers between the university and the community. As a faculty member at a public institution I believe I have a mandate to serve the public with my work.    

Currently, I am developing new programming that can promote anti-racist and feminist issues here in Kern County. I’m collaborating with a couple undergraduate students to develop partnerships with local activist groups who work to promote feminist abolitionism. We’re planning a reading group and several public conversations. Our goal is to establish long-lasting connections between feminist and anti-racist scholars on campus and those who are working in our community. I know we have a lot to learn from each other.  

Give an example of a successful project. 

I really enjoyed my time working on the Humanities Without Walls’ New Ethics of Food (Global Midwest) project. At the time I was a graduate assistant and cannot take much credit for the various deliverables the project produced, but I learned so much about what public scholarship can achieve from this interdisciplinary and collaborative team. For my part, I co-wrote three articles published in a special issue of the Public Philosophy Journal that focused on rethinking our ethical paradigms about food justice. 

Yet the real reason this project was a success for me is that I was able to collaborate with Renee Wallace of Food PLUS Detroit. In addition to bringing her expertise to the group, she was interested in developing discussion materials on food ethics for a series of townhalls in Detroit. It was the first time that I saw tangible evidence that philosophical ideas could be useful to marginalized communities. Maybe that sounds a bit strange! But I genuinely hadn’t experienced this before. I’ll always remember when Renee told me that she was excited to use a framework I developed to present ideas about composting and food justice to the community. That’s the excitement I’m looking to recreate with my current work. 

What motivates you to do this work?

The first vision of philosophy I was exposed to was Socratic. I took to heart the idea that philosophy was something to be practiced in community with the public. Then I had a rather painful training in canonical academic philosophy that, while it fascinated me intellectually, seemed to pull me away from the social issues that really mattered to my life. In fact, I left the discipline for a couple of years after receiving my M.A. 

When I began my Ph.D. something wonderful happened. I discovered feminist and critical race philosophers, like María Lugones and Angela Davis, whose philosophical work was inseparable from their engagements with the public and with contemporary social justice issues. I do not want to choose between my job and my ethical and political commitments, and I’ve now realized that there is a version of being a philosopher that necessitates the dissolution of this choice. I am also a better thinker when I can brainstorm with diverse interlocutors. Perhaps this is not the case for every scholar, but for me, public engagement helps rather than hinders my reasoning. I have no desire to be a gatekeeper for our discipline. The more the merrier! 

In what ways does your public philosophy inform your research (or vice-versa)?

I’m still figuring this one out. This work and my research are both motivated from the same place and in that sense inform one another. Yet integrating public philosophy into my research in meaningful ways is not something that I am practiced at. Because my research focuses on resistance practices in everyday life (which I approach from a feminist and critical phenomenological perspective), I know that it will happen.

I suppose that my hesitation is motivated by ethical concerns. I want to be able to collaborate in my research with members of the public in a way that is scholarly but also cognizant of power imbalances. I am in the learning stage at the moment. There is so much valuable feminist work that touches on this very concern, and I am navigating how best to proceed in my career and my community. 

In what ways does your public philosophy inform your teaching (or vice-versa)? 

Doing public philosophy has undoubtedly made me a better teacher. While I was learning how to teach as a graduate student instructor, I was running writing and reading classes for incarcerated women at CCCF. To my surprise, I realized that many feminist pedagogical strategies that I was struggling to implement in the university classroom, like sharing authority and deemphasizing compliance, were easier to do within CCCF. Talk about irony! The big difference, of course, was that I was doing philosophy without any need for strict assessments or learning outcomes. This freedom allowed us to focus on critical thinking and the creative exploration of ideas in a more unfettered way. 

Thinking with members of the public also forces you to learn how to explain complicated ideas without relying on jargon or discipline-specific analogies. It doesn’t mean staying away from complex arguments or concepts, only that you cannot be lazy or elitist in your communication of them. You need to make philosophy relevant, which means learning how to listen to others and incorporate their concerns and ideas. These “challenges” are beneficial because they force you to refine your own thinking and to ask yourself what you, in your role as a teacher, are doing for others. 

I try to make my university courses as accessible as possible. I get my students invested in philosophy by showing them how they can use their own lived experience as a ground for philosophical analysis. I learned the value of this approach by working with diverse publics.  

Have you had a silly/unusual/interesting experience with students as a result of your public philosophy work?

There is a certain predictability to student reactions to texts in the classroom. I’m not sure if this is because I always present the texts in ways that subtly elicit these reactions. In any case, I have not found this to be true outside of the traditional classroom. One especially memorable moment happened at CCCF with a group of incarcerated women. My co-teacher Shannon Frey suggested that we discuss the short story “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway that day. There are various interpretations of this enigmatic short story but the most common is that the “girl” is being coerced by the “Man” into having an abortion. 

When we finished reading it several of the students looked alarmed and mentioned that the “girl” was in danger and should run. As others were nodding in agreement, I asked why they thought she was in danger, assuming we would discuss the abortion interpretation. Instead, they told me it was because the “girl” was about to be the victim of sex trafficking. The group then collectively developed an analysis that supported this interpretation: they are waiting at a train station, they seem to be in a romantic relationship, he is trying to convince her to do something that will allegedly better both their lives, etc. These innocuous pieces came together to form a picture of a potential sex trafficking situation in their eyes. 

It was a moment that showed me how important it is to leave space for varying perspectives in a discussion. I can’t always anticipate what my students will think or how their own life experiences might inform their reading of a text. 

What is your favorite quote and why? 

“I am deliberate / and afraid / of nothing” from Audre Lorde’s poem “New Year’s Day” in the collection From a Land Where Other People Live. It’s a frequently quoted piece of her poetry that has always stuck in my mind. It is so bare and direct. I think this passage, and the rest of the poem, is about facing change head on. I could never imagine writing these words myself. I have never felt like that in the face of big transitions, which I find very difficult to cope with. But it is a favorite of mine precisely because I am awestruck each time I read it. It inspires me to be brave. 

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