2020 In Review

Well that was fun, wasn't it?

As I write my country is under blockade because a new strain of the global pandemic virus that has brought the world to its knees has developed here and is spreading in an uncontrolled rate. Per google 1.7 million people have died from this pandemic around the world and I cannot say how many more are suffering various effects of so called "long covid", not to mention the effects of other treatments deferred and the psychological harms attendant to living through these times. Governments around the world have used this an excuse to curtail democracy, and the impacts of both the virus itself and the policies adopted in response have generally exacerbated every social inequality. Personally, I am in an area that is under a hard lockdown for the second time this year. My government has responded to the virus in a fashion that has been in turn corrupt and inept, Christmas has been cancelled, and there are talk of potential disruptions to the food supply within a fortnight. I think the UK press has by and large systematically misinformed people making an appropriate democratic response to this very unlikely. All the worse since this has all happened amidst Brexit negotiation the Tories do not seem to have a serous strategy for, beyond avoiding the ire of our worthless national press. To top it off, bigotry against trans people is on the rise here. Meanwhile in the Imperial hegemon Trump has seriously undermined national faith in what passes for its democracy (problems worryingly mirrored in Ghana) via allegations of electoral fraud that he has repeatedly failed to maintain any serious case for in court yet nonetheless publicly and constantly broadcasts. He has yet to concede the election. The world's most powerful country, in whose shadow we all live, thus remains a country where racial oppression and serious cultural and economic divides make it unstable - as mass protest, rioting, and rank criminality from the police this summer evinced. Obviously this far from covers it all. As ever there was war, the crimes of the powerful received no justice, and the on going disaster of climate change rumbled on. So it goes.

So the question many people are asking themselves after all this is - what did Liam publish this year? 

Like many academics I tried to do what little I could to make some positive contribution to the global effort against the virus. This started with a post on this blog by Richard Bradley and I trying to explain in an accessible way how it is that (early on in the days of the virus' spread) we might hope to make rational decisions in the face of massive uncertainty. That post ended up being translated into Portuguese and published in a Brazilian magazine, and a related post was put up on Cambridge University Press' website. We followed this up with a brief look at the issues around immunity testing for our departmental blog, and an article in a philosophical magazine about the political choices vital to deciding what to make of our evidence. The theme in these pieces with Bradley was trying to help the public be informed about how we can handle information so as to make sensible pandemic policy decisions, and also too highlight choice points so governments can be held to account rather than simply fiat declaring policies are "forced on us" by the evidence or any such things. So it was perhaps fitting that towards the end of the year I collaborated on a paper published in Nature Medicine, calling for more direct democracy in setting pandemic response. There was a longer more fleshed out version of the paper that featured in a conference put on by the World Health Organisation. On a personal note, this pair of papers is the first time I have directly used expertise gained through teaching to publish, so that felt like something of a personal milestone.

One thing these pieces have in common, besides COVID-19, is that they deployed various tools from philosophy of science, which remained my core area of research. So this year also saw my polemic (with Remco Heesen) against prepublication academic peer review come out in BJPS. Proud to say that one made a bit of a stir, which I enjoyed. Remco and I even gave a brief summary of the paper on a podcast! I also continued my exploration of the causes and consequences of fraud in scientific communities, with this essay (coauthored with Bryce Huebner) out in a handbook on collective responsibility. This is at least somewhat related to a talk I gave at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology on Du Bois' plan for combating scientific fraud. I also discussed some of the socio-political-economic causes of academic fraud on the wonderful Mandatory Distribution Party podcast. Talking of podcasts, I also spoke about Verificationism (dear to my heart!) on PhilosophyBites and a whole host of philosophy of science things on a (for me!) fun episode of Mindscape. (Among the things we got to in this podcast was a discussion on the nature of truth and how that relates to what we understand of the goals and achievements of science. I also had probably my favourite blog post of the year on that topic. More on this subject to come!) Finally, I had a paper on Ida B Wells' sociological methodology come out in a collected volume on neglected philosophical classics.

The writing on Ida B Wells also highlights another point of overlap between much of my COVID writing and my philosophy of science writing - I am dipping into social and political philosophy much more often nowadays. Towards the start of the year I engaged in a well received letter exchange with Andrea (see her channel here) about what I took from Critical Race Theory and why I thought it was valuable.  I also tried to offer a rough taxonomy of strands of thought in black political philosophy.  In Dissent magazine Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (the other one) and I wrote a little academic essay to clear up some of Michael Walzer's confusions about the idea of racial capitalism. Finally, I appeared on BBC Radio 4 to discuss WEB Du Bois' work and how it relates to the phenomenon of code switching. As is apparent, I am drawing very heavily on the broad tradition of Africana philosophy when I explore social and political philosophy, which seems fitting to me. 

COVID, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of science. Are they connected anyhow? Well, I think they are. And this year I have done a fair bit to try and explain my meta-philosophy, often exploring other genres to do as much. Most directly were two things here. First, a paper called Ethical Life, where I tried to indicate what sort of things have influenced me, and set out my overall thoughts on how we ought live together and how that impacts what I research and how I behave. Remco and I collaborated on a related blog post about how we think an ethical understanding of the world is intertwined with a more materialist institutionalist one. Second, a paper in the Aristotelian Society's journal, where as part of a commentary on Jennifer Lackey's epistemological work I outlined an approach to the topic I find valuable. Slightly less directly, I collaborated with Aaron Novick to produce a dialogue on hermeneutical approaches to Zhuangzi, one of our mutual favourite philosophers. Comrades at the university of Toronto made a lovely animated YouTube video of this! And I wrote a short story reflecting on trends in analytic philosophy, political tendencies, and my own failings. Talking of short stories, the Ethical Life piece ends with one of two bits of microfiction/prose poems I wrote to try and convey feelings that are important to me and related to why I work. The other pictured below.

Oh, and I won the Leverhulme Prize.

I wanted to have my work for the year gathered in one place. It's pleasing to me to see it all laid out. it is very easy to convince oneself that one got nothing done - Yuzi prompted me to write this in part just to set out and illustrate the opposite. That said, I opened with that litany of horrors because it perfectly illustrates how totally inadequate my own work is to the present moment. I don't want to be too harsh on myself - I tried to step up, and that's not nothing. But with all jokes aside, my effort evidently pales in comparison to the magnitude of the tasks facing us. No one person could ever do such work, but even granting that I fall far short of what is possible for an individual so cannot personally be excused by such truisms. Still, if there is any consistent message running across everything I do, I would hope it is this: we are capable, through sustained and collaborative effort, of doing so much better in collectively facing our problems and shaping our social and physical environments towards the welfare of sentient beings. What we lack is the will, and the social structure that could turn that will into productive action. Another world is possible, and we are duty bound to create it.