­­Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and seventh installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and exclusion, as well as personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy in particular and in academia more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy. 

The land on which on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg nations. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and allied nations around the Great Lakes. As a settler, I offer these interviews with respect for and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples of so-called Canada and other settler states who, for thousands of years, have held sacred the land, water, air, and sky, as well as their inhabitants, and who, for centuries, have struggled to protect them from the ravages and degradation of colonization and expropriation.

My guest today is Amelia Hicks. Amelia is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Kansas State University whose research interests include moral uncertainty, non-ideal moral theory, moral particularism, and ethical issues related to neurodiversity. Outside of philosophy, Amelia has interests in audio production, animal behavior, plant-based cooking, and alternative educational models. She now lives in the Boston area, where she spends her free time walking her dogs and watching horror movies with her partner, Graham.

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Amelia! Your educational background and history do not fit with the expected academic trajectory of an employed philosopher. How would you describe this intellectual upbringing? How did it lead you to a career in philosophy?

Thank you, Shelley! It is an honor to contribute to your incredible interview series.

I sometimes half-joke that I am a sixth-grade drop-out. Of course, that is not entirely true because I eventually had the opportunity to attend college and then grad school. But I did drop out of sixth grade and did not return to school until I started college. One nice thing about receiving an autism diagnosis in my mid-30s is that it has helped me make sense of my strange experiences with school. I would describe my intellectual upbringing as driven by my unusual interests and shaped by a mix of privilege and random luck. I have not been able to gain admission to most educational institutions through normal pathways; so, instead, I have a long history of simply showing up uninvited and trying to make myself useful.

[Description of image below: Amelia is sitting in a restaurant with a large colourful pizza in a tray on the table in front of her. She is looking directly at the camera and smiling. In the background of the shot, a city street can be seen through a window, a counter that runs the length of the window, two stools below the counter, and a table in the corner of the room.]

I experienced a variety of challenges throughout elementary school, challenges that inevitably led to various emotional and physical breakdowns. With each breakdown, my parents would look for some alternative. All told, by the time I dropped out of sixth grade, I had attended—and left—seven different schools. I also moved around a lot throughout my childhood, but moving frequently was not the main reason for my irregular school attendance. I left school before the end of sixth grade because I was quite sick with stress-related ailments. I spent the following year (when I was 12 years old) recovering at home. By that time, my parents had divorced, and my mom was pursuing a Masters in Divinity at Calvin Seminary, in Grand Rapids, MI. She and I moved into a church-owned house―which we jokingly called “the manse”―with two other seminary students, both women in their late 20s. The year that I spent recovering at the manse was a turning point for me.

Here’s a little taste of that year of “unschooling.” For years, I had wanted to learn Latin; through her seminary coursework, my mom met a delightful undergraduate classical languages major who offered to give me weekly lessons. I was very interested in the legend of Faust, so I read Goethe’s Faust and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and wrote a little essay contrasting these two. Through one of my housemates, I met a philosophy graduate student who gave me a copy of Plato’s early dialogues and a copy of Russell’s Problems of Philosophy. I spent a lot of time agonizing over the Euthyphro problem and carried on a sporadic hand-written correspondence with this graduate student about my naïve philosophical questions. I also spent a lot of time singing in a local girls’ choir and reading about some basic meditation techniques.

I became highly motivated to develop better social skills. I was okay with talking to adults and usually had one friend my own age. But I did not understand most children very well, nor was I good at playing with them. I was often bullied. Nevertheless, I craved social connection and wanted to understand how to have positive social interactions with peers. One of my new housemates at the manse was an incredible social butterfly; she was brilliant, hilarious, and a fantastic conversationalist. I watched how she navigated conversations with her group of friends, how she used self-deprecating humor, how she would find a way to bring the shyest person into the social fold. It seemed like she had a super-power. So, I started to practice those skills, often imitating what I had observed my housemate do. I practiced with my housemates’ friends; I practiced with my choir comrades; I sometimes even practiced by forcing myself to strike up conversations with strangers in public. And, as a result, I got pretty good with social conversation. For a 12-year-old.

Unfortunately, because I was not attending school, my mother and I were kicked out of the manse by the church that owned it. After about six months in the manse, my mom, my social butterfly housemate, and I moved into a new apartment in seminary housing on the Calvin College campus.  At the end of that school year, my Latin tutor graduated from college and moved away. But I had a very strong desire to continue learning Latin; with my mom’s permission, therefore, I met with the Dean of Admissions at Calvin, who allowed me to enroll as a part-time student through a dual-enrolment program so that I would qualify for financial aid.

In the Fall of 2000, when I was 13, I enrolled in Latin 101 with a fantastic professor—Ken Bratt, who eventually became my undergraduate advisor—and I successfully completed the course. The next semester, I took Latin 102, along with Psychology 101. Again, my coursework went well—I felt like I understood the content of my college courses better than I had understood my classes in elementary school—and I became friends with other college students. Still , I assumed that I would eventually go to high school—like, what college student has not gone to high school? On a couple occasions, I visited local high schools with friends from my choir. But I found those environments overwhelming and was not interested in the classes that they offered. I began to wonder if I could simply continue to take college courses and become a full-time student. Again, I met with the Dean of Admissions, who reasonably suggested that I try to demonstrate that I was prepared for college-level math and science courses, which I proceeded to do by completing more college-level coursework.

I started as a full-time student at Calvin in the Fall of 2002, majoring in classical languages. I enjoyed my required Philosophy 101 course; but I came away from the experience with the impression that I did not have “natural philosophical acumen,” and thus happily returned to my translations. I began working as a Greek and Latin tutor in the classics department, and my “office” was a small sitting area that happened to be next to several philosophy professors’ offices, including Christina Van Dyke and Kelly Clark, with whom I eventually took courses. I graduated with a second major in philosophy in 2006, shortly before I turned 19.

When I graduated from Calvin, I did not know what to do. I wanted to go graduate school in philosophy, but I also wanted to take a break from school. I explored the possibility of teaching Latin at a nearby high school; but after visiting the school, I felt confident that I could not handle the life of a high school teacher. I was briefly hired to teach English at a technical university in China; but, before I could make any concrete plans to move overseas, I was un-hired—the university decided that it would be inappropriate for someone my age to hold that teaching position. I considered going to cosmetology school because I enjoyed cutting hair. When I shared this plan with one of my philosophy professors, however, he seemed disappointed.

My philosophy professors at Calvin supported my goal to eventually get a Ph.D. in philosophy and introduced me to Fritz Warfield, a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame who advised me on how to develop a strong graduate school application. I applied to two Ph.D. programs, one of which was Notre Dame. Fortunately, Notre Dame was able to admit me to their program immediately, and I was able to begin coursework in Notre Dame’s Ph.D. program in the Spring of 2007.

From there, my career in philosophy followed a more conventional path. During an independent study in metaethics with Michael DePaul, I read Dancy’s Ethics Without Principles and became fascinated with (and baffled by) moral particularism. Mike became my dissertation advisor, and I wrote my dissertation on moral particularism.

When I graduated from Notre Dame, Kansas State University’s philosophy department offered me a visiting assistant professor position as a spousal accommodation. Toward the end of graduate school, I had married a fellow graduate student, an all-around wonderful person who also happens to be a spectacular mathematical logician. Fortunately, my department head, Bruce Glymour, was eager to keep me around. Bruce supported me as I went back on the job market, got a competing tenure-track offer, and then used that offer as leverage to persuade senior administrators at Kansas State to create a tenure-track line for me. And that is how I got a stable job in philosophy.

You have confronted problems with inaccessibility since elementary school. Please explain some of these problems.

Throughout elementary school, I found school environments overwhelming. The transition from home to school was very challenging, which I suspect was the result of problems with emotional regulation, combined with the fact that I struggled socially. Most of my memories from school are of people yelling. For most of the day, other kids would run around yelling; then, the teachers would yell at the kids for yelling. I found the noise and lights extremely uncomfortable. I was often bullied, and the bullying got worse whenever I tried to make it stop; teachers and administrators would not help me. As I progressively developed stress-related eating and digestion problems, all of the rules around eating and bathroom-use made schooldays even more stressful.

In some ways, I was a good student. I did not learn to read until I was seven years old, but I became a careful reader and writer. However, I was not particularly fast at anything, and it seemed like most class activities required students to race each other, which I found stressful and demoralizing.

It took me years to realize that I sometimes simply needed to regurgitate nonsense to do well academically. I remember that when I was about nine, I was asked on a test to define a noun. I found the task very difficult! My answer was not good—I said something like “a noun is a word for something that exists.”  You can imagine my disappointment when I learned that the “correct” answer was “a person, place, thing, or idea,” which is a terrible definition of a noun! Even though I was able to memorize nonsense to get by in school, I never felt that I truly understood anything that I was doing, which made me feel as if I was “stupid.”

No one knew that I was autistic. My response to overwhelming environments was to sit still and be quiet—so, I did not exhibit any so-called “problem behaviors” that would have singled me out for psychometric testing. Plus, back in the 90s, not many girls were diagnosed as autistic (or, back then, as having Aspergers). Instead, I was labeled as “unusual” and “highly sensitive.”

Going to college solved many of those problems for me. The classroom environments were peaceful; I could create a daily schedule that worked for me; I was never bullied; and I had wonderful instructors who were willing to take the time to explain things to me in detail.

Has study and employment in philosophy exacerbated these problems? What sorts of support have been provided to you?

One problem that I have continued to encounter while studying philosophy (and working as a philosopher) is my slowness, which is frowned upon in academic philosophy. Whenever I am faced with a complicated text, I just try to work through it bit by bit, word by word. It is difficult for me to “filter” what I am reading through prior assumptions; as a result, it can take me extra time to resolve ambiguities in complex texts. In my opinion, this reading strategy can pay off! But it is time-consuming and painstaking.

Throughout graduate school, I struggled with the expectation that we “read” (or really, skim) long, complicated texts. For example, graduate students who had completed their first year of coursework were required to read through the last 2000 years of Western philosophy in a summer, and then spend two days writing exams on the subject matter. I spent the first half of the summer working through the corpora of Plato and Aristotle, and then panicked because I was proceeding much too slowly—even though I felt as if I had been rushing! I later realized that many graduate students shared notes with each other, which allowed them to skip many of the readings.

The social environment in graduate school was quite challenging. I met some wonderful people in grad school but tried to keep my head down and stay away from most other students. I experienced some relatively mild gender-based harassment and struggled with the competitive environment. In grad school, I realized that academia is a type of zero-sum game, in which you need to follow certain rules—e.g., develop an area of specialization early, begin publishing in that area as soon as possible, and do not worry too much about the quality of your teaching—to establish yourself in the academic hierarchy. I found the whole game disturbing and was terrible at playing it.

While working as a professional philosopher, I have often struggled to understand how to properly participate in contemporary debates. I often find contemporary philosophical debates confusing and try to reframe them so that they make more sense to me. I suspect that I often end up in a new debate, all by myself, due to the reframing.  

I also suspect that many of the challenges that I have encountered while working in philosophy are related to autism. They have been compounded by ongoing mental health problems, which led to psychiatric diagnoses that did not fit and pharmaceutical interventions that did not work. Fortunately, my autism diagnosis has helped me develop more practical strategies for maintaining my mental health.

Some generous people have supported me during my time in the profession. In particular, many of my colleagues at K-State offered me helpful feedback on my papers and several more senior colleagues at other institutions offered me early-career mentorship. Back in Kansas, I had a fantastic therapist who helped me find ways to address my mental health problems without resorting to a scary cocktail of prescription drugs. My mom has always encouraged me to pursue my passions, even if that meant violating other people’s expectations. And I have received a ton of support from my spouse, Graham; Graham has always believed that I have something to offer to the philosophy profession, even before I had any professional success. Plus, Graham is willing to listen to me talk through my half-baked ideas while I try to piece together lots of different details into a coherent whole. He’s an unusually patient fellow!

Amelia, although you are currently in a tenured position, you are transitioning careers. On what basis, did you decide to do so?

There are several different reasons why I want to change careers, many of which will be all-too-familiar to your readers who work at large public universities. They include increasing faculty workloads, threats to philosophy as a discipline, and dissatisfaction with the current dynamics in college classrooms. I want to be clear that these problems are not specific to Kansas State University—I see the very same problems unfolding across many colleges and universities today

I have always needed to work long hours because I complete most tasks slowly. With the pandemic, came an onslaught of new tasks. Administrators came up with new initiatives, which often required faculty to attend more meetings and fill out many more confusing forms. I know faculty who are skilled at figuring out which administrative tasks do not matter and determining the bare-minimum amount of effort needed to complete pointless tasks. I struggle with both these skills.

For years, I tried to find “hacks” that would allow me to manage my administrative and teaching workload, so that I could still get ~5 hours of research in per week without working more than 60 hours. I did not succeed. Towards the end of my time at K-State, I participated in a wonderful disability-affinity group for K-State faculty and staff. In conversations with that group, it became clear that there were systemic failures across the university to make life manageable for faculty and staff, particularly faculty and staff with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and care-giving responsibilities. I decided to stop beating myself up for failing to discover life-hacks to manage my increasing workload; instead, the university needed to make significant changes to support its staff. But those changes were clearly not forthcoming.

I also found the university environment increasingly demoralizing because of its disinterest in the liberal arts. My department was constantly under threat. When I started as a tenure-track professor in K-State’s philosophy department, we had about 13 tenure-line faculty members; by the time I left, we had 5. My colleagues were (still are) fantastic, both in their teaching and in their research output—but that did not matter. I had colleagues who brought in million-dollar federal grants—but it did not matter. Our department taught many students, and offered courses that were an important part of the general education curriculum and, as a result, our department made money for the university—but that did not matter, either.

Because of my university’s “Responsibility Center Management” budget model, each college within the university was incentivized to begin teaching other colleges’ courses, which meant that many students began to satisfy various ethics requirements by taking courses taught by instructors with no training whatsoever in philosophy (or the humanities). Over time, those types of requirements began to disappear. I desperately wanted to focus on doing my job well, instead of focusing on justifying the existence of my job.

Despite my successes with teaching, I found teaching increasingly difficult. I want to state up front that I do not blame students for most of these difficulties. I think that most students are doing the best that they can, with the resources that they have. Especially starting with the pandemic, many of my students were coping with unimaginable tragedies, with very little support from anyone. My university lost student support staff during the pandemic and a great deal of that labor fell into the laps of faculty. I did my best to help, but it was never enough. And increasingly, I noticed that many students began to struggle with relatively minor challenges and setbacks, such as having a disagreement with a friend. I suspect these struggles stemmed from an increase in mental health challenges among students. I did not know how to effectively address those challenges within the university environment.

More generally, I found it increasingly difficult to teach students in a way that I thought would truly benefit them. I wanted to avoid fear-based pedagogy—I do not want to scare anyone! I did not want students to complete their projects out of fear of a bad grade; instead, I wanted students to complete projects because they found these projects intrinsically rewarding. In most of my courses, I worked with students one-on-one to learn about their interests and to develop plans for projects, connecting their interests with class material. Usually, students enjoyed these projects! Yet, because most of their other professors used fear-based pedagogy, I could only rarely get students to put in serious effort. On many different occasions, students told me that they found my courses fascinating, meaningful, and fun, but that they needed to prioritize their other courses because they feared their other professors. I never figured out how to teach fear-free courses in an institution that runs on fear.

As you can probably tell, I am really interested in self-directed learning. Recently, I have been volunteering at a self-directed learning center for teens who dropped out of traditional school—I teach a class titled “Weird Ethics”. I love working in an environment in which students get to choose what they work on; such an environment makes it possible to tap into a student’s intrinsic motivation. I hope that I can continue doing this type of work.

Tell our readers and listeners about NeuroDiving, the philosophy podcast that you co-host with another philosopher, Joanna Lawson. What is the format of the podcast and what are its aims?

NeuroDiving is a philosophy podcast about neurodivergence. In each episode, we use interview material to create a narrative in which we gradually unfurl a conceptual mystery. Along the way, we hear neurodivergent people share stories about their experiences.

We have three main goals with the podcast. First, we want to tackle philosophical questions about neurodivergence in a way that begins with neurodivergent people’s experiences. We think that a great deal of the philosophical literature on neurodivergence is inaccurate and harmful because it ignores the experiences of neurodivergent people—we hope to help address that problem.

Second, we want to explore the ways in which philosophical concepts can help illuminate the experiences of neurodivergent people. For example, in Season 1, we suggest that the concept of a “degenerating research program” might help us understand why scientists have ended up doing autism research that is so divorced from autistic experiences. There is some excellent new work in the philosophy of neurodivergence and we hope to give that work a broader platform.

And third, we aim to provide a forum in which to discuss difficult foundational questions about neurodivergence in a way that is affirming of neurodivergent people. Many autistic listeners have contacted me to tell me that the podcast is not only interesting, but also helps them feel validated and less alone. That type of feedback makes the trials and tribulations of podcasting feel worthwhile!

Amelia, how would you like to end this interview? Is there anything that we discussed that you would like to say more about? Are there things that we haven’t touched on that you would like to mention? Would you like to make some recommendations of relevant books, articles, websites, or any other resources?

In terms of resources related to the philosophy of neurodivergence, I highly recommend disabled philosopher Robert Chapman’s new book Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. In the book, Chapman, who you interviewed in November 2022, explains how capitalism disables people and creates demand for new psychiatric categories. Yet, at the same time, Chapman avoids the pitfalls of the “anti-psychiatry” perspective. I have learned so much from their work, including their scholarly articles such as “The Reality of Autism: On the Metaphysics of Disorder and Diversity” and “Neurodiversity, Epistemic Injustice, and the Good Human Life.”

The disabled philosopher Amandine Catala, who you interviewed in November 2021, is doing incredible research on epistemic injustice and autism. As a start, I recommend her co-authored article, “Autism, Epistemic Injustice, and Epistemic Disablement: A Relational Account of Epistemic Agency.”

Monique Botha is a psychologist who has written some wonderful philosophically-rich pieces on scientific practice in autism research. Their paper “Academic, Activist, or Advocate?” is a heartbreaking account of what it is like to work in a field that routinely dehumanizes you; but it is also a fantastic introduction to the roles that values play in the social sciences.

I also strongly recommend the work done by the neurodivergent scholars who we have interviewed on NeuroDiving:

The psychologist Chloe Farahar has created a huge archive of educational materials about autism, which she distributes to the public for free on the platform Aucademy;

the psychologist Tobi Abubakare does incredibly important research on how to support autistic people in BIPOC and otherwise-marginalized communities, as well as non-Western conceptions of autism;

the philosopher Travis LaCroix does fascinating research in the philosophy of autism science—if you have listened to NeuroDiving, you know that I find his take on “autism pseudo-science” extremely compelling;

and finally, the philosopher Joe Gough is undertaking a post-doc to examine legal and medical assessments of decision-making and how these assessments fail neurodivergent and cognitively disabled people. 

I am so glad that there is a bunch of younger scholars who are doing more interesting, more ethical research on philosophical issues related to neurodiversity.

Amelia, thank you so much for these fantastic recommendations and for your candid remarks throughout this interview. You have provided a great deal for our readers and listeners to think about. I also want to mention that both Robert Chapman and Amandine Catala have contributed outstanding chapters to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability. Robert’s chapter is entitled “Neurodiversity, Anti-Psychiatry, and the Politics of Mental Health,” and Amandine’s chapter is entitled “Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Authority on Autism.”

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Amelia Hicks’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

The entire Dialogues on Disability series is archived on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here.

From April 2015 to May 2021, I coordinated, edited, and produced the Dialogues on Disability series without any institutional or other financial support. A Patreon account now supports the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page here.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, March 20, 2024, for the 108th installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.