26 August 2024
Written by Ying Han
Excavating the rhizomatic system that has long connected the sciences and humanities, university and publics, the analog and the digital, Dr. Kavita Philip has devoted much of her academic career to activating different networks of knowledge that can help us adapt to the rapidly changing conditions of climate change, technology, the world at large. Dr. Philip began as a scholar in the hard sciences before shifting her focus to the social, cultural, and historical environment that informs how we interact with science and technology. Now, as Professor in the Department of English Language & Literatures, President’s Excellence Chair in Network Cultures, Co-Director of the Centre for Climate Justice, and Advisory Board member for the Public Humanities Hub, Dr. Philip not only participates as a node in multiple networks, but also plays an instrumental role in building out those networks of conversation, collaboration, and knowledge with and for others.
In the following interview, Dr. Philip talks more about how we can lean into inter-relationality as a way of making the divisive virtual and physical world of social media and technology work for us, and how students can build solidarity both within and without the university.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ying Han: When you were appointed President’s Excellence Chair in Network Cultures in 2020, one of your interests was listed as “developing public humanities research that acknowledges the intertwined material and social context of cultural production.” Could you expand upon how you define the public humanities?
Kavita Philip: If you look at the Public Humanities Hub website, there is a great definition of the humanities as encompassing the different ways in which we understand all facets of the human experience, for example through narrative, memoir, creative expression.
If you look at what humans do and all its complexity, you need interdisciplinarity because humans do everything in a week. They might do something analytical, aesthetic, emotional, religious, political—if we break those all up into different departments, you do not get the full understanding of human experience. Interdisciplinarity is required to understand human experience itself because we experience life in all its complexity.
Listen to Dr. Philip discuss the expansive, interdisciplinary nature of the Department of English Language and Literatures and her experience creating and participating in different networks at UBC.
YH: When building these interdisciplinary networks, if we think about issues like climate change, how might we be able to trouble usual understandings of what public means?
KP: UBC has a wonderful mandate with the Public Humanities Hub to take the specialization that dominates how we think within our individual academic disciplines, and to engage in translation, collaboration, and conversation with what we conceive of as the public. As a Canadian institution, we are responsible to taxpayers; however, the publics we are most immediately in dialogue with are the nations whose homelands we are on, the Coast Salish Peoples. As individuals and teachers, we have to figure out how our work is in dialogue with and in ethical responsibility to those who were the ancestral owners of this land. That is an important ethical and political conversation that is beginning with the Indigenous Strategic Plan.
In addition to wanting to speak the publics within Canada, we are also speaking to a rapidly shifting global public. Whether you think about migration and the shifting face of even the people we call Canadian, or the people who are going to be refugees from climate change across the globe, all of those people are publics whom we try to talk to when thinking about climate justice. We can account for emissions, or point at each other over whose carbon footprint is smaller; these quantitative systems of measurement are important, but how do we make sense of rising authoritarianism, climate fear, refugees, the increasing gulf between rich and poor? How is all of this relevant when thinking about climate change? That comes into focus only when we listen to the publics and we shape our research agenda in a kind of responsible, ethical, accountable way to and with those publics.
YH: Keywords that keep coming up when we talk about doing the public humanities, are redistribution and reciprocity. What do these terms mean to you and your work?
KP: In the mission statement for the Centre for Climate Justice (CCJ), we use that vocabulary to say that we want to use the scholarly and material resources of the university in just repair, redistribution, and dialogue with publics to whom we are accountable. For all of my work, redistribution and repair is central to how I ask questions of methodology and research output. Is it a podcast, blog post, peer-reviewed journal article, or book? How is that accessible and accountable to the public? We constantly have to ask these questions at every stage of production, distribution, and dissemination of research.
Cover artwork for the Centre for Climate Justice “The Right to Feel” Podcast by Ale Silva
There is a long history of knowledge production made possible by wanton extraction from people and land; scientists would often go in after colonial armies have subdued a population, becoming adjuncts to empire. As a university, we inhabit an institution built on knowledge drawn from violent histories of colonization, conflict, occupation. How do we take these questions of research out of that violent history of domination?
Assuming we do not want to abandon all of the knowledge from the last 400 years, one way that we can move forward is by taking this knowledge gained through dubious means and reframing it by re-asking the questions, re-writing the conclusions in such a way that it might be in service to redistribution rather than extraction and complacency.
Learn more about “The Right to Feel” podcast series
YH: Recently we organized an event on “Witnessing Genocide in Palestine.” What are your thoughts on the activist work that has been happening online, and on bearing witness to their work and the knowledge that they are trying to disseminate?
KP: I do not think any assault on a people has ever been so livestreamed and so actively shared in real time. Most of the world has risen up in solidarity with the people of Gaza, who are being bombed from above, who are being starved, whose water source is contaminated. Whether you take a climate justice perspective and ask technical questions about the destruction of food and water sources and air quality or whether you are asking very human questions like does a child have the right to live—we are currently grappling with how to call on the humanitarian laws that we all choose to live by, that people are holding governments accountable for. This movement is happening largely because technology is so accessible. We all have social media, and we are all watching an event happen in real-time through the media; hence you see words like genocide, humanitarian catastrophe, water crisis, climate catastrophe.
However, media is not everything. Living through a pandemic really made us think about how we are related to each other. As Naomi Klein says in her book, Doppelganger, we were faced with this opportunity to think inter-relationally about our health and well-being, and many of us failed the test. We went back into our little hermetically sealed cabins and said, I am going to save myself, I do not care about everybody else, and we have had these long ongoing arguments over mask wearing. We can think about the US right wing and the way they mobilized that fear of the Other—the fear of me breathing in the same space as you, of having the same virus, of being connected to each other—and have mobilized that fear as a political project.
Technology is the way we communicate, but it is also the way that we are communicated with by people in power, and I do see a massive shift in the way people talk to each other around that power gap. While we do have top-down communications from leaders all over the world, we also have bottom-up communication in almost everybody’s pocket. Of course, not everyone can afford a smart phone and having Instagram does not mean that you have the same power as, for example, Joe Biden who is literally sending arms to Israel as we speak. But you can narrate and share ideas. The material always goes hand in hand with this. We do not just communicate digitally. We also meet at protests, on the street, at events on campus. We talk to each other to understand what is going on. We have to make sense together because, without that collective sense making, we are all lost in the clouds of misinformation. That is another answer to your question about publics. Publics are formed through intentional acts of communication.
YH: That is really powerful to hear. Speaking of this sort of power gap, especially within the context of UBC and censorship, how do you think technology like this will continue to impact academia, and how university systems respond to public need?
KP: Universities are at a crossroads. They have to figure out how they respond to the state, which in many cases are their main funders, but especially with the neoliberalization of education, they also face the interests and pressures by private corporations, pharmaceuticals, the military. While the “Ivory Tower” is very much still a symbol of the space between researchers and the public, in actual practice, the university serves many masters. However, increasingly, we see university citizens talking to each other about who is accountable to whom, what our knowledge practice is, who is it for. Posing these questions to each other and having an opportunity to discuss together is one of the primary functions of education. We educate not just students, but we educate each other.
I would not know as much as somebody in geography or political science about the specifics of the current conflicts around the world or whether one calls it legally a genocide or something else, but I can go to the law school and listen to somebody tell me about the law of genocide and how to understand it. Some people call this free speech, some people call it collaborative conversation, but no matter what we call it, there is no better space than the university to learn from and share ideas with people from different fields. The university is in a sense the easiest space to start because we are set up for conversation.
If we do not have public humanities now, we are giving up the first step to developing a kind of democratic publics. If we cannot do it with all the resources and the space that we have, then I think nobody can do it.
YH: What do these practices of communication, collaboration, and co-producing knowledge look like in your projects, and what have you learned from them?
KP: All of my work is collaborative; even if something is solo authored, it comes out of a lot of collaborative conversation. For example, in the middle of the pandemic, a collaborative book of mine came out, co-edited with three other historians called Your Computer is on Fire. The many virtual conversations we had together really brought home to me that a book is not a finished project; we continuously rediscovered each other’s ideas or pushed each other’s ideas in the light of what was happening in the world. 
Then there is the project I did more than twenty years ago on botanical colonialism, which has come back up almost by accident during an interview I did last year for the podcast “Stuff the British Stole.” Since I first worked on it twenty-five years ago in the context of South Asia and its colonial history, a whole revitalized area of Indigenous knowledge and botanical history has now become a part of that conversation. Even the work we have done can come back into our consciousness, depending on the people we talk to, the lands that we are on, and their histories.
Within UBC, I recently received a STAIR grant to do a collaborative project between STEM and the Arts. I work with two students, one who is a zoologist and artist and one in English who is working on poetry and environmental humanities, as well as a faculty member from zoology. The four of us each work on completely different areas of study, but we come up with questions together about science, objectivity, evidence, misinformation, collaboration. Working with people from other fields who might be unfamiliar with the jargon we use and instead developing a collaborative outlook fundamentally alters our work.
If somebody comes to the table in good faith and they ask you questions, even if it sounds ignorant from your point of view, if it is something that if you take on in good faith, it might teach you a lot about your own assumptions, to start to question why you chose to use that jargon and not other vocabulary, or why you chose to use that frame and what you might have missed by doing so. Collaborations can come in the form of something as simple and accessible as conversations over a cup of tea on campus. It is a small beginning, but it can have radical implications. The university is structured to reward solo achievement, so people trying to do interdisciplinary work risk not achieving conventional success. Those are the people who are kind of the guinea pigs for these new models, for these new structures. We need each other, but we have to then start rewarding collaboration rather than just solo achievement. But I think students are super excited and I feel optimistic for the next generation of collaborators.
Learn more about her collaborative project on Beatrice Da Costa
“The Fever Tree Hunt” podcast episode
“Your Computer Is on Fire with Mar Hicks & Kavita Philip” Radical AI episode
YH: How has your work in fostering this sort of interdisciplinary research influenced your pedagogical practices?
KP: UBC students are fantastic; they always take seriously the challenge of collaboration that I throw at them. In my classes, the students are constantly being trained not just to hone their own research skills and writing but also to respectfully, ethically, and accountably engage with each other. I love it when there are multiple majors represented in my classrooms, because then we get to share across really different paradigms and then not only enlighten each other but inspire each other to question our own assumptions.
I love the changing pressures of the university. During the teaching term, we are really focused on teaching, and then we take the learning, emotions, and responses that we get from students, and we take it into our research. What students say, as representatives of the next generation, lives in our minds as we go look at archives, do our field work or our policy investigation. In this way, teaching and research are deeply interconnected in the university. My only suggestion as we are rethinking structures is we create more opportunities for students to learn from each other across disciplines. Just as faculty have centers as places for us to meet each other and work together, I think students are really ready for that process of collaboration.
YH: What have been some challenges you faced on this pathway?
KP: It is hard to find a space that allows experimentation and collaboration, mostly because of the way disciplines are structured to encourage unquestioning allegiance to one disciplinary formation or another. We are trained to have a kind of patriotism to our disciplines that can be productive but can also blinker people. What blinkers do is they arbitrarily put edges on what you can see; if somebody is not able or willing to see things further than their peripheral vision, then there is not really a lot we can do in dialogue with each other. We all come into academia through disciplines, and we are trained in skills that are sometimes taken too literally, as if they are actual edges of existence and human experience, as opposed to just edges of our models. Beyond our specific disciplinary models and skills lies human life and complexity.
It is people who are curious about what lies beyond the edge of their knowledge that really enable interdisciplinary collaboration. I tend to gravitate towards people, institutions, formations that are really open to examining the margins and edges of their fields, because historically, those margins and edges usually will become the center. What I did early on in my career about postcolonial studies and South Asian science and knowledge formations have now become a very common thing in anthropology, history, sociology, and even within the sciences as they begin to look at their own colonial and imperial histories. So, you never know—something you do today might be central, maybe marginal today, but central in twenty years.
YH: Do you have any advice on how to effectively incorporate community engagement within research or how to bring these fruitful conversations we can have in the university out into the community?
KP: Centers like the CCJ exist for the purpose of linking communities and specialized research. For example, one of the things I did this year is work collaboratively with Hannah Whitman in the Faculty of Science to get a Teaching Learning Enhancement Fund to teach students how to approach community-based work ethically and accountably. It is easy to send students off to community organizations, but in BC and elsewhere, they have often had problems with teaching students to work with a certain constituency, or to learn, for example, respectful ways of engaging with Indigenous uses of land. Does that student know how to ethically work with this community and the practices they are involved in?
At the CCJ, Hannah and I are developing a set of toolkits for students on ethical guidelines in doing community-based research. What does it mean to work with Indigenous communities and be a settler on this land? How do you walk into that space, acknowledge that privilege, and approach your questions with humility and accountability? These are questions we feel should be taught and discussed in the classroom, not just left to chance, because that is damaging both to community and also to the students who might have an upsetting, distressing experience if they have to figure it out themselves.
I hope there are more centers like the CCJ who take up that challenge and start to integrate their work with curriculum design, pedagogy, and other research programs to send students out in the world with usable skills.