Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 256: Technoscience and Intersectional Justice — with Tina Sikka
Speakers: Julia Aoki, Am Johal, Tina Sikka
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Julia Aoki 0:05
Hello listeners! I’m Julia with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Tina Sikka, Reader in Technoscience and Intersectional Justice in the School of Arts and Culture at Newcastle University. Am and Tina discuss her research and writing on topics such as consent, justice, and feminist science studies, as well as her work in EDI at the university. Enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:39
Hello! Welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week. We have a special guest today, Tina Sikka is with us today. Welcome, Tina.
Tina Sikka 0:50
Hi. Thank you for having me.
Am Johal 0:52
Tina, maybe we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Tina Sikka 0:56
Yeah. My name is Tina Sikka. I'm a Reader in Technoscience and Intersectional Justice in the School of Arts and Culture at Newcastle University, but notably for the purposes of the podcast, I did my postdoc at Simon Fraser, as well as my undergrad degree at Simon Fraser.
Am Johal 1:14
And you've got a number of publications that I wanted to speak about with you, and maybe we can start with your book, Sex, Consent and Justice: A New Feminist Framework. Wondering if you could maybe sort of describe where that project started from for you.
Tina Sikka 1:30
Yeah, it was a project that I started working on in conjunction with some colleagues who are working on sexual violence in particular. And some of the work that I was doing in feminist spaces around #metoo got me interested in this kind of work. And I have a colleague at Newcastle in the law department whose work I was really interested in. Abolitionist work as well. And started doing a lot of research, a lot of reading, that sort of thing that happens when, you know, an academic gets interested in a new area, and just through the course of doing that work, I ended up envisioning this project, and thinking about consent really critically, and then developed a prospectus for the book, and ended up writing it during lockdown.
Am Johal 2:18
You use a number of case studies and examples to think through some of the ideas in the book, and I'm wondering if you could maybe share sort of some of the themes and through lines as you started working on the project, in terms of where you ended up, and maybe new questions that came up for you, I guess before, during, and after the project?
Tina Sikka 2:41
Yeah, I wanted to do something that was theoretical, and it is published under the legal sort of series for Edinburgh University Press. And so I do have a sort of framework that looks at consent as a legal ethic as well as a sexual norm, something that's cultural, but I wanted to apply it and kind of think through how consent operates using some case studies. So I looked at high profile ones, which I chose just for the purposes of sort of readers having familiarity with some of the cases and so things like Avital Ronell's case, Louis CK, I talk about Cosby a little bit in the book, as well, the Aziz Ansari case. And it was really about looking at how consent operated through those cases, looking at legal briefs, looking at media coverage, looking at the discourse surrounding it, and then putting it up against, you know what the historicity of consent and then what we could potentially imagine outside of it, particularly since #metoo's outcomes have not necessarily been the ones that were envisioned at the beginning.
Am Johal 3:55
Now I wonder, as you look through these different examples in the particular moments that they came out as well. There's the legal aspects of those cases. There are moral aspects. There are aspects of processes within organizations, institutions, businesses, etc. And then there's the social, cultural kind of norms, which is why they end up in the public realm, in the way that they do. And in the particular moment that you were looking at at these questions, at the time of #metoo, starting out in a fairly high profile way, wondering if you can talk a little bit about the different ways that you thought through these questions.
Tina Sikka 4:40
Yeah, and I used a framework of feminist new materialism, who sort of approaches knowledge generation, production as assemblages. And so in the way that you are talking about, you know, that there's these different layers to talk about, in terms of the ethics and as well as the legality, as well as media representation, and then the kind of sociocultural dimensions, the political ones also. It was this approach of, okay, can we think about sex in particular, not as, you know, is this discrete case consensual or not? But we have to take a broader look and think about all of the different parts of the assemblage that we have to disentangle. And so the book was really about me working through that assemblage and making these sort of cuts in different places to say, okay, what if we looked at it from this angle? What if we think about it from this perspective? And trying to put that into something that was coherent was a little bit difficult. But I think that, you know, this approach was something that I hadn't seen be taken in a lot of other treatments of #metoo.
Am Johal 5:51
Now, in a context in which we have social media proliferation, we have, you know, these issues have been around for a very long time. It's sort of in their making visible of these situations that maybe gave this moment a more particular kind of focus on it, in terms of the #metoo movement. And as you look at in a university context as well, sort of the presentand the near future in terms of how these issues get adjudicated. What are some of the things that you, drawing from your book, that you kind of want to theorise in the future, but you still see as emerging issues on this front?
Tina Sikka 6:32
Yeah. I think one of the things that I'm trying to pair with a kind of model of sexual ethics that I envision in the book as an alternative to consent, is transformative and restorative justice practices. And that higher education being an institution in a space that might lend itself to this kind of creative work, that because there's an opportunity to not go down the sort of carceral line that there potentially could be a way to incorporate different forms of sex education coupled with restorative practices also. And so then looking into that in particular and linking up with some academics at other universities in the UK to see if there's scope for a kind of coherent policy of transformative justice and a revived form of ethical sexual pedagogy within the university, to see if that is something that could work in practice, and so applying kind of creative arts workshops to see if, you know, if there is scope or interest. And we found some promising results from that. That yes, there is a sense that survivors in particular, are really unhappy with university policies and procedures, particularly as it comes around to things like harassment, sexual harassment, and things like that. So working towards, you know, policy work in this area, I think, is what I'm turning this project to now,
Am Johal 8:16
In terms of, at your own university, you've worked in equity, diversity and inclusion, and I wanted to sort of ask you about how, given your theoretical background, how that work lands down for you inside of your own institution?
Tina Sikka 8:30
I mean, I kind of felt reluctant in terms of being roped into that position, because it often comes to the person who is visibly minoritised. But I found that in the kinds of work that I want to do, EDI spaces seem to be ones where there is some institutional interest and some funding, which I don't know if it's going to dry up at this point. But a movement to start experimenting a little bit. So I've been pushing in that direction. And one of the things that I really like about the EDI position I have, which is sort of the director of our faculty of EDI, is that it is a job-shared position, and so I get to work with another sort of feminist activist, and I think that those kinds of positions need to be, you know, shared for the very purpose that it can be really isolating, and it can also be very disheartening when things are superficially changed but not structurally attended to.
Am Johal 9:36
Now I want to move to another project you were involved with. Very different. Health Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods: When Biopolitics Meets Neoliberalism. Where did that project start for you?
Tina Sikka 9:48
So, I do a lot of work in the space of feminist science studies, and so gender, and race, and kind of the structures of differentiation and intersectionality is what kind of connects my research, even though the project seems sort of very different. But it is an interest in, you know, how health and how science around health is structured in a way that is highly neoliberal, that it is ableist in a lot of ways. It is premised on gendered and racial hierarchies as well. And you know, you can say that in the space of sexual ethics also. And so this book was looking at teasing through and thinking about models of what constitutes good health with a critical lens, and taking case studies, using auto ethnography and new materialism to think through how health is socially constructed and how it can be constructed differently.
Am Johal 10:52
Now with, you know, there are so many— I think I even have a couple of health apps on my phone and stuff like that. I don't think I can check my blood pressure, but I can check my heart pulse or something like that. And, you know, how would we start to sort of quantify or create these data sets that we almost unknowingly or unwittingly, are hoovering into some sort of stacked condition. I'm wondering, what were some of the kinds of findings or the way that you thought through these questions that were constantly being monitored in other— in hyper individuated ways in so many different fields?
Tina Sikka 11:31
Yeah. I think that, you know, the findings around, you know, there being a kind of political economy of a, you know, genomics and functional foods and superfoods. It sort of created this complex where a lot of the social construction of good health was very, like you said, technophilic, that, you know, it was very regimented. It was very sort of Eurocentric, a lot of personalization and genetification, very neoliberal approaches to health used to individualise health as well, and so connecting it to larger formations of economic interest, I think was really important in the context of this, and then looking at specific apps and using them on myself to do a kind of self experiment. And, you know, collecting this experiential knowledge that I sort of wrote about, these little vignettes within the book, was a way for me to kind of connect the discursive with the material in these chapters and think about, you know, how a particular app that tracks, you know, your dietary intake, you know, what does it actually do materially to your sense of your relationship with food? With your relationship with your body? And I think that's what I was kind of trying to think through in the book.
Am Johal 12:57
Yeah, I want to ask you about the tagline of the book, 'when biopolitics meets neoliberalism,' and wondering if you could maybe shape or frame how the book deals with bio politics and neoliberalism.
Tina Sikka 13:11
Yeah. So I think for the neoliberalism in particular, I think comes up most in the way that these technologies are structured and their objectives in a sense, which is very much about the privatisation of health, cuts to health care, austerity, the individualization of health to its responsibility of the individual. So it sort of connects in that sort of economic sphere that way, the political economic sphere that way. And then you have the bio politics, which is this surveillant biomedicalization of health where you are sort of self surveilling your own health for purposes of producing data for a larger kind of entity that is wanting that data for, you know, their own profit, in a way. And so that profit then connects to the neoliberalism of it all. And so I think that that kind of self subjectification, that collection of data, of population, of statistics, in a way that you kind of have this individualising and then this massification going on at the same time in ways that loses, I think, health as like a community structure.
Am Johal 14:34
Thanks. Wanted to chat with you a little bit about another work that you produced with colleagues of yours at Newcastle, Disrupted Knowledge. And wondering if you can talk a little bit about where that project began.
Tina Sikka 14:48
Yeah. So that project, it was an edited collection, I think, in 2018 that we originally thought about doing, myself and my co-editors, Steve Walls and Gareth Longstaff, and what we— it sort of fell aside. Everyone got busy. And then, you know, during the height of the pandemic, we were just talking about, you know, what things we were researching, what work we were doing, we just found that all of our colleagues within the School of Arts and Cultures were working on projects that touched on the experience of COVID-19 in some way, but was really kind of experiential and rich. And we thought, okay, could we potentially put together an edited collection that showcases this scholarship? And then we put together a proposal, you know, we sent it to Brill, and it ended up being accepted, and we just produced these chapters that I think give a really rich insight, sort of a snapshot into the research that was going on in this particular space at this particular time. But does so by touching on issues that are not only relevant to COVID-19, but also to things as diverse as music consumption, as podcasting, as health technologies, as you know, sex clubs. So it's a very sort of broad feature of the book.
Am Johal 16:21
Now, of course, you guys have also put together a podcast series as well, and I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to podcasting as a form, almost amateurish in nature, to get ideas out to the public the way that maybe perhaps blogging was 20 years ago. But at the same time, once you enter it into a scholarly context, there's various degrees of uptake of it. And also we have in our own university, Hannah McGregor, in the publishing department, who's done amazing work in terms of trying to locate those very particular features of what makes a podcast scholarly or not, in all of the kind of dimensions that need to be thought through. And I'm wondering if you can just share a little bit about you and your colleague's approach to its scholarly potential.
Tina Sikka 17:15
Yeah, I actually did— I was on a podcast of Hannah's years ago, the Secret Feminist Agenda, and I, yeah, followed her work and find that scholarship and the argument of podcasting as a form of public pedagogy, as a form of scholarly output, really compelling. And it was really interesting, one of the iterations of the edited collection before Brill that we went to some other publishers and gave them, you know, we want to do this, and attached a podcast component to it. And so the podcast component, they evaluated separately, and on two occasions, it was accepted and then unaccepted in a way, I guess you could put it that way, because they couldn't monetize the podcasts. And so we said we wanted it to be treated like a journal article, so something that would be peer reviewed, that would be, you know, used in classrooms, that would be assigned and they said that, you know, we don't really know what to do with this. And so it's interesting that we, you know, then got some internal funding to put together these podcasts. But I, yeah, I think that, you know, we're hoping to have it, you know, widely distributed on different platforms, and to now have a kind of case in point of, you know, this is the way we envision that podcasting can be a form of scholarship, and it can also be something that publics can listen to and enjoy as a form of kind of knowledge production.
Am Johal 18:55
Great. I was going to talk a little bit about just the broader context of the kind of neoliberal age that we live in, and the kind of challenges to public funding of universities. You of course, have the Canadian and the UK context, and we're all sort of functioning and working within the context of budget cuts and other kinds of things. I'm wondering if you could just share any thoughts about, you know, your experiences in the UK functioning in this context where there have been real shifts and challenges to the public university system, which the UK is known around the world for.
Tina Sikka 19:32
Yeah. And Newcastle and Simon Fraser have a little bit of a, in my experience, a stronger union presence than some other institutions that are kind of in the vicinity and yeah, I've found in in the UK, there's a lot in terms of redundancies and cuts and tuition increases, cuts to arts programs, humanities, social science programs as well. I think we've been on strike every year since I've been here, which has been about six years. And it sort of mirrors the very, you know, that idea of a very neoliberal government that is not prioritising education, that is treating international students as kind of, you know, for their tuition fees, and then simultaneously spouting very, you know, racist anti-immigrant sentiment as well. And so all of this is kind of coalescing, I think, in the university space, we feel it quite acutely. And then you have the institution itself as sort of a colonial space also, which then intersects with the neoliberalization and the kinds of things that they prioritize within the university, and I think it's difficult to fight against that, and I think that having solidarity between institutions is really important. When I was doing the eight week visiting professorship at Simon Fraser, I was trying to make connections with some other people working in EDI spaces to potentially collaborate on initiatives and share resources and share strategies for challenging this neoliberalization of higher education, which I think is really important to protect.
Am Johal 21:19
Tina, I wanted to chat a little bit about another area of your research, which you've written on, and I suppose it comes from your media technology studies background, and that has to do with solar geoengineering. And I know that you've written about it. I had to read quite a bit about it when I was working on my dissertation over a decade ago looking at the ethics of geo-engineering. There's other people, like the Canadian geopolitical analyst, Gwynne Dyer, who's written on climate wars and has talked a little bit about geoengineering. There's others like David Keith, a Canadian who I believe is at Harvard, but wondering if you can just sort of share some thoughts in the writing that you've done on the ethics of solar geo-engineering. And also, sort of, I guess, I suppose the blind spots of the exuberance around it.
Tina Sikka 22:07
Yeah, the project around geoengineering sort of started in my postdoc with Andrew Feenberg, where I proposed a project around philosophy, science, and technology and geo-engineering in particular. And it was sort of looking at, you know, thinking about the ways that a science fiction type of technology could be analysed using feminist science principles and perspectives in particular, and what would it look like if we thought through the assumptions and the presuppositions built into, even the modelling, of solar geo-engineering. So for audiences, this idea that, you know, if we want to reduce the, you know, the temperature of the climate, what we need to do is to put particulates up in the air that could act as a kind of reflective device to reflect the sun's rays away from the Earth, sort of mimicking what volcanic ash does. And we've noticed, you know, centuries prior, that when there is a big volcanic eruption, there is a kind of dimming that occurs that reduces temperature. But there's a whole host of consequences that comes out from that in terms of who does it? Who is impacted? What are its side effects? And if there's no way to kind of trial other than model, because if you do it, then you actually do it, there's no way kind of test in a small area and so I was thinking about, you know, the ways that the technology was being tested theoretically and discussed in the media and discussed in journals, and how issues of intersectionality, of gender, of race, of climate politics were just not being discussed at all. So it was looking at the technology itself and the science around it, and then the media representations of it, and trying to dig through that to display some of the gendered, racialized, colonial assumptions that are built into a technology like that.
Am Johal 24:19
I suppose, just given the state of the world, I imagine those conversations around solar geo-engineering aren't going to go away anytime soon, but wondering if you have any thoughts about continuing work in this area?
Tina Sikka 24:34
Yeah, I think so. There was recently, I just saw, I think in the last day or so, a lot of conversations around Harvard putting a stop to their proposed testing of a solar radiation management project, and I'm going to be interested to kind of see where that discussion goes, and some of the other, you know, different perspectives that are piling in to talk about the impact of that cancelation. So I think I will go back to that because I'm still interested in issues of climate change and equity and, you know, science around— public science around the climate, that I'd like to return to at some point. But, yeah, once some of the other projects are finished, I think I'll go back.
Am Johal 25:23
I wanted to speak a little bit about your doctoral dissertation work that involved sort of recuperating politics from Derrida. I wonder if you can share a little bit of that work with us.
Tina Sikka 25:37
Yeah. So that research I was sort of mired in reading as much of Derrida and Habermas as I could, sort of as a PhD student. And thinking through the ways in which I sort of noticed that both Derrida and Habermas had very different approaches to understanding consensus, formation, and communication, and sort of principles that are held fast in The Enlightenment. And I found that that work on language was so different in terms of their perspectives, but then when you went to their political writings, they were quite similar, and both of them argued that those conclusions in politics were directly entailed by their work on language and communication. And so I was like, how can that, you know, how can that sort of be? And so the dissertation was working through that in real time. I think the dissertation itself says that, you know, is there a compatibility between pragmatism and post-structuralism or deconstruction? And is there a kind of contradiction within Derrida's work, which I argued that there was, but that under post-structuralism, does that even matter? And so it was that, you know, and I read through responsibility to protect as a kind of case study towards that. But it was just like, why do we always result in a kind of, you know, democracy, enlightenment, consensus formation, is the conclusion of both their work when their original stuff on communication were just so divergent.
Am Johal 27:28
So many fascinating lines of thought that you’re pursuing. I’m wondering if you could just share a little bit about what you’re working on now or hoping to in the near future?
Tina Sikka 27:39
Yeah, right now I'm writing a book for Temple University Press that outlines some of the findings that I've had in a series of workshops that I held around sexual ethics specifically. So what we ended up doing was taking some of the principles in the book and putting them in front of undergraduate and postgraduate students to have a kind of workshop and do some creative practice work as well. And so I'm now just doing analysis of some of the transcripts that came out of the workshops and also some of the art that was created to kind of think about a different way to present the new model of sexual ethics that I wrote about in the first book. So yeah, just doing that right now, and I'm on research leave until June. So that's about all I'm working on right now.
Am Johal 28:32
Well, Tina, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar, and we're going to link to a number of your book projects and others, and look forward to seeing your future work out in public as well. Thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Tina Sikka 28:47
Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.
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Julia Aoki 28:51
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Tina Sikka. Head to the show notes to learn more about Tina’s work. If you would like to support our podcast, you can donate at the link in the description below. Your generous donation will help support the podcast's activities and associated public events with SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.