In 2019, we launched a blog series called #AtHomeWithArendt. This series was intended to share research coming out of From Rootlessness to Belonging: An Arendtian Critique of the Family as a Structure of Refugee Assimilation, a research grant awarded from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Government of Canada). Katy, and her collaborator Dr. Rita A. Gardiner, were thinking about issues of refugee resettlement through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s philosophy. Janet came onto the project to focus on belonging in relation to drug addiction.
As the funding period comes to an end, we reflect on what it has been like to write this series together for just shy of two years.
Katy: This project focused on Arendt, and in particular her philosophy of home, belonging, and the family. For me, this project was a return to Arendt, who had been a centerpiece of my dissertation of agency in contexts of resistance.
I was introduced to her work in my Master’s program at Georgia State University, then took a class on her philosophy during my PhD studies at Western. Coming from feminist philosophy, Arendt’s lack of attention in The Human Condition to gender, and her public/private distinction, frustrated me. You might be familiar with the feminist mantra, “the personal is political.” Arendt seemed to say the opposite: the personal cannot be political. But as frustrated as I was, I also found aspects of her thought extremely provocative and helpful, especially around how politics was becoming absorbed by consumption.
This course was in 2009 or so. Which is to say–Arendt’s been in my head for awhile! But her work was new to you, Janet. What surprised you when you started reading Arendt?
Janet: My first Arendt reading was The Human Condition and, while her analysis of human activities was captivating, similar to you, I think the thing that surprised me most about Arendt when I first started reading her is her refusing to label herself a feminist. This came up in the interviews that you, Katy, suggested to me when we first started this blog.
As someone who fell in love with philosophy partly through feminism, I was a bit aghast that a woman philosopher of such significance would reject being called that. She was poised and intellectual; I couldn’t help but think that she would have been a trailblazer for feminists today. In any case, her ‘denial’ made me want to continue reading her works and listen to recorded interviews of her – if nothing else, because I wanted to know why she said that.
What do I think of Arendt now? I think she’s sort of a bad-ass, a rebel; I think her refusal is actually a neat little instance of resistance.
Katy: For sure! We cannot fit her neatly into boxes that we often use to describe thinkers–liberal, conservative, radical. She even rejected the label “philosopher” because she thought there was a tendency among philosophers to be too wrapped up in contemplation, so much so that they neglected important worldly and political issues.
Janet: Another example of Arendt being ahead of her time! But don’t let me get too excited. I know that I can be a bit of a fan-girl sometimes. So, tell me: how has your opinion of Arendt changed over the years?
Katy: Sometimes philosophers worship “their” thinkers. I might have been prone to this earlier in my career, and I think it’s an impulse that ought to be resisted.
For me, Kathryn Sophia Belle’s 2014 monograph Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question was a watershed moment. I think it’s fair to say Belle’s work has changed the conversation in Arendt scholarship. Belle meticulously documents problems with Arendt’s treatment of race, including how White supremacy is present in aspects of her thought.
My work draws on Arendt as a powerful thinker for our times. Scholars like Katherine Brichacek, a PhD candidate at Loyola Chicago, are really challenging me to think about accountability with Arendt scholarship. How can I use Arendt responsibly without brushing the racism under the rug?
This responsibility is directly relevant to my research on refugee experiences of assimilation. Arendt had lived experience as a stateless person. She fled from Germany to France in 1933. By 1937 she had been stripped of her German citizenship and in 1940 she was interned in a camp. With her husband, Heinrich Blücher, she was able to escape to the United States in 1941, and her mother soon joined them. Her story is powerful, but it’s also one story about a German-Jewish experience.
Work on Arendt and race demonstrates that she sometimes imported her experiences as a Jewish person to theorizing racism in America. I don’t want to make the same mistake in treating race or migration too simplistically. It’s important that I draw on philosophers who are attuned to the complexities of migration and that I draw on narratives from newcomers themselves. This in turn helps enrich the Arendtian approach I take to questions of belonging.
Now you’ve been reading Arendt in a sustained way for about two years. What do you think will stay with you about Arendt from this project? Other than that she’s a bad ass that is!
Janet: Arendt’s notion of enlarged mentality and visiting have made a big impression on me. The idea that we can visit the perspectives of others, to both be aware of our own perspective and the perspective of another simultaneously, seems almost mystical but I think that it has important practical applications. So much of what we know seems to build on each other. You know X because X is an extension of Y, sort of thing.
But Arendt’s enlarged mentality reveals the weakness in that way of knowledge building: you get limited to what you know. Enlarging our mentality and visiting others, however, expands the breadth of our perspective so that what we can know is also enlarged. I think that’s an incredibly valuable way of keeping ourselves humble and curious. And it has applications in both politics and our personal lives!
Katy: Yes, visiting is a way to help us reflect on our own assumptions and standpoints. It’s difficult to do, in practice (have you read Belle’s book yet?!) but worth thinking about how to do well.
For Arendt, visiting helps us form judgments. We share our individual judgments with each other. An exchange of judgments between members of a shared community, their talking about them, is part of how the community negotiates meaning. In a way, it’s how I think philosophy is best done. There is an individual component for sure, but philosophy is really done in conversation with others, whether that’s in a classroom, by engaging in a conversation across texts, or at a party (throwback to Plato’s Symposium).
Speaking of speaking together, how have you found the experience of blogging? I started my blog in 2017, but when you came onto the project was the first time I shared that space and had an interlocutor help me think through ideas before I posted them. How was your experience keeping a blog going for two years?
Janet: I’ve always wanted to start a blog, but I could either never make the time or figure out a theme or topic I wanted to consistently write about. So, for me, #AtHomeWithArendt gave me a chance to test out what it might be like to write a blog regularly. What did I think?
One of the biggest benefits I got out of it was to be a less perfect writer. That sounds backwards, but I usually nitpick my work for a long time before sharing it with anyone. This has the potential to delay progress significantly. Writing regularly for a blog helped me get over that. It forced me to write quickly and share widely. It gave me an opportunity to believe in myself more as a scholar and writer, and it helped me to realize that writing need not be a solitary activity. I think my favourite posts are the ones that you helped me work through.
Katy: Yes, collaboration is essential!
Janet: What did you like best? What would you change?
Katy: One of my challenges is a push to write quickly, especially if I want to comment on events happening right now. For me, the blog is more of an exercise in trying to say something small (short, concise) yet meaningful. I’m certainly not Substack newsletter material!
See how I didn’t really answer this question? My take on the blog is that I have more freedom to meander through thoughts rather than address questions head on.
What about you?
Janet: My favourite thing about the blog was that it challenged me to work with a particular lens – the Arendtian lens. This tight focus got me out of my comfort zone (since I never read Arendt before this project) and forced me to apply a new lens to issues that I was/am already aware of. The result has been good too! I feel like I know more about Arendt (obviously) and the issues I’ve always cared about.
What would I change? Maybe the frequency or the length of the posts. When you’re behind on your own research, writing a blog post every month can feel like a lot. Putting together a post from scratch, complete with rounds of editing, can take a lot of time and forethought. But maybe it’s because the posts are too long? Some blogs put out max 800 word posts – that seems a lot easier to me for some reason than a post about 1200 words long.
Katy: Sometimes I think it’s harder to write shorter, but that might mean an idea is too complicated. I agree–500 to 800 words is the sweet spot. I say this as someone with posts that tend to be 1200 to 1400 words.
We are nearing 1600 words for this dialogue. Maybe that’s a cue we should wrap up? What are your plans for the summer? I’m teaching, working on a manuscript on Arendt, the family, and notions of home with Rita. And of course there are my two favourite summer activities: cycling and ice cream! Best when combined!
Janet: After more than a year of too much screen time, I have made the choice to scale back and focus on my physical health this summer. I am going to continue my research but I am slowly committing myself to start training for a 50K trail race. Or maybe I’ll just eat some ice cream too!
Katy: Thanks for all your work on the blog, Janet. This seems like a good moment to leave home (bad pun?) for that sunshine and ice cream break, eh?
Janet: Absolutely!