Catch up on the LAS Research Highlights podcast and to know our LAS faculty, their backgrounds and current research initiatives with Genia Olesnicky, Ph.D., Professor of biology and Associate Dean of Research. Learn more about the podcast here and enjoy other episodes here.
This episode’s guest is Jennifer (Jen) Kling, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Legal Studies, who shares how she got into philosophy, and subsequently, her specializations of war and peace, protest, feminism and philosophy of race. Find the full episode and transcript here, and check out the episode highlights below.
Summary
Jen Kling first wanted to go to school to be a poet.
She was majoring in creative writing at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and taking a required philosophy course that she fell in love with, prompting her to switch majors.
“In some ways with philosophy, we’ve been dealing with the same five questions for 3,000 years, and in other ways it’s just endless, because new things are always opening up and changing,” said Jen. “And we get to be generalists and poke our noses into everything. I ended up double majoring in English and philosophy, but I kept creative writing as a minor.”
After her undergrad, Jen went on to earn her master’s from CU Boulder and returned to Chapel Hill for her doctorate, a practice she noted was unusual in the philosophy field.
“I’m one of very few philosophers I know that has their undergraduate degree and their Ph.D. from the same institution,” she explained. “That’s actually very rare, as we like to spread ourselves around, as philosophers say.”
At the time, Jen planned to be a medieval scholar. Her Ph.D. studies focused on that, while she worked as a Teacher’s Assistant (TA) for a course on the ethics of peace, war and defense.
“I went in to see the professor I was TA for – and who became my advisor – Dr. Bernie Voxel, and I held up the book we were reading and I was like, ‘I hate this. I want to throw this across a room,'” Jen laughed. “I think at one point I bit the book cause I was so mad. And Bernie, to his everlasting credit, looked at me and asked why I hated it, and I gave all these reasons, and he said, ‘Okay, if you don’t like it, you have to write a better one.’ And I was sold.”
Voxel became Jen’s advisor, and her path switched to the philosophical study of war and peace with emphasis on war and peace protest, revolution, antioppression, feminism and antiracism.
“When I’m describing my research to the public, ordinarily what I say is that I work on concepts and questions like, ‘Do we talk to each other across radical disagreements around the kind of country we should have? What kind of world we should have, is violence ever acceptable, and who we should hold responsible for the kinds of violence that we see in our world? When is protest right? When is it wrong to protest? Can it ever be justified to go to war? Is it ever right to commit violence as an act of protest?’ All of these questions,” Jen explained.
Jen shared more examples of her philosophical studies and questions, emphasizing the reality that perspective and experience will shape each person’s answers to these questions differently.
“Half of philosophy is framing,” she said. “You’re trying to frame the question really carefully, and getting the nature of it very precise. The other half of philosophy is banging your head against really difficult problems, just sitting there wondering what approach to use.”
Jen also discussed her recent research of uncivil obedience.
“We’ve seen folks engage in civil disobedience, especially in the ’60s or during the suffragette movement, that targeted lawbreaking to bring out dissonance,” said Jen. “I’m arguing that there’s there’s an inverse kind of protest that I’m calling uncivil obedience. It’s where you gum up the works by following the law or policy very, very precisely in an exaggerated fashion to make people see that something needs to change.”
“American Motorists Association did this in the ’70s,” she continued. “Congress dropped the federal speed limit to 55 miles per hour in response to the oil embargo and other things. The American Motorist Association protested by taking everybody in the association onto the LA freeway system and having them all go precisely 55 miles per hour. They obeyed the law and they shut down the LA freeway system for hours. Everybody was calling the police, but the police couldn’t do anything since they were obeying all traffic laws. It’s deeply uncivil, and it messes with society, but it’s obedience.”
To cap off the interview, Genia asked Jen to talk about a project that she’s especially proud of.
“One project was a book I wrote with a grad school colleague of mine called ‘Philosophy of Protests Fighting for Justice Without Going to War,'” said Jen. “We were talking about political philosophy and social philosophy and we started thinking about protest. We had the seed of an idea, which is to think very carefully about the prohibition against violence in protest. I worked with Megan Mitchell at Stonehill college, and we developed an argument that under certain conditions, in certain kinds of cases, lethal violence in protest is permissible and sometimes justified. This is a surprisingly radical thesis as evidenced by the difficulty we had getting it published. I don’t know that people will agree with us, but I’m proud of the way we wrote it.”
“Even if they don’t agree with us, a big part of our argument was people have this knee-jerk reaction,” she added. “They see violence and they immediately think ‘no.’ And we wanted people to think more carefully. I’m very proud of that.”