Thread by @shengokai

It is EXTREMELY risky for early-career people to specialize in LCT philosophies, not simply for the reasons that @BryanVanNorden pointed out in his retweet, but because of the way that departments and the field doesn't invest in LCT philosophies.

https://twitter.com/Helenreflects/status/1380733772287598600

An example is how departments advertise for specialists in LCT philosophies. "Non-western," for example, is used as a catchall for "not-anglophone," and even when it is disambiguated into something like "Asian Philosophy," they're not specific as to which Asian Philosophy.

Thus, you have specialists in Chinese traditions competing with specialists in Indian traditions and Japanese traditions all for the same job. And this doesn't get into what happens when ads ask for "non-western" as code for "non-anglophone."

Then you end up with specialists in Asian traditions competing with Africana specialists, Latinx specialists, and (rarely) specialists in Philosophy of Disability or Feminist or Queer Philosophy depending on how bad the advertisement is.

(I say rarely because quite often Philosophy of Disability is subsumed into Bioethics which is its own kind of problem. To date, I have NEVER seen an ad for a specialist in Philosophy of Disability.)

What happens is that you end up with one specialist who is expected to represent the non-anglophone tradition, and usually in a very general way. In PhD granting programs, this makes it difficult to train other specialists because the lone scholar may be over-burdened.

Which, of course, leads to a dearth of specialists. And, given the prestige economy, most of the specialists produced don't emerge from "top tier" programs thereby resulting in the continued lack of scholars and scholarship in LCT philosophy.

Now, I position this as an "investment" problem because you need to invest in ECRs and specialists in LCT philosophies to allow for the growth of the field. Departments and institutions need to take a chance on some of these traditions through hiring more than one specialist.

Rather than the current fieldwide practice of hiring a single specialist to cover all of Asia or all of Africa or all of Latin-America. The field also needs to understand the distinctions within these areas in order to drill down on something more than compositional diversity.

This, again, is an investment problem: it requires those with the authority to hire or to structure their departments to invest the time and effort to understand the distinctions between LCT philosophies rather than throwing out catchall requests.

In any case, if you're an ECR or a grad student wanting to be a specialist in LCT philosophies, expect to be the only specialist in your department. Expect to have to do the work of multiple specialists in your area of philosophy. Expect never to see an ad for your focus.

I honestly wish I had better things to say about this, but this is the reality of LCT philosophies in the field right now.