Why reappropriating words can be a really bad idea

It seems that the University of York student body is in uproar at the moment, in every direction, over feminism.

FemSoc has failed to be ratified by YUSU, the status and purpose of the Women's Committee has been thrown into doubt, and now a proposed all-inclusive "Walk A Mile in Her Shoes" event at one of the colleges has been met with a mix of support, frustration and dissent.

I'm not here to talk about the first two - I have never had any contact with either group, largely because I a) don't have time because b) I'm a postgrad, not an undergrad and as such c) it's unclear whether YUSU really has much to do with me at all, whether it proclaims to or not.

Anyway. The third point is the interesting one, or at least the one which can be more easily broken down. Vanbrugh College, it seems, want to hold an event to campaign against sexual harassment. A march, to be precise. There are two famous types of march which have captured popular imagination; firstly the Toronto-born SlutWalk, and secondly the Walk A Mile in Her Shoes from just south of that North American border. The former was instigated and participated in by women; the latter inspired by the SlutWalk but participated in by men. Although the Vanbrugh event is open to everyone, regardless of gender identity, they have chosen the "Walk A Mile" label over "SlutWalk" as they perceived the latter to be potentially offensive for some.

Cue the (double) crux of the disagreement. There are those who feel that it isn't right that the male-oriented version of the event should be assumed instead of the female-oriented version, particularly as the male-oriented version often comes with men dressing as women, and people are worried about the effect of trans students, for example. This is certainly an important point, but not the one I want to focus on here.

The whole debate made me wonder about the language which feminists use, as this is the source of the trouble - if SlutWalk wasn't deemed potentially offensive, I'm quite sure that the Vanbrugh welfare team would have gone with that title in a heartbeat.

So let's think about bit about where the name came from and why it was chosen.

The name SlutWalk derives from the comments of a police constable in Toronto, who advised a group of young people to 'avoid dressing like a slut' if they wanted to stay safe. Apart from being a very vague and unsubstantiated piece of advice, it implies that victims, specifically females ones, are in some way to blame for anything which may befall them. As a response, 3,000 women marched on the streets of Toronto, not only to protest against the implications made by the police constable, but also to reclaim the word 'slut'.

The idea of 'reclaiming' or 'reappropriating' words is just a linguistic version of bringing elements of subcultures into the mainstream, or taking on formerly offensive words within the group that word was once used to oppress. It is a process which has no real 'beginning' - to name just one, the term 'Jesuit' was used derogatorily to denounce a certain form of practising Christianity which is now used to refer to members of the Society of Jesus, of whom current Pope Francis is one - though the most successful reappropriation of a term in recent times must be that of 'gay', which is now used (largely) non-offensively to refer to the homosexual community, both by members and non-members of that group.


The big issue here is that whilst feminism (as I understand it) is about promoting the cause of an oppressed group, this group is HUGE and heterogeneous and - what is more - modern feminism in particular aims to engage all people in a move to support women and to achieve gender equality.

All people. Around 7 billion of us. That is a bloomin' big audience by anyone's standards, with an awful lot of different and differing cultural and social traditions to take into account.

And this is where, I feel, the reappropriation of the word 'slut' falls down. There are a huge amount of other connotations attached to this word aside from the sexist ones, specificaly racist and slavery-related overtones, which might make certain groups of women extra-uneasy about adopting this deeply complex term. For a particularly eloquent and much fuller explanation of this, see this open letter from Black Women to the SlutWalk organisers. 

That's not the only problem. Take 'gay', for example - the word originally meant 'joyful and happy', and was used as such until well into the 20th Century, as demonstrated in the Sondheim song 'I Feel Pretty' from West Side Story:

I feel pretty, oh so pretty
I feel pretty, and witty, and gay,
And I pity any girl who isn't me today!

In contrast, the four phonemes used in such an order as to be pronounced as the word 'slut' have only been used in a derogatory manner* continually since its earliest attestation as denoting loose morals and promiscuity in 1402. This word has centuries of abuse and offence attached to it and is still being used as a strong insult today - why should we attempt to salvage it, instead of slapping it with a dagger symbol to show that it is obsolete, much like the ideas it denotes?

In fact, I am of the opinion that, in the pursuit of such a global cause, language which is generally classed as 'offensive' has no place. I do not own the cleanest mouth in the world, but there are contexts in which I refrain from swearing. Because crucially, if you want to appeal to groups outside of Western White women between the ages of 16 and 35, in which swearing may be considered offensive and unnecessary, then I strongly suggest giving it a go. And if you are convinced that swearing is the only way to show just how angry you are at injustice, take some lessons from this lady:

Now, to be clear: I in no way advocate any kind of language policing; I believe that differences should be discussed, and that banning any kind of term can stymie discussion and therefore understanding. I do not believe that any person should assume what another person will be offended by, though it is obviously important to take into account any information you have about what your addressee may find offensive. I even believe that 'some -ist' jokes can have their place - for example, jokes about disability, pronounced within close friendship groups, have been shown to normalise disability in groups in which a member has found themselves dealing with the loss of a limb, or paralysis, or another form of disability. I know this personally from my friendship groups, and I know this from other anecdotes, for example in the video below:
 

I in no way advocate language policing but, especially when you are claiming to represent half the population, if not the whole population of our planet, your language choice must be made carefully, and always with reference to two things: CONTENT and CONTEXT, namely what you say and who you're saying it to.

To get a bit linguistic about it, the philosopher and semanticist Robert Stalnaker said, in reference to the act of speaking:

Presuppositions [essentially, assumptions - RW] are what is taken by the speaker to be the COMMON GROUND of the participants in the conversation, what is treated as their COMMON KNOWLEDGE or MUTUAL KNOWLEDGE. [...The speaker] may presuppose any proposition that he finds convenient to assume for the purpose of the conversation, provided he is prepared to assume that his audience will assume it along with him.
(Stalnaker, 1979, p.323; original emphasis)**

In short - if you assume something about a term or a piece of information you use, you must be aware that your audience may not share the same assumptions. He goes on to note that if the audience rejects the speaker's proposition, their shared understanding will not change in the way intended by the speaker. It may stay the same...or the speaker and the audience might diverge. This is where Stalnaker leaves it - the consequences of this weren't his concern in his paper. But in our context, this could just drive yet another wedge in an increasingly unhappy and divided concept of modern feminism.

In fact, this is exactly where I think modern feminism is struggling. It's not an easy case to fix - there are a whole raft of issues included within feminism, before even considering the other concerns which intersect with it. However, if the largely white Western brand of feminism, which seems to have the largest voice at the moment, wants to claim to speak for all women (cf. Caitlin Moran's two-step test for being a feminist***), it's going to have to start listening much harder than it is doing at the moment.

P.S. Psst, Vanbrugh Welfare? Look to your imaginations and come up with your own name for your own inclusive event. Just sayin'.

---

*The OED suggests that 'slut' can be used as a playful term, but as this usage (their examples show) are only ever used in the context of very close relationships, usually parent to child, this usage is not relevant here.
** Stalnaker, Robert (1979). 'Assertion'. In: P. Cole, ed.,Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics (pp.315-332). New York: Academic Press.
*** "So here is the quick way of working out if you're a feminist. Put your hand in your pants.
a) Do you have a vagina? and
b) Do you want to be in charge of it?
If you said 'yes' to both, then congratulations! You're a feminist."
Taken from Caitlin Moran (2011). How to Be A Woman. London: Ebury Press.

Why all academics could benefit from a second language

Nelson Mandela famously said, "If you speak to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you speak to him in his own language, that goes to his heart."*

I strongly believe that this is true, and that the same kind of tenet applies to literature; only in reading a work in the original language can you truly begin to understand what the author intended to do and to say with the raw materials available to her.

Of course, there will be times when learning another language may not be practicable or indeed possible - languages in remote or closed communities can be very difficult to access, or it may not be a great use of your time to learn Hungarian solely to read that one article with the tantalising keywords. However, by approaching cultures - and in that I include one's own - from a stolidly monolingual point of view, the scholar is bound to miss out both on varied viewpoints on his area of focus and on opportunities of a more enriching and potentially pecuniary nature.

Briefly, it is important to think about what it might mean to be multilingual in the context of academia. This may just refer to passive language skills such as reading and maybe listening, allowing the scholar to read and understand primary and, importantly, secondary literature on her topic. This sort of familiarity, if not fluency, in another language must be understood to 'count' as multilingualism, because even this opens up opportunities for the scholar in terms of the wealth of scholarship available to him. However, if the scholar is also able to converse in another language, whether it is a language of interest on a research level or another widely-spoken language such as French or German in which conferences and congresses may be held, this allows the scholar to form international links with other researchers and institutions on a more long-standing and personal level.

The practical benefits of multilingualism as explained above are clear. However, it fosters ways of thinking and of interpreting texts and discussions which are of great benefit to academics, especially in the arts and humanities.

For example, writing styles differ across cultures, which is often linked to language. As such, the Anglophone essay in which punchy Points, Examples and Explanations abound is quite at odds with the French dissertation whose conclusion is a gradually unveiled climatic moment, and is often perceived almost as an affront to a reader familiar with German Aufsätze, in which both example and detailed analysis co-occur in the same sentence. These stark structural differences, so closely entwined with specific languages, have in the past caused non-English ideas and texts to languish, untended certainly by the Anglo-American tradition, until decades after their first appearance - the French texts of Jacques Derrida being just one example**. In learning the language, the learner is often taught how to construct arguments within the culture linked to that language, or natural curiosity and motivation to read in the target language will also implicitly expose the learner to new ways of forming arguments.

Apart from writing styles, any multilingual will tell you that there are certain concepts that are best explained in a particular language; for example the Verfremdungseffekt is tied up with the German language in lots of ways, and serendipity is, for me, best explained in English. Terms in different languages come with different connotations, histories and assumptions which, if carefully considered, can greatly enrich an argument or a discussion in an effective and elegant way. Furthermore, many ideas, tropes and stories have been translated across cultures and which have been adapted in various ways. An ability to understand the idea's journey and history, from cross-cultural references to cross-linguistic wordplay, therefore allows the scholar a much deeper understanding of the idea under consideration.

This is just a short collection of my ideas on why multilingualism can benefit the scholar, and therefore academia more generally. I'd be really interested to hear what others think, and about any experiences you might have had learning languages or using them in an academic context.

*http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/06/24/mandela.quotes/
**Thanks to Martine Hennard Dutheil for this observation

Identity crisis

For a little while now, I've felt that my internet handles haven't necessarily represented what I do. I don't expect them to represent who I am particularly deeply, as they're usually limited in characters and two or three words cannot a person summarise in any case (no matter how hard you might try on Twitter).

Anyway. My name, or anything much based on it, has never been an option seeing as it's a spectacularly common British name. I've worked through a fair few handles in my time, from obscure teenage references to a Jonny Wilkinson obsession to my most recent feuille blanche brand. I chose feuille blanche because a) French sounds pretty and b) I liked the idea of 'blank page' as suggesting that I'm open to ideas, that I'm somehow a work in progress in myself. This latter point is no less true than before, but it's not very clear, it's a bit funny to spell and, as an established French phrase, it's sometimes find it free as a username or web address. I also have a more established framework to work in now than when I set myself up on the blog and on Twitter - I belong to an institution, I have a role within that institution, and I'm very proud of both of these things.

So from now on, this blog can be found at discipulaeboracensis.blogspot.com. I know, it's a bit pretentious, but I couldn't help myself. The idea came when I was given my temporary "zoo" office at the université de Lausanne (on which more another time), so called because its large floor-to-ceiling windows face into the centre of the building, leaving the occupant feeling a little like a specimen on display (not that the passing students are the most interested watchers-of-academics, but still!). On wondering what my genus name would be, I eventually landed on discipula eboracensis - student (female, of course) of York.

So there it is. This blog is officially written by a student of York, at York, in York (mostly), who is becoming, bit by bit, a little less of a blank page.

Did anybody else miss March?

Which is to say - oops, it's been a while since I was here last!

I mean, I'm not the only person who seems to have just given March a miss - British springtime is still dragging its feet as far as I can see, despite increasingly desperate entreaties from, well, EVERYONE.

Snow and blue skies on 11th March, my birthday. Very bizarre.

The AWOL status of the Gulfstream apart, what did happen to my March? With the aid of my diary, I can surmise that it got a bit lost under a slew of teaching, teaching observations (on which more another, more coherent time), meetings for a variety of conferences, and a lot of transatlantic Skyping with κύριε καθηγητά. And the small matter of some uninvited SVT, but that's nothing to dwell on, fortunately.

And where did a lot of rushing about and generally being a bit hazy get me? Well, the two reasons for multiple Skype meetings with George have both pretty much borne fruit, or have at least budded: firstly, I gave a paper at the 8th Newcastle upon Tyne PG conference last Friday (5th April), which went down well, if not spectacularly. The work that I have done so far, however, provides a good basis on which to build at least part of my PhD, so that's exciting.

Caught in action by Theodora...who unfortunately papped the worst
slide of my entire presentation - waaaay too much text!

And secondly, a joint project that κύριε καθηγητά and I are working on has been accepted to be presented at the EdiSyn workshop in Konstanz this summer - my first conference outside the UK! So, even if it's feeling like a slog from time to time, results seem to be appearing.

I've learnt a few, arguably more important, lessons along the way, though. Such as the fact that 'no' is a valid word, and it's OK to use it. That even if you're no longer a slave to the term schedule, you still can't just push through for weeks and weeks on end without a break.

Nothing like catching the sunrise from your tent
in the Peak district to chill you out...

And a last thought - a happy body = a happy mind; a run of squash coaching sessions gave me a huge (and underappreciated) boost throughout February, which I think I've missed in March. Better get back onto the court (or into a pool, or similar) soon then!

Or if all else fails... lindy-hoppers + red noses = a wonderful weekend

A diversion (for One Billion Rising)

I've just been taking a break from my paper on perspective shifting in interrogatives (3,127 words in, approximately 3,000 words of waffle) to pop down to the One Billion Rising event on campus.

Eve Ensler's One Billion Rising campaign is named after the one in three women who have, currently do, or will experience violence against them in some form during their lives. So to keep them in mind, and start to set other people's minds thinking on it, today - Valentine's Day - has been at least in part reappropriated from Hallmark for events to get people talking, thinking, and most of all, DANCING.

First came the fem-cakes....

Then came the dancing! Very brave
Linguistics MA student Petya got everyone
up and belly-dancing...

...then we were wowed by some seriously hot rumba

Oh-so-sadly, I didn't get any pictures of my dodgy shape-throwing to share with you. Consider this my Valentine's gift to each of you.

What I did turn my hand to though, and I will nervously share, is a few thoughts on that huge, great, pink elephant in the collective room at the moment - say it quietly - feminism. People (not just women) seem to be embracing it and abandoning it in equal measure at the moment, with both apathy and a LOT of 'pathy going around. So here's my attempt to get my head round it.

What is feminism?

It has no code, no doctrine
No great (or Greer) leader
It has no secret handshakes
No uniform - dungarees NOT excepted - 
Not even a gender restriction.

If you don't want to be a feminIST
or associate with decades of tired, conflicting baggage

Be a femophile
Like women, love women
Learn all about them and try to speak to them in their language

Be a fem-fan
Support women, cheer them on,
Elevate them to a higher league and rejoice in their successes as if they were your own

Be a Femian, a Femlim, a Femdu, or a Few
Believe in women, have faith in them
Trust them with your earthly happiness

And maybe you'll find
You too
Are a feminist after all.

A work in progress. In all senses.

Filling the Diary (and Baby's First Glasses)

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I'm a girl who needs a framework to get anything done. Leave me deadline-less and I will happily read novels until I go blind (more on that below!), preferably in a good hot bath until I turn into a prune/get shouted at by housemates, write letters to friends, doodle, make random paper-based objects that will never see the light of day and, in short, get very little done on my seemingly vast uphill climb of a PhD.

I've kickstarted myself by beginning to commit words to paper in possibly the least coherent literature review ever written. I'm now on about 8,000 words - how many of these will make it into the eventual thesis I cannot say, but it's keeping my head clear and on course.

I have, however, found that another way of focusing my mind is to get involved with projects, thereby plumping up the ol' CV and forcing myself to think time management - for example, if I'm in meetings and seminars all day Monday and Wednesday, then I am forced to sit myself down and get working hard on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.

Here's the things I'm involved in:

• So it's all about conferences in the first year - I'm submitting abstracts and I have already presented a bit, but most interestingly, I'm involved in organising not one, but two conferences for 2013. The first one is PARLAY (Postgraduate Academic Research in Linguistics at York), the first PG conference for general linguistics that York will have hosted in some time, if ever. This will be held in September and is being overseen by the indomitable and impressive Catherine and Emanuela. The second is a librarian-esque Unconference, which I'm organising with a couple of linguists, a computer scientist and the GSA...and we're keeping our heads down and getting on with the organisation at the moment, so more details to follow soon!
• I've signed up to be the new chief editor of the York Papers in Linguistics, whose pages last year contained a short paper by yours truly. We haven't got a lot to do just yet, but it should get busy around summer time, which will prove a pleasant sideline.
• I'm still teaching one seminar group in Introduction to Syntax, which keeps me sane, even if the Friday morning early start has me all fingers and thumbs, breaking chalk and accidentally flinging board rubbers around. I'm also down to cover a couple of Practical Psycholinguistics seminars towards the end of the term, which I'm really excited about.
• For my sins I am the PhD rep for the department, so I sit on the Graduate School Board and the Board of Studies. It's a good insight into the administration required to run a department, and useful to be able to take fellow students' concerns directly into an arena where they can be seen to.
• Aaaaaaand there's an intriguing little side project which will be taking up a bit of time between now and March...I can't say much more yet, but suffice to say I'm a bit blown away by it!

So with all of these commitments filling up my timetable, it leaves me specific times, luckily usually a full day at a time, when I am free and therefore VERY motivated to get on with my own stuff. 

And on a side-note, here's the first piece of physical evidence of the effects of librarianship/postgraduate study...

Baby's first pair of glasses

That's right, they've robbed me of my eyesight. 

That's a little dramatic, actually - with a prescription of -0.75, I'm hardly blind, and I don't even need to wear them to drive or ride my bike. But it was scary how much clearer the world became when I tried them on for the first time yesterday...

Ah well. This new-found clarity should help me see the pathways that the PhD is opening up for me, and to take them with confidence!

Review: Lightning Rods seminar on "Is the academy just not funny enough?"

It's an interesting place to work, the HRC. Sometimes we linguists can feel a bit like interlopers who've snuck in under the radar, when all the circulated emails are about Edwardian culture and whole reading groups dedicated to Finnegan's Wake. However, I decided to make a much more effort to get involved in HRC life this year through things such as Christmas Crafternoons (SO much glitter) and discovering that English lit students make great duetting partners for German translations of Beatles' songs.

Sie liebt dich: ja, ja, ja...
IMAGE SOURCE

Another, slightly more academic, way of getting involved is to trot along to some of the seminars that they hold here. There's two seminar series, of which the one I went to last night, Lightning Rods, is the less "utilitarian" and more "indulgent" one (so says Judith Buchanan, director of the HRC). Works for me.

Actually, the title of this talk was what drew me in particular - "Is the academy just not funny enough?" I have a latent interest in humour theory anyway as a legacy of the legendary Dr Penny Simons's module on Le Rire Gaulois (Medieval French Humour) from the final year of my undergrad. But it's also something that's been interesting me and my coursemates recently: it seems that academics so frequently say blatantly funny things with a po-face and serious bearing, or seem just about ready to pop with pomposity, while we're suppressing our sniggers and trying to work out how to turn into "serious academics". Are the academy and humour mutually exclusive? And if not, why are we so reticent to have a bit of a giggle at ourselves and the subject which impassions us?

A unicorn and a lion playing chess. That's pretty funny.
IMAGE SOURCE

The session was chaired by Professor Jason Edwards (History of Art) and there were four brave speakers from throughout the university: Professor Guy Halsall (History), Dr Lisa Peschel (Theatre, Film and Television), Dr Bryan Radley (English) and, interestingly, Dr Carolyn Hunter (Management). Professor Edwards opened with a few thoughts framed in a rhetorical style that would make Carrie Bradshaw proud, and ensured the first giggle of the night came good and early. He wondered aloud whether humour is seen as "juvenile, escapist, defensive" in an academic world in which "criticism and hostility are employed as modi operandi", before handing over to Professor Halsall.

Did you just nick my style there, Edwards?
IMAGE SOURCE

Eminent historian Professor Halsall was also quick to jump on a bit of humour, this time at his own expense, by referencing his recent mini-media storm. He then went on to question that "subjective, moveable fine line" which dictates whether something is acceptably funny or an acceptable target for humour, or whether things have "gone too far". He also looked at how the ethics of humour interact with the ethical responsibilities of the historian to represent and analyse historical events as carefully as possible. He noted that somewhere between "complete empathy and complete alterity" with/from sources may lie the key, but that humour helps historians both to distance themselves from and engage with sources, to the point that we (or at least he) often find ourselves laughing both with and at Sisyphus as his boulder rolls back down the hill, because our sense of shared humanity helps us see just how ridiculous humanity really is. He concluded that maybe it wasn't a question of having gone too far with humour in academia, but "maybe, we haven't yet gone far enough".

And you thought a PhD was bad... IMAGE SOURCE

From this Arts and Humanities perspective we segued into a more utilitarian perspective from Dr Hunter, who researchers the use of humour and play in corporate environments. Apparently there's a long tradition of studying the role of humour in management studies, and (as I too had noticed) humour is coming back into vogue as something which can be harnessed and used in the workplace. She talked about how corporate bods used humour - a good thing as long as it results in higher productivity, and it can even be seen as anti-corporate not to join in the fun - and that, following Bergson, there is a sense that empathy and emotion inhibit humour, so in order to build a more coherent workplace, people need to distance themselves from their natural emotions and laugh. This paradox of humour both distancing and forming bonds between people was a recurring theme, as you have probably already guessed. Dr Hunter concluded that humour certainly can be a serious thing, although the downside for a humour researcher seemed to be that all her study participants seemed to expect her personally to be and perform as 'a funny person'...pressure, much?!

Our next speaker, Dr Peschel, seemed more than happy to perform however - literally, as she and Dr Radley performed a skit about...the Holocaust. And it was genuinely funny. She challenged us to think about whether the writers, in this case two prisoners in the ghetto, should be celebrated or condemned, in the same way that Roberto Benigni faced both acclaim and revulsion for his 1997 film Life is Beautiful, inviting thoughts not only on distance and acceptability of topics, but also whether the position of the writer and his/her circumstances lends either credibility or insult to the given theme.

Rib-tickling, gut-wrenching, horror-inducing, or all of the above?
IMAGE SOURCE

After his cameo appearance in the skit, Dr Radley was our final speaker. He focused more closely on the question asked in the title of the seminar, and the consequences of such a statement. He wondered whether the academy could be funny, and if so, what the purpose of this would be. He highlighted how engaging an issue humour and seriousness is in the Arts and Humanities by linking back to the current political and economic situation, noting that it is possible that "we take ourselves too seriously, while no-one else takes us seriously at all", and that humour can be an incredibly powerful tool in holding the attention of and making connections in the minds of your students while teaching (something that Professor Halsall had also noted). As for the study of humour itself, he noted that even Bergson admits that it is hard to theorise humour coherently, and that none of the three humour theories - relief, superiority and incongruity - can alone account for human laughter without seriously warping either the source, or the theory itself. He also recognised how trying to study humour invariably seems to kill it flat, quoting E.B. White:

Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind. (source) 

...and Dorothy Parker:

I had thought, on starting this composition, that I should define what humor means to me. However, every time I tried to, I had to go and lie down with a cold wet cloth on my head. (source)

I want to know more about this woman...
IMAGE SOURCE

(...there was a Classical quote too but I've forgotten who it was...)

Dr Radley concluded that it wasn't helpful to create any kind of binary relation between humour theory and the study of tragedy, as neither is completely uncontaminated by the other, and it is that "contaminant" which is so interesting and so ephemeral.

There were some interesting discussions once the floor was opened up, from whether humour is appropriate in a teaching context or could undermine and put pressure on teachers, especially PGWTs; whether "enforced humour" from management is actually productive and whether it can be counted as humour at all; and the big question of who decides what is an appropriate target for humour - the answer to that, it seemed, was that no-one has the right to outlaw any topic, while Professor Halsall insisted that no topic was out of bounds of his funny-bone.

I asked two questions; I was interested in the distance-engagement paradox and, off the back of Dr Peschel's performance, asked whether humour would in fact be a very useful tool for studying history, as it breaks through emotions which stop historians from seeing the finer details - in the case of Dr Peschel's skit, we saw the real humanity of someone trying to survive in an utterly inhuman and dehumanising situation, and the humour allowed us to see through the head-spinning numbers (6 million) to see one person and how they coped. She agreed with me and a small debate followed on the ethics of laughing at history, but the importance of not being blinded by very human emotions in academia. I also asked whether it is more difficult for Arts and Humanities scholars to be humorous in their work, given that they are judged not only on their words, turns of phrase and opinions, but other people's interpretations of what they write; as such, it's much more dangerous for them to introduce any ambiguity e.g. through irony, whilst scientists, mathematicians and even theoretical linguists can throw in all the gags they want, because their evidence is in graphical or numerical form and will be judged (largely) in isolation.

Linguists: if you don't get this joke, we can no longer be friends.
IMAGE SOURCE

It was concluded from the open discussion that introducing humour into academia involves some quite serious risk-taking: the risk you will be misunderstood; the risk that you will offend; the risk that you simply won't be seen as funny. But there seemed to be an overriding air that maybe, it might just be worth taking that risk a little more often than we currently do.

**I want to say here that everything written above is my memory and interpretation of last night's session, and that I am sorry and willing to edit anything which may be seen as a misrepresentation of the excellent speakers and audience present. Please let me know if you were there and think that anything needs to be altered!**

And if you're interested: people who were mentioned last night or have made interesting contributions to this field (this is just intended as a starting point):

Henri Bergson

• Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic [Le rire](1900)

Ted Cohen

• Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (1999)

Simon Critchley

• On Humour (2002)

Sigmund Freud

• 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria' and 'Jokes and their relation to the unconscious' in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey (1973)

Dorothy Parker

• Just about anything, it seems! Let me know if there's a particularly good source and I'll add it here.

E.B. White

• 'Some remarks on humor' in Essays of E.B. White (1941)