fellow travellers

My friend and fellow Unpsychology editor Lesley recently gave me a wee gift: she referred to teachers and students as “fellow travellers.”

In our present education systems we have been conditioned to think of teachers as experts who are full of knowledge and are handing it out to others; and we think of students as novices who are receiving knowledge, empty of it otherwise. We frame professional relationships similarly: doctors, lawyers, dancers, engineers, pharmacists, astro-physicists, anthropologists, mathematicians… experts in their fields who have earned their authority through long programmes of education and training. We tend to think of these experiences vertically, ascending up a ladder of expertise which elevates the professional above those who haven’t earned such qualifications.

But what if we instead organised ourselves horizontally, with everyone on the same plane? What if we imagined ourselves all as fellow travellers, each with a backpack carrying our supplies of knowledge, experience, training, interests, insight, skills, strengths and abilities? What if we were to imagine that everyone’s backpack carried enough to share with others? Even the very young offer us understanding and wisdom that we might learn from together.

In this way, teachers and students are both giving and receiving; sharing with one another from their backpacks and learning together. This doesn’t invalidate what one may offer in the way of expertise in a particular subject – but it doesn’t privilege it as better or more worthy.

We have allowed expertise to be conflated with hierarchy and when we instead imagine ourselves as fellow travellers we find a very different way of learning from one another and being with one another.

This simple framing has helped me to revisualise the concept of epistemic injustice.

‘Epistemic injustice’ is a term coined by Miranda Fricker in her 2008 book of the same name, which she defines as “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.”

Fricker explains how socially privileged groups are given an “excess of credibility”, meaning they are treated as the authority on their own experiences, but also those of others different from them. Conversely, oppressed groups experience a “credibility deficit”, where they are regarded as unqualified to describe even their own experiences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_injustice

This theory of epistemic injustice has been useful in the mad movement and in the field of Mad Studies. Madfolk are frequently diminished in our capacities as knowers and experiencers. Deemed to be abnormal, problematic and pathological, our experiences of madness and the knowledge gained from them are dismissed as meaningless and worthless.

Yet when we visualise ourselves all as fellow travellers, our mad experiences form part of the supplies in our backpack. We offer them out in a spirit of learning, and they do indeed hold meaning and worth.

Photo by Josiah Weiss on Unsplash