Who gets to name the pain?, Agnes Kosek

On Wednesday, 6 May, Agnes Kosek gave a PhD lunchtime talk titled ‘Who gets to name the pain? Misrecognition, misrepresentation and the self: going beyond epistemological domination in educational spaces’.

In How to Do Things with Words, John Langshaw Austin (1962) observed that ‘for too long it was assumed by philosophers that the business of a “statement” can only be to “describe” some state of affairs, or to “state some fact”, which it must do either truly or falsely’ (p. 1). Yet to write or utter a statement is not merely to describe something; it is to perform an action, and many ‘statements’, he argued, have a performative force.

In many teacher-training programmes, such statements are drawn from sociological, psychological, and psychiatric research and are used to name children’s struggles: either through the language of inequality, which describes them as underachieving, or through the language of pathology, which frames them in terms of symptoms and conditions. Whilst these statements are important in enabling trainee teachers to recognise and support children identified as underachieving or diagnosed with developmental conditions, and in providing a shared professional language, Agnes will argue-drawing on Austin’s and Iris Murdoch’s philosophy-that statistical and diagnostic statements in teacher education can lead to significant misrecognition of students when taken too rigidly by teachers. In such cases, they risk shaping how children are seen and responded to in educational spaces, encouraging teachers to engage in acts of ‘naming’, affecting students’ sense of self and distorting the lived particularity of the child before the educator.

About the Speaker:

Agnes Kosek is Academic Employability Lead, Lecturer, and Module Leader on the Mental Health programme at the University of Central Lancashire, London. She is also a seminar leader at the UCL Institute of Education (IOE) on the BA Education, Society and Culture programme, where she teaches Philosophical Reflections on Education with Film. She has previously taught Educational Psychology, Clinical Psychology, and Psychopathology at the University of Greenwich, and contributed to the Primary Education and Early Years Teacher Status (EYTS) Initial Teacher Training programme, where she mentored early years practitioners in line with Ofsted and professional teaching standards.

Agnes has taught across both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and brings over ten years of experience as a teacher in primary schools and early years settings. She holds an MA in Philosophy of Education from UCL and is currently undertaking a PhD at the UCL Institute of Education.

Her scholarly interests centre on pedagogy and philosophical psychopathology, with a particular focus on the misrecognition and historical misrepresentation of ethnic minorities and neurodiverse children in political discourse. She examines how such processes shape children’s self-development and influence both psychological practice and pedagogical decision-making in educational settings.

Agnes is an Affiliate Member of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy at IOE, UCL, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). She serves as Editor of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB) Newsletter and is a member of the Society’s Communications Committee. Her research foregrounds moral development, with a particular emphasis on the importance of just and ethical encounters between students and educators.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome everybody and welcome to Agnes. Agnes is academic employability lead, lecturer, and module leader on the mental health program at the University of Central Lancaster, London. She's also a seminar leader at the UCL Institute of Education on the BA Education Society and Culture Program, where she teaches philosophical reflections on education with film. Agnes has taught across both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and brings over 10 years of experience as a teacher in primary schools and earlier settings. She holds an MA in philosophy of education from UCL and is currently undertaking a PhD at the UCL Institute of Education. Agnes is an affiliate member of the Helen Hamlin Center for Pedagogy at IOEUCL and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She serves as editor of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain newsletter and is a member of the Society's Communications Committee. Thank you so much, Agnes. Over to you.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Thank you so much. Thank you for introducing me. Thank you for all for coming here. I will just start sharing the slides. Can you see them at all?

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Okay, perfect. So today's the aim of the talk is to talk about uh Iris Murdoch really, uh, as well as other philosophers who have contributed greatly to the conversation. Um I'll just put the captions on. I'll talk about um the title is Who Gets to Name the Pain, Misrecognition, Misrepresentation, and the Self, going beyond epistemological domination educational spaces. So, what do we mean when we talk about student-teacher encounters and why do they matter? Educational research suggests that teacher-student encounters are important because they can enable students to become autonomous, can provide students with opportunities to flourish and for intellectual growth. But I would like to argue that insufficient attention has been given to the pedagogical use of diagnostic statements and the possible impact on student teacher encounters and on teachers' moral vision. In how to do things with words, John Austin observed that for too long it was assumed by philosophers that the business of a statement can only be to describe something or to state some sort of affairs or a fact, which it must do either truly or falsely. Yet to write or utter a statement is not just to describe something, it is to perform an action. And many statements, he argued, have a performative false. In many teacher training programs, such statements are drawn from sociological, psychological and psychiatric research, and are used to name children's struggles, either through language of inequality, which describes them as underachieving, or through the language of pathology, which frames them in terms of symptoms and conditions. And some of those statements read as follows. Children diagnosed with ADHD have some neurochemical and structural differences in their brain development. They are also more likely to blur things out during conversations, interrupt a teacher, and very likely to act before they think. So some of the statements read as follows, and these are the words that we tend to come across across various teacher training programs. Children are inattentive, they're hyperactive, they are different, but 20% of them are more likely to underachieve, 40% are less likely to succeed. I'll go back to Austin now. Austin states, yet we, that is, even philosophers, set some limits to the amount of nonsense that we were prepared that we had to admit we talk. So that it was natural to go on to ask as a second stage whether many apparent pseudo statements really set out to be statements at all. Some of the books used in teacher training programs are as follows getting the buggers to behave, getting your class to behave, for example. So Butler asks, because she has been building on Austin's work, what does it mean for a word not only to name, but also in some sense to perform and in particular to perform what it names? Then she states that Austin, of course, distinguished between eloquentary and prolocutionary acts of speech, between actions that are performed by virtue of words, and those that are performed as a consequence of words. And I would like to talk about stones. There are different kinds of stones, different types of stones, different sizes, different colours. And Theophrasis, of course, wrote about them and he classified them and he named them, so he went really absolutely with it. He probably even raised his hand like that and thought, okay, I am going to name this Sapphire. Snyes, oval, perhaps bluish, ruby, red, ametist. So he named them, he classified them. There are of course many things we can do with war with stones. We can study them if we want to. We can look at the shape, we can look how it looks very closely under the microscope if we really want to, as well. We can throw them, we can throw the stone if we don't like it, we can throw it. We can measure it if we want to. There are special tools to do that. And I would like to ask what distinguishes humans from stones and other forms of inanimate matter? And we have some particle physicists, so hopefully we'll be able to ask some questions in later as well. Indifferent kinds. Hacking argued that the classification of a quark is indifferent in the sense that calling a quark a quark makes no difference to the quark. Quarks are not aware. A few of them may be affected by what people do to them in accelerators. And this is a very cute charm quark that I found, so I thought I'm just gonna show off that I have some knowledge of different quarks here. Sentient kinds? An infant enters the word already capable of sensation and pain. The first sensation which an infant gets is for him the universe. He the young knower meets and greets his world. The physiological condition of this first sensible experience is probably nerve currents, which are coming in from many peripheral organs at once. So there are some questions I have. What is the relation between a statement and a wound? When does a statement become a form of misrecognition? That is imprisoning someone in a distorted and reduced mode of being. And if you would like to read more about this, do refer to Taylor. He didn't talk about misrecognition in the context of which I'm talking about. But I think it's very important to acknowledge this and to see that his work of misrecognition is very important in the field, specifically in relation to equality and diversity. Of course, diagnostic statements are very important and play an important role in enabling teachers to identify and support children who are underachieving or who present with developmental conditions. So we really need to acknowledge that. They can also provide professionals with language for communication and intervention, right? And many children have been waiting for years to get the right support for the conditions they might be suffering from or the different disorders they might have. Also, there are there is a lot of studies, there are a lot of studies that suggest that children, when they do receive diagnosis, can be able to name the condition or actually understand where the suffering or the struggles that they might have come from. So we are not dismissing that here at all, and this is not the purpose of the talk. It is not uncommon for statistical and diagnostic terminology to be taken at face value within many contemporary teaching practices, and that is the purpose of the talk. Because they risk shaping how children are seen and how they are responded to in educational spaces, encouraging teachers to engage in their acts of naming and impacting teachers' moral vision. What is the relationship between language and moral vision? Iris Marduk argued that language plays a significant role in shaping moral vision, in forming moral vision, to be more precise, with the language she used, and the quality of attention we give to others. And she did distinguish these two. Attention was more about our agency. We are able to attend to something. We are not passive, though, of course, we are attending to someone, and vision, she was mainly referring to us the concepts we might have, the knowledge we might have, really, that we uh might be drawing on, which can then influence our vision, from my understanding. So this is where Mardok says that moral vision is shaped by concept-forming words that saturate the very fabric of our being, whereas attention involves our active effort to see the reality of others clearly. So we can attend to someone, and she gives a very good example of the mother and daughter-in-law. Mardo continues to state that everyday conversation is not necessarily a morally neutral activity, and certain ways of describing people can be corrupting and wrong. We may, for example, come to see others as unable, as disruptive, as inmannered or lacking in dignity, and this is where she was referring to in that example I've mentioned before. So the question that I would ask is whether language is sovereign over in the inner. And I think Mardok would say that it is. Language can influence our private experience and is in the sense, she argues, sovereign over private objects. And then she states I can only identify the inner via my knowledge of the outer. Language, consciousness and world for Mardog are intrinsically bound together. Can't separate them. Mardog was both critical and appreciative of certain aspects of ordinary language philosophy as she understood it. I would like to highlight the last part. One, however, cannot really understand Mardok's philosophy as a whole without attending carefully to her thoughts about language. If one does so, one will see that in a profound sense, Mardok may actually be described as ordinary language philosopher. And if you like to read more about this, you can find the thoughts of Forsberg in his latest book, where many people have contributed, called the Mardokian Mind, that I have been recommended to read. The other questions I would like to ask is if language, statements, or words are the only factors that might form moral vision and shape how we see and attend to others. Murdoch states that not just our words, this was the critique of the language, uh, and many other versions she also had, many other ideas she also had to contribute there. So Murdoch stated we should not overestimate the role of the concept-forming words we utter to ourselves and to others in the formation of our moral vision. There are a few things that might be blurring or distorting, that's probably the right word, distorting our vision according to Murdoch. Murdoch states that our human psych is an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy, which is hard for us to understand and to control. So we naturally feel plurality, diffusion, and chaos and want to transform what we cannot dominate or understand into something which is reassuring and familiar. So I've just given you an image here of a classification of rocks. It's nicely in a very tidy way, classified, right, separated. Mardok also talked about behaviorism and the rise of scientific accounts of being human, which can distort our vision. Modern behavioristic outlook, according to Mardok, fails to provide us with a standpoint for considering real human beings in their variety, or any technique for exploring and controlling our own spiritual energy. Murdoch also draws on Kant, and she has some interesting ideas to say. She says that behaviorism and scientific advances encourage us to position ourselves in the role of a perfect psychoanalyst who would serve as the detached, omniscent observer of the external movements to explicate internal motivations, and who is imagined as somehow there, the ultimate competent observer playing the part of the eye of God. And of course, it all links to pedagogy. She further states that Kant abolished God and made mangod in his stead. We are still living in the age of Kantian man or Kantian man god. And of course those questions have been engaged, already been engaged with by Judy Buffley, for example. But not so much about division there, of course. She talked more about words. What does it mean for teacher-student encounters and educational practices? The actual problem. The increased reliance of many primary school teachers on diagnostic statements has also attracted the attention of many policymakers. Former UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hand argues that we have seem to have lost the sight of the fundamental reality that child development is messy and uneven. Our laudable desire to ensure that young people are happy and well supported is at times manifesting in excessive impulses to medicalize and diagnose the routine in a manner that can undercut greed and resilience. Beyond epistemological domination, of course, Mardok was not engaging with that at all, it's more a modern way of approaching things, specifically, I think, through the influence of Miranda Fricker. But Mardok does uh add some very interesting uh part uh in the contemporary conversation because she asked this why should some unspecified psychoanalyst be the measure of all things? That also links to pedagogy. Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here. And then I would ask is do we as humans have the capacity to name and to interpret our own condition? This is the article I was influenced by and I have been advised to look at some time ago, and I would like to refer you to that if you'd like to. It's published by Hart, who has stated that children are not meant to be studied. They are meant to be loved. Loving and cherishing them is the essence of the whole thing, Hart says. If you can bring yourself to do that, if everything isn't centered on that, then leave them alone. And because of my role in employability, I usually like to suggest different career pathways. So if anyone is interested in studies, studying um stones perhaps. Geology. Um, if you are interested in Iris Mardok, I would really like to encourage you to do engage with um the archives um at Kingston University London. I am not representing them in any way, uh, but of course, Iris Murdoch wrote a lot uh beyond the usual books we look at, which is Metaphysics as Morals or Sovereignty of the Good. Uh, she published many other papers and letters which are in this archive as well. Um, thank you so much for listening, and I am looking forward to your questions.

SPEAKER_00 21:33

Thank you so much. That was really, really interesting. So, we're actually going to stop the recording for the QA. Um, so if you're watching this, tuned in, thank you so much for tuning in, and I'm gonna stop the recording now.