Of Accountability and Interdependence

This week I have been thinking A LOT about accountability and who we are accountable to in our day-to-day lives and who should be accountable to us. I am thinking about this of course because it is the end of the semester and final assignments are due and final grades will be posted. I am also thinking about this because there has been a lot of discourse on academic Twitter that leans so much on individualism which is of no surprise (if you have ever met most academic types) and because of the systems academics work within.

This is usually the time of year where I reach out to students who have forgotten to hand in a thing to remind them to hand in a thing. It is also a time where I remind them that this thing needs to be handed in by this date because I have to hand in my grades by this date and I cannot push this date because the date is set by the College. I am responsible and accountable for handing the student grades by that date and as much I would love to give them more time, there is no more time I can give them. 

This is an example of the many vectors of accountability. I will admit I don't necessarily like that word because etymologically accountability is connected to trying to quant a qual. But the idea of being "answerable" to someone is something that I really want to explore from a philosophical point of view by providing some open ended questions. Should everyone be answerable to someone? Is everyone answerable to someone? What happens when people think they are only answerable to themselves? 

A lot of the time I feel someone's level of accountability is intertwined with how much someone actually understands, considers, and values interdependence. Interesting enough Coleridge (yes the poet) seems to be the person to first have used interdependence in 1816. But my framing of interdependence is informed by the work of Sins Invalid and their principles of disability justice. In this work they note and expand that for interdependence: "We meet each others’ needs as we build toward liberation, knowing that state solutions inevitably extend into further control over lives."  (See this pdf of the principles for more information; opens in a new tab).

There is not a lot of meeting each other's needs in academe. And of course there isn't because academe and academic spaces is a state solution to a community need for spaces for education. Some folk try to put that value and space for interdependence in their pedagogy, by co-creating rubrics, instruction assignments, discussion spaces. But bigger picture interdependence has no place in this academic space because the systems are set up for folk to try to climb over each other for permanence, for recognition, for grants, etc. 

Interestingly the most grounded, community informed, social justice aware spaces are the ones where folk see themselves as accountable to others, to students, to their colleagues, to their departments, to their research groups. This is because each person sees how their actions, their work, their words, can affect the rest of the folk in the space. These are the spaces where you won't hear the word collegiality, because that is a weaponized word that usually refers to some systemic white, heteronormative, abled, way of being. Instead it is a space that acknowledges community is built, and will always already by its very nature be in a perpetual state of becoming because there is no end to community. When you give an end or a limit to community you are necessarily excluding those who may come after. 

This is not me saying you should have no boundaries of self and ignoring what you need. This is me saying those boundaries and making sure your needs are met would certainly happen more readily in a space where folk understand accountability, interdependence, and power that comes from one's positionality and social location. People who exist in spaces where no one else seems to understand being accountable to others, have heavy and lonely days. This is exactly what is happening to people who are excluded from events because no one thought of meeting disabled folks needs, or decided to host their conference in a hostile environment for queer folk, or any intersecting identities not taken into account. 

But more than this, this lack of accountability awareness happens on the day to day and the best example that those in academe can relate to is when there is a group assignment and you know that only 2 of the 4 people in the group worked on the assignment and the other 2 expect to get the same grade without having contributed. There are many pedagogical strategies that we can be put in place to support the groups so that these kinds of situations don't happen: group contracts, having individual pieces to group work, planned check-ins and debriefs. But the fact that these need to be there in the first place are because of a lack of a sense of accountability and interdependence from some group members. This could be for many reasons, which are often discussed in debriefs (life happens and we need to make sure we remember that), but we exist in spaces where these kinds of things need to be there to remind and make aware.  

This is already too long and I could honestly go on forever about this. So I guess I will leave this week with an ask yourself. Ask yourself: who are you accountable to? Are you working with an awareness of interdependence with your actions and the words you use? 

Reference

Sins Invalid. (2015). 10 Principles of Disability Justice. Sins Invalid.  https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/10-principles-of-disability-justice