“There’s Always Work to Do”: Politics, Interpretation and the Power of Citizenship

“This is a bit of a challenging question,” laughs Menaka Philips when asked to describe her research: “I tend to pursue subjects that I find interesting!” 

We sat down to chat with Professor Philips, recipient of the 2024 Research Prize, ahead of our upcoming Symposium, during which she’ll be recognized for her work in the social sciences. Her research interests are cool, timely, and perhaps eclectic.  

“It’s a bit of a mishmash,” Philips says. “But if there’s a core theme to my work, it’s looking at the kinds of habits people develop when they’re thinking about or interpreting politics. How can those habits help us to understand the political world? But also, how can they be limiting – and what might they prevent us from seeing?” She applies that question broadly, moving through historical and contemporary political thought, democratic theory, feminist and gender studies, postcolonial politics, and American political thought. She’s also written on super-heroism and fiction.  

Recent work includes an edited volume which examines the wives of canonical political thinkers, a study of violence through the lens of popular culture, and her monograph The Liberalism Trap, published in 2023 with Oxford University Press. The book focuses on nineteenth-century political thinker John Stuart Mill but also offers an assessment of political theory as a whole, examining how the field treats liberalism as a kind of a ‘shortcut’ into labelling thinkers, problems, and solutions.  

“And to the extent that it is a ‘shortcut,’ thinking about what we lose in the translation,” she adds. “Mill is often read as a quintessential liberal, but liberalism is a pretty elastic term.” And scholars, she notes, approach liberalism with widely differing perspectives and motivations. “I was thinking about how many molds Mill has been made to fit because we’ve identified him first as a liberal. But what if we don’t do that? What do we find in his work then?” 

Once she’s outlined this premise, Philips looks closely at Mill’s politics on women, class and empire, offering a set of alternative readings that are more complicated than the standard approach. 

A career studying political science was perhaps always in the cards. Philips moved with her family to Canada from Sri Lanka during the civil war, her parents were politically active, and she even accompanied her mother, an anthropologist, on field research. Philips credits her parents and two of her high school teachers with steering her toward academia, but it was only at the end of her undergraduate career at the University of British Columbia that one of her professors informed her that she was a political theorist.  

“At the time, I didn’t know what that was,” she says. But when she realized it could mean making a career of thinking about ideas, and about “the ways that we live with them,” she was hooked. 

It’s a privilege just to be part of the rich intellectual community that my colleagues and our students have built at UTM, so I feel especially honoured to be awarded the Social Sciences prize this year. 

Philips will join fellow recipients at the Annual Research Symposium next month, when we’ll gather to celebrate the recipients of UTM’s 2024 Annual Research Prizes. The award recognizes the contributions of early-career researchers and scholars in the Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences. 

“It’s a privilege just to be part of the rich intellectual community that my colleagues and our students have built at UTM, so I feel especially honoured to be awarded the Social Sciences prize this year,” says Philips. 

For her talk, Philips will focus on a recent project on women in the history of political thought, in which she explores how we define what counts as ‘intellectual’ in the field of political science. (What are the qualifications? Is it a book? Is it a big book?) 

While she was working on The Liberalism Trap, Philips started thinking about Mill’s wife. A feminist and political writer in her own right, Harriet Taylor has often been dismissed and diminished by readers of Mill – sometimes aggressively so.   

“It raised a lot of questions for me and pulled me into that next project,” says Philips. “Where are women in the history of political thought? How do our habitual assumptions about what counts as an intellectual work shape who we count as people who contributed something to the development of political theory?” 

“The Wives of Western Philosophy,” which Philips co-edited and contributed a chapter on Taylor to, was published in 2020 by Routledge. 

This is how a lot of her work comes to be, Philips says, a stray spark ignited while researching one project that lights the way into the next. And sometimes she’s surprised by how these projects do link to each other – especially when they can seem unrelated. 

For instance, in a project on the role of audience in feminist politics, Philips observed that what looks like an entirely contemporary research program was probably sparked by nineteenth-century writings on domestic violence and on public perceptions of women who sought legal protections from their husbands.  

Now newly returned from maternity leave and settling back in at UTM, Philips is also working on the role of imagination in feminist politics. She asks what contemporary feminist fiction, for instance, might tell us about the character and aims of resistance – especially when you’re free from the boundedness of real life.  

“How fantastical can we get, and what does that tell us about what we really want? And, alternatively, what seems less possible, even in our imaginations?”  

Of course, given the current political climate, we have to ask what she thinks. Philips shares a story from when she was teaching in New Orleans, Louisiana, right after the 2016 election. In her feminist theory class, students voiced concerns about what policies the incoming administration might enact with respect to reproductive rights, LGBTQ communities, as well as immigrant and ethnic minorities. As the students spoke about their concerns, and about what they were going to do, one student, who had been sitting quietly, shared that she’d spoken to her grandmother, who had been an activist in the US civil rights movement.  

“We worked,” her grandmother told her. “We sacrificed a lot to get here, and we worked hard to craft a vision of a better future for everybody. And now it’s your turn.”  

“It was interesting to see the other students respond to that,” Philips recalls, “because it gives you the long lens on things." 

“It’s a reminder that politics is never quite settled,” she adds, “and that leadership is often about preparing for the unknown, especially for what comes after you. You can't completely rely on things being done. There is always work to do. And this is the work of citizenship writ large, of your responsibility as a person living in society with others. So, it’s a tough climate, and it calls for taking that work, that responsibility, seriously.” 

Do you know of an outstanding early career researcher at UTM? Consider nominating one of your colleagues! The next call for nominations will take place in spring of 2025. Learn more about the UTM Annual Research Prizes.  

Mark your calendars! Join us in the UTM Room on February 26 at 1:00 p.m. for the 2024 Desmond Morton Annual Research Excellence Lecture — an in-person event celebrating Professor Elsbeth Brown from the Department of Historical Studies and ICCIT professor Sarah Sharma.