OH S02E02: A Conversation with Dr. William Kujala, Assistant Professor in Political Science

I just happened to have professors who got us to read some of the most interesting and bizarre books that I’ve ever read at the time. And I thought, well, why am I even doing any of this other stuff in education? And like, you know, I need to ditch that. I need to get into something, you know, really, really fascinating that’s actually exciting me. So that got me into, you know, classics, which is the study of ancient Greece and Rome and ancient cultures, literatures, archaeology, in general, and into political science, and in particular, the political theory discipline of political science, the sub-discipline. (Will)

Hi, I’m Madison. (Madison)

I’m Olivia. (Olivia)

And I’m Varun. (Varun)

And we’re your hosts of Office Hours Season 2. (All)

Uhh…what’s Office Hours, Madison? (Olivia)

Oh, good question, Olivia. Office Hours is a monthly podcast produced by us, your peer research coaches, and the Huron University Library, where research takes center stage. Each month we interview a professor at Huron to hear more about what they’re up to. (Madison)

Oh, oh, and don’t forget, we also talk to undergraduate students each month about their own research projects in our Student Spotlight episodes. (Varun)

Before we dive in, we want to acknowledge that we are bringing you this podcast on the land of the Deshkanzibing Anishinaabeg Chippewas of the Thames First Nation, Lunapeewa Munsee Delaware Nation, and Onyota Ka Oneida Nation of the Thames. We encourage you to read our full land acknowledgement on the Office Hours website or the show notes to learn more about the lands that Huron occupies and get informed about indigenous news and resources. (Varun)

Hi everybody and welcome back to Office Hours. Today I’m joined by Dr. William Kujala, who teaches a number of fascinating political science courses here at Huron, such as political theory and the political theory of policing. His research, broadly speaking, focuses on critical theory, anti-colonial political thought, policing and punishment, and the history of philosophy and social science. Do you have anything else to add? (Olivia)

No, I think that pretty much captures it. (Will)

Okay, great. So we’ll get into our first question. Can you give us some more detail on the focus of your research, as well as the projects you have worked on since joining Huron? (Olivia)

Yeah, so, as you already said, in that little list of research interests from the website or that I usually publish that I’m doing … uhh, methodologically, right, I come from a kind of tradition called critical theory, right? And that has a very contested definition, right, like most things in political science and political theory. But one classic definition of it comes from the feminist scholar Nancy Fraser. And she argued that a critical social theory is one that starts with a partisan but not totally uncritical identification with oppositional social movements, right? In other words, critical theorists try to theorize from when people point out the injustices of society. So that’s the methodology that we would typically take up, as opposed to the kind of things you might read in intro political theory or philosophy where the goal is to lay out, okay, from first principles, what is a just society? What’s the best society? Instead, we want to start from what are the injustices being pointed out on the ground, right? And how do you develop your ideas of justice from that, right, in political and social struggle on the ground, so to speak, right? And our job as theorists is to clarify, interpret, learn from, work through the kind of discussions that are happening at that other level. Now, within that kind of approach, my research is broadly, I focus a lot on policing, right? And counterinsurgency, basically how do states and radical actors of various sorts interact or react in different ways to the way people revolt in society, right? And so I’m kind of right now working a lot on policing and political philosophy. That’s why I’m teaching the course on it. And my big focus right now is on the one hand kind of criticizing a lot of the classical liberal approaches to policing that see it as basically we’re all just little individuals coming into conflict in society and we have a 911 problem. We have to call someone in to help us, right? I think that takes away a lot of the historical context, right, and the social structures within which police evolve, right? If we’re going to have moral or political discussions about what to do with police power, we should be starting with the historical genesis of the police, and we should be starting with their function in the particular kind of society that we live in, which is a capitalist colonial society, right? And so that pretty much is the broader program that I’m kind of working in. Right now, I just finished up a project with an RA from my first year at Huron, that studied the way that social scientists in Ontario and across Canada, both in universities and in the government, basically interpreted the 1971 Kingston Penitentiary, quote unquote, riot or disorder or revolt, whatever you want to call it, in 1971, people who were incarcerated at the Kingston Pen, in Kingston where Queen’s University is, right, basically revolted against their conditions, took hostages, and it was a whole big thing on TV and the newspapers. And my RA and I looked at television coverage, newspaper coverage, and reports by the government and analyzed how they were framing the riot. So that’s the most recent thing I’ve been working on, but that’s the bigger idea. (Will)

What inspired you to pursue this research in the 1st place? So could you tell me more about your research journey from when you were a student until now? (Olivia)

Oh, wow. That’s a long, that’s a long time period. Well, I actually started college wanting to be a high school teacher and a music teacher in particular. I wanted to go to music school, get a music degree, and then go into education and become a high school music teacher or something along those lines. Obviously, it’s not what I ended up doing. Once I got to college, I just got really lucky or unlucky, depending on how you would think about it. I got really lucky with professors who taught classics, political science, philosophy. That really shocked me that these were things that you could study in school, because I had really no idea when I got to university what the subjects were. I had no idea that anyone really studied ancient Greece or Rome. I didn’t really know what philosophy was. I didn’t really know what political science was. I just happened to have professors who got us to read some of the most interesting and bizarre books that I’ve ever read at the time. And I thought, well, why am I even doing any of this other stuff in education? And like, you know, I need to ditch that. I need to get into something, you know, really, really fascinating that’s actually exciting me. So that got me into, you know, classics, which is the study of ancient Greece and Rome and ancient cultures, literatures, archaeology in general, and into political science. And in particular, the political theory discipline of political science, the sub-discipline, which is about basically how ought society to work, right? How should we arrange power? Who should govern and why? These are the kind of questions of political theory. So that’s what got me into that subject was really, I just read really interesting books. I was already kind of interested in politics, but didn’t really realize that it was a big thing that you could study as a major. I just had not really thought about any of these questions until I was already at college. And again, part of that is sometimes you just get lucky. Like I had professors who, going to the, maybe we’ll talk about this later, but going to their research thing, I had a professor just reach out to me and say, look, I need an RA for this random project I’m doing. Do you want to help me out? And that vote of confidence that I got from that professor and another one really kind of clued me into like, well, maybe I actually can do research. Maybe I actually could go to grad school and pursue my own project and read these books more permanently, right? Read these interesting texts, for, “keep the party going at least.” That’s how I used to talk about it in graduate school. No one really expects to get a position or make a living off these things, not necessarily right. But you do think, well, if I make it another year and a year after that, I can keep the party going. I can keep reading these interesting books. And that’s really what I’m still doing. When I got to my masters, I studied, I was really interested in sovereignty and the state. I was interested in police power and particular border patrol and border controls. So that was my main interest back then. And I ended up writing a master’s thesis actually on Thomas Hobbes, who we read in the political theory course, who is one of the kind of most important theorists of the modern state … as a person, right, as the state, as a kind of independent entity that we talk about where we say, hey, Canada does this, or the United States does this. Hobbes is one of the first kind of attempts to theorize that. And of course, he’s also key to the idea that society is a social contract. So I wrote a master’s thesis on him, partly out of necessity, I just had to get something done. And in my PhD, I went back more to the concrete politics stuff that I’m into right now, partly because of social and historical events around me, right? So mass protests that were subject to police brutality really were what drove me to go from the more abstract reflections on the state to more concrete ones, right? And trying to theorize it less from the tradition of texts, which I do love reading. I love reading old books, right? I love reading these texts. I could do it all day. I’d do it for free. I love it. But I also think that we need to start from what people are actually saying on the ground and then go back to those resources from political theory, right? So that’s basically how I ended up here, is I really like the books. I really like politics. And I went really into the books. And now I’ve come back down towards, you know, political and social reality on the ground as much as I can, right? So that’s pretty much the whole educational journey. (Will)

Okay. Two of your more recent papers focus on Arendt and Spinoza. Can you tell me about how these two thinkers theorize about social and political movements and what that meant for them at their time and potentially how it could be applied to us with our context today? (Olivia)

Wow, what a question. What do Arendt have to say? Arendt and Spinoza have to say about social movements? Well, Hannah Arendt is, of course, she’s a very controversial figure because she had very, very contradictory at times and uneven reactions to the movements that were going on around her. But one of the things that she contributed to the whole field of political theory was a very unique concept of action, right? One of the things she wanted to argue in all of her work is that in the modern world, we are slowly losing our capacity to act. And now that sounds really ridiculous because we’re doing things all the time, but she has a very specific idea of what action is. She means political action in the sense of saying what you believe, saying what you think we ought to do in public with your fellow citizens, and in doing so, building discussions and spaces of political community that last over time, right? Building public spaces, right? Building power with your fellow citizens, right, in order to get what you want, in order to restrain your government, and so on. She argued that capacity, which was crucial for her, to the ancient Greek city-state. So this is one of the things that attracted me to Arendt, was that I was really into ancient Greece and ancient Greek, like the language. And I thought that Arendt was interesting because she really wanted to go and look at that ancient Greek predicament and see what it tells us about the present. And what she thought it told us was that we’d lost something the Greeks had, which is that they could go into the public sphere and they knew each other and they could say what they meant and say what they felt about what’s going on and what they should do as a community. And they would be remembered for what they said. They would exist in a world where people recognize their thoughts and their actions and judge them accordingly. And Arendt thought that the rise of the modern nation state put that in crisis, right? It replaced a deliberation with national unity and solidarity, like the blood and soil, essentially, of the nation state. She thought that modern economics, like the growth of capitalism, although she was no friend to many other critics of capitalism, like Marx, she didn’t like Marx very much, but she argued that, look, the rise of capitalism has undermined our ability to act in the way I just described. Instead, we’re mostly treated as behaving animals, right? As people who respond to various stimuli that are put on us by market forces, right? We’ve been reduced to something less than what it really means to be human. Now, how does that connect to social movements? Well, it’s that she had a, she put a high value on the development of independent social movements, social movements that weren’t part of the state, that weren’t just protecting their own little interests, but were rising up from below, making demands on behalf of society as a whole. Like I’m now, she obviously was very interested in anti-communist movements in the Soviet Union. She was very interested in the civil rights movement when she moved to the United States. But I think Arendtian scholars have talked about how Arendt relates to trade unions, environmental movements, movements against police brutality, especially movements for immigrant and refugee rights, because her idea is that you don’t need to be a citizen to act. You can create your own public. You can create your own community by beginning your protest, by going out and saying something, right, with your fellow human beings. You can create your own little city, right? And you don’t have to worry about whether you’re a citizen because you’re a human being. You can claim a right to have rights, she called it. Now, in my article, I actually kind of critique Arendt and Arendtians in general for failing to grapple with the problem of modern revolt, right? I actually criticized her and her readers or, her fans, I should say, I criticize them for not being able to make sense of the relationship between revolts based on our needs, right? Like housing, food, economic well-being, and revolts based on legal and juridical rights. She thought that the civil rights did the second thing, and they’re great. The people who started going into, hey, we need to combat ghettoization. We need to combat redlining. We need to combat economic inequality. She thought that was too far. She thought that brought us all back into being these behaving animals who are just purely economic beings. Well, I think that’s a mistake, right? And actually, if you look at the context she was in, the 1960s, which I guess is the other big research interest I have, is the intellectual milieu of the 1960s in the United States, All these other thinkers were connecting these things. They were like, if you want to have political rights, you have to build social power and social well-being first. And in turn, when you get political rights, one of the first things you do with them is try to create policies to improve your standard of life, right? These things have a inextricable relationship, and Arendt missed that, right? So that’s where I think Arendt fits, is she’s both one of the greatest theorists of political action, right? I think political theorists owe her an immense debt. She’s absolutely critical to the field of political theory. But when it came to actually doing the work of what I call critical theory, right, that work with interpreting, making sense of the revolt on the ground and what it means for our big concepts, she made critical mistakes, right, that I think are worth pointing out. Now, Spinoza, I don’t know, do I have time to talk about Spinoza or should I move on? Well, I don’t think Spinoza, there’s, it would be too complicated to get into how Spinoza might apply to social movements, although I think he does. I, the articles on Spinoza with, I assume you’re referring to the one with my friend Reagan Burls, an old colleague of mine who now works in Scotland. In that article, we are very much more interested in how are people mobilizing these texts from the tradition? Like the text we’re reading, Intro Political Theory, Spinoza would be one of those, right? And what contemporary political theorists often do is they take these texts and they say, hey, this is really useful for the kind of argument I want to make right now, right? And all we were arguing there was, look, they’re misusing Spinoza. They’re getting crucial things wrong about Spinoza. They’re missing things in Spinoza’s argument that are causing them to not really understand either Spinoza’s argument or how you might apply it. And the point of that article was, and this is how it might relate to social movements, is that a lot of what readers of Spinoza do is they transform him into someone who might be the source of a kind of ethic, right, a kind of way of behaving, a way of orienting yourself to the world as an individual. And yes, of course, he talked about that. He wrote a book called The Ethics, which is not all about ethics, but that’s really what he was after, right, was this theory of essentially human happiness or what he called beatitude. Now, the other side of Spinoza, though, is he is a very traditional social contract theorist who thinks that The State is when we add all our powers together and we give it over to the state and then we obey, right? He has a very ordinary theory of The State and we need to focus on what is he saying about power. So I think what’s more interesting about him is not the ethics side, but the very disturbing argument he makes in one of his books called The Theological Political Treatise where he says, Right and Power are the exact same thing. Which means that however much Power you have, that’s how much Right you have. right? We can’t point to someone and say, hey, you have too much power. You don’t have a right to have all that power. Spinoza actually very radically says, no, that’s not how it works. Power comes first. Right is the thing that comes after to legitimate or authorize the arrangements of power we have. If you want to change what people think is right or wrong, you should change the arrangement of power first, right? You should engage in social action to change the arrangement of power. That will create new opportunities to imagine new ways of understanding the law, new ways of understanding morality, et cetera. So he famously reversed the classical idea where you say, look, first I figure out what’s right and wrong, then I give the right people the power, right? He’s reversing that completely, which I think does have a lesson for social movements, which is that they shouldn’t be moralistic. They shouldn’t try to go out and say, well, we’re on the right side, right? We’re on the right side, you’re on the wrong side, and expect that that’s going to get them success, right? That’s part of the game, of course, but it’s also about building social power. It’s actually about building coalitions, building mass power that will then enable you to shift the conversation. So I think that’s how Arendt and Spinoza relate to social movements. That’s a very challenging question. (Will)

Thank you. Those are some very insightful answers. We’re going to move right into the next section. How are you able to balance your research work with your teaching responsibilities? And do you have any advice for students looking to better manage their time? (Olivia)

You know, I think that mostly I don’t have any amazing strategies for myself in terms of balancing teaching and research. Sometimes you get lucky and your research and your teaching are about similar things. So I taught a class on policing and political theory and, you know, also was writing on the police at the time. So those two things kind of go hand in hand, right? But I think in terms of time management, it really is more basic stuff, like carve out your day so that you have a specific amount of time for teaching and a specific amount of time for research and a specific time for service to your institution or university, right? So what I usually have to do, to be honest, is I have to say, look, hour or so max prep for this class that I’m going to teach this week. Because otherwise, if I’m teaching Hobbes or Machiavelli or we’re reading Fennel this week, I’ll just start reading about that and my whole day will be gone because I’ll just get sucked into that. So I usually have to carve out like space for teaching so that I don’t get it swallowing up all my thinking because I start thinking about all the things that I think you guys would find interesting in the classes and then I never get any research done. So that’s the main strategy. And I think for students, it’s a similar thing. I do think that students managing their time, the trick that I got back in undergrad was a prof told me, look, treat your degree like a full-time job, right? Get the, you have your five classes per semester maybe, or four or five classes, allocate about 6 to 8 hours to each one. Plan it out and make sure that you’re able to dedicate that time throughout the week, right? And some weeks you won’t have anything to do and then you get a free hour, but at least you’ll have the time all planned out, right? My other big, I guess the other hack I would give to students is finish your assignments ahead of time, even if you’re going to do the all-nighter. Maybe this is like maybe too dark wisdom for the professor to say. But if you’re going to overnight your paper, right, the last night, you’re going to write it right up to that 12 a.m. deadline, you might as well just do that three days before. You might as well just stay up all night, three days before the paper’s due, and then you’ll have it done. And then if you notice anything’s wrong with it, you can correct it. But at least you’ll have the security that, hey, I’ve got that paper done and I don’t have to worry about it. And that’s probably, even though, of course, you’re still going to be unhealthily doing all-nighters, hey, at least you’re going to be on track, right? So I think it’s about kind of cleverly doing things ahead of time and managing your time just so you’re not doing things last minute. I really think that’s the biggest danger with being a student is getting caught in the situation where you’re doing things last minute. Because that’s where you like make mistakes, forget to do things, and cause yourself grief for no reason. Yeah. (Will)

I definitely struggled with that in my first year. Have you faced any specific challenges throughout your research career? And if so, how did you overcome those? (Olivia)

Not in the material sense of, not being able to access things like that, right? Like nothing like I couldn’t get materials that I needed. Actually, I got incredibly lucky and ended up living near various archives and rare book collections that I needed access to. That was just a pure stroke of luck because I wrote my dissertation on topics related to the United States and I happened to live in the United States during most of my degree despite going to the University of Alberta in Edmonton. I think the biggest challenges I always faced was trying to figure out exactly what at the end of the day I wanted to say and to who. I think when you, especially when you go on to graduate school and you’re working, it feels like you have all the time in the world and it feels like you’ve got the biggest project you can do and it’s going to solve all the problems and it’s going to be your statement on reality for all time. And only in retrospect do you realize that it was homework. Only in retrospect do you realize that you were doing three or four years of really, really difficult, really challenging and really fulfilling homework, right? You were doing an assignment. But it doesn’t feel like that when you’re in it. It feels like it’s very existential and important, and in many respects it is. So I think my biggest challenge was always, you have to make these crucial decisions about what am I going to include in my research? What am I going to exclude, right? Who is my audience going to be, right? Who are the scholars that I’m going to decide to pitch this thing to? And how am I going to, another big question is, Once I decide who the audience is and who I want to talk to, how do I make sure that my research process is accountable to them, right? And that I actually get feedback from the people that I’m trying to talk to. And the way I answered these questions, partly these challenges, I don’t know that I’ve ever really fully overcome them. I think they’re built into intellectual inquiry. I think you survive them partly out of necessity. Partly sometimes it comes time to, look, the thing has to be finished. What are you going to do? And you basically are forced to drastically cut, drastically rethink. And I often find, this is also bad advice to students, but I often find that when the time compression hits, you get clarity, right? When you have to do something, you get the clarity on, okay, this is actually the core of what I want to do. The other big way that I overcame basically all my writer’s block, all my existential angst, all the horrors of graduate school, because that’s my most recent research, big research experience, because I’m a, you know, I graduated in 2023. How I overcome all of that, if I ever did, was through intellectual and non-intellectual friendship, right? Through reading groups, for one thing. So one of the things you lose out on when you leave school is you don’t get to read the books with people like in a seminar or a class anymore. So I did that, right? I met up with friends and read books, sometimes stuff that had nothing to do with my project. Sometimes just reading a random old text or random new texts totally changed my view on what I was doing because I noticed how, for example, an article that my friend really wanted to read that she passed on to me, I would say, oh, this person has figured out a way to spell out her argument in the way that I want to, right? And you could learn from these exemplars, right? So I think that was the major way I overcame it was by talking to other people, other people in grad school, but also mentors outside of the student body, like mentors, like profs from other schools, people who are doing research in the same field that were willing to answer emails from me, willing to talk to me on Zoom or the phone, right? I don’t think without that kind of like intellectual community that one can really, in a healthy way, survive graduate school or survive the research process, right? That was probably the biggest feature. It’s the one thing I remember about graduate school that I really, really liked was the conversation. And I still to this day do. I still participate in reading groups to this day. to continue basically learning with peers. (Will)

So there are two major focuses in this podcast, and the first is to help students learn more about the research interests of faculty members, and the second is to inform about the impacts of independent undergraduate research. In regards to the latter, can you share some of your thoughts on the benefits of undergraduate research and potentially your experience with extracurricular research during your time as a student? (Olivia)

Yeah, maybe I’ll start with the second thing and then go in, then that’ll allow me to say why I think it’s important. So like I said, when I was an undergrad, a professor really, I have no idea why. He just, he knew of me. I don’t even think I was in any of his classes. And he just said, hey, are you interested in being my RA for the summer? And so with that, he saved me from, a summer in the mines at Safeway or whatever I was going to do, which is amazing by itself. I think that alone is one of the benefits of undergraduate research, is it gives you the chance to do work that’s actually related to your degree, right? I mean, that alone is worth its weight in gold. But it’s also about you get to develop yourself as a more independent thinker and scholar. And I think that’s really what we’re doing at universities, right? We’re not trying to create functionaries to, not to be too polemical, but we’re not trying to create functionaries to fit into the various systems and, bureaucracies and so on. Yes, you will be useful for that, I’m sure, but students are supposed to be created into independent, autonomous people who can think for themselves, do research for themselves, engage with the world on their own terms. And, you know, undergrad research is the place where you learn how to do that, right? So there’s, at an existential level, I think it’s just absolutely critical. And I think Huron, one of the greatest things about Huron is that they have, you know, CURL, the Center for Undergraduate Research and Learning, that so many professors hire students as RAs, that there are students employed by the library. All of these things are amazing because they cultivate that in students that you might not get just by taking classes, right? So I think that is so central. And I have, not only experience, being a student, obviously, but also supervising students, right? And I can see the difference it makes to them. One of the things that people have remarked to me is something very similar to what I thought about the professor that gave me an RA is they said stuff like, look, I just didn’t think that I would be someone who could do this, right? Because it’s easy to forget that many students don’t expect that they’re like gonna be an independent researcher or like do their own project, right? It’s something that if you introduce to them and they get used to the idea, they find incredibly fulfilling, right? But otherwise it’s blocked off, right? So I think it’s one of the ways to help people develop into like really mature citizens and learners. I also think it has material benefits, right? It obviously has material benefits in the sense of giving you essentially career experience that’s relevant to your degree, right? And that can be as specific as you learn specific research techniques. It can be like learning a literature that ends up shaping your graduate school work, which is what happened to me. Or it could be as simple as getting yourself a line on your CV that shows you’re capable of doing things on your own, this independent research that I think is crucial to most careers that people from the social sciences and humanities get. So yeah, I think it’s just utterly critical. I think that it’s absolutely essential to undergraduate universities that they support individual independent research. But I think that’s all the experience I had was just the one RA. And then, of course, I did all this stuff in graduate school as well. But being an RA in undergrad was absolutely transformative. And so was interacting with other students in like the I had an honors program where we had our little thesis that we had to write. The thesis, obviously, my thesis is probably awful. I’ve deleted it from my consciousness. But interacting with all those other students meant that at this big monolithic alienating research university, University of Alberta, which is an awesome university, but it is big, it meant I had this little community of people who were really interested in the subject I was interested in and we talked and I made friends in that program and some of us are still in touch. And that was really important too, right? So it’s also, you get that community that you, most people get in grad school, you can get that in undergrad with individual research. So that’s what I think. (Will)

On to the most important section of our interview today. Do you have a favorite animal? (Olivia)

Yeah, probably cats. Because I have three cats. Or I have two cats. (Will)

Oh, what are their names? (Olivia)

Gao and Bing. (Will)

Is there a meaning to that? (Olivia)

There’s no meaning. Other than that Gao means cake and Bing means pancake. (Will)

Okay, that’s cute. And you said you almost went to music school. Do you have a favorite artist or band? (Olivia)

Yeah, I mean, I have lots. I feel like that’s a, I’ll just say one band I always like, and I think that never really gets old, is a punk band called At the Drive-In from the early 2000s. (Will)

Yeah, that’s a good one. And do you have a favorite political theorist? (Olivia)

Well, Spinoza is probably my favorite political theorist from the history of political thought, right? Spinoza is probably up there. The one I’m reading a lot of right now is a Russian-American Marxist theorist named Raya Dinaevskaya, who was involved in the US labor movement and tried to basically adapt Marx’s theory to both make sense of how Marxism transformed into, authoritarian communism in, the Eastern Bloc, according to her, and to make sense of how Marxism could integrate itself better and make sense of its connection to black people’s struggles for freedom and to women’s liberation, right, and to anti-colonial struggle, because many people accused Marxists not being able to do that. So the classic would be Spinoza, but I think right now I’m also reading thinkers like that and finding them interesting. (Will)

Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been great to talk to you and learn more about you and your research. Is there anything else you’d like to add that we didn’t touch on before? (Olivia)

No, I don’t think so. Thanks for having me on. It’s been a great time.(Will)

Yeah, thank you. (Olivia)

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