Shelf Conscious: Dr. Sumeet Patwardhan

Dr. Sumeet Patwardhan is an assistant professor of philosophy. His research interests include ethics, moral psychology, feminist philosophy, and social philosophy, and South Asian moral and political philosophy. He studies questions of how consent and blame are navigated in close relationships.

Are there any standout books you’ve read recently?

This summer, for my research, I read Green Light Ethics: A Theory of Permissive Consent and Its Moral Metaphysics by Hallie Liberto. It’s a good book about consent.

What book is crucial to understanding your academic area?

Green Light Ethics addresses a lot of fundamental philosophical questions about consent. The colloquial way to think about it is when you give consent to a sexual interaction, what exactly is happening in that interaction of consent? What does it mean to give consent? Does it mean that you have now waived a right for them not to touch you, or is there a better way of understanding what’s going on in the moral world when you consent? One of the biggest contributions the book makes is giving a new and better view of the dynamics of consent.

What is one of your all-time favorite reads?

Dune by Frank Herbert. I love all of the inner dialogue and the ways in which it connects psychological and political dimensions of experience.

What’s one book you would recommend to everybody at Macalester?

Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression by Sandra Lee Bartky is one of the books that started me on my trajectory in philosophy. Her essays explore ordinary life experience through a Marxist- feminist lens. One essay is about shame. In traditional depictions of shame, she writes, you may feel a sense of disappointment about your character, and then that feeling of shame motivates you to take action to improve and get through the shame. But in cases that are affected by sexism, shame can be less of a momentary condition, and more of a permanent feeling. She finds a lot of young women who seem to feel perpetually ashamed of themselves. And if shame is a perpetual feature, in what ways does it affect your motivations?

In general, Bartky not only illuminates our understanding of the world, but also improves our perception of it; her book helps us see the world as feminists.

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