Innovation Springs Interview 2: Jen Kling (Part 1)

• DH Center: https://labs.uccs.edu/crefdh/ 
• Legal Center: https://centerforlegalstudies.uccs.edu/
• Philosophy Dept: https://philosophy.uccs.edu/ 
• Ethics Bowl: https://philosophy.uccs.edu/ethics-bowl
• Quiet Resistance: https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/fakho011
• Hotel Bar Session Podcast: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/ 
• National Center for Faculty Development: https://www.ncfdd.org/

https://youtu.be/_AjrqXY8tys 

Welcome to Innovation Springs. I'm your host, Hayley Blackburn, Innovation and Design Librarian, Program Director at C3 Innovation, and affiliate faculty with the Center for Research Frontiers in Digital Humanities. Now, this show spotlights the folks doing cool things across education, research, business, and thought leadership.

You can find more information and notes about the show at c3innovation.uccs.edu. Let's dive into the spring.

Hi, I’m Jen Kling, an Associate Professor of Philosophy. And Department Chair. And Director of the Center for Legal Studies. And the co-director of the Center for Research Frontiers in the Digital Humanities. And the coach of the UCCS ethics bowl team.

Thank you so much for joining in. Wow, what an introduction. I mean, Daenerys Targaryen has nothing on you. Titles, titles, titles. 

It's so bad. These things just sort of happen. I don't know quite how they happen. They just sort of occur. They just occur; I love it. 

I'd love to pause on the associate professor. You could just define what that means, in a world of kind of academics.

Absolutely. So, what this means is for starters, I'm on the tenure track. So, there's three classes of faculty at the university. There are lecturers who are temporary faculty. There are full-time IRC, instructional research and clinical faculty, who are not on the tenure track. They're not compensated for research. They're full-time usually teaching. That's the instructional or research or clinical faculty.

I'm on the tenure line, which means that I'm sort of half and half. I'm half teaching, half research.

I'm associate, which means that I have tenure, which is very exciting, thank you. But I'm associate, which means I'm not a full professor yet. There's another rank for me to attain. 

Always one more. Oh, I just keep learning, if I’ve learned anything for being in higher ed, there's always one more milestone. 

I know, but I'm so close. But yeah, I'm not a full professor yet, but I do have tenure, which is exciting. 

Fantastic, that is exciting. With all the things on your plate, can you walk me through a little bit of what is your day-to-day kind of work life, like balancing being the director of all these things, plus a department chair, teaching, research. Just give me a glimpse. What was your Thursday like?

My Thursday, so I got my kiddo to school. I'm also a mom, which is exciting, and a partner. I usually start my day with research. I have a fairly ironclad rule for myself, which is that the first 45 minutes to an hour of my day is research.

I recommend it for everybody. So, if you're struggling to get research done, write every day. Every day, you have to be moving that project towards being out the door. So usually, that's my first 45 minutes to an hour. Then I transition into the tsunami that is email. (Laughing) And so I will spend, I try for a half hour to 45 minutes of email just to get anything that's on fire, turn of the fire off, or turn the fire down, or transfer the fire to somebody else. Be like, here's the fire, I'm so sorry.

Yeah, and then if it's a teaching day, I'll prep for teaching. So, it usually takes me half an hour to 45 minutes to prep for teaching, and that's everything from making sure I know what we're talking about that day to prepping any activities, to looking over any annotation’s students have done.

If I'm teaching, I go teach. And then if I'm not teaching, I usually do some deep work on one of the various projects that I'm doing as a director or chair or whatever. And then I'll balance back and forth between sort of deep work and email and trying to keep up with the myriads of things.

All the things, oh my gosh. I really love that kind of tip and almost like a small innovation of research every day. Like find that time to write. How did you kind of come up or figure out that that was going to be a schedule and a way for you to keep up with your creative, curious kind of research endeavors? 

Yeah, so I actually can't take credit for that one. That one is a tip I got from the NCFDD. 

Oh, yes.

 So, which our university has a, so you remember they're amazing. So, I recommend everything they do. And so, the university has a group membership. And so, I've done a lot of their trainings.

And one of the trainings they do is for new faculty. They say, "Are you drowning?" And you've basically lost your research time. And the answer is, yes. I'm finding that this semester. I'm like, ugh. Yeah. And so, they actually have a series of trainings where they'll walk you through how to make a semester plan, how to make a semester schedule, and they give you a bunch of tips and tricks. This is one of them, a write every day. And I thought, there's no possible way I can do that.

And then I just tried it for a week. And I was like; I'm doing this every day. This is great. And a semester plan is, I'd never had a plan for my research before. I just, you know, all through grad school, you just sort of do what's next on the plate because that's all you're doing. But when I started working as a professor, I was like, ooh, I need a plan so that I know what's supposed to happen, right? Yeah.

And so, they really walked me through that. So that's from them. I can't take any credit for that. 

Well, and a lot of, you know, just innovation, strategy, just business models, a lot of what we do comes from being inspired, listening, learning from others. And so, yes, we love to give credit, and we love to take the ideas and make them, you know, work for us.

One of the titles that you had mentioned was with the Center for Frontiers and Research in Digital Humanities. Tell me a little bit more about that and specifically like, how did you end up working in that realm and sort of on that career track with kind of digital humanities? Yeah.

 So, I think there's two answers. One is about the history of the center on campus. So, it's the, the long name is the Center for Research Frontiers in the Digital Humanities. We call it the DH Center. Yes. Which is much more straightforward.

And so that center is really about bringing together folks who are doing research in the digital space. So, what you might broadly call STEM research and humanities research and saying, is there a way where we can bring these two fields together. So because as a co-director, one of the really cool things I get to do is hear about all this cool digital humanities research that is happening on campus, which you wouldn't, you maybe wouldn't know about, but I get to hear about it because I hear from our affiliate faculty and they're like, oh, I'm doing this and I'm putting together a president's fund grant application for this.

And you get to learn about all of that and about the very cool ways in which many of our affiliate faculty are putting the digital humanities to work in their classrooms. So, they're saying, you know, here's how I'm going to use the digitization of maps to change how I teach geography. Hey, yeah. Right, or the digitization of texts to change how we can analyze them in English class and all of these really cool things. Really cool things. 

So, it sounds like the DH center is really at the heart of innovation, especially with some like maybe classroom pedagogy. I would say so. Exactly. I think it's like, I hear the whispers and being kind of involved in going to those meetings. I'm definitely always inspired by all the other affiliate faculty and what they're doing. Such cool stuff. And I love that it's so cross disciplinary as well.

[08:27]

Well, with that kind of innovator mindset that you and your other co-directors and the folks that you're around clearly have, how do you actually define like innovation and inspiration? Like what do those terms kind of mean in your world?

That's such a good question.

Because I'm from a philosophy background. And so, for me, inspiration is going to be anything that lets you see that the world could be other than it is. That's how philosophy tends to think of inspiration. Because a lot of what I do and a lot of what my research is in and a lot of what I teach, it says, the world is this way, yes.

But it doesn't have to be. Things could be otherwise. How could things be otherwise? What other systems can we imagine? What other ways of living can we imagine? What other ways of learning can we imagine? And then what would it take to get us there? Are those good visions? Do we not want to go there for some reason?

How are we thinking about this? And then in my classroom, I like to bring in a lot of information from other disciplines, from cognitive science, from psychology, from sociology, saying, okay, we've tried that. It didn't go great. That might not be a reason to try again, but we should just bear all of this information from history and mind, for instance.

So, for me, that's how I think about inspiration. And then innovation, which you also asked about. I think there's two different ways to think about innovation. One way to think about it is just anything new. You know, it can just be newness.

Philosophers tend to be a little wary of newness. Oh, what is that? A little bit, because there's a, just because something is new doesn't mean it's better. Fair. People sometimes mistake difference for progress.

And philosophers love to make distinctions. And so, we'll say, just because it's different, just because it's new, doesn't mean it's better to determine the value of a thing. We have to think about what it is that we're trying to achieve, and what do we care about?

What do we want to uphold? What's the vision? What's the goal? And so I think we tend to distinguish innovation from newness, but then we also tend to think about innovation as ways of doing things that are not traditional, but that maybe do get us the goals that we're trying to achieve in a different way, or a way that makes sense of the way the world has changed. A classic example of this is, I no longer ask my students to buy textbooks. Okay. Okay, because so 30 years ago, a textbook was the best way of conveying information to students. 

Right. Now. Information dense, and portable, and relatively where the tech was, sort of accessible, you could be given out and purchased. 

Exactly, and pretty durable, right? We know the shelf life of a book is about 3,000 years, that's pretty durable.

One of the interesting questions, I think, in the digital realm is we don't actually know the shelf life of digital information. We don't know how long the hardware that's holding the software, that's holding the data will last, because we haven't had it around for that long. So, I think that's a genuine question, right? We've got a book, we know, so a book is a piece of technology, people don't think of it that way, but it is, it's deeply technological, and we know it's shelf life. A hard drive, right, a little thumb drive or whatever, I can keep a thousand books on that, but I don't know it's shelf life. Right.

Like, at what point will it be corrupt? Will it break down? Or just stop working? Like, yeah. Right? Will the circuitry expire? Like, we don't know, all the little magnets, and pieces, and bits and bobs inside of, yeah. 

And so, you have to think there is, it's more innovative to do what I do now, which is I put all the readings for my students, you know, our PDFs, I do them online, so I can use group annotation software. That's awesome, but I'm aware, so I'm aware that I'm doing something innovative, that it is something different, I think it achieves my goals better to ensure accessibility, to get the students thinking about the reading before the class starts, but I'm also aware that I'm using a technology that I don't know how durable it is. Right. Yeah, I don't know the shelf life, and I just don't know that because we don't have the history. Right.

So, for me, I tend to think of innovation as like, it's doing something in a different way to get at the goal. Right. But being aware of its costs. Yeah, I love that. Keeping the goal in mind is, I feel like one of the key things that I've learned through my teaching kind of side of the career is, you know, the learning outcomes first, it's the goals first, and there's a lot of different ways we can have assignments and activities and demonstrate knowledge if that kind of goal is first. And for me too, that's where a lot of the innovation inside like the classroom kind of came to mind. For sure, yeah. Yeah, and I also really appreciate it, and I think that's an important piece, the distinction between new or different, doesn't necessarily mean better in kind of my realm of technical writing and just media and communication. Very easy to get trapped in the spiral of making what I would consider lateral changes, so like a document or something that we're working on, where it is different and it is new, but it's not necessarily advancing what we're trying to communicate in a different way. And so, it's not really innovative if I'm just spiraling around like, okay, I need to just stop making changes. Like it is fine now, it's not progressing anymore. Yeah, and I say this to my students all the time. I said, this is one of the burdens of philosophy. You're almost never finished with a thing because there's always changes, but at some point, it will be done. Because you just need to be done with it, right? You need to send it.

Yeah, my advisor told me, at some point you just run out of time. Yep, and that's right. It might not be done, but it has to be done. It has to be done, it has to be finished, right? And then, but I do think it's helpful because sometimes we get trapped in new, new shiny sparkly. I'm going to chase the new shiny sparkly. And it's worth pausing and saying, am I chasing the new shiny sparkly because it's actually better or helps me to achieve my goal more efficiently or better promotes a value that I have? Or is it just shiny? And we like shiniest because we're all secretly crows, right? (Laughing)

We just have to think about podcast that you're on. You recently became a co-host of the Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, where, and I listened to quite a few episodes. I was like, I am into these now. And it seems like kind of the goal is making a lot of these philosophical topics and also modern and just kind of what's happening in the world topics. Why is it really interesting and engaging to speak to, in a way that's totally different than sitting through a lecture. Tell me a little bit more about like, how did you become involved with this podcast and what do you see it's sort of mission and innovative nature as? 

Yeah. So, I started as the Hotel Bar Sessions co-host this fall. Which is exciting. Right. Everybody would stop this fall. I know, this fall has been a season of change. Everybody should listen to Hotel Bar Sessions, please. Definitely.

And so, the conceit of the podcast is all of the good philosophy happens at the hotel bar after the conference. So right, if you've ever been to an academic conference, you know, we do a whole day of panels and lectures and discussion and then everybody goes to the hotel bar and that's where things get real. Right, everybody goes, right? They're like, ooh, I did my like talk. Now let's talk. Yeah, I was so good all day. Now I need to know. What did you mean?

And so that's where the name comes from. And the podcast has actually been going for a long time. It's one of the most downloaded philosophy podcasts in the United States. Oh, okay. Which is pretty exciting. We have global listenership. Congratulations. Which is really cool. Thank you. Amazing. And speaks to, right? Some of those people think it's new and interesting. It's in a way that's enduring at the same time. Yeah, which I really love about it because I think one of the long-standing issues in academia is that it's very hard to speak outside your specialized audience. Yes.

And I think what we're doing on the podcast that's really innovative and cool is that we're talking about really these really difficult, important, deep philosophical ideas in an accessible way because we're just talking about it at the hotel bar. You know, we're not trying to make it sound fancy. We're not trying to be highfalutin. We're just saying, yeah, this is what I think, and I think this is the background of this idea and here's where I'm coming from. Where are you coming from? Let's get into it. And it helps people, I think, I hope, work through some of these really important issues and recognize that philosophy is for everyone, which I firmly believe.

I think everybody does philosophy. Philosophy is for everyone. People just don't recognize it. Yeah. Maybe they just don't label it as philosophy. They don't label it with all the same terms and concepts that we would in any kind of discipline, but especially it's something that, yeah, I think we enact and engage in every day, even if we aren't saying, oh, I'm philosophizing about this. But exactly, right? Any time you see something on the news, or somebody does something to you and you think, wow, was that good? Was that bad? Am I mistaken? Are they mistaken?

Should things be this way? Really? Can we really not do any better? People are doing philosophy. They're doing it. But I think there's a stereotype of philosophy as this sort of thing that is done in the ivory tower and you must be very serious.

Philosophy for me is a space of play.

[01:18:25:04 - 01:18:36:08]

 It's a chance to play with ideas. It's a chance to play with concepts. It's a chance to do something in community, to talk together and figure out something new from that conversation.

I often describe philosophy as a team sport. Okay. I'm an old athlete.

So, for me, philosophy is a team sport. And what I think is really cool about the podcast is my team used to just be my academic friends. But with the podcast, my team now is anybody who listens. Yes! Which is really cool. So, I've just magnified my team by like 5,000 people. That's awesome. Oh, I love that. Do you get listeners writing in and comments on this show? Yeah, so that's actually, that's how I got to be a co-host on the show. Okay.

So, I've listened to it for, I sort of, you know, I'm a very long-time listener, first time caller.

And so, I've listened to it for a long time. And I actually, they had an episode on Hannah Arendt's, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is a text that I teach. And I think about a lot because my area of research is political violence and war and peace. And so, they did an episode on that text, which is a beautiful text and really interesting. But I thought they had missed a really core part of it. Such a philosophy thing to say. You actually missed the important part. Excuse me. Yeah, I just have a comment. And so, I wrote in and I said, "You know, I loved what you said and how you talked about it, but I wanted to just say, I would have liked you to talk about this more." And I actually, you know, got in a conversation with a co-host and then a co-hosting spot opened up a few months later.

You got the call. And here I am. Called up to the big lead. 

Yeah, so it was exciting, but that does happen, right? Which is so cool because it means we're not, you know, you worry about being in a void.

And philosophy never wants to be in a void. And I think what's so cool about the podcast is we can tell we're not in a void anymore. Yeah. You know, and we're getting out there. Artifacts of engagement, you know. Exactly. That we are in that void. I love that.

So, you were talking about play and how you feel like the podcast really captures that essence of play when it comes to philosophy. I definitely agree the episodes that I've listened to. I really appreciated how it is a lot of back and forth across yourself and your other co-hosts. And sometimes there's a little bit of tension as you disagree a bit. But then it always circles back around to a new kind of place of co-constructed understanding, which I think is really, really interesting. I was listening on the drive up to Fort Collins with my spouse to visit his family. And we listened to the one on therapy. Yeah. Then sparked us to kind of have an interesting play-based conversation. That's so good. That's the goal.

What are we going to think about that? So that was one of my favorite episodes to listen to that created then a new relational building core memory. What is your favorite episode you've recorded so far? Like conversation that. Yeah. You just walked away being like, wow. I'm so glad I was part of that conversation. Yeah.

So, A, I'm really glad that you listened. Thank you. And I'm so glad that happened because that's exactly the goal is to get folks thinking about something you might not have even thought about before. And then you're like, I've got thoughts. Let me talk about those thoughts with another person and keep the dialogue going because philosophy again, it's all about dialogue. It's all about conversation.

So, I'm glad I really actually enjoyed the therapy episode. Yeah. I feel like there's definitely a lot of disagreements especially at the beginning. And we had all come around. We were not on the same side. Yeah. It's on the middle ground. But yeah. For sure. So I-- so actually one of my favorite episodes that we've done so far is the episode we did on quiet resistance with Tamara Fakhoury, who is a philosopher at the University of Minnesota who writes about quiet resistance, which is a kind of resistance that's different from protest and it's different from revolution and it's different from complicity. She's arguing that there's another kind of way people can resist oppression and domination that mostly Western philosophers have missed. OK. Yeah. Which I think is really cool.

And so, she came on the podcast, and we talked about her article and tried to understand this concept of quiet resistance, which is not a common concept in liberal democratic theory. And I really enjoyed that.

And I thought that was so cool to hear about-- especially because these are issues that I work on-- to hear about something so different and yet so immediately relatable when she talks about it. So quiet resistance is when you resist oppression, like you do an activity that's restricted or you're not allowed to do it because you're a member of an oppressed class. But you do it because you love it. You don't do it because it's resisting the oppression. So, the example she gives is the Palestinian Rock-Climbing Club. So, there are Palestinians who have started a rock-climbing club.

Palestinian movement, as we know, is exceptionally restricted. It's almost impossible for this rock-climbing group to get to the crags and climb. And they do it anyway.

And they've been interviewed. Folks say, why do you do this? It's so dangerous. And you can really get hurt or even killed or imprisoned by trying to move through these very restricted spaces to get to the mountains. And they say, you know, I'm a rock climber. I love rock climbing. Like sure, they can try to stop us. But this is what I adore doing. This brings meaning to my life.

I'm going to do it. I'm a human. I get to do things that I love.

Yeah. So, it's kind of like resistance through live your life. Yeah. In a way. 

Yeah, exactly. Finding-- or yes, it sounds like it's not necessarily the intention of resisting that makes it the quiet resistance. But in just living your life, being a human, doing the things that bring joy, then you kind of become a resisted force. You're resisting, right? The social meaning of your action is to resist depression, even though you don't set out to resist depression.

And Tamara argues, this is a whole category of activity that you can do that Western philosophers just miss. Because we only think about really public protests, right? We tend to think about things like civil disobedience, or protest, or revolution. And she says, there's this other thing you can do. You can love things. And I just think that-- it was such a cool conversation. Interesting. Yeah. So, I loved that episode. Yeah, but now it is on my immediate TBR, T-B-L-A-S. Y'all should listen. It sounds good. Yeah, it was such a cool discussion. Because what was cool about it was it's such--as soon as she explains the concept, you're like, oh, I can think of six examples. But before she explains the concept, you're like, what is this? I don't understand. This doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Right, kind of like my immediate kind of ding, which it's obviously not this at all. But I went to this term of like, slacktivism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That we did media studies a lot where it's like, well, I posted. And it's like my quiet resistance. Right. Posted the black square. And it's like, mm-hmm. Yeah. And this is the core of philosophy. This is philosophy at its best, I think, is it gives you a way of looking at the world that you didn't even know was possible. Yeah. You didn't even know you were missing it. But then she gives this category and these examples and this way of thinking. And you're like, oh, my entire view of the world just changed. 

That's so cool. That is cool. Yeah. Oh, wow, I mean, thank you. Yeah, I love that. Is there anything you would like to plug or add? Any of your centers have an upcoming event in the next year? 

Well, next year's a lot. But I will say, everybody should listen to Hotel Bar Sessions. Please come give us a listen. Like and subscribe. I think that's what I'm supposed to say. I know. I don't know what I'm supposed to say. I will make sure to have the links in the description for you. Yeah. And I would also say that I'm the director of the Center for Legal Studies. OK. It hasn't come up a lot. But I work with a lot of students who are interested in getting into the legal field, going to law school.

And please keep an eye out. We are going to be having a lot of events in spring. So, we're going to be having some networking events with local folks who are working in the legal field. We're going to hear from some UCCS students who have gone to law school. They're going to spill the tea on what law school is really like. So please keep an eye out for those. Awesome. Thank you so much. 

Well, Jen, thank you for this conversation. I'm walking away with many things that I'm going to be like cycling through in my brain for a while. So, I really appreciate you taking the time to tell us all about the innovation and just like curiosity that you really bring to this campus and the. And that's today's journey into innovation. Now, when to explore the research and ideas we mentioned today, everything is linked in the show notes. If you want to be a guest, I'd love to hear your story. Find the submission form at our website, c3innovation.uccs.edu.