"What Do We Owe Each Other in Shared Inquiry" with Dr. Emily McWilliams

A student’s question exposes a gap in their instructor’s reasoning. Instead of pursuing it, she turns the discussion into a display of her expertise. A company holds a meeting to understand why women keep leaving its engineering team. Each time the discussion turns toward the company’s culture, an executive redirects it towards industry-wide ‘pipeline issues’. In both cases, people committed to pursuing a question together, and someone redirects that pursuit toward their own ends, yet the conversation carries on under the guise of shared inquiry. In each case, shared inquiry is hijacked, and the hijacker has wronged their co-inquirers. I argue that hijacking is a kind of betrayal. When we commit to inquiring together, we create distinctive obligations to each other and accept a vulnerability that comes with thinking aloud with others. The hijacker violates this commitment and capitalizes on the vulnerability. This vulnerability is also not evenly shared. Power determines who bears it and who is positioned to exploit it.