VoE - Jada Wiggleton-Little mixdown 02.04.2025_mixdown
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Jada Wiggleton-Little: We are social creatures. If you were to be ostracized way, way, way back in a time, that could lead to your demise. You lost out on potential mates, you don't have access to resources or information in the same kind of way, just as physical pain is a signal to threats of our bodily integrity or bodily well being.

So, I do think there is a shared story there, philosophers haven't really talked about it 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as Art, Astronomy, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics, Emergent Materials and Mathematics and Languages, among many others, the College always has something exciting happening.

Join us to find out what's new, now.

David Staley: I'm pleased to welcome Jada Wiggleton-Little [00:01:00] into the ASC Marketing and Communications Studio today. She is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences and has been a Neuroethics Fellow at the Cleveland Clinic.

Her research concerns questions at the intersection of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, bioethics, and race, primarily concerning pain communications, particularly in the context of racial and gender disparities in pain management. Welcome to Voices, Dr. Wiggleton-Little. 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

David Staley: Well, and I'll confess, before I sat down for this interview, I have never heard of pain communication before. So, I wonder if we could start with a definition. 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Sure. So, I use pain communication to refer to just any way we communicate or express pain, from the faces we make, the grimacing, the gesturing, just saying, ow, the words we use to describe pain, so, when we describe pain as numbing, burning, throbbing; anything we're doing to take this kind of private, subjective experience and make it at work [00:02:00] as a way to maybe invite people into the experience, invite attention, share knowledge, all those are what I kind of refer to as pain communication, which I think is so vital to how we go about medicine and how we go about diagnostics, but we don't really kind of focus in the role that language and communicative practices have. 

David Staley: So I have to ask, did you invent this concept? 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Uh, no, not even. I think in many different ways it's been studied in silos. We have, you know, psychologists who really focus on what it is to make kind of the pain phase or express pain in that phenomenon.

David Staley: You see that on the... 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Oh, the chart. Exactly, exactly the charts. And I think there's researchers who often do a lot of studies on what they call the McGill pain descriptors, those would be the words like the burning throbbing when you're asked to kind of use sensory descriptors to talk about your pain.

And then just in general, from things like the pain verbal scale, on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst pain, how bad is your pain? All those are kind of just studied [00:03:00] independently, and I want to put them all together in a big bucket to say, in each of those things, what are we doing? Pain communication.

David Staley: How do you study pain communications? How do you do it as a philosopher? 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Yeah, as a philosopher, I'm very much interested in what assumptions do we have about what pain ought to look like, what pain ought to sound like. So, not just looking at kind of the words we use, but how do our social locations, our social identities, come into play?

So things I'm interested in is there's a phenomenon that when women talk about pain, they're overly expressive in their pain, they're more likely to overdramatize or kind of perform pain in a certain kind of way, and that actually has real life implications and influences on how we perceive pain in women, how much pain treatment goes into that, or that we feel comfortable prescribing to a woman. And so, from a philosophical standpoint, I sit back and ask, okay, what's going on there, right? What do we mean when we really talk about bias? What do we mean when we say that gender is [00:04:00] something that can be performed or embodied, that pain can be something that's performed in the body?

And then I even go a step further or step backwards and say, well, what do we expect language to do? So there's a philosopher, J. L. Austin, who talks about the things we do with words. He says when we use words, it's not just, you know, reporting information, oh, it's raining outside or it's sunning outside, that we're actually trying to change things in the world. When I give you a promise. You can now hold me accountable. That's a normative change that happens. When I say, Hey, close the door, I'm giving out a command. I expect certain behaviors as a result. And so, when I even look at pain communication or what we expect pain to sound like or do, I'm looking at what do we expect to be shared?

Are we sharing knowledge? Are we sharing some kind of affective unpleasant experience? And then I look back from the person who's doing all the talking, who's communicating the pain. What did they expect as a response? Did they expect you to believe them? Do they expect to also [00:05:00] be met with some kind of care or concern, that seems pretty likely given the research, but I really as a philosopher I look back at, what are our assumptions?

What are our beliefs? Where do they stem from? And if we have an assumption or belief that might be faulty or problematic, what are the harms that can come from that and how has it manifest in our expectation of on the scale of 1 to 10, you say 10 is your worst pain, what does that look like? A simple question loaded with so many assumptions.

David Staley: Do you observe people? Do you survey them? Do you interview them? How do you get to these questions? 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Good. Yeah, so I think most philosophy or theoretical approach, it's kind of just thinking in, in theory from the, I call it like the bird's eye view, but one of the approaches I do like to take in philosophy is I like the theory to be grounded in the empirical.

So, any opportunities that I have to kind of be in the clinical space, I've had opportunities to kind of sit in, in the examination room, listen to how a patient or provider talk about pain,ask both sides, w hat was the thing that [00:06:00] stood out to you? What facial reactions spoke to you the most?

How do you interpret that? How do you interpret the language that was being used? I do try to cite a lot of experimental psychology into my work. So, even though I myself am not conducting the kind of on the ground observations, I do try to use what I do have access to. That's a way to ground what are the observations or assumptions or theory that philosophers kind of more broadly are thinking of and whether or not it fits.

David Staley: Is pain truly subjective? I mean, we were talking about all these measures, the faces, for instance, I remember my kids always have that in the hospital. Is pain really subjective, or can we have objective measures of pain? 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: I think we can have objective proxies to pain.

David Staley: Okay. 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: And I think a lot of people are comfortable with saying that. The things that we look at to determine if a person's in pain that's objective, that's observable, would be things like whether or not a person's blood pressure is going up. A lot of research that was being done at Cleveland Clinic and by other [00:07:00] researchers are looking at, is there a kind of a neural biomarker that we can see changes and say things like the theta waves that determine... theta waves are kind of aspects of the brain that studies have shown to be responsive to pain sensitivity in general, and the more active the theta waves, the more we kind of predict based on people's facial reporting to verbal reporting, the more their pain is in.

And these theta waves have also been shown, these neural activities, to be responsive to pain medication, something as simple as acetaminophen. And so, because we're seeing this correlation in activities in these brain waves, some researchers are saying we're getting one step closer to identifying something like an objective measure of pain.

But given how even if we have the same kind of painful stimuli, well, I kick you or you kick me, even though we both kind of felt the same, had the thing hit us the same way, the way subjectivity and the privacy of pain works, we're going to have feel that [00:08:00] differently based on our socialization, how we were kind of taught to experience pain, past exposures, how has past exposures made us more sensitive to a certain pain?

It can change our pain threshold, how much pain we could take. And so, even if the outside thing that's observable is the same, how it is felt by the individual: it's unclear we'll ever get to a measure of that. 

David Staley: Say a little more about the socialization of how we feel pain. In other words, the way I was brought up means I will experience pain differently than you.

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Yes, so socialization, I think, intercedes with pain in many different points. From how much exposure you have to pain early on can make it whether or not you're what we call like more sensitive to pain, so to speak. How has society taught you to recognize a pain as worthy of kind of complaining about?

So the example I always give is, you know, the stereotypical boy on the sports team at six trips and fall and the coach said, Hey, brush it off, you're [00:09:00] okay. Right? In that moment, you get this kind of internalized message. Oh, I'm fine. Like, I felt something, but it's not, big enough to make a fuss about, so to speak.

And we see this in literature of babies as well, where if a baby trips and fall, the first thing they do is look at their caregiver, and if the caregiver makes a like shocked face, like, Oh my goodness, then the baby immediately cries as if it's in pain, but if you look at the caregiver, and the caregiver is like, Oh, brush it off, you're okay, the baby doesn't seem to respond to the quote unquote painful stimuli, the thing that ought to have caused pain. Instead, they keep going on, you know, flopping around playing with toys. So even as early as infancy, we see that we're looking at the world, we're looking at those who are significant to us for these cues of, okay, this thing just happened.

What am I supposed to be feeling? Should I be expressing that outwardly, so to speak? 

David Staley: You have a recent article called "Sharing Pain: A Hybrid Expressivist Account". Could you tell us about your findings in this article?

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Yes, so again, [00:10:00] traditionally philosophers, when they talk about pain and they talk about sharing pain, they do kind of talk about it as something similar to providing a weather report, right? How do I know someone's in pain? You tell me, now I form this belief that you're in pain. So what does that mean that pain reports do?

And we even call them pain reports, in the public, we call that pain reports in medicine. It's as if we're providing knowledge, right? We're asserting something, we're reporting something. What I talk about in that paper is that there's a group of philosophers called imperativists, and they believe that pain is an imperative state, meaning that pain is kind of inherently motivating.

So, in speech act theory, or when we look at language, when we talk about imperatives, imperatives are examples like, hey, shut the door or stop talking. They're kind of demands, commands, directive, I want action out of you. Traditionally, when we talked about pain or thought about pain, we thought that what it is to be in pain is to have some representation of an injury in our body.

So to go to example, I touch a hot [00:11:00] stove. When I feel the pain, what's going on? Well, I'm getting some kind of message from my pain by how unpleasant it feels that I'm getting bodily damage, I'm being burned, it's a bad state, I don't like it, I pull my hand back. Well, there's some limits to that view. One, by feeling pain, it's not like I immediately learned about the cause of my pain by feeling the pain.

It's not that I know exactly what cells were burned, to what degree the burn was, I just feel unpleasant. And plenty of studies have shown that pain happens independent of any kind of bodily damage injury. Often when we talk about like chronic pain, where we have so many phenomenons or kind of chronic pain diagnosis where it's hard for us to pin down what is actually causing the pain or why certain individuals continue to feel pain, even after we quote unquote cured or healed the initial injury.

So, if pain comes apart from bodily image, and we don't actually get any kind of knowledge by feeling pain about what's going on in our bodies, they said, what else can pain be? Oh, [00:12:00] pain must be something related to this motivation piece, because another thing that happens in pain, I touch the hot stove, I immediately pull my hand back.

I twist my ankle, there's some kind of feeling I have of, Oh, maybe I shouldn't put weight on my ankle anymore, oh, let me grab something, right? Pain inherently motivates us to act. And so, similarly, to kind of extend the analogy, a command, when I tell you shut the door, I'm doing so with the authority to get you to act.

Pain, this philosopher Colin Klein, writes in with the body commands, is a command from the body. The body is trying to get you to act, and it has the authority to do so where we can't just ignore pain. It really takes up our attention and our mental capacities. In this paper, I argue, well, if that's all true, right, if pain is more of this command than a state like a weather report, when I feel pain and I am being issued a command from my body, when I tell my pain to you, when I'm literally sharing my pain to you, and some may be not as [00:13:00] metaphorical sense, I'm sharing that command with you. So often, evolutionarily, we express pain as a way to elicit care and concern from others, and if we can't manage or treat our own pain, we ask other people to come on board, right? That's why we go to the doctor. We seek medical attention. So, when I go into a doctor, it's not that I'm just asking the doctor or the care team to believe me, like even if I told you, oh, my head hurts, and you go, I believe you, and you walk out, it seems like the communication still failed, like you did something wrong.

I'm asking you to believe me and to do something about it. And so, what I argue there is I really try to change, again, our assumptions of what it is that a pain report does and how we ought to respond to patients pain reports, because a lot of conversations happening in philosophy as we are aware that certain individuals, especially those with marginalized identities, their pains are not believed, they're doubted.

You get accused of being drug seeking, you get accused of being hysterical. I think all that still [00:14:00] happens and it's true, but I think there's also cases in which we fail to respond to people's pain communication even though we believe them. We got the belief part, but if pain really is this command and I'm sharing that command with you, if you don't respond in the way that it's responsive to my pain, the communication fails, and I argue one of the ways that looks like is a phenomenon like normalizing pain.

When I say, oh, it's just a period pain, it's just a menstrual pain; there, I believe you, right? I, I got the report part. You told me you're in pain, I shared that knowledge with you, I can check that box. It was successful pain communication, but as the patient, I may feel, but no, no, what about the illicit part, the action part? Shut the door. Give me help. Give me aid. There's a reason why I have that knee jerk reaction when you say, oh, it's just a period pain. It's just a menstrual pain and you walk away. It's a reason why I feel like the pain communication still failed and in this paper, I say it still fails [00:15:00] because Part Of a pain report is this command part.

So, successful pain communication is both believing a patient or believing, share, justifiably so, right? I'm not saying believe everything you hear, but justifiably believing someone when they say they're in pain and in virtue of them actually sharing that pain command with you, coming along with that goal.

What actions are we supposed to do to help mediate that pain that you're experiencing? 

David Staley: What explains, I guess, people's inaction or not hearing, and I'm sure that there's many causes of this, but what are some of those causes? What would induce e someone not to care or act on someone's pain? 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Good, yeah, I think again, one main way would be if I don't believe you, I'm not going to care or act, right?

So, assuming I actually believe you, something again, like the menstrual pace case, things I think that can aid in that is how society has taught us whose responsibility is it to act or respond. So, there are phenomenon of the menstrual etiquette, the [00:16:00] behaviors that people who menstruate are supposed to engage, you're not supposed to talk about it, right?

We use all these euphemisms, you know, been joined by the Red Seas, so to speak. It becomes this hush, hush, and then we see in studies, especially people learn this from their mothers, this expectation of you're supposed to cope, that this is just what it is to have this kind of embodiment, right?

That everyone else goes through it, you're supposed to go through it, too. So in moments like that, when there's this normalizing language of this is normal, we expect this to happen we see, in a ambition for individuals to engage in with sociology is called the sick role. And in the sick role, as a society, we say, yeah, you can be sick.

That means you get to stay at home, you don't have to go to school, you don't have to go to work, that it's appropriate to seek medical attention. But when you believe but don't necessarily feel motivated to act on someone's pain because it becomes normalized, like, you're just supposed to have this kind of experience, then when people try to engage in a sick role, when they try to stay at [00:17:00] home, right, when they try to seek medical attention, it now feels like you're not entitled to. What do you mean you can't cope with this? Everyone else with the same predicament can cope. What do you mean you want to stay home because of period pain?

It's like it becomes just harder to fathom. So, I think that's one primary way, and then the second primary way does look at kind of how historically racial bias comes in in our presentation of who can experience pain and not. So, as many people may be familiar with, in 2016, this excellent paper came out looking at medical providers from the level of medical school attendees, residents, attendants, and seeing whether or not they held these beliefs that, biologically speaking, there really were differences between Black people and white people.

And they showed that up to 50 percent of individuals who are practicing medicine held these very false scientific beliefs that, you know, the blood coagulates differently in Black bodies versus white bodies, or the skin is thicker, thus they can't feel pain as much. So, that [00:18:00] changes whether I believe you're actually in pain, because I think, oh, a person like you is not supposed to feel pain this way. So, you tell me you're in pain, it must be something else. Or I might think, No, I believe you're in pain, but your embodiment says you're supposed to be able to take it right? You're tough. You're resilient. You resist it. So another excellent book out there, people are interested, _Medical__ Superbodies_ by Deirdre Cooper-Owens, and she talks about this, this belief that Black bodies, especially Black female bodies, and the fact that they're so tough, they're so resilient, they can take pain, it justified using them for experimentation, and in those moments, it doesn't always seem obvious that it, you know, historically, it was this thought that, oh, they didn't experience pain. If you hear reports or, I mean, read reports of those who witnessed this, they would say, oh, she looked miserable, like her body was converted in such a way, but it was amazing she could take it, right? Like, she had this resilience, she was built to take it in such a way. So, I think those were that distinction between it's not just [00:19:00] beliefs, but that the way our biases, the way social norms and expectations come in can shape what we expect a person can handle as pain and whether or not we think you're then compelled to complain about it or share it as a way to elicit care and concern from others.

David Staley: Do these findings, work also in the discussion of emotional pain? Is emotional pain different from physical pain? 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Good, interesting question. So that's actually my current project that I'm working on. I'm, looking at, I call the paper, "But Hurt Feelings Really Do Hurt", because, interestingly, philosophers, they pretty much ignore emotional pain that falls under the camp of negative emotions, and we want to draw this distinction between physical pain or genuine pain and negative emotions. There's one paper that's been written in 2016, called "The Social Pain Positive" by Jennifer Korins, which she says, yes, clinical psychologists, experimental psychologists, researchers think social pain is real pain, but the overlaps that we [00:20:00] see in the fact that the same parts of the brain are activated with hurt feelings and physical pain, that we have same behavioral responses, that we even use the same words, both seem to hurt in some kind of way. She says, well, that could just be explained by the fact that they're just all unpleasant, that any unpleasant sensation will have these kind of features.

But I want to say no, there's something to be said of social pain being defined as a pain of a perceived social threat or ostracization, right? When I feel slide in this some kind of way or left out the group, there's something to be said that that really hurts me. The anger I have of a heartbreak or as the young folks say of being ghosted, it's very different than the anger I have at, I don't know, a sporting event or, you know, the fact that someone, you know, maybe didn't say hi to me when I say hello to them, that there's certain kind of degrees of a threat to my social being. And so, I do think that a shared phenomenon or part of social pain or hurt feelings and physical [00:21:00] pain is the fact that they both hurt and they both hurt because we feel like our well being is being threatened, whether physical or social, and that there's an evolutionary story there.

We are social creatures. If you were to be ostracized way, way, way back in a time, that could lead to your demise. You lost out on potential mates, you don't have access to resources or information in the same kind of way, just as physical pain is a signal to threats of our bodily integrity or bodily well being.

So I do think there is a shared story there, philosophers haven't really talked about it. And then the next part of that project would be, well, if we think social feelings and hurt feelings are painful, that they have some kind of command like to us, they tell us to avoid the thing that emotionally or socially threatened us or harmed us, that it wants us to do some kind of bodily care, some kind of self care, what does that now mean when I share my hurt feelings with the world, right? Does that change how we ought to respond to each other when we say that someone hurt my feelings? That it's again not just this metaphor, but [00:22:00] maybe some kind of actual pain was inflicted that warrants care and concern.

That it's not just a the difference of imperative, there could be low imperatives and high imperatives, or a weak imperative and strong imperative. A weak imperative be like a request, like, hey, you know, please shut the door. I want you to do action, but if you ignore me, no harm, no foul, right? You didn't violate the communication rules.

But if we think that the imperative is something strong, like shut the door, like I'm saying, get with authority, and if you don't, you really are disrupting the communication by not acting. So, then the next step would be, is pain and emotional pain, if they are these kind of imperatives, do they have the strength of a command such that if someone ignores me and doesn't feel moved to act or moved to concern, they're in a way kind of disrupt the communication.

We didn't have a successful communicative exchange there. 

David Staley: I introduced you as a Neuroethics Fellow at the Cleveland Clinic. Could you tell us more about this very interesting fellowship? [00:23:00] 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Yes, yes. So like I said, I'm primarily trained as a philosopher, so a lot of reading, a lot of writing. But one of the things I always wanted to do is, again, if I'm thinking about these situations that have real implications in the world of like, what is pain, how we should respond to pain, what does it mean to hurt someone's feelings, I wanted to make sure that I was embedded in a clinical space so I could hear how are the science individuals, how are patients, how are healthcare professionals talking about these phenomenons and what restrictions do they see to be for successful exchange?

So, I had the opportunity to do a Neuroethics fellowship at Cleveland Clinic, because I communicated to those at Cleveland Clinic that, hey, this was something I was interested in, that pain ethics is a lot of what I'm doing. By looking at pain communication, I'm really asking the questions of what is good pain management, what is bad pain management, right?

And so, pain ethics falls under this phenomenon of neural ethics, of how do we, our advances in neuroscience, how do the [00:24:00] ways in which we treat neurological conditions, what are the right ways, wrong way, what impact does that have on agencies and others. And so, while I was at the Cleveland Clinic, I have opportunities to be trained in clinical ethics more broadly.

So, we talk about bedside clinical care, we're talking about, what are the values of a patient, what are the values of the healthcare team, in moments where those values may come at odds, how can we reach some kind of compromise? How do we preserve what they would call, maybe, a good death, so to speak? What does DNR, the Do Not Resuscitate Order, what purposes does that serve in our care and what happens when you have a health care team who thinks maybe the DNR is appropriate in this case, but the patient disagrees or the patient just says, remove all life sustaining treatment.

So, those kind of big, more clinical oriented questions, and Cleveland Clinic is really special because it's one of the few places that have clinical neural ethic consultations. So, an ethicist will be embedded on patient selective teams, and so kind of [00:25:00] helping decide, you know, who would be a good candidate for deep brain stimulation, for treatments for epilepsy, how do we compare those risks and benefits while also kind of being able to interview different pain providers out there.

So, I had a chance to shadow at the sickle cell clinic, I had a chance to shadow with their Wellness Institute that looks at more holistic ways of treating chronic pain. I got a chance to shadow with physicians that primarily looked at injections as a way of managing pain, to be able to have conversations with them of what they saw the communication barriers being going to limitations so to speak.

So it was definitely a great opportunity and one that you rarely imagine a philosopher also being in the hospital. But it allowed me to learn some of the medical jargon and some of the kind of mechanisms that was of interest in medicine that might go missing in the literature and philosophy.

David Staley: Did your findings feed back to the Cleveland Clinic? Did you share these and did they alter any of their practices or beliefs as a result?

Jada Wiggleton-Little: [00:26:00] One piece that I did get to do while at Cleveland Clinic in my time working with the sickle cell pain clinic, so at Cleveland Clinic, they have one of the few clinics that treats individuals with sickle cell into adulthood consistently. So, one of the issues with sickle cell care is that usually it's very hands on care up until the patient is 18, and then it kind of falls off and then that's where we start to see a lot of care being given in emergency rooms, and then that's where kind of the bias as it relates to the opioid crisis and sickle cell and race becomes all messy in that space. But during the time with the sickle cell clinic, we had conversations about this new approval for gene editing as a potential cure for sickle cell. And through conversations with the care team there, we realized that even that language of cure started to get very, very complicated.

Patients weren't necessarily excited about the opportunity of gene editing because of how much it costs, the potential risk for fertility, the fact that [00:27:00] even after you could cure the sickle cell or remove the sickle cell from the blood, a lot of patients still reported pain. So that really was a grappling experience for the care team, so I worked with them to kind of create a project that we have under review right now of how can we start talking about even the treatment options we give for sickle cell patients in a way to not continue to enact stigma of, pain can only happen when you're in a sickle cell crisis, when the sickle cell has actually accumulated in the region such that it creates this intense pain, that sickle cell, as a pain condition, has multi facets of what it is to be in pain. And so just by proposing or going under gene editing therapy or bone marrow transplant, that it's possible that these patients can still be in pain. So, we did have some conversations about that, of how to kind of change our language as we're introducing this new therapeutic option to patients.

David Staley: I'm curious to know, as a philosopher, why have you chosen this dimension of research? I mean, there's, there's all kinds of problems in [00:28:00] philosophy. Why pain? Why pain communication? 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Yeah, so, before going to undergrad, I had never heard of philosophy. I'll say that. I did not, I did not intend to be a philosopher.

I feel like many, many undergrad students, I came in bright eyed and pre med. It was like medicine is the, is the way for me, and I end up taking a philosophy class as a distribution requirement, and there was a quote from the book that said, if you believe you're in pain, then you're in pain. And it just really resonated with me because prior to undergrad and even in a few years of my undergrad, I struggled with my own chronic pain condition.

And so, I was diagnosed with chronic migraines at 18, but my migraine started when I was five, and there was a period of my life where I was stuck in what they call a pain cycle where migraines are typically triggered, because I had my migraine had been undertreated and under managed for so long, I would wake up and go to bed just permanently in a migraine state. [00:29:00] And so, it was because of that that I started to ask a lot of these questions of, what does it mean to be in pain?

And I myself started to experience these kind of societal message and ideas of what pain ought to look like. I think as many individuals who struggle with chronic pain experience, it's at some point, you know, you can't, well, you maybe don't feel like you can grimace all day, every day, that you can cry all the time.

So, sometimes you do learn to grin and bear it, or maybe, you know, you don't perform pain in a way that's expected of you. And then you start hearing these languages of, well, if you really are in pain, how are you laughing? Or, you know, I've definitely had moments where I started to get interested in language, it wasn't until I was diagnosed with chronic migraines and we got that language of migraines that started to come out that migraines ran on both sides of my family, and I remember my mother telling me the story that her mother had migraines, but they didn't know it was migraines, they would just say grandma were having like episodes.

She would lock herself in the room and just cry in the dark, [00:30:00] don't bother her, it's just an episode. And it's similar with my father's side of the family, but because I think we called it episodes, instead of something like migraines, our orientation to it was different of how was her pain managed at that time.

And then now of my time, my generation be able to have this language, I'm like, oh, this part of it was hereditary, but that was missing. And now even how do I describe the kind of pains that I'm in? I'm very mindful of not saying, you know, it's an episode or just, you know, I'm just having a moment, because it hides the moral significance of the suffering that a person can be experiencing.

So definitely because of my own experience and having embodied as a cisgender Black woman growing up, hearing these kind of languages or questions of, Oh, are you really in pain? How are you still able to do that? How other people started to keep pain to themselves and I, you know, end up in this philosophy class one day and just read that one sentence: if you believe you're in pain, then you're in pain. I said, well, philosophy seems to [00:31:00] have some answers. They say they've been thinking about this stuff and started to apply that to making sure that other individuals aren't suffering with that burden of being in pain, but also that burden of feeling like I have to prove that I'm in pain by giving that language to the assumptions that we have of who can be in pain, who's not, what pain ought to look like, etc.

David Staley: Tell us what's next for your research. 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Yeah, I'm always thinking of a lot of things. So next, as I mentioned, very interested in hurt feelings and social pains, whether or not we think those are actual pains, looking at this phenomenon of normalizing bodies and pains. I talk a lot about menstrual pains in prior projects, and I want to see how common is that phenomenon, if there's such things as normalizing labor pains, right? Of course you're in pain, you just had a baby, right, that kind of language. Certain embodiments, there's a lot of idea of ageism and pain that as you get older, people think it's necessarily the case that your back would hurt, [00:32:00] even though we know osteoarthritis in elderly age is related as one is a high risk of the other, it's not a necessary relationship. So even how many pains get undertreated in those who are of a certain age because of these ideas. And then lastly, I think each of these projects is leading to me thinking deeply about a phenomenon of something like a motivational injustice.

So, in philosophy, a recent book came out, by M iranda Fricker talks about epistemic injustice, this idea that we harm people in their capacity to be knowers, and then when it comes to pain, to be knowers of themselves, by unfairly doubting their testimony just because of their identities, right? So that's, again, would be the case of the, Oh, you're not in pain, you're probably just drug seeking, or if you're a woman, you're not in pain, you're hysterical.

I argue that maybe another phenomenon is happening with pain, given that pain is so motivating, it's this command that's issued by our bodies, that maybe we have motivational [00:33:00] injustices. There are times in which we should be motivated by each other's pain, but because of the identity of the person in pain, or because of the stigma that's assigned to the type of pain, labor pains, menstrual pains, that we fail to be motivated in the way we ought to be, and so I think a lot of my work is leading up into that kind of conversation of is there such things as motivational injustice that we do unto each other by quite frankly just not caring. 

David Staley: Jada Wiggleton-Little. Thank you very much. 

Jada Wiggleton-Little: Thank you. Again, it was a pleasure to be here.

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer. [00:34:00]