Meg Mott - Political Theory
Meg Mott became interested in political theory while working as a court advocate for a battered women’s shelter. Having worked as a paralegal in the 1980s, she was confused by some of the practices emerging in family and criminal courts. "I had been trained to put the burden of proof on the accuser’s testimony but in family court, the accusers only had to prove they suffered from a reasonable fear. The part of me that was a feminist was delighted to see women’s testimony taken so seriously. The part of me that was a paralegal was worried about the erosion of due process."
Meg explored the tensions between feminist and liberal theories while getting her doctorate in political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her dissertation considered the role of "natural law" in the Spanish Inquisition. "Oddly enough, I found many similarities between the Inquisition and feminist jurisprudence," says Meg. "Both want to correct human behavior and both protected women and children against abusive men. History books don’t often report how women and slaves used the Inquisition to find relief against the brutalities of Spanish Conquistadores."
Marlboro College, with its Town Meeting form of campus governance, provides Meg with a perfect laboratory for exploring the reality of democratic theory. "Town Meeting teaches us the virtues and vices of living in a democracy. Sometimes we reach consensus after a persuasive and poetic argument and sometimes we get lost in the details. Democracy is probably the most frustrating form of government and also the most rewarding."
Marlboro’s emphasis on writing is central to Meg’s project of teaching theory. "I don’t want to students to just read theory, I want them to practice theorizing. That activity can only happen through the practice of writing, of moving out of held beliefs and into the new territory of the mind."
B.A., Norwich University, 1992; Ph.D., University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2001; Marlboro, 1999—