Police in Zimbabwe on Friday charged three women found in possession of 33 condoms containing semen with 17 counts of aggravated indecent assault in a case that may be a break in a string of sex attacks over the past two years by women targeting male hitchhikers.
…
Watch Ruparanganda, a professor of sociology at the University of Zimbabwe said : “Some sections of the society use these sperm for ritual purposes. The thinking is that it can be used for regeneration of life since they are source of life (biologically). Some people think that they can have their bad luck gone by using semen. I am sure that explains all this we have been witnessing (men being forced).”
Today the GOP-led House of Representatives, with the blessings and encouragement of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops and extremist religious groups such as the Family Research Council, passed a bill in a vote of 251 to 172 that would, among other things, allow doctors and hospitals to “exercise their conscience” by letting pregnant women facing emergency medical conditions die.
A friend sent me an off-print of his which referred to Eugene Gendlin as someone who has explored implicit understanding a great deal. At the same time I was reading Alexis Shotwell’s intriguing Knowing Otherwise, which also explores how we have an implicit, bodily-based grasp of things that forms a great deal of our take on ourselves and others. Nearly the same day, Amazon.com was recommending that I pre-order Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, of which Publisher’s Weekly says:
“The mind is a hilariously muddled compromise between incompatible modes of thought in this fascinating treatise by a giant in the field of decision research. Nobel-winning psychologist Kahneman (Attention and Effort) posits a brain governed by two clashing decision-making processes. The largely unconscious System 1, he contends, makes intuitive snap judgments based on emotion, memory, and hard-wired rules of thumb; the painfully conscious System 2 laboriously checks the facts and does the math, but is so “lazy” and distractible that it usually defers to System 1.
Kahneman’s unconscious System 1 is at least aimed at implicit understanding. And then Read Montague’s work has recently turned to what seems to me to be a fascinating example of implicit bias, first described by Ann Harvey, who is in his lab.
So on reading Gendlin on accessing this level, I wondered what sort of role employing the unconscious/implicit understanding has for philosophers today. Here in fact is a description from Gendlin of what such accessing is like. I suspect that if it plays a significant role in your cognition as a philosopher, then you’ll recognize it, even if the description definitely does not come from an analytically trained philosopher:
You have a bodily orienting sense. You know who you are and how you come to be reading this page. To know this you don’t need to think. The knowing is physically sensed in your body and can easily be found. But this bodily knowing can extend much more deeply. You can learn how to let a deeper bodily felt sense come in relation to any problem or situation. Your body “knows” the whole of each context, vastly more aspects of it than you can enumerate separately.
You can sense your living body directly under your thoughts and memories and under your familiar feelings. Focusing happens at a deeper level than your feelings. Under them you can discover a physically sensed “murky zone” which is concretely there. This is a source from which new steps emerge.
At first, this murky “something” may seem opaque. Although concretely there, it may not seem promising. With certain teachable steps of bodily attention it opens. How you sense the situation shifts. New possibilities for fresh thinking and action arise beyond the already-given alternatives. The whole scene changes. An intricate territory of factors, events, conditions, and new questions emerges where there was only a slight bodily sense at the start.
If you’ve followed so far, and you work as a professional philosopher in the sense of producing work you have or would like to see published as academic philosophy, it would be wonderful if you would take the poll:
Reimagining Equality: Stories of Race, Gender and Home, is the title of Anita Hill’s new book. She was recently interviewed on NPR and commented on one of the obstacles preventing equality of opportunity in the US. This seems timely as the hiring season is upon us:
“I do think that just in general, people are comfortable with people who look like them or they believe think like them. And I think we have a lot to do in terms of really giving people full opportunity in employment, whether … you think of them as safe or not. I think full opportunity in employment just does not exist today in the way that maybe I thought it would have when I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s. I really thought some of these battles and some of these issues would have been resolved by now.
“And I really aggressively titled my book Reimagining Equality because that’s a process that I’m having to go through, like: What is equality like today? How can we envision it in terms of the way people live every day as opposed to the abstract rights that we say that everybody has and that, you know, we can go to court to enforce?”
I haven’t read the book, but it seems an interesting project to try to conceptualize what we do have in the way of equality, and what we do not, which may be what she is doing.
Two interesting comments on Amazon’s website; I take it these were blurbs for the book:
“In a book that is rigorous and heartfelt, sharply analytical and deeply moving, Anita Hill examines the idea of what ‘home’ means to Americans. Bringing to bear her formidable skills as a scholar of American law, history, and culture, Hill has produced a personal narrative that reaches across color and class to explore how our family homes and our national home are inextricably linked to how we understand achievement, opportunity, and equality.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
“In her new book, Reimagining Equality: Stories of Race, Gender, and Finding Home, Professor Anita Hill has written a sobering and compelling book about the plight of woman historically and now. This book is a must read for anyone who is committed to gender equality, and will be invaluable to those who are trying to understand many of the burdens that women, black and white face, in their everyday lives. An easy read, this book has both tragic and triumphant stories and covers the life of women through slavery, and those who now live in the Obama era. They remind us that we still have to come to grips with issues of race and gender, and that we need to re-imagine the question of equality for all. I recommend it with great enthusiasm and excitement about its value to a large audience of readers.”—Professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr., author of The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class, and Crime in America
Can readers suggest women philosophers to incorporate into a metaethics syllabus? I’m perfectly willing to stretch the canonical definition of “metaethics.” Thanks!
A professor of oceanography at Rice University has accused a Texas environmental agency of censoring an article he wrote by deleting references to global climate change and the impact of human beings on the environment, the Houston Chronicle reports. The professor, John B. Anderson, said he refused to go along with the edited version of his article about sea-level rise in Galveston Bay that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality wanted to publish. A spokesman for the agency said it had removed information that the agency did not agree with.
Well, not really. But it would be fun to get a flash mob dancing at some all-men conference. And we do have our own song.. And our own t-shirts, both from the incomparable 20th Century Monads.
And as you can see below, we’re not talking violent disturbance or anything likt that:
Perhaps if we picked an East Coast US conference we could get a lot of people AND an APA grant to cover travel costs, t-shirts, etc.
We, the organizers of Stomp & Holler; Because We’ve Had Enough Northampton, have decided to march in solidarity with SlutWalk. We believe that the word ‘slut’ was chosen in direct response to the cop’s statement in Toronto, but this movement is about addressing a global issue. We, collectively, felt uncomfortable with the call to ‘reclaim’ the word ‘slut.’ It is our mission to stand up and speak out against sexual assault and victim blaming, but we don’t feel that reclaiming this derogatory word accomplishes what we want to accomplish. In addition, there have been multiple critiques of SlutWalk in the past few weeks (including, but not limited to, the letter from Black Women’s Blueprint.) These critiques state that SlutWalk has not made room for people of color and has been predominately gender-normative. We, Stomp & Holler; Because We’ve Had Enough, want to make sure that our mission of inclusivity is known. We cannot fight sexism without working against all other forms of oppression. We must make a call for solidarity. Our first step may be changing our name, but the fight does not end with this march.
We continue to stand in solidarity with SlutWalk, because the message of the movement is clear: No one is ever ‘asking for it.’ No one deserves to be raped.
Breaking new ground in its enforcement of civil-rights laws, the Education Department is investigating whether a Columbia University professor discriminated against a student by steering her away from a course on the basis of her Jewish background.
… The investigation of Columbia University by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is examining whether [there was a civil rights violation] when an academic department chairwoman allegedly discouraged an Orthodox Jewish student from taking a class taught by a professor who has been accused of anti-Israel bias.
Although the Education Department has often investigated complaints that elementary or secondary schools illegally tracked students into low- or high-ability classes based on their ethnicity or race, several veteran higher-education lawyers said Tuesday that they could not recall any similar investigation of alleged discrimination in academic advising at a college.
In considering the idea that bias in academic advising could violate federal civil-rights laws, the Office for Civil Rights could be opening the door to similar investigations involving other forms of discrimination, such as cases involving female students who were discouraged from enrolling in engineering programs considered unwelcoming to women, or black students whose race was cited by advisers who encouraged them to major in black studies.
Arthur L. Coleman, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of education in the Office for Civil Rights who now is a managing partner at EducationCounsel, a firm that advises colleges, declined to comment specifically on the Columbia controversy. But in general, he said, colleges seek to avoid even subtly steering students into certain classes or fields based on their race, ethnicity, or gender.
Noting that colleges’ efforts to promote diversity on campus are premised on the assumption that such diversity promotes the robust exchange of ideas, Mr. Coleman said any steering of students to avoid exposing them to disagreements in the classroom “raises a set of fundamental concerns” related to a college’s educational mission.
As far as I can see, “anti-Israel” bias is considered as a clash of ideas. There is a question about whether sexism – in the form, say, of “being unwelcoming to women” – would be analogous.
There is a difficulty, it seems to me, in that a climate hostile to women is supposed to be illegal. Perhaps, though, it can be illegal to steer peple away from academic depts with illegal activities if one does it because of the students’ ethnicity or gender.
Filed under: Uncategorized — redeyedtreefrog @ 4:26 am
Usually I think that one’s day job and one’s personal activities ought to be kept separate. Lawyer by day, dominatrix by night? No one’s business but your own I say. You want to teach English history and write smut on the side, that’s your decision.Calls for Professors, Deans, and Provosts to resign for sexual behavior outside the classroom are uncalled for, I think. But a recent case in Canada has me thinking that sometimes it does matter what one says, does, or writes outside the workplace. Here’s the case: According to the CBC, the head disciplinarian for Ontario teachers has resigned after it was revealed he authored a sexually infused novel for teenagers. Jacques Tremblay is stepping down from his position as chair of the Ontario College of Teachers’ discipline committee after it was revealed that Tremblay co-authored a teen novel, The Sexteens and the Fake Goddes. The novel published in 2008 tells the story of two Grade 9 students who rely on “cleverness and sex appeal” to confront authority figures.
The content of the novel and the author’s day job seem to me to be in conflict. I think it’s right that he resigned. Thoughts?
The Australian military will now allow women to take frontline combat roles. This happened as the result of a new policy allowing all military positions to be filled on merit rather than gender within five years. Only three of Australia’s military partners allow women on the frontlines — New Zealand, Canada and Israel.
In the post “New Research Busts Myths About the Gender Gap” researchers Christine Silva and Nancy Carter write: “Our study’s overall finding is clear: The problem isn’t only a late-career phenomenon by which women are denied the big promotion after having advanced steadily alongside men. Rather, the entire pipeline is in peril. More particularly, our research has managed to explode four prevailing myths about the progress of women in workplaces.”
Myth #1: It’s mainly a pipeline problem.
Myth #2: Women’s relative progress just got a boost from an economic downturn that hit men harder.
Myth #3: To the extent there’s still a gap, it’s because of women’s choices.
Myth #4: With more mentoring, women will be better prepared to take on the top jobs.
Read more about these myths here at the Harvard Business Review Blog.
Arche - the AHRC and CSMN-funded research center at St. Andrews – has a list of upcoming visitors here. All are male.
I don’t know what the distinction is between the “Forthcoming Visitors” column and the “Forthcoming Speakers” column, but the latter has a better gender balance. If you combine the two lists, however, women still make up less than 10% of the visitors to Arche.
Arche is also (unsurprisingly, I guess, given the visitor lists) currently advertising two all-male events an all-male event (thanks for the correction, Catarina!). Details here.
(Thanks for the tip, R!)
*UPDATE*
There’s a very helpful response in the comments to this post from Katherine Hawley (Head of School at St. Andrews) and Jessica Brown (Director of Arche). Please do take the time to read it. Arche postdoctoral fellow Derek Ball has also commented, and I wanted to highlight this in particular:
Perhaps it is appropriate to mention here that in many cases, Visitors apply to come. We would welcome applications from women (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/visitors/scholar.shtml), and advice about how to attract such applications would be gratefully received.
Thanks very much to Katherine, Jessica, and Derek for joining the discussion!
A few weeks ago Noelle McAfee who hosts the Contemporary Women Philosophers wiki contacted me to point out a growing lacuna in the online presence of women philosophers. Her site provides information about living women philosophers ; mine provides information about women who lived and died before 2001.
But in these last years there are a number of women philosophers born in the 20th century who died since 2001. They are falling through the cracks since up til now there has been no place for them on either site.
One of the reasons I set a limit of 2000 is that I knew I could never do the necessary research to include ALL the women philosophers after that. I am one person, have no institutional support, clerical assistance or funding. But like Noelle I am concerned about women philosophers who are ‘ falling through the cracks’ of on line research tools.
Soooooo – I have decided to add a button: 2001 – to the website. I will add women who die or have died since 2000 IF I RECEIVE information in usable form.
Right now the site provides both a Chronology [not a biography] and a Bibliography for each woman. If submitted I would add these to the site. If that seems like too much work, I would add an Obituary or an eulogy or another statement submitted by a SWIP member or college/university department. (I would add one of these, not all). For these I ask that folks consult one another so that only one item is
submitted in a form suitable for posting If you want to include a photo, I can upload thumbnail gif or .jpg. The size must be as small as other photos on the site since I do not do photo editing.
I want to include these women. They deserve to be listed among the women philosophers ……. but I have limited energy and no institutional support for this work.
Thank you. I trust that this will work out….though I fear I may be inundated with posts of ‘why don’t you have xxxxx’ on your site. I can not do the research…nor will I check accuracy of materials submitted.
(My own research concerns a whole group of Renaissance Italian women and a new list of ancients I have found.)
Please, if there is a woman philosopher who deserves recognition, I hope you will take it upon yourself to submit the information. I DO credit those who submit so include your name….. and your affiliation if you want that added.
I am currently teaching an upper-level seminar on the philosophy of race and gender; I have 18 students, 8 of which are male and 15 of which are white. Several students have expressed a concern that so many of our readings on race are written by non-whites, that none of our gender readings are written by men. To them, this indicates that some of the readings we have looked at are unfairly biased against men and whites. While I am doing my best to address this concern through more appropriate measures, it seems that what the students want to see is white academic philosophers working on race, and male academic philosophers working on feminist theory. Coming up with the former has been at least somewhat doable, but the latter is proving really difficult. Any help would be very much appreciated- either through a blog post, or through suggestions.
It seems to me a very important part of the response to this would be pointing out the high numbers of white men on the rest of their reading lists, and taking a close look at the concept of “unfairly biased”. However, I think it can also be important to show students that men can be feminists and that white people can be anti-racist. So please put your favourite suggestions in comments!
I thought letting you know about a conference on Practical Reason and Metaethics that David Sobel and I are working on might be worthwhile. It will be held next April 20-22 in Lincoln Nebraska.
I know that you’ve been (rightly) agitating to make conferences less of an old boys club. So I want to highlight that we have two slots that we are saving for anonymously refereed submissions. We’re doing our best to make the refereeing genuinely anonymous by having folks submit both an abstract and a paper. We’ll use the abstracts to get down to a small number of finalists and then read the papers of that small number to get our two slots filled. Those chosen will be have their expenses for coming up to $1,000 covered by the conference.
As far as I know very few conferences have truly anonymous refereeing, partly because it is too much work for referees to read full papers but organizers don’t trust abstracts in the absence of knowledge about who wrote them. This is our attempt to get around those considerations, though obviously in a small way since we invited several people as speakers in addition to having the two refereed slots.
We’d like to stress that people shouldn’t tell us they are submitting papers so that we can really do this anonymously. Any questions about submitting can be sent to Lisa Albers at lalbers2 AT unl.edu and she will anonymize them before passing them on to us.
Anyway, thanks for looking at this and also for highlighting the issue of unbalanced conference programing.
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