CFP: Bioethics/Health Care

FAB 2008 Congress, Call for Panel and Paper Abstracts
We cordially invite proposals for panels and papers. The Congress theme is “Voice, Power and Responsibility in Health Care”. Papers on any topic in feminist bioethics are welcome, although the plenary sessions will be devoted to the Congress theme.

This theme should be interpreted broadly. Examples of topics include but are not restricted to:

· Health care challenges for members of marginalized groups;

· Imperialism in international health research;

· Power relations among health professionals and within the profession of bioethics;

· Concepts of ‘personal responsibility’ in public health discourse;

· Power and knowledge in reproductive medicine;

· Surrogate decision-making in non-traditional families;

· Disability perspectives on voice, power and responsibility.

Abstracts should be 350-400 words, and be accompanied by both a descriptive title for the paper proposed and 2-3 keywords. Individual papers accepted for presentation will be allotted a maximum of 20 minutes, plus 10 minutes for questions. Please provide enough detail about your argument for reviewers to be able to assess your proposal from the abstract.

To submit an abstract or a plenary paper for consideration, please fill out the submission form and e-mail the form and your submission, saved as .doc or .pdf, to FAB.Croatia2008@gmail.com . This e-mail address should only be used for communications concerning submissions, and not for general conference or FAB inquiries.

There is the opportunity for one or two submitted papers to be selected for plenary presentations. If you wish your paper to be considered for a plenary, please submit the full paper and indicate that you seek review for a plenary.

Publications from Congress

Vol II, no.2 of IJFAB will be based on the conference proceedings. All papers whose abstracts are accepted for the conference will be eligible for inclusion. Once abstracts are accepted, they will be forwarded to the editorial staff of IJFAB, which will follow up with authors in having them submit a paper. Authors will have sufficient time after the conference to make revisions. Any author who does not wish to have their paper reviewed for inclusion in IJFAB should indicate this when submitting the abstract. Please note that, all other things being equal, preference will be given to those submissions that are available for inclusion in IJFAB­.

Support for new researchers

We encourage submissions from early career researchers. Dr Angela Ballantyne has offered to provide support and mentoring for early career researchers. If you are such a researcher and would like feedback on your abstract before submitting it, please contact Angela directly (from 1 September 2007) at angela.ballantyne@yale.edu

Presidents who cry (and the public who love them)

Majikthise brings us an (undoubtedly only partial) impressive list of crying presidents. I’m not including the photo she used, because I wouldn’t want you to have to look at it. And if you want some macho sports stars crying, go here. (Thanks, Jender-Parents!)

Simone de Beauvoir’s bottom

Let me begin by stating that I am not a hater of the human form. If pushed, I will confess to thinking that there should be more, not less, public nudity for a variety of reasons. Nothing, for instance, beats the sensation of sun on skin. And what better way to learn that one’s thighs, upper arms, tummy, chest, breasts, labia, or penis are entirely normal and not hideously deformed than by looking at other ordinary folks with their clothes off? (See for yourself by visiting a nudist beach, or Betty Dodson’s online Genital Gallery – nsfw.) Nevertheless, I was disappointed to discover Le Nouvel Observateur celebrating the centenary of de Beauvoir’s birth by printing a nude photograph of de Beauvoir, viewed from behind. Prominent French feminist group, Les Chiennes de Gard, were likewise annoyed, and protested outside Le Nouvel Observateur’s office, wearing dog masks, brandishing placards, and demanding to see naked photographs of various male bottoms, including those of Levinas, Sartre, and Le Nouvel Observateur’s director. In a meeting with the feminists, the editors defended their decision by claiming that the picture aptly represents the scandal de Beauvoir caused in her time, with her unconventional views and non-conformist lifestyle. That’s as maybe. The problem, as Les Chiennes Gard pointed out, is that no male philosopher would be depicted in this way. Sartre, e.g., was just as unconventional and non-conformist as de Beauvoir, but it’s highly unlikely that we’ll get to see his naked arse on the front page. Ditto Bertrand Russell. Nude pictures of his unmentionables are not forthcoming, despite his suberversive opinions having rendered him jobless and declared unfit to teach the young. Moreover, the odds are somewhat stacked against women in philosophy. Whilst I do not, for one minute, wish to accuse all men working in the discipline of misogyny and sexism, it is still true that one’s femaleness can make it hard to get one’s work taken seriously. Feminist philosophy is similarly marginalised. The main academic journals are reluctant to publish it, and the specialist feminist journals, such as Hypatia, traditionally receive lowly rankings in the lists of the great and the good. Within this context, the celebration of de Beauvoir’s centenary with a picture of her backside, says less about the scandalous nature of her work, and more about the low regard in which female philosophers and feminists are held. For these reasons, I join Les Chiennes Gard in calling for more naked photos of the philosophical male’s posterior.  (Thanks for the tip, Evelyn!)

Steinem’s Response

Gloria Steinem has now responded to some of the criticisms that have been made of her op-ed (the one that suggested sexism was a stronger force than racism).  In case you’d like to read it, you can do so here. The article is confusingly structured. First there’s a criticism of the op-ed, then the op-ed, then Steinem’s response to criticisms, and finally a response to her response.

Carnival!

There’s a great new Carnival of Feminists up at Philobiblion, and we’re very pleased to see that our own Monkey has something in it!

Taking a break from anxiety over the world’s future if the US gets the next one as wrong…

Some skills come easily to some of us and less so to others. In the latter case, the practicing can go on for a very long time.

Annoyed by biased and stupid campaign coverage?

Here’s a quick and easy way to complain. Particularly annoyed by Chris Matthews calling Hillary Clinton a “she-devil” and her male supporters “castratos in the eunuch chorus”, and saying that “modern women” like Clinton are unacceptable to “Midwest guys”? Go here. A note: the first one of these does discuss racist coverage of Obama, but its focus is mainly on sexism in Clinton coverage, and the second is just about Matthews’ sexism.  If I come across a campaign more focused on racist Obama coverage, I’ll let you know.

Hypatia and Hirsch Numbers

O.K., let me start with some apologies for drawing attention to some recent discussion on the philosophical blogosphere of Hirsch-scores and author impact analysis through citation indices. This sort of thing often smacks as the kind of posturing that I find troubling in the philosophy profession. However, citation scores for published articles are certainly one possibility for future research assessments in the U.K, and maybe even Australia.

But let me get to the point.A 2005 paper by J.E. Hirsch, “An Index to Quantify An Individuals Scientific Research Output”, proposes to generate a “Hirsch” number for a researcher according to how many citations that researchers’ papers receive. (You can find details of how its calculated here). There is also a down-loadable program called”Harzing’s Publish or Perish” (here) which uses Google Scholar to calculate Hirsch Numbers. Now, some philosophers have been playing around with this programme recently to create lists of Top Epistemologists, Departmental Rankings, and most recently, and of most relevance to this post, Journal Rankings.

The reason I’m posting is that, in light of lots of the concerns that we have on this blog about publishing feminist philosophy (see the posts under this category), and in particular, the ESF’s low ranking of Hypatia and the problem of getting others to recognise the value of being published in that journal (see here), the result of the Journal Rankings are quite interesting.Gregory Wheeler (over at Certain Doubts), who ran the statistics for Journal rankings by Hirsch numbers, used the same ESF list which gave Hypatia a low rank. By Hirsch numbers, of the 75 journals listed, Hypatia comes in 26th (see the spread sheet linked on Wheeler’s post), and ahead of the following selective list of well known journals which the ESF ranked higher: The Proceedings of The Aristotelian Society, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Quarterly, American Philosophical Quarterly, Law and Philosophy, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.And of well known journals given the same ranking by the ESF, it scores a higher Hirsch number than: The European Journal of Philosophy, The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and Ratio amongst many others.

It’s obvious that the Publish or Perish programme has obvious flaws, and the reasons why Hypatia scores well may have much to do with the limited choices Feminist philosophers have when trying to place an article. I’ll leave you to ponder the reasons why Hypatia scores well by Hirsch numbers, but I have to say that seeing this left me feeling cheered up and thumbing my teeth at the ESF. And since the future of some important research assessments is certainly looking citation shaped, it leaves me feeling a little optimistic too (but I am a bit of a Pollyanna).

Fucking hell.

Just in case the Americans might have thought the UK was doing better in terms of totally blatant prejudice, here’s the cover of this week’s Private Eye.

  Thanks, Mr Jender. (In future posts, I will try to return to speechlessness when only expletives come to mind, but hey sometimes you can’t help yourself.)

Have you actually seen it?

Some of the responses in comments suggest that people might not actually have seen the “Hillary Crying” video.  I’m putting it up here so you can.  A few things (of many) that strike me:  (1) This is not crying; (2) I’ve seen plenty of male politicians do this without anyone caring; (3) She seems genuinely upset at the disastrous state of things under Bush.  Because of (3), I count myself amongst those who like her better after seeing the video.  (I always liked the visible anger in John Edwards, and have been put off by those who don’t seem upset enough.) So here’s the video, for those who have worried she might really have been losing control.

Here’s Jon Stewart’s wonderful take on it.

And here’s an excellent Tom Toles cartoon, linked to in a comment from Helen Esch.