Full text of the letter I received from Middlesex VC Michael Driscoll, in response to the letter signed by the full Sheffield Philosophy Department:
“Dear Sirs, I refer to your letter of 04 May 2010. Your concerns regarding the closure of the Philosophy programme are noted.”
The signature was not even a high quality digital one.
…successfully fight university administrators’ plans to destroy philosophy departments. We did it with King’s. Now let’s keep the pressure on Middlesex.
While the big news in Canadian academic circles is the successful recruitment of 19 “leading scientific minds” by the Canada Excellence Research Chair program, a sharp feminist philosophers blog reader points out that exactly ZERO were women. (Although these men did indeed secure spousal hires.) As the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, put it, “There also is not a single female researcher among the 19 spots, an indication of how few women hold senior positions in science and engineering, the fields that dominate the winning entries.” The full article is here. The list of those hired is here. Our reader also notes that that fully seven of the new hires are in the Life Sciences and Technology field, which has an excellent representation of women. Coverage in the UK has focused on the brain drain of British scientists to Canada, see here.
The theme of the 2011 Feminisms and Rhetorics conference is “Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics?: Locations, Scholarship and Discourse.” The Feminisms and Rhetorics conference is sponsored by the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, and will be hosted by Minnesota State University, Mankato October 12-15, 2011.
The conference committee is strongly interdisciplinary and therefore our theme seeks to recognize the spaces between disciplines and communities. The conference theme is meant to acknowledge the academic and socio-discursive spaces that feminisms, and rhetorics on or about feminisms, inhabit. Major political, religious and social leaders have recently discussed feminism, including the Dalai Lama, but the discussion seems to revolve around cultural or essentialized discourses of feminism. This spotlight on feminism is, of course, not new, and they ways feminism is engaged in public discourse is much different than that of academic discourse. However, in Rhetoric and Composition, we have seen many significant publications lately focusing on what it means to be a woman in the field, how to be a successful woman in the field, and the connections between feminist theory and feminist pedagogy.
We seek proposals that speak to the challenges and diversities of feminist rhetoric and discourse, in public and private life, in the academy, and in the media. We welcome proposals on topics that significantly engage disciplines other than Rhetoric and Composition, and that have consequences for communities located outside of the academy.
For more, go here.
Feminist Philosophers 