Evolution, Gender and Sexuality, and ISH: a conference including women and feminist topics

This year’s ISHPSSB meeting, that is The International Society for The History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (fondly called ‘Ishkabibble,’ or just ‘Ish’), is fast approaching.   While the deadline for submitting papers has passed, you can still register to attend, or just take a moment to be pleased with the inclusion of women and feminist topics!  It will take place July 10-15, 2011 in Salt Lake City.  Conference themes mentioned in the cfp include: Civic engagement; Race; Policy, science funding, and scientific progress; Sustainability, environment, energy, and economics; Gender and LGBT; Genetic testing; Evo-Devo; and Education.  The conference committee is international and includes prominent women.  And, the conference is associated with a forum on Evolution, Gender and Sexuality.  Well done!

The Forum on Evolution, Gender and Sexuality

The University of Utah Department of Philosophy will be hosting a Biohumanities Public Forum to complement ISHPSSB 2011.  It is scheduled from 7-9 pm on Thursday, July 14, following the final ISHPSSB sessions that afternoon.  The topic of the forum is, “Evolution, Gender & Sexuality.”  We are honored to be able to feature three panel members: Elisabeth Lloyd (Indiana University), John Dupré (University of Exeter), and Lisa Diamond (University of Utah).

The following is from the CFP:

Our expectation for the Salt Lake City meeting is that we will have more cross-disciplinary sessions than ever before.  In addition, we expect that all sessions will be geared toward wider audiences.  This was a major thrust of the discussions that came out of the Brisbane meeting in 2009.  Every scholar has numerous meetings in which to present work to her or his peers: historians speaking to historians, philosophers speaking to philosophers, sociologists speaking to sociologists, and biologists from across the spectrum speaking to biologists within their specialty.  ISHPSSB is uniquely situated to provide us the opportunity to talk to each other, across disciplinary boundaries, about biology studies.  In order for this to happen, we need to think broadly about each other as an audience.  We hope you will begin now to look for ways of collaborating.

…

Presenters should think about ways their work will potentially connect to other sessions throughout the meeting.  We hope this can be accomplished by thinking about the larger themes that are illuminated by your work.  These themes are meant to be broad and overlapping, but will help to provide benchmarks for organizing sessions as well as signposts for people at the conference seeking out areas of inquiry.  Some themes we have identified include: Civic engagement; Race; Policy, science funding, and scientific progress; Sustainability, environment, energy, and economics; Gender and LGBT; Genetic testing; Evo-Devo; and Education.  Details about several of these themes can be found on the bulletin board, and more will be posted as we move forward.  Please note that not all papers and sessions are expected to fit into one of the themes, and we hope that as we see work that pushes beyond these categories we can all be more aware of the new directions scholars and members of ISHPSSB are taking.

And finally, here is the program committee:

Callebaut, Werner

Millstein, Roberta

Santesmases, María Jesús

Suárez, Edna

Stotz, Karola

El-Hani, Charbel

Largent, Mark (co-chair)

Young, Chris (co-chair)

Local organizers are Matt Haber and Jim Tabery

Closure of Philosophy, History and Performing Arts at LMU

From Philos-L:

A meeting of London Metropolitan University’s Academic Board yesterday approved proposals for the closure of Philosophy, along with its fellow Humanities subjects, History and Performing Arts – that is to say, it decided that they will not recruit from 2012/2013. This decision was extremely sudden. Until Tuesday evening of this week, when colleagues on Academic Board received papers for the coming meeting, it seemed that these courses were to be preserved. This was not the decision of the Faculty, which proposed to continue these courses, but of central management.

The ground for the decision was ostensibly that of prospective profitability. However, neither Faculty nor central management have been willing to divulge the figures or the modelling methods used to reach this decision. Crude calculations on the basis of existing student numbers suggest that the University actually will lose more income than can be possibly saved in redundancies. This supposition is supported by the fact that when asked at the sub-committee of the Board of Governors meeting last night how much the cuts were expected to save, the Director of Finance replied that they had not yet made that calculation….

The decision to close History and Performing Arts is just as shocking as the decision to close Philosophy…. The cutting of these three courses, following the decisions made earlier this year to close several other Humanities courses, leaves only a small rump of surviving courses, which will almost certainly be absorbed into other Faculties. It therefore seem likely that LMU will in a very few years be a University without Humanities. This is therefore another instance of that alarming trend, whereby, not only philosophy, but also other Humanities courses are deemed inappropriate for students in the post-1992 Universities.

It is still possible that pressure from inside and outside the University will prompt reconsideration of this decision. If you wish to register a protest, please email:

Prof Malcolm Gillies, Vice Chancellor – m.gillies@londonmet.ac.uk
Roddy Gallacher, Dean of Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Languages and Education – r.gallacher@londonmet.ac.uk

I look forward to the idea when we’re not constantly posting on efforts to close philosophy departments. In the meantime, though, I urge you to write.