An upcoming conference on analytic engagement with continental philosophy is taking place in December at the University of York. All members of the program – both speakers and respondents – are male.
(Thanks for the tip, L!)
Day: October 9, 2011
Query from reader: men on feminism and whites on race?
L writes:
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!
CFP: Practical Reason and Metaethics
Mark van Roojen writes:
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.
The conference announcement is here.
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.
Feminist Philosophers 