Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins has sent us this guest post:
This year I had to stop using the metaphysics textbook I used in previous years (Crane and Farkas, Metaphysics: A Guide and Anthology, OUP 2004), as it features no papers or book extracts by women. Although there is introductory material written by the editors (one of whom is a woman), of its 54 selected readings zero are by women. I couldn’t in good conscience present this book to any more of my students as their introduction to metaphysics. I looked around when I was preparing my course this year for a more representative alternative, but I couldn’t find anything. So this year I’m using a selection of readings I’ve curated myself. I’m wondering what options I have for next year; I’ve been informed of the /Routledge Companion to Metaphysics/, which does include some articles by women (9 out of 53, I understand) but this collection doesn’t line up ideally with the topics I would like to teach in my course, and 9:44 is still not a great ratio. I also know that Elizabeth Barnes is currently editing /Current Controversies in Metaphysics/ for Routledge, and that Alyssa Ney is preparing a metaphysics text and accompanying anthology (also with Routledge). I’m looking forward to checking these out when they are published and I’m optimistic that one or both of these will help me in future years. Is there anything else I should know about?
I’m writing this post partly to get help for myself (and for others whom I know to be in a similar position), and also partly because I’d love it if academic presses could be encouraged to bear this sort of consideration in mind when commissioning and publishing textbooks in the future. The more we can raise to salience the fact that academics take this issue seriously when making textbook choices, the clearer it is that publishers have a reason to care about it as well.