Concordia University Graduate Conference
May 10-11 2014
Montreal, Canada
The Concordia Graduate Philosophy Student’s Association would like to invite submissions for this year’s graduate conference, to be held May 10-11, 2014, at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
This year’s conference is entitled Philosophy dans la rue!: Activism and Philosophy in the 21st Century. The aim of this conference is to provide a forum for graduate students to discuss the role they see for philosophy in the public sphere. A graduate student conference is a particularly fruitful occasion for a discussion of the future of the intersection of activism and philosophy: such a conference is able to take seriously the notion that philosophy’s role can and will be determined both in and outside of the academy by today’s graduate students.
The history of ‘public intellectuals’ like Socrates, Bertrand Russell, Mary Wollstonecraft, or Slavoj Žižek demands that the next generation of philosophers take on the question of activism. The global climate – politically and otherwise – represented in part by movements as varied as ‘Occupy’, ‘Anonymous’, the ‘Arab Spring’, Idle No More, and accessible education demonstrations across Europe and in Quebec provide us with a rich context from which we may engage in this discussion today. Questions may include, but are not limited to: What sorts of activities constitute activism? Is there a role for philosophy within or alongside activism? Must philosophers aspire to the actualization their own arguments? Is there a duty on the part of philosophers to take on an active role in public affairs? We highly encourage submissions from both the analytic and continental tradition, as well as from other disciplines or alternate critical frameworks. Submissions in English and French are both welcome.
Submission Deadline: March 14, 2014
Keynote Speakers: Lisa Guenther (Vanderbilt University)
Kathryn Norlock (Trent University)
Submission Guidelines: We are pleased to accept abstracts (of between 200 and 400 words) for consideration. Each submission should be prepared for anonymous review and accompanied by a separate PDF which includes your name, paper title, e-mail address, and academic affiliation.
Each speaker will be granted twenty minutes to present their paper. Ten minutes available for questions will follow each presentation. As such, completed papers should not surpass 3000 words.
Submissions should be sent to concordiaugpsa at gmail dot com.
Feminist Philosophers 