Sex/Gender and the REF

Really interesting article here.

Content restrictions in classroom discussion?

Do any of you use restrictions on content of discussion contributions in your undergraduate classrooms? By this I mean restrictions on expressing or arguing for particular views, even if politely expressed. (I’m assuming we’d all block students from using hate speech or being directly abusive to each other.) The kind of thing I’m wondering about is e.g. forbidding students from advocating white supremacy, or arguing that consent is not necessary for morally acceptable sex. If you do use such restrictions, how do you formulate them?

Thanks for your help!

Philosophy and Race in the THES

Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman has an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement on the whiteness of philosophy – both our faculty and our cannon.

Literature, history and politics have treated Douglass, and other persons enslaved-as-negro, and, more generally, other persons racialised-as-black, as artists, biographers and campaigners. Yet, philosophers have not tended to treat such persons as philosophers.

Reflecting on such neglect, Anita LaFrance Allen-Castellitto, professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that “[i]f people of color are to ‘do’ philosophy, philosophers must be willing to ‘do’ people of color. When we give minorities’ issues their due we dignify them as moral agents with morally and intellectually significant lives”. Yet, as Albert Atkin (a senior lecturer in philosophy, who had to leave Britain for Macquarie University in Australia before he could write and publish his monograph on The Philosophy of Race (2012)) puts it, “mainstream philosophy has managed to make itself something of a notable exception in contributing to debates on race”.

Go read it!