SWIP-UK cfp deadline: Dec.31

The full text of the 2015 SWIP-UK conference call is here. From Rosie Worsdale:

The aim of this conference is to explore the possibilities for enriching philosophy through exposure to its many ‘Others’.

Possible themes for papers might include, but are not limited to:

• Feminist epistemology and standpoint theory
• What is it to exclude? What is it to include? Strategies and practices of inclusion/exclusion and their effects
• Philosophy of race
• Critical approaches to philosophical methodology, including pedagogical method
• Philosophy and disability
• Philosophy and heteronormativity
• Non-western philosophy and its relation to western philosophical praxis
• Identity politics
• Political philosophy and ‘others’
• Justice and injustice
• Critical theory
• The concept of ‘rigour’ and its place in philosophy
• The object/subject distinction

We invite proposals for 20-25 minute papers on any topic relating to the theme. We would like, if possible, to have both a postgraduate panel and a panel concerning practical issues relating to the ‘Otherness’ in philosophy.

Please send an anonymised abstract of no more than 300 words to essex.swip.2015 at gmail.com. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 31 December 2014. Successful speakers will be notified early in the new year.

The writer’s diet

What sort of shape is your prose in?  Here’s a test.

I think the test is going to grade a lot of academic prose more harshly than is actually deserved since it’s unhappy with ‘that’, for example. But ‘that’may be important or even essential to disambiguations if a thought is somplicated.

ADVICE: you really should avoid the test if you are feeling low already!

I did not know this

The African American woman who was crucial to NASA’s first flights. (Thanks, Mr J!)

Cosby victim speaks out

There’s an op-ed in today’s Washington Post by Barbara Bowman, one of the many women who has accused Bill Cosby of rape. She writes:

Only after a man, Hannibal Buress, called Bill Cosby a rapist in a comedy act last month did the public outcry begin in earnest. The original video of Buress’s performance went viral. This week, Twitter turned against him, too, with a meme that emblazoned rape scenarios across pictures of his face. . .

While I am grateful for the new attention to Cosby’s crimes, I must ask my own questions: Why wasn’t I believed? Why didn’t I get the same reaction of shock and revulsion when I originally reported it? Why was I, a victim of sexual assault, further wronged by victim blaming when I came forward? The women victimized by Bill Cosby have been talking about his crimes for more than a decade. Why didn’t our stories go viral?

UW statistician, philosopher win prize for detecting bias in peer review

Story here.

Research in social psychology suggests that, when evaluating job applicants along multiple criteria (like education and experience), evaluators prioritize whichever criterion favors the in-group applicant (white/male) versus the out-group (black/female) applicant, which has the effect of boosting the white/male applicant’s overall score,” Lee explained. “Analogously, we hypothesized that at NIH, white grant applicants receive higher overall impact scores than minority applicants in cases where they have received identical (or sufficiently similar) scores on sub-criteria.