CFA: 10th Annual S.W.A.P. Graduate Student Philosophy Conference

10th Annual Philosophy Conference
2015 Call for Abstracts

The Society for Women’s Advancement in Philosophy, in collaboration with the Minorities and Philosophy Chapter and Philosophy Graduate Student Association at Florida State University, are pleased to announce the 10th Annual S.W.A.P. Graduate Student Philosophy Conference to be held on Friday, March 27th, 2015. This year we are pleased to announce Charles W. Mills (Northwestern University) as our keynote speaker.

We invite submissions from all areas of philosophy. We encourage submissions that relate to the work of Charles W. Mills, social and political philosophy, and issues in race, class, or gender. Papers should be suitable for a 20 minute presentation.

High quality abstracts of 500 to 1,000 words may be submitted to fsuswap@gmail.com. Abstracts should be prepared for anonymous review. Please include your contact information and institutional affiliation in the body of your email.

The deadline for submission is Sunday, January 18th.  We will notify accepted presenters by Friday, January 30th. If you have any questions please contact Carmen Marcous (cmarcous@fsu.edu).

Mondays Are for Links

Here are some links from the past week or so (H/T to my FB feed):

Happenings In Academia:

Dismantling the Master’s House – a project at UCL.

“#DTMH is a community of academics, administrative staff and students at UCL, committed to righting racialised wrongs in our workplace and in the wider world. […] Through scholarly comment, public events, and social media, #DTMH interrogates both Whiteness and Anglocentrism in the academy, while presenting alternatives from among the diversity of voices which make up UCL, London, and the globe.

“[…] Going forward, we seek to put right these racialised wrongs, both by winning the Race Equality Charter Mark, for our good institutional practice here at UCL, and by establishing an unprecedented postgraduate programme, underpinned by a supportive community of researchers, offering a radical and critical analysis of race, for the benefit of London, Britain, and Britain’s former Empire.”

On philosopher Joseph Levine weighing in on the Salaita case in the NYT. 

Eight men talking about Truth and Grounds. (GCC)
[OP Note: If anyone out there wants to make a tumblr for the GCC, I think that would be a great venue for the project. (I don’t have the time/energy to host and maintain such a page right now, otherwise I would.) The 100% men project is an excellent example of a similar project. Being able to scroll through example after example makes the points that the GCC wants to emphasize much more vivid, I think.]

Happenings in History:

A letter Einstein wrote to Curie, telling her to ignore the trolls and haters, because her work is awesome.

Posters from the early 1900s warning about the unnatural abomination that is [some] women’s suffrage. 

Happenings in Activism:

A collection of political cartoons in the wake of the non-indictment for Eric Garner’s death.

Picture of Orange Is the New Black cast in New York with “I Can’t Breathe” signs.

Two articles on athletes wearing “I Can’t Breathe” shirts in solidarity with current protests:
“The Enduring Importance of the Activist Athlete” and
“Protesters vs. Props for Freedom: College Athletes Can’t Breathe Either”

The women Falsely ID’d as the student at the center of the Rolling Stone’s piece about rape at UVA is suing the blogger who falsely ID’d her.
(That should be a sufficient description for anyone who hasn’t heard about the various pieces of this story yet.)

An article on the difference between self-segregation (which might be akin to “reverse racism”) and “healing spaces.”

It discusses how it can hurt to feel excluded from a group as an ally, but that sometimes, the best thing we can do is to step back and not demand that we have access to every space, or to every conversation. #LifeProTip

Other Happenings :

A look at The New Republic, the recent resignation of its editor, and the magazine’s racial legacy, by TNC
“It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that black lives didn’t matter much at all to the magazine.”

NPR on “How The Gender Pay Gap Has Changed (And How It Hasn’t)”

“Women Resisting Heterosexuality In Western Art History” 

Interview with Angela Davis

The Guardian has published a wonderful, wide-ranging interview with all-around extraordinary person Angela Davis. In the interview, she shares her thoughts on structural racism, including mass incarceration:

Surely the lives of African-Americans in 2014 are better than during the days of slavery? Yet Davis isn’t the only black American intellectual to be less than sanguine. Professor Cornel West recently said that the US still has in effect a “Jim Crow criminal justice system” that “does not deliver justice for black and brown people”. Davis agrees. “You have this huge population of people who come up against the same restrictions that the Jim Crow south created,” she says. The segregation laws that existed until 1965 in the American south, where she grew up, might have gone but, as Davis points out, racist oppression remains.

One key feature of that racist oppression, Davis says, is what she and other leftist intellectuals call the “prison industrial complex”, the tawdry if tacit alliance between capitalism and a structurally racist state.

“The massive over-incarceration of people of colour in general in the US leads to lack of access to democratic practices and liberties. Because prisoners are not able to vote, former prisoners in so many states are not able to vote, people are barred from jobs if they have a history of prison.”

. . .

In Davis’s philosophy, this should come as no surprise; for her, the prison industrial complex is not just a racist American money-making machine, but a means to criminalise, demonise and profit from the world’s most powerless people.

The interview – which is really worth reading in full – covers lots of other topics, including the marginalization of women in discussions of prison, the expectations on and failures of the Obama administration, and. . .Beyonce. (Yes, a major international newspaper gets to interview one of the most influential, interesting women in the world, and one of the things they just had to make sure they got her perspective on was Beyonce. Hard-hitting journalism.)