Day: March 10, 2015

Reflections on trying to organise a panel with more women

Jender2 Comments

Recently, we—Elisa Freschi and Malcolm Keating—set about organizing a panel for the upcoming ATINER panel. We aimed for a panel which would include significant numbers of women, using suggestions from the Gendered Conference Campaign (GCC) published on the Feminist Philosophers website to achieve this goal. Not only is the result an exciting combination of global philosophical interests which can push back against stereotypes of philosophy as a Western activity, its gender ratio can push back against stereotypes of philosophy as a male activity. Our hope is that the more panels and conferences which work to include women, the more women’s names will come to mind as experts in these topics. Further, hopefully younger generations of women will find it easier to find a path in academic philosophy. And finally, including more women who might otherwise be ignored due to implicit bias means better philosophy will be done.

Click here to read their reflections.

IAPh in Australia in 2016. See you there!

Sam B1 Comment

Women and Philosophy: History, Values, Knowledge

A conference to be held at Monash University, Caulfield Campus, Melbourne, Australia

7-10 July 2016

Invited speakers: Moira Gatens (Sydney, Australia), Ruth Hagengruber (Paderborn, Germany), Sally Haslanger (MIT, US), Lisa Shapiro (Simon Fraser, Canada)

Founded in 1976, the International Association of Women Philosophers (IAPh) is an organisation committed to promoting discussion, interaction, and cooperation among women in philosophy worldwide.

In honour of the IAPh’s 40th anniversary, this symposium proposes to celebrate women’s diverse historical and contemporary contributions to philosophy, and to highlight the work of female philosophers in all branches of philosophical and feminist inquiry.

We particularly invite papers that reflect on the history of women’s engagement with philosophy and feminism in Europe, the Americas, Australasia, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, during the past forty years, and back to the earliest periods.

The conference themes of history, values, and knowledge reflect the broad scope of contemporary research on historical women philosophers, on feminist ethics and politics, and on questions of feminist epistemology.

Submissions in other areas of philosophy and feminist theory are also welcome.

The main conference organisers are Karen Green (Melbourne) and Jacqueline Broad (Monash).

To contact us, please email: iaph-symposium@monash.edu

http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/iaph2016/

More from NU grad student Kathryn Pogin

magicalersatz3 Comments

Kathryn Pogin, a philosophy grad student at Northwestern, has followed up her open letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education with an editorial at the Huffington Post, where she relates her experience discussing her concerns with the Chronicle’s editors – which include their reference to her original letter as an ‘incomprehensible tirade’. (I for one found her original letter pretty easy to follow and understand. Perhaps the editor’s inability to do so reflects more on them than it does on Kathryn.) She also elaborates her concerns about the article (by NU professor Laura Kipnis) the Chronicle published:

Laura Kipnis is perfectly welcome to hold whatever view of faculty-student relationships she likes. She is also welcome to publish those views, and the Chronicle of Higher Education is welcome to assist her in doing so. What is not welcome is willfully misleading the public, particularly when Kipnis is exploiting the misrepresentation of events which are surely deeply important and deeply painful for all of those directly involved. It is striking that those concerned in publishing a piece which questions the credibility of women who allege to be victims, and mocks their experiences as ‘melodrama,’ only feel the need to qualify some allegations as allegations, and seem to feel no need to be sensitive to how inaccuracy might damage their own credibility. Perhaps when you are an accomplished university professor, or the most respected news source dedicated to higher education, credibility comes in comfortable excess. The entire affair is fitting, though, as a microcosm of the dynamics behind the larger problem of sexual violence on college campuses.