Saray Ayala on “Explaining Injustice in Speech”

The Brains Blog is hosting an online conference this month, and one of the papers, by Saray Ayala, is on structural injustice in speech.  You can watch an 8 min presentation by Ayala, as well as read the paper, here.

“Explaining Injustice in Speech: Individualistic vs. Structural Explanation”

Abstract

Testimonial injustice occurs when the audience deflates a speaker’s credibility due to the speaker’s perceived social identity (Fricker, 2007). Although this phenomenon has received much attention, a lot remains unclear. I identify two drawbacks of a widely accepted explanation attributing testimonial injustice to prejudices (e.g. implicit bias) in the mind of the hearer. I propose an alternative: a structural explanation that appeals to discursive conventions.

Gender in International Relations Syllabi

Synopsis of some research by Jeff Colgan, political science, here.

“The data suggest that 82 percent of assigned readings in IR proseminars are written by all-male authors (i.e., women or co-ed teams account for the other 18 percent). That percentage is high, but it is also roughly consistent with the gender pattern of articles published in top IR journals (81 percent male-authored).”

“We found that female instructors tend to assign more readings by female authors than male instructors. Men or all-male teams authored “only” 71.5 percent of readings in courses taught by female instructors. By contrast, male authors wrote 79.1 percent of readings in courses taught by male instructors.  “

“Female instructors are also considerably more averse to assigning their own research as required readings. They assigned an average of 1.68 readings that they themselves had written (as solo or co-author). Male instructors assigned about twice as much of their own work: an average of 3.18 readings. “