This is what one girl did.
Author: redeyedtreefrog
Feminist philosopher and fan of red eyed tree frogs
Help me publish
Not me, personally. It’s the name of an app. Here’s the announcement:
“The Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago is pleased to announce their development of a Philosophy subject database for the HMP mobile app which launches internationally today.
HelpMePublish is a ‘crowdsourced’ database listing over 5300 academic journals in 13 subject areas.
The database displays live data as it is contributed by journal editors (including acceptance rates and refereeing policies) and academics via the app’s built-in journal rating questionnaire.
We’ve built it, but if HelpMePublish is to be a valuable resource for the research community, we need you to contribute your experience as a publishing researcher.
For more information about the HelpMePublish project go to helpmepublish.org.”
Science, Technology and Gender: Challenges and Opportunities
FEMMSS5/CSWIP 2014: Call for Proposals
Submission deadline February 15, 2014
Submissions are invited for the 2014 meeting of the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy to be held at the University of Waterloo, August 10 to 13, 2014. We welcome feminist papers, posters, panels and workshops related to Science, Technology and Gender. Conference presentations are eligible for submission for consideration and review in a resulting anthology or special journal issue. Topics can include but need not be limited to:
Challenges to and challenging scientific literacy
Implicit bias and stereotype threat
Creating equitable Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics organizations and institutions
Gender, oppression, and the public understanding of science
Rhetoric, argumentation, and gendered communication
Epistemologies of ignorance
Policy of/for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
Intersectionality in practice and study of science and technology
The ethics and politics of science and technology
Science, technology and global justice
Feminist methodologies in the humanities, social and natural sciences
Production of biological “differences”
Feminist scholarship of teaching and learning
Professional development (ex. Effective interdisciplinary communication/teaching/research)
Submission instructions
You are permitted one submission, unless you are submitting a poster. If you are submitting a poster, you can additionally submit an abstract for a paper, panel, or workshop.
To submit please go to https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=stg2013 and sign up for an account. If you have questions, email science.technology.gender@gmail.com.
· Individual papers and posters: Please provide a title, 300-word abstract, and 3-10 keywords. At the beginning of the abstract please indicate if your submission is a poster. There is no need to upload anything, so please tick the box that says, “abstract only.”
· Panels: Please provide a title, 300-word abstract, and 3-10 keywords for the panel as a whole. Also, upload a single document that includes the title and 300-word abstract for each paper. Please take care not to identify authors.
· Workshops: Please provide a title, 300-word abstract describing the workshop rationale, and 3-10 keywords. Also, upload a 300-word description of the activities in which your audience will engage. Please take care not to identify authors.
This conference will be held in conjunction with FEMMSS5.
Is Miss Piggy a Feminist Icon?
Women, banknotes, and patterns of inequity
Business ethics blogger Chris MacDonald writes, “Attention has recently been drawn to a petition calling for women to be pictured on bank notes. Currently, Canada’s bank notes feature only dead (white) male politicians. Queen Elizabeth is the only woman featured, and she’s not Canadian. The result is that Canadian women, no matter how accomplished or historically significant, are excluded from being celebrated in this high-profile way. The petition notes that Canada’s $50 bill once featured “The Famous 5″ (women instrumental in the fight to acknowledge women’s legal personhood) and Thérèse Casgrain, a Canadian senator who had once been a leader in the women’s suffrage movement in Quebec. But in 2012, those images were replaced with an image of an icebreaker.”
See the rest here,
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/blogs-and-comment/women-bank-notes-and-patterns-of-inequity-chris-macdonald/
An interview with Cato Taylor
Cato Taylor is a PhD student at the University of Alberta and she covers lots of turf, including fatness, fashion, and being a woman of colour in Philosophy.
Here’s her terrific, articulate response to being asked about often being the only one of her kind in the discipline, like being a unicorn.
“Hah! You’re not the first person to have called me a philosophy unicorn and I so hope that this somehow comes to be one of my officially recognized titles from now on. Unfortunately, institutionalized philosophy does have a, frankly, pretty well deserved rep for being one of, if not the most homogenous of all the humanities. According to the most recent data from the Canadian Philosophical Association’s Equity Committee (which, full disclosure, I am currently a member of), only 31% of tenure-line philosophers in Canada are women and the majority of them are able-bodied white women. Visible minorities make up only 5.5% of the profession and only 0.3% of those surveyed identified as having a disability. And Canada is actually doing pretty well comparatively; as of 2011, less than 125 of the 11,000 members of the American Philosophical Association were black and less than 30 of those were women. Of the 14,000 professors employed in all disciplines in the UK, only 50 are black and none of those 50 are philosophers. So, yeah…as an out queer fat woman of colour who, at times, presents as physically disabled (I occasionally walk with a cane), I have always stuck out in philosophy like something of a sore thumb. As you might imagine, my experiences thus far in institutionalized philosophy (I’m a PHD student just less than a year away from completion) have been pretty mixed. I have both borne witness to and experienced sexism and racism and have seen close friends deal with both macro and micro forms of sexual aggression which, if the blog What is it like being a woman in philosophy? is any indication, seem to run rampant within our discipline.However, I have also had a lot of wonderful experiences which have sustained me and help keep my passion for philosophy alive. I’ve met many wonderful, thoughtful, passionate people through philosophy who have become cherished friends and mentors and the support i have received from these folks over the years has been essential to my continued dedication to my work. But, I think like many other “unicorns” working in fields where our mere presence is “important” and worth noting, I have something of a complicated, sometimes fraught relationship with philosophy.”
Go read the rest of the interview here, http://heart-beats.ca/HDB/exhibit/catotaylor/
Subjectivity in Question Call for Papers
Duquesne Women in Philosophy 2014 Conference
Duquesne University
February 8, 2014
Subjectivity in Question
Keynote Speaker: Lisa Guenther, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University
Duquesne Women in Philosophy (D-WiP) invite philosophical papers on the question of subjectivity. Given the tensions found within the traditional notions of subjectivity, we aim to facilitate a discussion on the future directions of feminist philosophy and the question of the subject. Papers are welcome from within contemporary philosophical discourse, as well as from perspectives grounded in and engaged with the history of philosophy. We invite full paper submissions to dwipcontact@gmail.com by December 1, 2013. Allotted presentation time will be approximately 20-30 minutes. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
sexual difference and subjectivity
temporality, spatiality, and perception
corporeality, modes of embodiment
presentation, representation, and misrepresentation
agency, power, and vulnerability
political subjectivity
metaphysics and the political subject
affect and emotion
alterity and ethics
subjectivity in expression: art and language
gender and sexuality
racial subjectivity
vagueness and ambiguity
(dis)ability, crip theory
feminist materialism
The strongest graduate paper will receive a modest cash award from the Duquesne Women in Philosophy. We are an active group of female philosophy graduate students who are striving to improve the status of women in philosophy.
Gender gap in science around the world
See A Map of the Gender Gap in Science Around the Globe: A portrait from UNESCO shows where women are well represented among employed scientists, and where they are rare.
The map offers confirmation for the conclusion that (surprise) there’s no biological explanation for the low numbers of women in science. Concludes Rebecca J. Rosen in the Atlantic “Cultures vary, and the result is expressed in the map above. We’d do well to look at countries like Argentina and Brazil and see what is helping them achieve their nice purple color.”
Women, talking about sports, and epistemic injustice
Myisha Cherry writes, “As a former college basketball player and basketball fanatic who literally watches all 82 games of Miami Heat basketball every season, I have had the same experience as the woman in the bar. When I go to watch and talk sports with men, I am not taken seriously initially and sometimes not at all no matter how sound my arguments are. Or I find that what I say is considered more speculative than what men say. As a result, I find myself asserting myself in conversations, being extra argumentative, and quoting stats as if it was an ESPN Numbers Don’t Lie episode just so I can at least be heard and sound convincing. It’s annoying, makes me feel invisible, and I always feel treated unfairly because I am a woman.”
For a good discussion of the issues how it connects to epistemic injustice read Why Women Are Not Taken Seriously in Sports Conversations and What We Can Do About It at the Huffington Post here.
Philosophy Comics
Margreet de Heers’ philosophy comic book is reviewed by Suzette Chan at Sequential Tart here.
Philosophy can sometimes be presented as dogma, removing the pursuit from real lives and preserving it in the ivory tower. Refreshingly, Margreet de Heer’s graphic novel Philosophy: A Discovery in Comics (published by NMB), characterizes philosophy as a process, not a product.
De Heer leads readers through the book with questions such as “What is thinking?” and “What is reality?” — questions that she began to ask when she was a child. Personalizing the questions reminds us of how philosophy is rooted in our curiosity about the universe, and also creates the feeling that we are companions in this enterprise.
Read the rest of the review here.
Visit Margreet de Heer’s website here.
Feminist Philosophers 