CFP: ‘Transformation and the Dynamics of (Radical) Change’

 

Dear colleagues,the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s
University Belfast is seeking paper proposals for a two-day conference
(28th-29th November 2008) on the subject of ‘Transformation and the
Dynamics of (Radical) Change Insights from Political Theory and
Philosophy’.

Transformation is a seemingly ubiquitous concept within the field of
political theory and philosophy. Whilst some idealize transformation as a
source for progress and the improvement of the human condition, others
frame it as a disruptive and unsettling process which can damage the
social, political and natural elements of our world.

Paper proposals should include a tentative title, an abstract (200-300
words) and details of the author’s institutional affiliation and contact
information.

Proposals should address any of the following issues/topics: Factors and
actors in transformation: Pluralism, nationalism, individualism,
collectivism, recognition, complexity.

Forces of transformation: Globalization, economic change, social change,
processes, transformation of conflict.

Objects and subjects of transformation: ideas; norms; values; ideology; the
concept of transformation itself; state and sovereignty; government;
governance; social structures and processes; environment and nature; human
beings, including the self.

Evaluations of transformation: theories, approaches, critiques and the
possibility of a broader discourse on transformation.

All papers should make an explicit contribution to the establishment of a
broader discourse on transformation and the dynamics of (radical) change.
The organizing committee welcomes papers from scholars in all fields and
also encourages submission from early-stage academics, as well as from
postgraduate students.

The deadline for submissions is JUNE 15th 2008. Please send your submission
to: transformations(at)qub.ac.uk

For further information, please visit:
http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofPoliticsInternationalStudiesandPhilosophy/Events/Transformations/#d.en.94863

Fabian Schuppert
School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy
Queen’s University Belfast
transformations@qub.ac.uk

 

Under-Represented Groups and Stereotype Threat

There has been a lot of excellent discussion lately about the under-representation of certain groups in philosophy, and what can be done about it.  (This post gives links to some of it.)  One force which is very likely to play a role in this (both as partial cause and effect) is Stereotype Threat. Stereotype Threat is a very well-confirmed phenomenon, in which people from groups stereotypically expected to perform badly on a task perform in stereotype-confirming ways if they are reminded of their group membership.  (See Stoat’s post here.) For example, women asked to indicate their sex at the beginning of a math exam do worse on the exam than women not asked to do this.  It’s not hard to see how this could have effects in philosophy.  Women are stereotypically bad at e.g. logic, so being reminded of their sex could worsen their logic performance.  Surely, you may argue, nobody asks women to indicate their sex at the top of a logic exam.  Absolutely right, but there’s more than one way to be reminded of one’s sex, and being one of very few women in a room certainly has that effect.  (As does being in a room full of people who go to men-only events together, hearing the phrase ‘lady academic’, being told that one is ‘an affirmative action hire’, to cite anecdotes from recent comments. For more on the way this works, see a post from JJ.)  I use women as my example, but there are similar destructive stereotypes about other groups. It’s heartening to read, then, at Mixing Memory, that there are some very easy and effective ways to combat Stereotype Threat.  Here’s one example:

Good et al. had advanced college calculus students take a practice exam that they were told would test their readiness for the upcoming real exam, and would also get them extra credit based on their score. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: the reduced-threat condition, in which they were told that the exam had been thoroughly tested, and had shown no gender differences, and the control condition, in which gender wasn’t mentioned (gender stereotypes in math are pervasive, so it’s likely simply taking a test will activate them). Male participants performed equally well in both conditions, while female participants performed significantly worse in the control condition than in the reduced-threat condition. In fact, while female participants in the control condition performed worse than male participants, the female participants in the reduced-threat condition performed better than all of the male participants.    

It would be great if we could come up with easy ways, appropriate for teaching philosophy, to reduce stereotype threat. I’d love to hear any ideas that folks have. One potential problem that occurs to me is that I wouldn’t want to just focus on sex/gender stereotypes. But it’s hard to imagine a non-clunky way to combat all the many stereotypes that might affect our students. Suggestions?  One thing I find myself wondering is whether teaching people about stereotype threat could help make them less susceptible to it.  Has this been tried?

Outsourcing Pregnancies to India

You know, this one just renders me speechless. And yet I feel somehow I should have expected it.

Anand, India– Every night in this quiet western Indian city, 15 pregnant women prepare for sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession of ballooned bellies, to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills. A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world. The small clinic at Kaival Hospital matches infertile couples with local women, cares for the women during pregnancy and delivery, and counsels them afterward. Anand’s surrogate mothers, pioneers in the growing field of outsourced pregnancies, have given birth to roughly 40 babies….Commercial surrogacy has been legal in India since 2002, as it is in many other countries, including the United States. But India is the leader in making it a viable industry rather than a rare fertility treatment. Experts say it could take off for the same reasons outsourcing in other industries has been successful: a wide labor pool working for relatively low rates.  Critics say the couples are exploiting poor women in India — a country with an alarmingly high maternal death rate — by hiring them at a cut-rate cost to undergo the hardship, pain and risks of labor.  “It raises the factor of baby farms in developing countries,” said Dr. John Lantos of the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, Mo. “It comes down to questions of voluntariness and risk.”  

(Thanks, Jender-Parents, for the link.)

Pink Vigilantes

A group of poor women in India have mobilised to fight, violently where necessary, for better treatment of women and the poor, while wearing pink saris.  The article is interesting, though problematically written:

The pink sorority is not exactly a group of male-bashing feminists – they claim they have returned 11 girls who were thrown out of their homes to their spouses because “women need men to live with”.

Aside from the fact that It’s hard to be impressed by anything that uses the phrase ‘male-bashing feminists’, there isn’t enough explanation in the article to tell one what is meant by “need”– is this meant to be a fact about women’s nature, or about the way that their society is set up? These sorts of distinctions are important, and the article really isn’t very helpful for those seeking real understanding. Still, it’s interesting to know even a little bit about this. (Thanks, Jender-parents!)

Women and Minorities in Philosophy

There’s currently a huge amount of momentum around the issue of improving numbers of women and minorities in philosophy.  A major catalyst for this has been Sally Haslanger’s incredibly important paper on the topic.  I know that many women just starting out in philosophy found that paper a very depressing read.  But the extremely good news is that it’s serving as a real catalyst for discussion and action, and there’s actually a lot of optimism and energy. There’s a nice example in this post from Evelyn Brister:

In the last decade, at least half of U.S. college graduates have been women. But less than a third of philosophy majors have been women. Women have not reached workplace equity at the beginning of the 21st century, but there are only a few places and ways in which they are not reaching educational parity. Philosophy—the discipline that takes as its subjects ethics, justice, consistency, and self-reflection—is one of those places.What does this gender inequality indicate about our discipline? Some have taken it to indicate that the material itself is gender-biased, that the methods of argumentation reflect masculine psychology, or that philosophy is a bastion of cultural traditionalism that incubates sexist practices.That assessment is too negative, in my opinion. As an optimist, a meliorist, and a pragmatist, I think that it indicates first and foremost that philosophers, unlike other analytic disciplines, have not made gender parity a priority.       

Brister argues for greater attention to undergraduate recruitment and retention. If you have thoughts on this, head over to her post and share them! Sharon Crasnow suggests that those of us from under-represented groups who have persevered or even thrived in philosophy should reflect on what helped us to do this and to talk about this. If you have stories on this to share, go tell Sharon. There are also some very important data collection efforts getting underway– more on those in a later post.

One thing that’s struck me is that there actually are a lot of genuinely well-meaning people in philosophy who would like to improve recruitment and retention of women and minorities in philosophy, at all levels, but who need some guidance about how to do so. I’m going to be working on providing a document with such guidance, and would appreciate any suggestions you may have. One thing I’d particularly like to hear about is what sorts of techniques actually help one to correct against the very unconscious biases that Haslanger and Valian have drawn our attention to. But I’m really interested in hearing about any ideas you may have– or reports of efforts, even those that haven’t worked. Please put them in the comments!

Note: Categories have been updated as a result of comments.

Gang Rape

You’d think we’d all agree that  it’s bad.  Surely it’s only in those backward Islamic states that victims of gang rape get punished and disbelieved.  At least, nobody from America, the Land of the Free, would imprison an employee who was gang-raped by co-workers and deny her food and water for 24 hours. And no Australian judge would claim that a 10-year- old “probably” agreed to have sex with nine men.  OK, maybe they would, but surely the *prosecution* wouldn’t have pushed this line.  Hmm. Guess I was wrong.  (I’ve clicked the categories ‘race’ and ‘class’ because they’re very important to the Australian case.  I don’t know whether they played a role in the other one.)

Sex Wars VS Farm Wars

Brownfemipower has a powerful post comparing the feminist energy devoted to the porn industry with the lack of feminist energy devoted to the farm industry.   

I know that there’s more than one way to get fucked.And I only hope there will be a time when feminists fight for thirty years about the best way to end violence against farmworkers.

“a guilty pleasure”

Some UK bloggers were writing about this last year, but it’s just coming to US attention.  Foreseeing a stressful  weekend, I ordered it from Amazon.com  last week.  Truth be told,  I’m feeling much better after a double dip last night. 

It’s not fattening and there is no haze or hangover the next  day.  All there is is a sneaking suspicion one should have been more critical. 

The source?  It’s “The Amazing Mrs Pritchard,” which is now showing on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater.   It’s a silly fantasy in many ways; a very bright and determined manager of a supermarket expresses a few strong political feelings and ends up Prime Minister of England, with many women occupying important positions in the government.

The acting is first rate, and the men are – so far, anyway – scoundrels, except for the occasional sex object.  O dear.  Very, very much the shoe on the other foot.

Strong criticism is possible.   But it strikes me as rather like saying that animals are clearly incapable of effectively replacing humans in the running of a farm.  True, but it misses the point of Animal Farm.

The title of this post was borrowed from a  comment in an NY Times review. The reviewer also says:

”-“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a-bicycle” kind of feminism that feels as distant and goofy to us now as the “Mad Men” era of sexism it fought to depose.

This view of the series is echoed in a number of feminist comments on it on the web. I’m reflecting on whether the era of 1970’s sexism in philosophy hasn’t renewed itself decade by decade. Are women in other professions now experiencing a professional world so different from that in so many philosophy departments?

Jane Jacobs revisited

The NY Times summarizes a symposium  on Jane Jacobs, activist and writer, whose The Death and Life of Great American Cities is considered by many to be a masterpiece (sic).
Those who are not very familiar with her thought and impact might find Julia Vitullo-Martin’s characterization helpful:

In practice, she disapproved equally of self-isolating large development, like public housing for low-income people, and luxurious towers for high-income people,” she said, adding later, “She admired a certain kind of active integration, of people of different races, incomes, educational levels. She admired the presence of work in neighborhoods. She had a romantic attachment to manufacturing work and certain small enterprises — retail, commercial — on the street. She liked everything mixed up together.”

A friend of hers, Roberta Brandes Gratz, is quoted as remarking

Jane’s ideas are not frozen in time. She never expected change not to occur. The process of change – the process of change – is what concerned her most, how it was managed and how intimately involved in shaping that change were the citizens affected by that change. Furthermore her ideas were never static. She loathed ideology and bristled at any suggestion that her ideas added up to a theory.

Most people will find her legacy mixed, since her thought has been used by different sides of the political spectrum. Her convervative stance on  some public spending, of which I have just become aware, hardly sounds something I could support.  What captivated me, however, was the characterization by historian Christopher Klemek, who is curating an exhibit on her. The use of quotation marks and personal pronouns seems garbled a bit, but I’ll give it to you as it is in the Times:

Jacobs “was sort of strange looking,” having come into prominence well into her middle age. “She’s a late bloomer in some ways,” she said. “She had a very strange voice. It was almost a whiny voice.” But she was also “hard as nails,” and “willing to go head to head in the old trenches of New York City politics,” and “managed to play this tension between insider and outsider to quite powerful effect.”

The tension between insider and outsider is one many of us could also play to powerful effect.

Document the Silence: 31 October

The Document the Silence Project aims to end the lack of attention to crimes of violence against women of color in the US. They have an important event coming up on October 31, and I’d urge you to participate:

Recent events in the United States have moved us to action. Violence against women is sadly, not a new phenomenon in our country or in the world, however, in the last year women of color have experienced brutal forms of violence, torture, rape and injustice which have gone unnoticed, received little to no media coverage, or a limited community response. We are responding to:

The brutal and inhumane rape, torture, and kidnapping of Megan Williams in Logan, West Virginia who was held by six assailants for a month.

Rape survivors in the Dunbar Housing Projects in West Palm Beach, Florida one of whom was forced to perform sexual acts on her own child.

A 13 year old native American girl was beaten by two white women and has since been harassed by several men yelling “white power” outside of her home

Seven black lesbian girls attempted to stop an attacker and were latter charged with aggravated assault and are facing up to 11 year prison sentences

In a Litany of Survival, Audre Lorde writes, “When we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.” These words shape our collective organizing to break the silence surrounding women of color’s stories of violence. We are asking for community groups, grass-root organizations, college campus students and groups, communities of faith, online communities, and individuals to join us in speaking out against violence against women of color. If we speak, we cannot be invisible.

Join us and stand up to violence against women!

Be bold, be brave, be red. Wear red on October 31, 2007. Take a picture or video of yourself and friends wearing red. Send it to: beboldbered@gmail.com. We’ll post it!

Take Your Red to the Streets! Know of a location where violence occurred against a woman of color? Have a public location where you feel women of color are often ignored? Make violence against women of color visible by decorating the space in red. Be sure to send us pictures and or video of your display!

Rally! Gather your friends, family, and community to rally. Check out the Document the Silence website for the litany we’re asking participants to read together on October 31st. Be sure to send us pictures and/or video of the event! You could even gather where you created a display!

For more Information on how to Host a RED Rally, please click on the page “How to Host a Red Rally.”

Share your story of silence. Share your own story of silence by uploading it to the Document the Silence website (http://documentthesilence.wordpress.com/). You can send a story in any form you’d like – as a written statement, video clip, movie, documentary, or visual art.

For more information, go here.