I have been terrible at posting, but my excuse is that I am traveling. Here’s a picture just to indicate that I am still here and that I have not abandoned the blog. It is a sea scape version of a Quinean desert landscape, at least that is how I was thinking of it and my excuse for posting it on a philosophy blog. The location is Otaru, on Hokkaido, in Japan.
CALL FOR PAPERS
SAF Session at the Central Division APA Meetings
Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois
February 18-21, 2009
NOTE DATE CHANGE!
The Society for Analytical Feminism invites submissions for a session at the 2008 Central Division APA meetings to be held in Chicago in February 18-21, 2009. Please note that this is a different date than you may be used to!
The Society seeks papers that examine feminist issues by methods broadly construed as analytic, or discuss the use of analytic philosophical methods as applied to feminist issues. Reading time should be about 20 minutes. Authors should submit either (1) a paper, or (2) an extended abstract, as detailed as possible (up to 1000 words) accompanied by a bibliography. Please delete all self-identifying references from your submission to ensure anonymity. You may submit papers as a word attachment to sharon.crasnow@rcc.edu (preferred) or mail four copies to:
Sharon Crasnow
925 Archer Street
San Diego, CA 92109
The deadline for submissions is August 15, 2008.
Graduate students or underfunded professionals whose papers are accepted will be eligible for the Society’s $250 Travel Stipend. Please indicate on a separate page (or in your covering letter) if you fall into one of these categories.
The Society for Analytical Feminism
The Society for Analytical Feminism provides a forum where issues concerning analytical feminism may be openly discussed and examined. Its purpose is to promote the study of issues in feminism by methods broadly construed as analytic, to examine the use of analytic methods as applied to feminist issues, and to provide a means by which those interested in Analytical Feminism may meet and exchange ideas. The Society meets yearly at the Central Division meetings of the APA, and frequently organizes sessions for the Eastern Division and Pacific Divisions as well. Information can be found on our website:
http://faculty.rcc.edu/crasnow/SAF.html
Membership in the Society is open to all who are interested in and concerned with issues in Analytical Feminism. Annual dues are $15 for regularly employed members, $5 for students, unemployed, underemployed and retired members. To join, send your check for the appropriate amount payable to the Society for Analytical Feminism to Sharon Crasnow at the address above.
Forgive my very late reporting, but even though it was almost a month ago already, I still think that it is worth saying something about the wonderful Society for Analytical Feminism conference in Kentucky at the beginning of April. You can see the program on this blog or at the SAF website. I came away with the strong impression that feminist philosophy is indeed very healthy, thriving, in fact. Now, I am bound to be somewhat biased on this topic, since I was one of the organizers of the conference (as well as being a presenter), but I do not think that my bias has compromised my judgment too badly. Time will tell.
Kentucky was lovely and green, if wet. Sorry that the picture doesn’t do Kentucky more justice, but it did rain rather viciously on the first day and most of that night. In my defense, however, the picture does have very green grass and horses. Still this has nothing to do with philosophy, so let me get to the interesting stuff.
The theme of the conference was Analytical Feminism’s Contributions to Traditional Philosophy. The papers that were presented over the greater part of three days clearly were representative of this idea, though it was not the explicit theme of most (with the exception of Ann Cudd’s closing plenary presentation). There were papers in epistemology (including philosophy of science), metaphysics (questions of gender and identity primarily), and values (ethics and social an political philosophy), all traditional areas of philosophy, but with feminist concerns at the forefront in two ways. First, the papers were embedded not just in the analytic tradition but in the feminist variant of that tradition that is now maturing. The papers reflect a conversation within the philosophical tradition as a whole but especially with feminists working in that tradition. Second, the papers point towards the contributions (as the conference title suggests) that feminist discourse can provide in the growth of the analytical tradition as a whole.
Here is an example. When Libby Potter discusses “Hybrid Values”, she begins with but refines a notion of social practices that she finds in Alisdair McIntyre’s work. A discussion of propositions and propositional attitudes provides a bridge to the epistemic and the work of Elizabeth Anderson and other feminists thinkers offers the idea that there are hybrid values (hybrids between epistemic and social or moral values) that we can see in practices such as feminist consciousness raising. So she engages with the tradition but at the same time offers a resource for addressing a current concern in epistemology and philosophy of science. Though using her notion of hybrid values specifically in relation to feminist work, the idea that there are practices of knowledge production that incorporate values that are at the same time epistemic and social/moral provides another way of thinking about the vexing questions that have troubled not only feminist but most epistemologists who take seriously the idea that knowledge is social.
Another example is Kristina Rolin’s “Defending Critical Contextual Empiricism” in which she responds to objections raised to Longino’s contextual empiricism. What is striking about this paper is that it is a conversation within feminist epistemology itself, but again about issues that are not just feminist issues. The concerns about relativism that are raised run throughout the literature in philosophy of science at least since Kuhn. The idea that contextualist epistemology might be compatible with Longino’s contextualism is worth exploring. In each of these cases, the papers are embedded in the analytic tradition both methodologically and in terms of content.
I mention these papers in epistemology because it is sometimes harder to acknowledge feminist contributions in epistemology than it is to see that there are such contributions in ethics, social and political philosophy, and metaphysics (though the recognized contributions in metaphysics might be thought of as more circumscribed than in the other areas and mostly confined to issues of gender and identity). As Ann Cudd pointed out in her talk “Resistance is Not Futile: Analytical Feminism’s Contributions to Political Philosophy”, the role and contribution of feminist thought is more readily acknowledged in political philosophy and ethics than in other areas.
The philosophical problems that feminists are dealing with are not problems solely for feminism but they are often problems that surface in feminism because they are philosophical problems and grappling with them in relation to feminism can produce insights that are applicable elsewhere. If one is a feminist, this may well be where you want to do your grappling.
Look for more from this conference. Some of these papers are already committed for publication in a variety of venues, but Anita Superson and I hope we will soon have an anthology that will display the breadth and depth of the current work in analytical feminism. My apologies to all the authors of the papers that I have not specifically mentioned. The papers were uniformly of high quality and there were so many good ideas!
I was in San Francisco over the weekend and while wandering around the de Young Museum looking at American art, S and I ran into some people that he knew. One of these was a psychotherapist from a mid-western urban center. Her patients were almost entirely from one of the major universities located where she lived. We chatted a bit in that way that one does when you are trying to get to know another person a little and very quickly. In the course of that discussion, I told her that I was a philosopher. “Many of my patients are graduate students and the women in philosophy and the sciences are really struggling.” She told me that she had one woman patient who had recently just given up and quit, finding the environment in her graduate program too inhospitable, particularly after two of her female friends quit. “What is it about women and philosophy?” she asked me. I pointed out that it could simply be that there were fewer women in the field that made it harder for women to enter it, but of course this isn’t a very good explanation because many of the fields where women are now 50% were fields where men once were the majority. Then I offered some of the other explanations that are sometimes offered. That there is the emphasis on the mind in philosophy and the association of women with the body is possible explanation of why there are fewer women. I didn’t get very far with this line of thought because we were joined by another couple and dropped the conversation. This was just as well I think because I didn’t really have a good, coherent explanation, though I would have been interested in exploring it with her.
Here was someone outside of the profession commenting on a feature of it that so many of us have noticed from the inside. I felt something almost like relief that this psychotherapist was providing independent confirmation. No, we are not imagining it. Other people have noticed as well. I would have loved to have known more about her patient, the other women who had left the program, and so on. Was there something in particular about this program or is it a more general feature of philosophy that was the problem? I am not committed to any particular explanation but rather suspect that there are a variety of expanatory factors that all contribute to varying degrees in specific causes but that they may be all causally relevant in a variety of ways that are difficult to sort out. Investigating by asking people why they leave instead of just guessing (and by “asking” I mean asking through good quantitative methodology) seems like an essential first step to understanding what is and is not causally relevant.
I hesitated to post this story because some of the comments about philosophers and the APA more specifically have been focused on how unpleasant the profession is for women and the psychotherapist’s experience would seem to support that. I am wondering how useful it is to dwell on the negative. Here is another confirmation that it is bad for women in the profession (at least in this one urban university’s philosophy graduate program). What are we to make of it? Reporting that the profession is particularly difficult for women is important for audiences that do not know this, but most of the readers of this blog are aware of it already, so this story has limited usefulness beyond reinforcing what we already believe. But noting that the story is true and that its truth is not particularly helpful in moving us to action is itself worth pointing out. It is important to be clear about, acknowledge, and document the fact that there are not many women in the field, but this is just the beginning. From here we need to move to the next step. How do we re-create philosophy as a profession that doesn’t drive women into therapy but rather is part of a fulfilling life? We don’t really need more evidence that this is not where philosophy is at the moment but rather ideas and plans about how to be different. Still, I would have liked to have finished that conversation.
In a previous post I mentioned the CSW (APA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession) panel Strategizing Changes in the Culture and Ideology of Philosophy at the Pacific APA. Here is a brief report on that panel along with a set of weblinks that Ann Garry distributed. Many of these links you may have seen elsewhere (some of them were mentioned on the SWIP and FEAST lists) but it is nice to have them all in one place.
The four members of the panel spoke briefly. Ann Garry started off with an account of the resources that you will see below and the motivations that gave rise to them. They are the result of several months of discussions on a variety of listserves including SWIP land FEAST lists. Ann also mentioned one thread which focused on the percentage of women applicants for jobs this year. Several listserves members had done informal counts of women applicants in their departments. These numbers were disturbingly low (10-17%). Ann noted that she had been inspired to do a similar count after reading these reports. Her figures were higher. Having better information on the number of women applying for and getting jobs came up again in the discussion period (see below).
Alice MacLachlan was next with the story of how she came to set up the Feminist Philosophy Draft Exchange after a FEAST meeting last year where she mentioned that such an exchange would be a good idea. The next thing she knew everyone was saying that they liked her idea and asking when she would have it up and running. The draft exchange is a google group and has quickly grown as a way of sharing information. It has several discussion threads, 97 members, a page for posting conference announcements, several syllabi, but only one online draft so far! There’s a lot of interest in the idea but so far people have been reluctant to post drafts. Alice finished her talk by wondering why.
Lindsay Thompson from the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins gave an account of working with a committee appointed to do research of how to improve the retention of women faculty. They had collected data and had put together a report but the members of the committee came to think that the report was just going to join all the other reports up on some shelf. They came to believe that the way to truly change things for women in the academy was to work to change the culture by using various strategies to subvert the current ideology. So rather than employing institutional changes alone (policies that stopped the tenure clock and so on) they were working informally to make the institution friendlier for women. Lindsay offered to share strategies to any who were interested.
I was the last panelist and spoke about the Chicago panel, the difference in the way women’s organizations in other disciplines had approached the status of women in their professions (sociology, history, and psychology had all infiltrated the political hierarchy of their professional organizations), the work of the CSW over the past several years, the question of data collection, and the more general question of what to do next. The discussion was then opened to everyone. Some of the interesting exchanges that I remember were questions about women applying for and getting jobs (as mentioned above). I noted that this was one of the key projects that the CSW had been working on. David Schrader, the Executive Director of the APA, was at the session and spoke to the issue. The APA had hoped to collect this data this year but the transition to a new computer system seems to have created problems about this. The good news is that the new system ought to make such data collection much simpler. The bad news is that we are still waiting. One of the reasons why this data collection is important is that there are still reports that it is women who are getting all the jobs. As Lindsay Thompson pointed out, data collection isn’t the solution but it is an essential tool in the arsenal of strategies for changing ideology. David Schrader also pointed out that one of the reasons that the strategy of infiltrating the organization politically was difficult was because the APA is very much less centralized than other professional organizations. But he also noted that his could be positive as well because there were lots of ways in. He urged women to self-nominate or nominate each other for committees other than the CSW or the Committee on Inclusiveness, committees where they are well-represented.
Another question led to some discussion of the relationship between being a woman in philosophy and feminist philosophy. Since much of the available support for women in philosophy revolves around feminist philosophy, women who do not identify themselves as feminist philosophers sometimes feel that they have nowhere to turn. Somehow, I felt that this issue was never fully addressed. The conversation always turned back to feminist philosophy without addressing the question of women philosophers specifically and separately. I have posted on this issue previously here.
This last issue intersects with my personal. Coming out of graduate school in 1980 I saw myself as a philosopher of science and not as a feminist philosopher. When asked if I could teach feminist philosophy at a job interview, I politely replied that though I was prepared to teach in new areas, this was not my area of specialization or competence. At that time, I didn’t feel an affinity for feminist thought and though I considered myself a feminist, I did not see that there was any connection between feminism and the philosophy that I did. By the end of the decade, I realized that many of the issues interesting to me in philosophy of science were the issues that feminist philosophers of science were working on, but I also was beginning to recognize that many of the choices that I had made and the insecurities that I felt as a philosopher were constrained and sometimes shaped by the fact that I was a woman. This was the beginning of the integration of my professional and personal life.
My overall assessment of the panel? I think that continuing to search for strategies to change the ideology of philosophy is a good idea and having conversations like these is one of the many steps that can be taken. But there was a lot of exhaustion and discouragement on the faces and in the voices of those who were there. I think the panelists were more upbeat than the audience, perhaps because we were each engaged in some sort of activity that we felt was contributing.
Resources:
Web resources or books about programs or containing data (most mentioned on SWIP-L or FEAST-L):
Barnard study that Alison Wylie co-authored: Women, Work and the Academy Report on-line:
APA-Committee on the Status of Women (there are two different “resource” links on the site):
Blogs:
Last week the Pacific Division of the APA met. For a very brief, visual summary, see this post at Feminist Philosophers. I found the meeting truly interesting for a change. It wasn’t so much the sessions, though there were good sessions, but rather the professional dynamics that were visible in more informal interactions, though these “informal interactions” were fueled by the sessions. Here are my “highlights”, though some of them might be more appropriately referred to as “lowlights”. I acknowledge that this report on my Pacific APA may bear little or no resemblance to your APA!
Update: Check out Philosophy’s Sexism at the APA particularly the comments. I think these are discussions we need to be having. What are we ourselves doing to keep these sexist practices in place?
The APA’s Committee on the Status of Women is sponsoring a special session at the Pacific Division meeting next week in Pasadena (see the complete program here).
Thursday, March 20
1:00-4:00 p.m.
Topic: Strategizing Changes in the Culture and Ideology of Philosophy
Chair: Robin S. Dillon (Lehigh University)
Ann Garry (California State University–Los Angeles)
Alice MacLachlan (York University)
Lindsay Thompson (Johns Hopkins University)
Sharon Crasnow (Riverside Community College-Norco)
You will see that the program I have listed here is slightly different from that in the printed program given that two of the scheduled panelists will be unable to attend. The idea of the session is that it is a follow-up to the Central Division session of last year blogged about at Lemmings and at Knowledge and Experience. One of the key features of that Central Division session was a paper by Sally Haslanger, “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)” that has since been widely distributed.
The Central Division session started off a lively discussion not only on those blogs but also on several feminist philosophy listserves including the SWIP-list and the FEAST-list. The upcoming session is designed as a way of keeping the conversation going by looking at what as happened since and discussing some concrete projects that address the low participation and limited persistence of women in philosophy. So Alice MacLachlan will discuss a Feminist Publishing Support group that she has set up online and Lindsay Thompson will discuss her participation in a university-wide initiative on the status of women.
The format will be a panel discussion rather than formal papers and the hope is that we will be doing some serious brainstorming. I will report back on the results after the session. Please join us if you are in Pasadena.
While this post is on objectivity more generally it is specifically about Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison.
There are three main points that I took away from the book, though there is much more there that others might be interested in. The first is that objectivity is not a univocal concept. This isn’t a particularly surprising point for those who are familiar with philosophical literature on objectivity. Lisa Lloyd, Heather Douglas, and Marianne Janack has all written articles in which they have identified a variety of senses of “objectivity”. But the way in which Daston and Galison identify the various different concepts of objectivity is different. Rather than looking at one moment, an abstract philosophical “now”, they examine what they take to be concepts of objectivity that emerge at different moments in the history of science. They do this through an examination of the use of images in science (atlases which are used in a variety of ways to inform our and the experts’ understanding of the phenomena). Their contention is that these images track different epistemic virtues, which they identify as both virtues of science and of those that do science.
This leads to the second key idea, that “objectivity” can function as a stand-in for a slew of epistemic virtues rather than the pre-eminent virtue that it sometimes taken to be. This reminds me of Alison Wylie’s idea about how to reconceive objectivity. She too takes objectivity to be a shorthand for set of epistemic virtues, while also pointing out that at any given time we may not be able to maximize all these virtues. In fact, they frequently compete with each other and a judgment is made about which are more important in the particular context. While the list of epistemic virtues that Wylie has in mind is something like simplicity, conservativeness, empirical adequacy, maybe fecundity (some variation on a list that Kuhn and others have proposed), Daston and Galison are looking at three (actually four) different sets of virtues proposed in the different periods that they examine.
The third idea follows from the historical approach that they take. It is that the concept of objectivity can change. Changing, or reconfiguring a concept of objectivity that is useful for feminist philosophy of science has been a project that a number of feminist philosophers have been involved in and so the approach that book offers lends support to that project.
There are some questions that the book raises for me however. Virtues are virtues in relation to a particular goal. It would seem that if what are taken to be virtues change there are at least two ways in which this can happen. Virtues can change because the idea of how to achieve a goal changes or they can change because the goal changes. So, for instance, at one time chastity might be considered a virtue of women. It is a virtue because women are to be mothers of the children in a patriarchy and their chastity helps to ensure that the children they bear will indeed be the children of the appropriate father. But chastity might cease to be a virtue (as perhaps it has) and there are at least two ways in which this might happen. It might be the case that patriarchy ceases to have the hold on society that it once did and so the importance of linking a child to a particular father is diminished in society. This would be a case where the goal has changed. It also can turn out that the method for obtaining the goal might not work any longer in which case the virtue also ceases to be a virtue. So, if birth control is effective, chastity is no longer necessary.
So how does this work in the case of objectivity? What goals changed or was it that methods failed to work? Daston and Galison talk about the goals for which objectivity is a virtue in terms of the fears that people had of various ways in which we might fail to attain knowledge. As they see it, the different types of objectivity are each aimed at addressing these fears and the fears change. So, they begin by describing an ideal that they call “truth to nature”. With truth to nature the goal is to capture the real natures of the things that are being depicted. The fear is that the variations that individual examples of those things might exhibit will prevent us from seeing their true natures. After a while, a new ideal of objectivity emerges. This is what they call mechanical objectivity. This idea (the only one that they consistently refer to as “objectivity”) involves avoiding interpretation and mechanically reproducing nature (think of photography). The fear here is that we insert ourselves into understanding nature and we rather need to record what is actually happening. The interpretation is seen as a distortion. Which of the two ways that a characteristic can cease to be a virtue is happening in this account? For Daston and Galison it isn’t clear whether the goal has changed or the change has to do with a change in ideas on how to achieve the goal. I think that minimally understanding objectivity requires investigating what kind a virtue we think it is and this means being clear on what goals we are trying to achieve. Daston and Galison have a very interesting way of telling the story that they choose to tell but in the end I am not sure to what extent it illuminates the kinds of questions that are currently raised about scientific objectivity, particularly those that have to do with science and values.
Society for Analytical Feminism
2nd Conference
Analytical Feminist Contributions
to Traditional Philosophy
Sponsored by the Dean of Arts and Sciences
and the Office of the Vice President
University of Kentucky
Friday, April 4th
12-1 pm Registration (at desk near hotel meeting rooms)
1 pm: First Session
A. Breckinridge Room
Chair: Betsy Hopkins (University of Kentucky)
Speaker: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
“Standards of Rationality and Intrinsic Worth”
B. Clay Room
Chair: Libby Potter (Mills College)
Speaker: Phyllis Rooney (Oakland University)
“Toward a Feminist Metaepistemology”
2 pm: First Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
Plenary Speaker: Ann Garry (California State, Los Angeles)
“Implications of Intersectionality”
3 pm: Second Session
A. Breckinridge Room
Chair: Christa Hodapp (University of Kentucky)
Speaker: Carol Hay (Bryn Mawr College)
“Rationality and Oppression”
B. Clay Room
Chair: Heidi Grasswick (Middlebury College)
Speaker: Libby Potter (Mills College)
“Hybrid Values”
C. Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Jen McWeeny (John Carroll University)
Speaker: Nancy McHugh (Wittenberg University)
“More than Skin Deep: Situated Communities and the Case of Agent Orange in Viet Nam”
4-4:30 pm: Coffee & snacks/registration (hallway outside meeting rooms)
4:30 pm: Third Session
A. Breckinridge Room
Chair: Carol Hay (Bryn Mawr College)
Speaker: Anne Barnhill (New York University)
“Feminist Sexual Virtue and Feminist Sexual Vice”
B. Clay Room
Chair: Janine Jones (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
Speaker: Jen McWeeny (John Carroll University)
“The Epistemology of Margaret Cavendish: A Seventeenth Century Theory of Embodied Cognition”
C. Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Pieranna Garavaso (University of Minnesota, Morris)
Speaker: Sharon Crasnow (Riverside Community College, Norco) “Resources for Feminist Epistemology: Models, Representation, and Objectivity”
5:30 pm: Second Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
Plenary Speaker: Louise Antony (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
“Democracy is Not an Epistemic Value”
7:30: Welcome Dinner at Radisson; pre-registration required; cash bar; Daniel Boone Room
Saturday, April 5th
8-9 am Registration (at desk outside meeting rooms)
9 am: Third Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Sharon Crasnow (Riverside Community College, Norco)
Plenary Speaker: Alison Wylie (University of Washington)
“What Knowers Know Well: Standpoint Theory and the Foundation of Gender Archaeology”
10 am: Fifth Session
A. Breckinridge Room
Chair: Helga Varden (University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana)
Speaker: Andrea Westlund (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) “Rethinking Relational Autonomy”
B. Clay Room
Chair: Phyllis Rooney (Oakland University)
Speaker: Kristina Rolin ( Helsinki School of Economics)
“Defending Critical Contextual Empiricism”
C. Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Lisa McLeod (Guilford College)
Speaker: Nancy Daukas (Guilford College)
“Why Feminist Epistemology Needs More Virtue”
11 am: Fourth Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
Plenary Speaker: Julia Driver (Dartmouth College)
“Feminism and Moral Realism”
12 — 1:30 pm: Lunch (local downtown restaurants)
1:30 pm: Fifth Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Clare Batty (University of Kentucky)
Plenary Speaker: Sally Haslanger (MIT)
“Social Categories, Social Structure, and Ideology Critique”
2:30 pm: Sixth Session
A. Breckinridge Room
Chair: Anne Barnhill (NYU)
Speaker: Helga Varden (University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana)
“The Injustice of Anti-Abortion and Anti-Homosexuality Laws”
B. Clay Room
Chair: Kristina Rolin (Helsinki School of Economics)
Speaker: Heidi Grasswick (Middlebury College)
“Sharing Knowledge: Querying the Norms”
C. Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Alison Wolf (Simpson College)
Speaker: Pieranna Garavaso (University of Minnesota, Morris) “Personal Identity and Gender Identity”
3:30-4 pm: Coffee; Registration (hallway outside meeting rooms)
4 pm: Sixth Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Sharon Crasnow (Riverside Community College, Norco)
Plenary Speaker: Miriam Solomon (Temple University)
“Discerning Feminist Empiricism”
5 pm: Seventh Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
Plenary Speaker: Robin Dillon (Lehigh University)
“A Feminist View of Vice and Virtue”
6 pm: Dinner on your own; local downtown restaurants
Sunday, April 6th
9 am: Eighth Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Sharon Crasnow (Riverside Community College, Norco)
Plenary Speaker: Charlotte Witt (University of New Hampshire)
“Humans, Persons and Social Individuals”
10 am: Ninth Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
Plenary Speaker: Ann Cudd (University of Kansas)
“Resistance is Not Futile: Analytical Feminism’s Contributions to Political Philosophy”
11 – 12:30: Lunch on your own; local downtown restaurants
12:30 pm: Tenth Plenary Session
Daniel Boone Room
Chair: Anita Superson (University of Kentucky, University of Michigan)
Plenary Speaker: Mariam Thalos (University of Utah)
“The Self-construction of the Self”
1:30 pm: Seventh Session
A. Breckinridge Room
Chair: Elisia Taylor (University of Kentucky)
Speaker: Marilyn Friedman (Washington University)
“Female Terrorists: Gender and Meaning”
B. Clay Room
Chair: Andrea Westlund (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)
Speaker: Sonya Charles (Cleveland State University)
“Stoljar’s Challenge: How Should Feminist Autonomy Theorists Respond to the Problem of Oppression?”
Women, Work, and the Academy written by Alison Wylie, Janet R. Jakobsen, and Gisela Fosado in now available from the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW). There is also a video of a panel on the topic and other information on the website.
It is interesting to ask about to what extent the issues that women philosophers have in the academy are part of a more general phenomenon and to what extent they are endemic to philosophy as a profession. It is clear that there is some compounding of causes that results in the overall under-representation of women in the profession. But just exactly what is it. Knowledge and Experience has some links to further thoughts on these issues.
A Philosopher's Walk 