Gender, Race and Philosophy: The Blog

More facts on the climate survey

Let me respond here to some more questions about the climate survey of the report that we received from Elizabeth Harmon as well as others. 

Only the Feminist and Gender Advisory Board members filled out the survey from which we gathered our findings, but in order to decide how to fill out their surveys some circulated our questions to others, as was done in Liz's case. We made clear that people could gather information in whatever way they saw fit.

We also made doubly and triply clear, by restating this in several places, that they could leave departments blank in cases where they could not make any assessment. We made sure to include this both in every letter we sent explaining what the survey was and how to fill it out, and also in the survey itself. 

We emphasized again more than once that we were interested in the present, not the past. Students considering applying to graduate school this year need current information, not old history. 

Here is the actual list of questions we put on our survey (though it was formatted a little better than what you'll see below): 

Questions on the climate for women:

 

1. In this department, women students face more difficulties because of their gender.

Strongly agree            Strongly disagree

5            4            3            2             1

No knowledge/ Not applicable

 

2. In this department, women students take an equally active role as do men students in seminars, symposia, and the life of the department.

Strongly agree            Strongly disagree

5            4            3            2              1

No knowledge/ Not applicable

 

3. In this department, women students are equally supported as men students in their research, teaching, and job applications.

Strongly agree            Strongly disagree

5            4            3            2             1

No knowledge/ Not applicable

 

            4. In this department, sexual harassment of female students is not a present day or ongoing concern.

Strongly agree            Strongly disagree

5            4            3            2             1

No knowledge/ Not applicable

 

Additional Comments on this Department:

 

I hope this information is helpful. 

regards,

Linda Alcoff

Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Trans and Queer Philosophy Programs

The Pluralists' Guide certainly generated a lot of heat, even before it went public. In this short post, I'm not going to address any of that heat.

Instead, I'd like to talk about one of the difficulties we faced in putting this site together, and one that I hope posting publicly will help. 

When we decided to cover under-represented areas, I felt it important, and Paul and Linda agreed, that we should cover GLBTTQ Philosophy. Since I had published in the field and had contacts with other philosophers working in the field, I thought I could make up an advisory  board, send out surveys, and see the results. 

I was wrong. Virtually nobody responded to the survey. Several people contacted me expressing their hope that we could generate such a list, but they did not feel fully qualified to fill out the survey. I had access to several reliable email lists of philosophers working in GLBTTQ Philosophy, but to no avail. In the end, the data generated for what are described on the site as "Tentative Lists" was worked out in actual conversation with the people on the advisory board and through sheer "grunt-work" -- checking on who was at which departments and what they had published, and looking through the meager survey results.

There are two obvious reasons for these difficulties: first, GLBTTQ philosophy is a fairly new field, and second, it is a fairly small field. My impression is that there are no departments that can be described as "strong in GLBTTQ Philosophy" in the same way that a department can be described as "strong in American Philosophy." That is, no department has multiple people working in that field and at the top of their game. This impression was reinforced by the difficulty of finding strong departments, and (depressingly) reinforced by the fact that the data showing which parts of the site are getting hits reveals that nobody's going to look at the GLBTTQ recommendations.

So I end this post with a plea, the same one that that appears on the site: please, if you have reliable information about strong programs in GLBTTQ Philosophy, or would be willing to serve on our advisory board, contact the site through our email: pluralistguidetophil@gmail.com

 

The Pluralist's Guide to Philosophy: the facts

The Pluralist’s Guide to Philosophy that I have been working on for over four years with Paul Taylor and Bill Wilkerson is not even officially public yet, but it is already getting slandered. A few facts for people to know:

1) The Pluralist’s Guide to Philosophy is meant to provide a resource of information on which graduate depts would be good bets for students wishing to pursue work in American Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race and Ethnicity, or GLBTQ Philosophy. The reports have been generated through expert surveys, and all of the information about methods, advisory boards, etc, is transparent on the site.

2) Our guide is entirely independent of every philosophy organization, including SPEP. Paul Taylor is not a member of SPEP nor a continental philosopher (though I have been trying to recruit him for years...). He and I created the project entirely ourselves, then recruited the excellent philosopher Bill Wilkerson. Many leaders of SPEP, the APA, and other organizations have voiced their encouragement to us because they are concerned that there needs to be more information about philosophy departments out there, and more than one source of information. But we, and they, want total independence.

3) Our methods were painstaking (thus the four years), but obviously limited as anything of this sort is when it is basically an “expert survey.” We tried to make our expert survey better than others by allowing respondents to do research, making our questions more specific so it was less of a beauty contest, and casting a more pluralist net of advisors. Again, information on our advisors, our methods, and our questions is all on the site. The responses are confidential---we don’t know who reported what, though we know who was asked and who sent in a response.

4) One blogger says “some” of our advisors are dead. John Haugeland is up on the continental list of advisors although he is recently deceased, because he in fact assisted in this report before he died.  

5) Much of the vitriol is going to the climate for women report, which reports problems at a few depts. We knew this would generate heat, but what are we to do when we get numerous very negative reports on these depts? Ignore them? We felt a responsibility to report the information we received when it was significant enough to warrant concern. We will update our report every year, so depts have a chance to change their rating. That’s the best we can do.

6) There is an inevitable problem of change occurring in departments between the time our report is finished and when it is made public. This is unavoidable, but updating the report every year will help announce new developments. We will also have a space for updated information about specific departments on the site itself, but this will be moderated by us to try to ensure its factual basis.

6) As viewers of the site may note, there are many departments not listed. We listed departments with positives in two categories: Strongly recommended and recommended. Some departments did not make the cut, and some departments did not have enough of a response to generate any information. It is true that our advisory lists are less than 100% comprehensive in their collective knowledge of the profession. That is inevitable. Suggestions for new board members, as well as self-suggestions, are always welcome. We can be reached at pluralistguidetophil@gmail.com 

We expected a defensive response to this attempt to provide more information on philosophy departments, but it is still disheartening that the vitriol is not fact-based, nor evidently concerned to support attempts to make philosophy more inclusive.

We have been helpfully offered the use of this blog site over the next three months as another avenue for fact-sharing, as well as comments and discussions, and we welcome the opportunity for exchange. 

Linda Martín Alcoff

 

 

 

 

Gooding-Williams on C-SPAN

Interview with Robert Gooding-Williams on his recent book, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/299941-4#

CFP: Gender, Sex, Race and the Family

CFP: Making Sense of Gender, Sex, Race and the Family

Humana.Mente – Journal of Philosophical Studies

Call for Papers Issue 22, July 2012

Making Sense of Gender, Sex, Race and the Family

Editors: Elena Casetta & Vera Tripodi

One of the main topics in analytic feminist philosophy is the notion of gender and it is widely held that it is a social constructed concept or category. Traditionally, the inquiry into the nature of gender has been focused on the relation between gender and sex, but recently an increasing number of analytic feminists is coming to consider the status of gender also in its correlation with the categories of race and family. Briefly, according to this approach, it would be a mistake to isolate conditions such as gender, race, class, age, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, economic position, family status: insofar as they are social constructions, all these notions differ from one society to another and women or men do not experience their membership in a gender, sex or race in the same way. But are really all these notions socially constructed? And, in case, are they constructed in the same way and to the same extent? And how can race and sex affect the way we perceive and shape our gender experience and gender expression? Are there different types of human bodies and different ways of sexually classifying them? What does make a woman (or man) a mother (or father)?; Is parenthood a biological or natural relationship? What defines a family?

This issue of Humana.Mente welcomes contributions addressing these and related questions, including the following topics:

The ontology of race and gender
Reproduction and sexuality
Non-human animals sexuality, reproduction, and “families”
Family and adoption
Reproduction, procreation and family
The science of race and sex
Gender, race, ethnicity and class
Man and masculinity
Sexuality and marriage
Identity, race and gender
Sex reassignment and personal identity
Motherhood and fatherhood
Transgender, transsexual, and queer sexualities
Gender and science
Marriage, same-sex unions and civil marriage

Furthermore, we invite to submit reviews of recent books (published after 2010), and commentaries of articles and books that could be of particular interest for the topics analyzed in this Issue.

Please send a document in an editable format suitable for blind review to:

Elena Casetta: elena.casetta AT unito.it
Vera Tripodi: vera.tripodi AT ub.edu

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: 2012 January 1st
PEER-REVIEWING PROCESS: 2012 January 7th to March 31st
NOTIFICATION OF ACCEPTANCE: 2012 April 2nd
FINAL VERSION DUE: 2012 April 30th

Instruction for Authors:
Max. length:
- PAPERS: 20 pp. (2400 characters with spaces per page – 50.000 types, blankets, notes and references included).
Papers must include an abstract (between 600 and 700 types) and a reference list (please use the author-date reference style).
- COMMENTARIES: 7 pp.
- BOOK REVIEWS: 4 pp.
Font: Bodoni 11 – Page Dimension: 15×23 cm
Margins: Sup 3,25 Inf 2,25 Left and Right 1,8

Language: English

New Book - Feminist Epistemology and Phil Science: Power in Knowledge

A new volume just out (cross-posted from SWIP-L):

FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE: POWER IN KNOWLEDGE, edited by Heidi Grasswick and published by Springer (as part of the Feminist Philosophy series edited by Elizabeth Potter).

The table of contents can be found here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-1-4020-6835-5#section=895294&page=1

Though this book is expensive (as are all Springer books), consider Springer's "MyCopy" option. If your library subscribes to one or more of Springer's e-book collections, you will be eligible to purchase a "MyCopy" version of this volume, either hard copy or electronic, for only $25. This means that if you are fortunate enough to be at an institution with a library that has the requisite subscriptions, you and your students could purchase the book reasonably, making class use a possibility.