Feminist Theory: What's Coming Up

Here's a round-up of deadlines for U.S. conferences and cfp's in feminist philosophy:

Pacific SWIP is hosting a session at the Pacific APA in Vancouver on April 8-12. Essays for the session are being solicited on the topic of "FEMINIST POLITICS FOR DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS." Deadline is September 14 (coming right up!) and can be submitted to Christina Bellon. More info. here.

The 3rd FEMMSS conference will be March 19-21 at the University of South Carolina. This year's theme is "THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE" and the deadline for submitting paper abstracts or panel proposals is September 15 (Yikes! Also coming right up!). Info here.

Midwest SWIP is September 19-21 at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Program here.

A CFP on reasoning and political engagement:

Call for Papers
REASONING FOR CHANGE

We invite submissions for a special issue of the journal Informal Logic that will address the relationship of reasoning and argumentation to political change and progress.

Informal Logic (www.informallogic.ca) is a peer-reviewed open access online journal. It addresses topics related to reasoning and argumentation in theory and practice. It is multi-disciplinary, welcoming theoretical and empirical research from any pertinent field.

This issue of Informal Logic will focus on “Reasoning for Change.” Whether we seek to redress existing social inequities such as sexism and racism or halt the decay of our natural environments, the operations of reason can aid the achievement of social and political progress. In turn, political engagement can affect how people reason, and be involved with theories about reasoning and argumentation.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:
What forms of reasoning are most effective in bringing about change in social, political, or environmental circumstances?
What forms of reasoning encourage or discourage activism and political engagement?
Which types of reasoning entrench existing views and which encourage change?
How may activism affect a person’s or a community’s reasoning and argumentation?
Do specific models of argumentation help or hinder understandings across differences (social, cultural, political, or religious differences, for example)?
What are the liberatory potentials of monological as opposed to dialogical models of reasoning and argumentation?
What are the political implications of the distinction between formal and informal logic?

The editors for this special issue are Catherine Hundleby, Department of Philosophy, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada (hundleby@uwindsor.ca), and Phyllis Rooney, Department of Philosophy, Oakland University, Michigan, USA (rooney@oakland.edu).
The submission deadline is Monday, February 10, 2009 and submission information is available at www.informallogic.ca.

Christina Bellon has asked for volunteers to write articles for the INTERNET ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY in their areas of feminist theory expertise. She's posted a wishlist here.

Gender Equity: False Hopes and False Dreams

Over at The Philosophy Job Market blog, Rebecca Kukla gave us a tally on how this year's job market is shaping up along gender lines. According to the hiring announcements that Leiter has posted, and with all the caveats needed for such informal word-of-mouth data collection, only about 19% of the tenure-track jobs have gone to women. (N.B.: The APA has promised to collect accurate job market statistics this year, but the collection and analysis will take some time yet.)

Since women have been earning about 25 to 30% of PhD's in philosophy, this looks like there are some social or structural barriers to the hiring of women.

This observation set off a fusillade of criticisms, both on the PJM blog and on the SWIP list. Among women in philosophy, one concern is that collecting such statistics carries the implicit message that women who do not choose to pursue a tenure-track teaching career are somehow in the wrong.

This appears to me to be a misunderstanding of the meaning of statistics (and see Kate's earlier response to similar worries). Statistics can only give us a picture of a collective. They cannot tell us anything, much less anything normative, about individuals. They can't say that a certain woman should have been hired in a certain department, or that a certain man should not have.

Indeed, these statistics are completely mute about how many people with PhD's in philosophy move into (or try to move into) tenure track jobs. It is entirely appropriate that some people get a degree and use it for some purpose other than university teaching in philosophy departments. Or they use it for no purpose--they go into another field entirely.

The statistics only point out that men are hired into tenure track philosophy jobs at a disproportionate rate. And the best explanation for this, based on reams of social science research, is that there is explicit and implicit sexism in academia.

But if you don't see my point, then perhaps you'll find some solidarity here instead:
"CEO Barbie Criticized for Promoting Unrealistic Career Images."

Pacific SWIP CFP

Below is the Call for Papers for the fall meeting of Pacific SWIP, with a fast-approaching deadline.
A couple of great ideas have been added to the program--workshops on pedagogy and on publishing, and an Author-meets-Critic session that discusses a not-yet-published manuscript.
These sessions should generate wide interest--who wouldn't benefit from sharing ideas about teaching and publishing? They will be a great venue for getting to know other women in philosophy, especially women outside our narrower research areas.

CALL FOR PAPERS

SOCIETY FOR WOMEN IN PHILOSOPHY

Pacific Division
Fall Meeting: October 13-14, 2007

California State University, Sacramento
Local Host: Christina M. Bellon

Submissions on any topic are welcome. For this fall's meeting, P-SWIP is especially interested in works in progress and author meets critics sessions. Authors with completed manuscripts are invited to submit abstracts. Paper submissions should be prepared for a presentation time of 20 minutes.

New Workshops!
This fall, SWIP will host two workshops, one on pedagogy (teaching women philosophers, as in teaching content provided by women philosophers, and teaching philosophy to women students) and another on publishing (the ins and outs of getting that manuscript published). Individuals interested in participating in one of the two workshops should contact Amy Coplan.

New AMC Session ­ Pre-Publication!
This fall, SWIP will also host an Author-Meets-Critics session, but with a twist ­ the author of a fully developed manuscript will meet with several critics to give commentary on the text prior to its publication. Too often, we hear authors begin their responses with "I wish I heard these criticisms BEFORE the book was published!". Well, this is that opportunity! Authors who would like to take this opportunity to have their manuscript critiqued pre-publication, and members willing to serve as critics, please submit a proposal with an abstract of the book manuscript to Amy Coplan. The manuscript must be available to distribute to the readers by Sept 20th.

SWIP members will be given priority, but others are welcome to submit their work. Some funds may be available to help support graduate student travel.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: September 10, 2007
Electronic submissions are encouraged.
Please send submissions to: Amy Coplan (acoplan@fullerton.edu)
Department of Philosophy, Cal State Fullerton, P.O. Box 6868
Fullerton, CA 92834-6868

Notification of acceptance will be sent by September 20, 2007.
More info on the P-SWIP webpage.

Midwest SWIP Fall 2008 CFP

A note about Society for Women in Philosophy and their sponsored conferences:
SWIP is divided into regional groups in the U.S. -- East, Midwest, and Pacific. From what I can tell, the regional groupings serve little other than an administrative function.

Each group sponsors conferences at least annually. Eastern SWIP usually meets in the spring, sometimes in conjunction with other conferences. For example, in 2004 Eastern SWIP met the day before a conference sponsored by the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State on the feminism-related topic of "Epistemologies of Ignorance." Midwestern SWIP holds a conference in the fall and one in the spring, and the Pacific group usually meets twice a year. The conferences are not strictly regional, though, since presenters may come from any area of the country. Indeed, since academics do move (at least once, from graduate school to other employment, and often more than that), the regional memberships do not always represent the members' current academic homes.

SWIP also organizes multiple sessions at each of the three APA division meetings, and often organizes sessions in conjunction with other groups with overlapping interests, such as the Society for Analytical Feminism or the APA's Committee on the Status of Women.

There is also a SWIP group in the UK and one in Canada.

I've attended two Eastern SWIP conferences and one Canada-SWIP. They are always programs that range over a wide variety of philosophical disciplines, and are a great place to network, especially for graduate students and young professionals. (See Sharon's earlier post here.)

Organizers of the Eastern and Pacific SWIP conferences, in particular, make an effort to construct programs that include both papers focusing specifically on feminism and papers that address women in philosophy more generally. That is, there are papers on feminist bioethics alongside history of philosophy papers alongside social epistemology and social theory. In addition to a number of feminist papers, they attract submissions that analyze, critique, and extend the work women philosophers (e.g, papers on Hannah Arendt).

Although I've never attended a Midwest SWIP conference, their cfp's and programs have always struck me as being more specifically focused on feminism and women's issues while being more inclusive in terms of format, encouraging presentation styles outside of the typical philosopher-at-the-lectern-reading format. (A footnote to this inclusive message, though, is that, as an analytic philosopher, I don't feel as welcome to submit to the Midwest as to the Eastern--I don't know if that's just me or if I'm picking up on a message that analytic philosophers have other venues.)

And now, the announcement:

Midwest Society for Women in Philosophy
Call for Papers

****************************************************
Midwestern SWIP has always had a practice of making
its programs spaces for work that develops feminist
ideas, theory, philosophy and practice. We have not
included on our programs work that is not engaged in
feminism.

At this time, we amend this practice so our programs
are spaces for work that, whatever else it does,
connects themes of feminism and male supremacy with
themes of anti-racism and white supremacy.

Midwest SWIP is an interdisciplinary conference with
a particular emphasis on troubling the discipline of
philosophy and the theory/practice dichotomy.

****************************************************
Fall 2007 Division Meeting
October 26-28, 2007
University of Toledo, Toledo, OH

Deadline for submissions: August 1, 2007

We invite work in all areas relating to feminist
anti-racist theory/practice, from political theory and
ethics to metaphysics and epistemology as well as
papers, panels, and performances that engage feminist
anti-racist praxis and theorizing more broadly.

Papers, poetry, panel proposals and/or other proposals
and queries should be sent via email to each of the
following:
Gaile Pohlhaus at pohlhag@muohio.edu
AND
Sophie Vick at VickSoph@msu.edu

P-SWIPping

I spent last Saturday at the annual Southern California SWIP. As frequently happens when I go to this spring meeting, I found myself thinking back to the first SWIP meeting I attended. It was at Ann Garry’s house in Pacific Palisades and it must have been an early one, though in the blur of graduate school memories, I am not really sure. It was probably 1976 or 1977. I remember that Nancy Cartwright was there and someone presented a paper on make-up. My friend from graduate school, Joanne Waugh, and I were the only women not dressed in denim and we felt very out of place. I think we were out of place pretty much everywhere in those days.

This weekend. what really struck me as I remembered that meeting was how SWIP had turned out to be an unexpected anchor in my life, even though it was 15 years before I went to another meeting. I thought that feminism and philosophy really had nothing to do with each other and I did not really understand what the point of the meeting was. I wasn’t going to do “feminist” philosophy just because I was a woman! I mean, I was a feminist in the sense that every sensible woman who came of age in the 60s was. But it took me those intervening 15 years to begin to understand the ways in which gender had played a role in my life as a philosopher and was absolutely relevant to my philosophical work. So that first meeting serves as a benchmark and gives me some insight into the ways in which we can be blind to the forces that shape our own lives.

This particular meeting was great though small. Sandra Harding hosted at UCLA and Libby Potter, Helen Longino, and Alison Wylie each presented papers on gender and science in the afternoon. Libby is working on practice theory and the idea that epistemic practices and moral practices could be “overlapping” practices might give us some insight into the dual role of the epistemic and moral in the sciences. Helen’s paper reviewed her idea that there might be feminist epistemic/pragmatic virtues that differed from the “standard” list (sometimes attributed to Kuhn, but mentioned by many). This was an illuminating update of this idea, which was spelled out in her 1995 “Gender, Politics, and the Theoretical Virtues” Synthese 104: 383-397. One of the most interesting aspects of her presentation was the focus on the ways in which each of these lists, the alternative feminist and the traditional virtues, are pragmatic, but at the same time epistemic virtues. Alison looked at the way interests in gender issues had emerged in archaeology in the 1980s and how, though not explicitly feminist in origins, interest in gender seems to have led to a more explicitly feminist archaeology. The developments in this particular discipline provide a case study for further investigating the role of standpoint in the sciences.

All in all, the meeting was a welcome respite from the madness of end of semester grading and a chance to talk with friends. Thanks to SWIP for providing one means through which the much-needed intellectual nurturing of women philosophers takes place.

Update: I just thought it would be nice to add pictures from the prior year P-SWIP. Also check on the P-SWIP webpages.

CFP: Canadian SWIP

Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy Conference 2007
October 12-14, University of Alberta, Edmonton

Conference theme: Communicating Feminisms

The 2007 Program Committee invites submissions on any feminist philosophical topic that relates to the conference theme, broadly construed.

Keynote speaker: Dr. Moira Gatens
Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow
Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney

Feminist scholarship continues to contribute massively to knowledge across the disciplines, to public policy formation, and to popular discourse. Yet as feminist research has become more diverse and developed, perceptions of it are often reductive or one-sided; this has tended to limit the extent to which feminist methods and insights are communicated in extra-academic contexts. This conference seeks to develop new strategies for representing feminism and communicating feminist research to audiences within the academy and beyond. How can feminist theorists be in conversation with empirically-minded scholars? How can scholars of feminist philosophy draw on the experiences and insights of the world outside the university to make better theory? How do feminists of different theoretical schools and political persuasions collaborate across our intellectual differences? What connections might be drawn between extra-academic feminist political practice and feminist philosophy?

Submissions of long abstracts (1000 words) are invited (for eventual presentations of 20 minutes, or not more than 3000 words). Submission reequirements and full contact information can be found at
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~cheyes/research/CSWIP.htm

DEADLINE: March 12 2007.