CFP: Philosophy of Biology

The International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) is meeting July 25-29, 2007 in Exeter, England. Proposals are due February 15:

Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB)

Exeter (Great Britain), July 25-29, 2007

Since its inception, the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) has brought together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to discuss historical, conceptual, epistemological, political, institutional, and ethical issues of the life sciences in an open and informal setting. Over the past twenty-odd years, attendance has increased from about 60 participants to about 350 in Guelph, 2005. In 2007, we hope to continue our tradition of an inclusive and experimental approach, while meeting the challenge of increased attendance.

Scholars wishing to attend the meeting are now invited to submit session and paper proposals on the ISHPSSB website (visit http://www.ishpssb.org/meeting.html). Deadline for submissions is February 15, 2007, and abstracts should not exceed 500 words.

While individual paper submissions are welcome, we strongly encourage submission of session and panel discussion proposals. For the 2007 meeting, we especially seek sessions that

• are innovative and cross-disciplinary in content and/or format;
• strengthen the lines of communication among historians, philosophers, social scientists, and biologists;
• open conversations that lead to new ways of thinking about the life sciences and the disciplines that study it;
• bring together people of different disciplinary and national backgrounds.

The Society is open to proposals on any topic connected with the history, philosophy and social studies of the life sciences. For the 2007 meeting, we would especially welcome sessions in the following areas:

• Interdisciplinarity.
  
• Anthropology of the Life Sciences.
  
• Biology and Politics.
  
• Systems Biology.
  
• Biology beyond the Evolutionary Synthesis.
  

Upcoming conferences: PSA, 4S, HSS

In Vancouver this week, from Nov. 1 - 5, there are three concurrent science studies conferences:
the Philosophy of Science Association, the Society for the Social Studies of Science, and the History of Science Society.

The PSA, I am disappointed to say, seems to be featuring no talks explicitly on the topic of feminist approaches to philosophy of science, though a session on Friday afternoon may be smuggling them in. It is titled "Towards a more political philosophy of science." Some of us on this blog would rather not find feminist approaches always categorized as political, since the label seems to imply a particular bias. It is the exclusion of women and of feminist thought from science and philosophy of science that is biased, not the exploration of diverse points of view.


The 4S conference has feminist inquiry scheduled throughout, too many sessions to catalog here. But we will point out those sessions of particular interest to philosophers of science:
1. Our own, of course, scheduled for Thursday morning:
"How central are values in scientific reasoning?"
2. On Friday morning, a panel of papers on Miriam Solomon's social empiricism
3. A session of author meets critics on John Zammito's A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour on Friday afternoon.

Book announcements: Women & Technology

Two new books have recently appeared on women and technology:

Women, Gender, and Technology
Mary Frank Fox, Deborah G. Johnson, and Sue V. Rosser, eds. (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

This is an interdisciplinary investigation of the complex relationship between gender and technology. Each of the ten chapters explores a different aspect of how gender and technology work--and are at work--in particular domains, including film narratives, reproductive technologies, information technology, and the profession of engineering. The volume's contributors include representatives of over half a dozen different disciplines, and each provides a novel perspective on the foundational idea that gender and technology co-create one another.

Unfortunately, the table of contents is not yet available for viewing either at Amazon or at the University of Illinios website, so it is impossible to know who has contributed to the volume and on what topics without buying the book. Deborah Johnson is an ethicist who has written a textbook on computer ethics, so we can expect that there will be some contributions of interest to feminist theorists.

The other book is
Women and Information Technology: Research on Underrepresentation
Joanne McGrath Cohoon and William Aspray, eds. (MIT Press, 2006).

Computing remains a heavily male-dominated field even after twenty-five years of extensive efforts to promote female participation. The contributors to Women and Information Technology look at reasons for the persistent gender imbalance in computing and explore some strategies intended to reverse the downward trend. The studies included are rigorous social science investigations; they rely on empirical evidence--not rhetoric, hunches, folk wisdom, or off-the-cuff speculation about supposed innate differences between men and women.

This volume is focused on sociology rather than theory, but it will be interesting to examine the various types of explanations that are given for the continuing disparity in IT as well as evaluations of the remedies that have been implemented in educational settings.

Women in Philosophy: Making up a syllabus

One of the simplest things to do in promoting the full inclusion of women in careers (and other public spaces) where men are the predominate participants is to include them ourselves. For me, this means putting women's writing on my syllabi, inviting women lecturers to speak on campus, and encouraging my colleagues to do so also.

I'm teaching a course in Environmental Philosophy for the first time, and I've had less success in designing an inclusive syllabus than ever before. Among the required readings, there are 23 authors, and 4 of them are women (17%). This is a higher percentage than in many of the Environmental Ethics textbooks I looked at, but it's nothing to be proud of. Part of the difficulty is that the course centers on topics that have an epistemological or philosophy of science cast to them rather than being ethics-based, so I haven't assigned any ecofeminism. (I resist including feminist readings merely for the sake of including women because I think it tends to reinforce an artificial separation between 'mainstream' philosophy and feminist philosophy.) Among philosophers who write on issues in ecology and environmental science, Kristin Shrader-Frechette is the only woman I'm aware of, but suggestions would be appreciated!

To be and not be: The play is the thing

Who can you speak for? How can you speak about other people? How can you speak about other people when their experiences are marked by forms of oppression, such as racism, sexism and heterosexism that you don't share?

These are familiar questions from the age of identity politics. That age which had a hey-day in the 1980s and 90s may seem to be over. The rise of queer thought and theory, the deconstruction of race and gender, all reveal that identity is much more fluid than it seemed. Yet identities marked by oppression still deserve special consideration, however we understand them: socially constructed or biological, embraced or rejected.

One of the questions that remains is how to give voice to marginalized experience without presuming to speak for or appearing to speak authoritatively about those positions when one does not share the same marginalization. "How same must one be" is a related issue, but that begs the question (in the logical sense) of whether we must be the same, and whether we can be the same. Clearly full identity is never possible (even playing oneself involves pretending to a lost youth!), but how do we negotiate sensitive differences?

The issues of sameness and playing another person, are central to theatre. On stage, identities are always assumed. So, the problems of assuming "voice", that is speaking authoritatively from a particular personal and social position, have a particular urgency. How can a straight person play gay? man play woman? white play black?

J. Kelly Nestruck argues in "Playing it Safe" from the last issue of This Magazine (for those of you in the U.S., it's a Canadian analogue to Mother Jones) argues that such issues are killing radical political theatre. Notably, the native Canadian playwrite Tomson Highway will no longer pen dramas, but stick to monologic fiction. Moving away from a format that requires representative voices is needed because theatres shy away from scripts if they don't have a cast who share the marginalized experiences of the characters. Having native characters without adequate numbers of native actors entails shelved rather than performed plays.

Of course, dramatists have strategies for avoiding the "voice" conundrum. Instead of a performance, a reading may be put on, as Windsor Feminist Theatre attempted to do this summer with Ntozake Shange's choreopoem "For colored girls who've considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf". Yet avoiding the polish of a full performance can give the impression of disrespect, and of inattention, when quite the opposite is the case. Impressions, one might think, can be tutored by program notes, but these too can fail to be read or understood.

The misunderstanding has created a lot of discussion. Perhaps that is all one could really hope for. Yet I fear that this is a truly a harbinger of the death of radical theatre, as Nestruck suggests. Losing that creative and imaginative space seems very dangerous for feminism, and other social justice movements.

NWSA Call for Papers

National Women's Studies Association 2007 Conference
June 28-July 1, 2007

Submission deadline: November 1, 2006

The National Women's Studies Association is pleased to announce that the Call for Proposals for its 2007 conference scheduled for June 28-July 1, 2007 in St. Charles, IL, a suburb of Chicago, is available at www.nwsaconference.org.

NWSA invites submissions that examine the conference theme,
"Past Debates, Present Possibilities, and Future Feminisms: A Women's and Gender Studies Conference Celebrating 30 Years of NWSA"
and its related sub-themes:
— Girls Studies and Activism,
— Performing Feminisms, and
— Im/Migration and Mobility
from women's and gender studies practitioners in college and universities, women's center administrators, independent scholars, K-12 educators, artists, and community activists. The Association also welcomes proposals that do not directly address the theme, but are relevant to women's and gender studies today.

The 2007 conference will feature:
* Women's Centers Pre-Conference
* Sandra Cisneros, celebrated author of The House on Mango Street and
the novel Caramelo will speak
* Engaging Scholarship Sessions to promote intellectual exchange and
networking
* Writing workshops for graduate students and junior faculty
* Tribute panel to honor past scholarship that has set new directions
for the field: This Bridge Called My Back

CFP Reminder: FEMMSS deadline

The deadline for submissions to the next conference on Feminist Epistemology, Methodology, Metaphysics, and Science Studies is coming up in about two weeks, on Sept. 15. The conference is February 8-10, 2007 at Arizona State University in Tempe.

More information here.

Call for Proposals: Recruiting Girls into Science

The Feminist Press is soliciting novel ideas for short stories, books, and book series that are aimed at getting girls excited about science education and about the prospect of pursuing careers in science. The "Women Working: Thinking, Creating, and Making Science" project is funded by the National Science Foundation. Suggestions include scientific detective stories and graphic novels that feature girls or women engaged in scientific research or applications. The idea is to transcend stereotypes and transform preconceptions about gender and science. See the Call for Proposals for more info.

Telling Stories

I’ve returned after a month-long hiatus. It was extraordinarily productive, though not in an academic way.
************

Female Science Professor blogs about the value of “Old War Stories,” the stories that women in academia tell about "how it used to be."

Novices, whether women or men, can make good use of cautionary tales of others’ experiences. I think they can play an especially valuable role for women in male-dominated areas of academia. Stories that narrate what made it tough for other people can help us identify and avoid similar situations, and by naming a situation (as harassment or as discrimination or as otherwise unfair), the blame for failure can be shifted from the self/victim to the institution or individuals that have caused it. They make us aware and wary of acting in ways that reproduce the marginalization of women, especially since in competitive circumstances (like grad school) there is often something to be gained at others’ expense (“better her than me”). Sharing war stories, especially of recent conflicts, can build awareness of ongoing problems so that they can be addressed. War stories have helped us build our identity as feminists because the general patterns of discrimination are far too common, even when the details change from one person's telling to another.

Personal narratives, the good and the bad, are a necessary complement to feminist theory, since experience is where feminism begins. Their role is not just critical, but also positive: war stories don’t just identify obstacles, they can also point out alternative career paths when life circumstances (partners, children, preconceptions) block the conventional route through graduate education to tenure. Stories where the heroines have won their battles are just as necessary as the cautionary tales.

When should we not share our old war tales? Telling them too often, perhaps, is boring. Hearing them too often is discouraging. But the worst is when they induce a race to the bottom, a competition for pity: who has had the worst experiences? Or when they mask Schadenfreude. Or when they are used by one generation to put the next generation in their place: “Your battles are not nearly so bloody as the ones I had to fight.”

Some autobiographical stories have been published and are worth reading:

Linda Martin Alcoff, ed. Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy, 2003.
Constance Coiner and Diana Hume George, eds. The Family Track: Keeping Your Faculties While You Mentor, Nurture, Teach, and Serve, 1998.
Jane Roland Martin, Coming of Age in Academe: Rekindling Women’s Hopes and Reforming the Academy, 1999.
Christine Overall, A Feminist I: Reflections from Academia, 1998.
George Yancy, The Philosophical I: Reflections on Life in Philosophy, 2002.

But not all autobiographies are useful in this way. Stories from those who have led a charmed existence but can still find things to complain about are not as likely to inspire those of us with a more ordinary lot. Take Colin McGinn’s autobiography. He tells of being both surprised and not surprised to be offered a position over Christopher Peacocke:

“…soon after the interview I was offered the job. I was totally astonished. Rumor has it that the psychologists found Peacocke too difficult to understand…I, on the other hand, was as clear as daylight—whatever my other failings may be.”

But sadly, there is a grey lining in every silver cloud:

“I had my misgivings about accepting the job. I now liked living in London and felt apprehensive about living in Oxford, which is, after all, just a small market town.”

Wildfire and Climate Change 3

Not too hard to connect the dots between the current wildfires in Southern California, the unusually warm weather, and long-term trends in climate change, though, strictly speaking, the conclusion of the study in Science is several dots away from making this a direct connection.

More commentary over at Gristmill, by Maywa Montenegro, on the attitudes we should adopt: half skeptical pragmatism (skeptical, that is, that the trend can be shifted before we have to respond to its more drastic effects) and half optimism that political action on energy consumption and fuel sources can stall further warming.

Blogging for Academics

I decline to comment on the politics of the Juan Cole affair--the issue is whether the controversial ideas expressed in his blog had an effect on his failing to receive a position at Yale.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has invited seven bloggers to comment on various issues the case raises--on politics, blogging, and being a public intellectual (and has uncharacteristically made the forum free for non-subscribers. Hooray!). What are the hazards of academic blogging? Indeed, what are its benefits? To the blogger, to their academic communities, to the broader public?

For one thing, academics blog about a range of topics. Some are mostly personal, and some discuss their professional setting in a personal way. Privacy issues arise. But what about blogs that are continuous with a person's (or a group's) academic activities? Is blogging a distraction from our work, is it a complement to our work, is it (can it be) a part of our work?

It certainly seems plausible that there are individual benefits for the academic blogger, and that these may vary according to where the person teaches, her rank, her other academic obligations, her experience:

- frequent writing exercise. This may be especially helpful for graduate students or other inexperienced, rusty, or blocked writers.
- an informal venue in which to work out half-done thoughts
- a place to get feedback other than at conferences (especially for those with limited travel funds or travel abilities)
- a way of keeping track of ideas that have not yet found a home in a scholarly paper, and a way of keeping track of sources and examples

And there are surely community benefits as well:

- group blogs can unite a coherent core of bloggers (and readers) to discuss academic topics
- informal exchange of ideas (through comments) that does not depend on being invited into a social network--and that can extend social networks
- a central location for storing calls for papers, announcements, and book reviews that is more easily searchable and more optional than listserves
- through the blog's very publicity, in comparison to listserves, it permits easy access to newcomers and an exchange (or flow) of ideas from one academic subcommunity to another via links
- again, via links, blogs encourage permeability between academic exchanges and real-world events and non-academic readers which are rare through venues like conferences

Some communities and community members stand to benefit more than others. Although some blogs are guarded by gatekeepers, which reinforce the prestige of those associated with them (need I mention a particular philosophy blog?), blogging is also open to all comers--beyond the policing of pre-set standards--and so encouraging of experiment and innovation. The structure of blogging therefore explains their popularity among graduate students and young academics. It should also be attractive to other academic groups that struggle with feeling marginalized or are spread thinly among institutions.

Finally, weblogs are a venue for public intellectuals--something philosophers and feminists should aspire to.
About the benefits of blogging, Brad DeLong writes:

Plus — and this is the biggest plus — it is a play in the intellectual influence game. My blog got about 20,000 page-views a day last month.

And Michael Berube adds:

And though there are people who consider my blogging a waste of time, my guess is that many of them see writing for newspapers and magazines to be a waste of time as well.

Evidence in medicine: Preeclampsia

Again on the theme of pregnancy, the July 24 issue of the New Yorker (not available online) contains an article by Jerome Groopman on the "The Preeclampsia Puzzle."Preeclampsia is characterized by high maternal blood pressure and protein in the urine; it can also cause kidney and liver problems, hemorrhage, and stroke. It affects 5% or more of pregnancies in the US, and globally it is a leading cause of maternal death and of lasting complications for mothers and infants.

The cause of preeclampsia is unknown, and the recommended treatment is delivery of the baby ASAP. Although the complex causal pathways that lead up to many diseases are unknown, it is worth pointing out that there is something special about pregnancy disorders: they are not well-studied.

There are several reasons for this. Fetuses cannot consent to participate in clinical trials. Pregnant women, understandably, are not motivated to take on risks to their pregnancy and fetus in order to test new drugs and therapies. Moreover, in some cases, as in preeclampsia, the best available treatment is to deliver the baby, which precludes further testing or treatment in utero.

But if pregnancies are so valuable, shouldn't it be possible to overcome some of these obstacles? Perhaps by running larger trials which permit deeper statistical inferences. But large trials take funding, and this is what the New Yorker article has to say:

Among medical researchers, obstetrics is often regarded as a dead end. "An enterprising young physician-researcher who seeks to make his [sic] name in a field faces huge hurdles if he wants to work with pregnant women"..."Our ability to truly understand what goes on in the fetus is poor," he [Sachs] said. "You can't predict physiologically how a fetus is going to respond to some treatment given to the mother. So people are very hesitant to do this kind of research, and the committees that protoect human subjects are, by and large, gun-shy"..."The only large clinical trials that have been going on involve innocuous treatments, like antioxidants, low-dose aspirin, or supplements like calcium," Sachs said.

Disorders of pregnancy receive relatively little research from the federal government, even though they exact a considerable medical and financial toll.

But it is not just studies of treatments that cannot get off the ground. Even descriptive studies and the development of registries for tracking diseases of pregnancy and post-delivery outcomes are lacking. As with gestational diabetes, the exact rates of preeclampsia in the US are not known, nor are the contributing factors well understood.

The culture of obstetrics is not oriented toward identifying causes that would permit prevention. This is also a relevant topic for feminist bioethics. As Laura Purdy has argued in her article, "What feminism can do for bioethics," bioethicists can and should take on advocacy tasks that shift the way that research is ordered and prioritized.

HPV Vaccine vs. Pap Smears? What's wrong here?

Thanks to Evelyn for inviting me to contribute. I was working on a more theoretical post about feminist philosophers of science and what, if anything, they should want to say about the issue of scientific realism/antirealism and I hope to post something on that later, but I had a negative reaction to an essay, “A New Vaccine for Girls, but Should It Be Compulsory?”, by Roni Rabin on the opinion page in the NYT today and so I wanted to say something in response to it.

First, the parts I think are right. Yes, we should be careful when advocating compulsory health care. Yes, we should make it possible for all women to get routine Pap smears. Both of these points seem right, but this argument is constructed in such a way that one might walk away thinking that Pap smears will prevent cervical cancer and so there is really no need for this vaccine, end of story. But this is disingenuous and misleading. It isn’t Pap smears that prevent cervical cancer. Pap smears alert us to the need to proceed to other procedures that can prevent cervical cancer. So they are necessary but not sufficient. Since the current vaccine prevents only the four of the most common forms of HPV (which account for 70% of cervical cancers), it is not sufficient to prevent cervical cancer either and so does not eliminate the need for Pap smears. The lesson here should be that this is not an either/or situation; the ideal is both vaccine and Paps.

There’s another concern that I have though. Rabin focuses on the number of deaths from cervical cancer (relatively low) and notes that these have been and can continue to be reduced though Pap smears as part of routine health care for women. True, but the medical cost of HPV should not be weighed only in terms of deaths. Women whose immune systems do not automatically clear the virus will need more frequent Pap smears (every three or 6 months rather than once a year) and may also need more invasive treatment to remove dysplasic cells. These treatments, such as the LEEP procedure, while done on an outpatient basis, can be uncomfortable and expensive. Repeated incidents of “bad” Pap results can mean multiple procedures. The jury is out on whether and if so to what extent repeated procedures compromise cervical competence and so put future pregnancies at risk. (Samson SL, Bentley JR, Fahey TJ, et al: The effect of loop electrosurgical excision procedure on future pregnancy outcome. Obstet Gynecol 2005 Feb; 105(2): 325-32.) So while certainly the most frightening cost of HPV is cervical cancer it is not the only cost.

Given a political climate in which it has already been suggested that this vaccine should not be offered because it will encourage sexual promiscuousness, I think we need to be very clear about just what and are not the consequences of advocating particular public health policies. While I fully agree that it should be a public health priority to ensure that all women are informed and able to get Pap smears as part of their routine health care, I do not think we should be seeing this as an alternative to making use of a vaccine that can cut out the possibility of contracting the forms of HPV which result in 70% of cervical cancers. This strikes me as another case of false economic reasoning about health care that occurs in a society that does not have health care as a priority for all of its citizens.

General information about the vaccine from the CDC here.

Women in Science: Experiencing both sides

According to this Washington Post article, the Stanford neurobiologist Ben Barres has a commentary in Nature this week (by subscription only) on the differences between his professional treatment as a woman (Barbara Barres) and as a man, after sexual reassignment. A profile of Barres was published in Nature online last year. Barres describes how he is treated with more respect as a man than he was as a woman.

Barres describes various forms of intentional and unintentional bias that limit women's opportunities in science (and, presumably, some other academic fields). In some form of journalistic balance, the Post article also interviews Stephen Pinker, "who said he is a feminist," and who holds that there are innate differences in men's and women's cognitive abilities. Pinker has not yet revealed the source of his insight into bare innate cognitive differences in fully trained professionals who have had life-long gendered social experiences to shape their cognitive development and professional stature. (See also a post by Majikthise.)

Update: Jim Johnson, at Politics, Theory, Photography, points out that the Nature commentary, titled "Does Gender Matter?" is really about whether or not there are innate SEX differences in cognitive ability, and the good reasons for thinking that there are not (or, at least, that if there are, they are indistinguishable from and minor relative to the impact of culture and acculturation). That perceived gender does matter is what makes Barres' standpoint a noteworthy source of insight.

Women in Science: InterAcademy Council report

Although women are earning more degrees in science, engineering, and technology than in previous decades--over 50% of U.S. undergraduate degrees in the life sciences now go to women--they continue to be drastically underrepresented at further career stages, and particularly in top positions. Women make up 10% of the membership of the National Academies of Science. Women's participation is higher in some areas than others: there are 82 members of the engineering sciences section, and 2 of them are women.

The international council of national academies of science has released a report on the status of women in the sciences. The report emphasizes solving the leakiest parts of the pipeline--graduate education, workplace advancement, and centers of prestige such as national academies themselves. It argues that women's ability to advance into the top tier of research scientists has as much to do with management and social environment as it does with individual women's promise and achievements.

A tragic expression of the frustration that women encounter is covered in this news story about the death of Denice Denton, chancellor of UC Santa Cruz.

On a side note, the representation of women in philosophy is higher than in engineering, roughly equivalent to physics, and lower than other sciences.