New APPS

There are two complimentary Gendered Conference Campaigns petitions,* Jennifer Saul's here and Eric Schliesser's here. 

Saul's petition and and supporting material (e.g. how to avoid a gendered conference here) focus on helping organizers of conferences and edited anthologies avoid having an all male lineup.

Schliesser's applies more leverage, also focusing on those who might present at (or submit to) a conference (or anthology) with an all male lineup.

What we are calling for is a strong defeasible commitment not to participate in exclusionary conference line-ups.) The aim of this call is not the refusal, but the deployment of leverage, where it resides, so that inclusiveness becomes an integral part of conference-planning. Further, we ask senior male philosophers to carefully consider refusing invitations to conferences and edited volumes in which the line-up is disproportionately male. 

We call on all philosophers – male and female, junior and senior – not to organize male-only or male-almost-only conferences,workshops, or edited volumes. (Information on female experts in various areas is available here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Now here is my question. In what manner should the above be thought to apply to summer schools?**

Now clearly, for all of the reasons given by Saul and Schliesser (please follow the links above) it would be better if no summer school was gendered. However, there are five relevant differences between summer schools and conferences that make me wonder if non-participation is too strong a stance to take.

1. Being an invited speaker at a conference is the labor of a weekend at most. People show up and give a paper. If they are doing it correctly they will get dinner with the graduate students and attend other papers as well. But teaching at a summer school usually means that you will be lecturing for three hours a day for a week to a lot of people. When the weekends, possible participants conferences, and socializing with the attendees are added, it's a much more significant commitment of time and effort. As a result, it is much harder for summer school organizers to get teachers.
2. Many summer schools have participant conferences, before the summer school proper begins. In such cases, even though the teacher lineup may be all male, the female attendees will be presenting papers. Does this count as a gendered conference?
3. The average philosophy summer school has a much narrower foci, than the average conference. You typically don't do a summer school on "19th Century Philosophy" or "Philosophy of Art" but rather some figure or very narrow issue therein. As with (1), this ends up severely restricting the teachers one might get.
4. Summer schools typically try to get the most famous people in that sub-area as teachers. This again severely restricts the candidate pool.
5. Average conferences have a lot of non-keynote speakers, but summer schools only have a few speakers.

I think for the above reasons its much more important for summer schools to ensure non-gendered participant line-up than ensuring a non-gendered lineup of teachers.

I realize that I might be totally off about this, and the issue is important, so I'm interested in what anyone thinks.

[Notes:

*I haven't signed either petition. (1) As far as I understand them, they don't apply that strongly to the overwhelming majority of us who are very unlikely to be invited to keynote anything.*** This may be because Schliesser's was written in ways not to hurt junior people's job and promotion prospects. So maybe tenured people who might present as non-keynoters should sign them. I don't know. (2) Many of us, tenured or not, identify as students of philosophy rather than philosophers, and are as a result generally uncomfortable issuing diktats to people we regard as actually philosophers in the same sense that Kant was a philosopher. It's too much like asking a giant sequioa to move because it's blocking the light. For both reasons, I think for some of us it might be better to publicly support the campaign without actually signing the petitions.

**Thoughts occasioned by comments on the reaction to one of my typically fan-childish**** blog posts.

***Not complaining! Keynoting does not look like very much fun at all. Most of us are introverts in the Myers Briggs sense, and why on earth would an introvert put themselves through all of that? I don't get it.

****No apologies for the fandom aspect. The art of being a fan is something my generation desperately needs to recover (somewhat derailed meditations on that here).]