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    • The Funny Thing About Colorado

      One thing that attracted my attention in the Colorado situation was the university’s use of the APA’s Committee on the Status of Women Campus Site Visit program. Judging from the description of the program on the Committee’s website, campus visits are normally advisory. Departments request site visits in which a team investigates climate issues, with the purpose of “offering practical suggestions on how to improve the climate for women.” (The Committee also says: “The team will be attentive to issues beyond gender, e.g., race, sexuality, disability, and will make an effort to collect quantitative data on these groups.” Apparently, no practical suggestions, though, about these matters.)

      In this particular case, the context was rather different. It is clear that the Department, Dean, and Provost must have decided that they needed to know and do something about the spate of complaints from Department members (including students) to Colorado’s Office of Discrimination and Harassment. So the advice being sought was not general, but highly specific. In other words, the investigation of climate was not motivated by general concern but by a specific bad situation.

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    • Is jury duty a trolley type problem? What should one do?

      Once again I've been called in for Jury Duty.

      It's nearly a priori that they won't impanel me for death penalty or war-on-drugs type cases, since I'm up front about exercising my right to jury nullify in the case of unjust laws or state sanctioned murder.*

      But I have no idea what to do with respect to someone who has both broken a just law and who should not be on the streets.

      How can anyone in good conscience send another human being to an American prison?

      But as a juror the only choice they give you is sending the person to prison or releasing them. And many people are too predatory to be allowed to operate in normal society. 

      I've got two weeks until I have to go in. Any advice about from people agree with me that this is a genuine dilemma** and/or have some experience negotiating the system would be greatly appreciated.

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    • How to deal with a journal rejection?

      Recently, I received two journal rejections within 4 days; it must be some kind of record. I could of course despair and take it personally, which is what I used to do at early stages of my career. But now, with sufficient publication success in the past to assure me that I am not a hopeless case when it comes to publications (or so I hope!), I try to look at rejections from a more positive, constructive angle. Readers who were interested in this post of mine of a few weeks ago, on how to go about selecting journals to submit your papers to, may find my current thoughts on how to deal with these two rejections useful.

      The first of the two rejections was somewhat frustrating. It came from a very fine, highly selective journal, but it was based on only one referee report, and a referee who seemed to misunderstand the main claim of the paper quite severely. (S/he identified an equivocation that I’m pretty sure is simply not there.) But at the very least, the report suggested that I hadn’t been clear enough concerning the main claims of the paper. The truth is that this paper defends a somewhat controversial thesis; the referee commended the paper as well written and well structured, but seemed simply not to find the main thesis particularly appealing.

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    • Important Feminist Philosophers post on Colorado

      Many of the issues discussed on our thread are carefully addressed there. Link.

    • Biopolitical Employment Screening

       If anyone still doubted that Agamben’s thesis – according to which biopolitics today is about the reduction of politics to biological existence (zoe), shorn of anything to do with the form (bios) of life – needs revision, this arrives about big-data employee screening that operates with an amalgam of questionnaires and biometrics.  Salon’s Andrew Leonard relates:

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    • University of Colorado Boulder Chancellor replaces chair, suspends grad admissions, and makes other moves to ensure new culture for Philosophy Department after APA report finds sexual harassment and discrimination

      Chancellor's announcement:

      Earlier today, the campus announced that Professor Andy Cowell will head our philosophy department at CU-Boulder. Professor Cowell is a professor of French literature and a former chair of two departments, French and Italian and linguistics. This change was made to improve the climate in philosophy for our faculty, staff and students and, specifically, to improve the climate for women.

      We have made these changes based upon the recommendations of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in a recent report that we are making public today, as well as on evidence gathered from faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students in the department. That evidence points directly to the need to create a stronger, more inclusive environment in the department for women as scholars and students, that prevents acts of sexual harassment and discrimination, and that allows faculty to work together in a collegial environment of mutual respect.

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    • Male lions are jerks

      One of the worst things I've done as a parent is take my then four year old son to see Disney's documentary-style nature film African Cats. In it, Samuel Jackson and Patrick Stewart narrate the partially successful struggle of a mother cheetah to raise her cubs and the unsuccessful struggle of an alpha male lion, Fang (so named for a hideously looking broken tooth that juts out of his mouth) to protect his family.

      The narration around Fang concerning the successful coup by his replacement alpha male, Kali, is almost surreal. We get all of these "Lion King" type quips about the noble role male lions play in protecting the female lions and their cubs, even as the female lions are really doing all of the work hunting the food and raising the babies. For 95% of the time the male lion just lies around doing nothing and/or taking food away from his family.

      The only way Jackson/Stewart are able to make this have any resemblance to Mufasa and Simba from the Lion King is by stressing how the male lion protects the female lions. But what on earth could a female lion need protection from? I mean, they are just these incredible killing machines. Very slowly in the movie it begins to dawn on you that the only thing male lions protect female lions and their cubs from is the vile depredations other male lions. 

      Anyhow, it's a good thing that human gender norms are nothing at all like that. We'd be in terrible shape if they were.

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: Trio Corrente and Paquito D’Rivera

      There have been quite a few musically relevant events this week. Most important of all, Pete Seeger left this world. But on a more down-to-earth dimension, the Grammy earlier this week had a few memorable moments, including the Daft Punk-Stevie Wonder performance of ‘Get lucky’. At the same Grammy, but receiving much less publicity, a Brazilian trio, Trio Corrente, won the Latin Jazz Grammy award for their album Song for Maura, a collaboration with iconic Cuban saxophone player Paquito D’Rivera. So here is the beautiful eponymous song from the album. (It’s not like I had heard about Trio Corrente before, so thanks Grammy for calling my attention to this beautiful gem.)

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    • Got Water? (part two)

      West Virginia

      Snowpack in the Sierras

      Lake Michigan 
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    • Hair and politics

      This article by Laurie Penny on women and short hair, which in turn is a response to another article claiming that women with short hair are ‘damaged’, has been making the rounds on the internet (H/T Gillian Russell on Facebook). It makes a number of very important points concerning ideals of femininity, and the kind of policing that women are submitted to, by men and women alike, concerning their appearance.

      Wearing your hair short, or making any other personal life choice that works against the imperative to be as conventionally attractive and appealing to patriarchy as possible, is a political statement. And the threat that if we don’t behave, if we don’t play the game, we will end up alone and unloved is still a strategy of control.

      (There is a lot of serious, interesting scholarship on hair out there (not only restricted to hair that grows in heads), which I am not able to address here – but do go check it out, for example this book).

      I’ve had fairly long hair for most of my life, but when I was 17 and a bit of a capoeira fanatic I had my hair cut really short (I felt all that hair was in the way for my capoeira moves). Reactions were mostly positive (including my boyfriend at the time), but one comment I got was epic. The guard at my high school (!!) deemed himself in the right to comment on my new haircut, in fact to ask a question: “Is this a penitence?” Why else would any woman want to wear her hair so short?

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