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    • Big Data and the Hyper-Reserve Army

      By Gordon Hull

      At the end of my time in high school, I worked part-time bagging groceries.  There was some modest union influence on the job, and its scheduling was pretty predictable: the longer you’d been there, the better schedule you’d get.  Your first few weeks, you knew you’d be working late into the evening, especially on Friday and Saturday.  After a while, the late shifts would taper off as somebody newer than you would get slotted into them.  You could depend on a pretty predictable schedule week-in and week-out.  It was a service sector job with a factory-like scheduling.

      I mention this because one of the more nefarious uses of big data got emphasized last week in the context of discussion Black Friday’s steady march backwards into Thanksgiving day.  Last week’s news highlighted one way that data analytics can be used to introduce further precarity into the lives of low-wage workers.  The transfer of risk and precarity to employees more generally is of course something neoliberalism does pretty well, but the process is even more intense for low-wage workers due to the introduction of scheduling software that produces unsteady, uneven, just-in-time scheduling, so that employers don’t have to pay for employees who aren’t absolutely necessary.  Since a disproportionate number of those affected by these programs have children to care for, and since many of them are minorities, it’s also a case of disparate impact on poor, minority women.  As stores open earlier and earlier for Black Friday, more and more workers – again, mostly women – are being put into the position of not knowing whether they’ll have Thanksgiving off until a day or two before. It’s a good example of the general problem.

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    • While we’re talking about rankings…

      We're talking about rankings this week. (Do we talk about anything else, any more?)  While we're doing so, I'd like to encourage everyone to read and meditate on this extraordinary post by Kate Bowles, which takes off from the heartbreaking story of Professor Stefan Grimm, "a senior UK academic who has died after being put on performance management for the insufficiency of his research. He was 51."

      The piece is a meditation on the professional culture and the emotional world, all too familiar, that almost inevitably surrounds not just a death like this but also any number of other real abuses which we have become all too capable of overlooking, if only by virtue of their excessive familiarity.  It bears, heavily, on rankings, and the uses to which they are put. But it also calls us out for the way in which we participate in, and facilitate the whole process. As a tease, I'll simply leave folks with these two paragraphs. 

      Some days they will also drive each other for you. They will whisper about each other, and turn a blind eye to each other,  and not quite find the time to act on their own secret critical thinking about any of it. They will also surreptitiously maintain each other through care and coping practices and shrugs in the corridor and exchanged glances and raised eyebrows in meetings and Friday drinks that become chronic, secretive drinking problems so that they can get some rest without writing emails in their heads at 3am.

      In fact, if you get the scarcity, intermittency and celebratory settings for occasional reward just right, then the toxic alchemy of hope and shame will diminish their capacity for solidarity, and they will keep the whole thing going for you, in the name of commitment, professional standards, the value of scholarship, academic freedom, the public good of educational equity.

    • Gender and Publications (H/T Bonnie Kent)

      When I first looked at placement statistics at the Philosophy Smoker I performed some analyses that I shouldn't have. First, I performed too many analyses. Second, I used the wrong kinds of analyses for some of the data. I did not imagine that these statistics would take off as they did and I was overworked*, which contributed to some mistakes on my part. One of these mistakes was running correlation analyses over gender:

      I also found a negative correlation between PhD granting institution and number of publications (-.17: the lower your PhD granting institution is ranked the more peer-reviewed publications you have) and between gender and number of publications (-.21: if you are a man you likely have more publications than if you are a woman). 

      While at the time I suspected that this negative correlation had to do with the increased difficulty women have in publishing their work, others worried that women had an upper hand on the job market. I brushed off this latter worry because the proportion of women who found tenure-track jobs was about the same as the proportion of women who obtain PhDs in philosophy. In fact, in the 2011-2014 data set I found that there is not a significant difference between the proportion of women who graduate from each department and the proportion that find tenure-track jobs from each department (but there is a significant difference for postdoctoral/VAP/instructor positions, which are awarded to a smaller proportion of women relative to women graduates). But this worry regularly comes up in comments and I feel a responsibility for having possibly led people astray with analyses I shouldn't have used in the first place. For that reason, I want to provide some more appropriate analyses here, as clarification on the relationship between gender and publications in the placement data from 2011-2012 and 2012-2013. Those who want to check this work can use the spreadsheet at the bottom of the post here, which is the one I used. (I do not use the more recent data because I decided not to collect publication data in this last round, due to time constraints.)

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    • What is it like to be a person of color in philosophy?

      Following the sucess of What is it like to be a woman in philosophy? a new blog has arisen on the blogosphere: What is it like to be a person of color in philosophy? I look forward to hearing about people's experiences; although many will no doubt be painful to hear, this is a conversation that is long overdue.  I hope that the new blog will be as good for the profession its predecessor has been.  So far, with the first five posts, it delivers well.

    • Let The Fire Burn, And Ferguson

      By: Samir Chopra

      Jason Osder's searing Let the Fire Burn–a documentary about the tragic standoff between the radical black liberation group MOVE and the Philadelphia city administration in 1985–is ostensibly a documentary about an America of thirty years ago, but it is also about the America of today.

      Last night, as my wife and I waited for the 'verdict' in Ferguson, we decided to watch Let the Fire Burn; at its conclusion, we sat there stunned and speechless and disbelieving. I could hear my wife sobbing. Contemplating the death of children, left to burn, and indeed, possibly forced back into a burning house by gunfire from a homicidal police force will do that to you. I got up, walked over to my dormant desktop machine, touched the space bar, and watched the screen spring to life. I checked my social media news feed: as expected, the grand jury in Ferguson decided not to indict, and thus bring to trial, the police officer Darren Wilson, for the deadly shooting of Michael Brown.

      The brutality and cruelty of what we had just paid witness to was enough to make me pen the following initial response on my Facebook page:

      Jesus Christ, the racist, malevolent stupidity on display in this documentary was unbelievable and unbearable.

      Much of that same thick, unblinking, deadly mental and moral dysfunction has been on display in Ferguson: in the murderous shooting of Michael Brown, the heavy-handed reaction to the protests, (which sparked an inquiry by Amnesty International), the refusal to indict, the timing of the announcement, and sure enough, the pronouncements of St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch.

      To place this latest episode of the continuing tragedy of African-American life in some context, to see that black American life has always been cheap, that the police get away with murder all too often, all too easily, Let The Fire Burn is essential viewing.

      There is no doubt MOVE in the Philadelphia of 1985 was a prickly bunch: they were radical in their deeds; they could be violent; there is ample cause for disagreement with their indoctrinaire methods; they were anti-social and bad neighbors. But nothing I saw in Let The Fire Burn will convince me that the police action, the heavily armed blockade of their 'headquarters' in a predominantly black neighborhood, followed by a gun battle in which over ten thousand rounds were discharged, the bombing of their house by a incendiary device dropped by a helicopter, and then fatally, the decision to not put out the fire, and burn down not just the house with its occupants still inside, but a total of sixty-one homes, could ever be justified.

      Let The Fire Burn is made up entirely of archival footage; there are no talking heads, no contemporary analysis, no hindsight to be offered. The words and actions you see and hear are those of almost thirty years ago. They speak for themselves; no commentary is required. This is documentary making of the highest order. Watch it, weep, and rage. Most of all because nothing has changed.

      Note: This post was originally published–under the same title–at samirchopra.com

    • From Politics to Culture in Nietzsche and Others

      One aspect of Nietzsche’s political thought of note is the strong tendency to replace politics with culture as the source of value. Some sense of cultural value as the human goal, or at least a major aspect of flourishing humanity, or some flourishing group of humans, goes back to The Birth of Tragedy. However, at the time of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche still adhered to German nationalism with regard to the state, as well as culture, even if culture is the greater preoccupation.

      The Birth of Tragedy suggests a rebirth of the greatness of tragedy in the operas of Wagner, an unmistakably nationalist project. At that time Nietzsche welcomed the revival of German Empire under Prussian leadership, if not stridently and had been proud to serve in the Prussian army. Ill health only allowed him to serve in the Franco-Prussian War, which led to proclamation the Second German Empire, as a medical orderly, but he would presumably have fought if allowed.

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    • A new resource for those interested in graduate programs in philosophy of biology

      By Roberta Millstein

      A graduate student in my department, Shawn Miller, has created a wiki for graduate programs having faculty who specialize in philosophy of biology: philbio.net It gives an at-a-glance overview of schools and faculty, with links to websites, CVs, and PhilPapers profiles for individual faculty. The wiki thus serves as an excellent springboard for those who are researching graduate programs in philosophy of biology, both Ph.D. and terminal M.A. As the wiki notes, "The primary intended audience is prospective or current graduate students with interests in philosophy of biology who want to get the lay of the land by seeing who works where, and on what."

      Some important features of the site:

      • Anyone can edit the wiki, with or without an account. Faculty and students are encouraged to add listings and update listings.
      • The criterion for program inclusion is just that a philosophy (or a history and philosophy of science) Ph.D. program have at least one full-time faculty member who self-identifies as a philosopher of biology.
      • On the main page, faculty specializations can be listed and willingness to work with new students can be indicated. Programs can also create a separate page that lists further information about the program, such as lab groups (see UC Davis's entry for an example).

      I would encourage others to update this site and help make it a useful resource, and to recommend the site to prospective graduate students with interests in philosophy of biology. I would further encourage those who work in other areas of philosophy to create similar sites to facilitate prospective graduate students in doing the sort of deep research that an important decision like applying to graduate school calls for.

    • Waiting on Ferguson

      by Leigh M. Johnson

      We continue awaiting the decision of a grand jury on whether or not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, exactly 15 weeks ago today on a suburban street in Ferguson, Missouri. News reporters from across the globe have been camped out in Ferguson for months, their expectation of an announcement teased and disappointed several times in the last week alone.  On Monday, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard in advance of the grand jury's decision. Yesterday, President Barack Obama, in what can only be judged to be an anticipation of Wilson's non-indictment, preemptively urged protesters not to use Ferguson as an "excuse for violence."  In the meantime, demonstrators of various ilk remain on standby, rallying their troops, refining their organizational strategies, painting their oppositional signs, standing vigilantly at the ready for whatever may come.

      But what are we waiting for, really, as we wait for Ferguson?

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    • Steven Salaita, Palestinians, And Autobiography

      By: Samir Chopra

      Last night, along with many Brooklyn College students, faculty (and some external visitors) I attended ‘Silencing Dissent: A Conversation with Steven Salaita, Katherine Franke and Corey Robin‘, organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine. (My previous posts on this event can be found here and here.)

      As Robin has noted over at his blog, there was a genuine conversation to be participated in: hard questions, hard answers, disputation. Most importantly, I think, there were moments of discomfort and bluntness.

      I want to make note here, very quickly, of  a point of interest that stood out for me (among many, many others).

      I was intrigued by Robin's opening questions to Salaita, asking him to tell the audience a little bit about himself: his family background, his academic interests, his writings etc. At this stage, I was, as someone who had read–and sometimes written–a great deal about La Affaire Salaita, eager and impatient to move on to a discussion of the finer particulars of his case: what's next in the legal battles, how strong is the First Amendment case etc. Surely, all this was just throat-clearing before the substantive discussion would begin.

      But as Salaita began answering these queries, I realized something all over again: all too often, 'the Palestinian' is a shadowy figure: not fully filled out, a zone of unknowing into which all too many fears and anxieties are projected.  The state of exile of the Palestinian people, their refugee status, their diasporic existence has often meant that they seem like creatures that flit from place to place, not resting, not stopping to acquire detail, painted on by everyone but themselves. ('All the Palestinian people, where do they all come from'?) They exist in a blur, our understandings of them underwritten by forces often beyond their control. In that context, the mere fact of hearing a Palestinian speak, telling us 'where he is coming from' – whether it is by informing us of the nationality of his father, a Jordanian, or his mother, a Palestinian, born and raised in Nicaragua, and where he was born – Appalachia, if I heard him right! – is enlightening. These simple autobiographical details humanize the too-frequently dehumanized. (The little intellectual autobiography that Salaita provided–for instance, detailing his realization of the notions of colonialism and dispossession tied together American Indian studies and the Palestinian question–did this too.)

      For Americans, these particulars Steven Salaita fit into the fabric of American life, into its immigrant past, into cultures and histories and geographies in which they too have a stake. They might force a reckoning of the Palestinian as a 'new kind of American,' as heir to long-standing local traditions of political disputation, and enabled a viewing of his dissent in a different light. Without the context of Salaita's embedding in his past, his family and the places he made his own, his intellectual journeys, those who encounter him will always find it easy to rely on, yet again, on the accounts of those who have an ideological interest in offering alternative narratives of his motivations and inclinations.

      Note: This post was originally published–under the same title–at samirchopra.com

    • Taylor Swift’s Platonism

      By Gordon Hull

      Over on Cyborgology, my colleague Robin James has a post up about Taylor Swift’s promotion of her new album.  James focuses on two moments in that promotion: on the one hand, Swift has removed her music from the free streaming part of Spotify, on the grounds that it insufficiently compensates her (and others’) labor in producing it.  On the other hand, she released a video, “Blank,” that watches more like an interactive video game.  On James’ argument, both of these strategies amount to an effort on Swift’s part to control and otherwise dictate the terms of her affective labor.  On the surface of it, that’s laudable enough, and certainly the Internet can readily be seen as an enormously complex vehicle for extracting surplus value from its users by getting them to work for free.  As Terry Hart tirelessly points out on Copyhype, Silicon Valley makes a lot of money off of other people’s work, and shockingly little of that money finds its way back to the content industries: Silicon Valley obscures (and does not compensate) the enormous amount of affective labor on which it depends.

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