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    • Feminism, Privacy, Actor Networks, and the Jezebel Trolls

      As I noted in an earlier post, preparing for a seminar on privacy and surveillance has given me the opportunity to learn more about any number of aspects of the topic – in this case (again) the feminist critique of privacy.  To recap: on this argument, which is most commonly associated with Catharine MacKinnon (see the abortion chapter here for a succinct, 10-page version), privacy manages to be very bad for women under conditions of structural sex inequality.  Because women are socially unequal, “privacy” manages to protect men, but not women.  Wife-beaters, for example, get to hide behind the veil of privacy in the home to shield their conduct from scrutiny: “a man’s home is his castle.”  (MacKinnon then answers the obvious question: why does patriarchy support abortion rights?  The answer is that the availability of abortion removes the one last obstacle men faced in the complete social domination of women: the possibility of undesired pregnancy.  So abortion rights justified on privacy grounds (as opposed to equality) end up being tools of patriarchy.  But that’s a different conversation)

      MacKinnon’s argument is a lot more subtle than it usually gets portrayed as being, but it’s vulnerable to some obvious objections. For example, Jena McGill, writing out of her experience working in battered women’s shelters, points out that privacy is the thing that women who make it to the shelters need most of all.  If they don’t get it, their abusers are very likely to kill them and their children. One way of interpreting the implications of this point is to say that the value of privacy for women depends on where it’s claimed; once women leave the traditional patriarchal household, privacy suddenly becomes a lot more important as a concept.

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    • a facebook meme actually worth replicating

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    • A Place Where Nobody Knows Your Name

      This is the time of the year at LSU where incoming students get processed via "freshman orientation." You can see a PDF listing all the stuff they have to do here. In my experience, the people who handle this kind of thing at LSU care a lot about the students and work very hard to put together helpful programs. I do transfer advising a few times a year as part of it. The trick is to try to get incoming students' transfer credits to cover LSU Gen. Ed. requirements. It's pretty rewarding, because you're meeting people at an exciting time in their lives and the little bit of effort you expend can make a big difference to them. Plus, it's one area of services at LSU that doesn't seem to have been hit by budget cuts.

      This being said, some of it is pretty irritating. A certain subset of current students, called LSU Ambassadors, help out with the process, leading tours around campus and whatnot. You can recognize them because they wear these distinctive yellow shirts and get their tour groups to do military boot camp like call and response routines relating to LSU school spirit as they walk through campus buildings. I think it's just a coincidence that they do this outside of my office over and over again. I mean, I don't think anyone in administration hates me that much.

      Honestly, the school spirit chants make me a little bit ill, not just because they're loud and distracting, but also in part because they remind me so much of church camps from my youth, which were Max Weber cubed. If you didn't manifest this kind of hysterical forced gaiety no matter what you were going through, then God must have some issues with you. And if God doesn't give a spit about you, why should I? What do the LSU Ambassadors think about the people who would rather not chant along to athletic oriented cheerleader routines?

      More importantly, the whole point of going to a big state university is precisely to escape that kind of nonsense. You've already read Salinger in high school and all of the forced gaiety has begun to seem deeply suspect. Then college gives you a few years try to find out who you might become. In my case, this involved smoking cigarettes in cafes and having the exact same conversations that teenage smokers have had ever since the beatniks, the existentialists, and the German Idealists before them. It was trading one work for another, but I was seventeen. What do you expect? And if the existentialists are correct, that's all we have anyhow.

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    • Hypatia Open Forum on Climate Change, Aug 18-22, 2014

      At the request of the folks over at Hypatia, we're helping to publicize the open online forum they will be hosting in conjunction with their recently published special issue on Climate Change.  

      Here's the description the editoral staff at Hypatia provided for the event: 

      Policy makers have recently begun to acknowledge the disproportionate impacts of climate change on women and disadvantaged communities, but feminist analyses of the complex epistemic and political dimensions of climate change, as well as its causes and effects, are urgently needed. Hypatia recently published a special issue on Climate Change that initiates a necessary conversation that will deepen our understanding and help identify promising opportunities for positive change. Feminist philosophers Chris Cuomo (author of Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing) and Nancy Tuana (author of Feminism and Science) have invited scholars and activists working at the forefront of feminist climate justice to share their perspectives.

      Watch the interviews online, and join the co-editors in an open forum on their special issue of Hypatia (29.3) on Climate Change on August 18-22, 2014. Please join: http://thephilosopherseye.com/phileye/online-events/hypatia-symposium-2/

    • First female mathematician wins the Fields medal.

      Stanford mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani has been awarded the Fields medal, the most prestigeous prize in mathematics.   She is the first woman to win the prize.   Details here.

    • The Enlightenment and Barbaric Republics

      I’ve recently encountered a suggestion (in personal communication) that it might be difficult for an Enlightenment thinker to envisage republicanism in barbarian or even more savage peoples. While that makes sense with regard to the civility and legal institutions that Enlightenment thinkers are looking for in a desirable state, and saw in the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, there are some other sides to this. I cannot look into properly right now, but it is sometimes held that the founders of the American republic took some inspiration from the Native Americans with regard to the institutional arrangements they were designing, particularly the federal nature of the republic (preceded by a  period of confederation), which may have had some reference to the groupings and alliances of small native communities into nations. In any case, the dressing up in native garb during the Boston Tea Party certainly made some reference to the idea of a natural freedom. 

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    • Campaigns re: the Salaita Case

      [3 updates below] A quick informational note apropos of my previous post.*

      In addition to the email-writing campaign and the various petitions that have been circulating re: the Salaita case, there is an initiative, begun by Corey Robin (see here), to organize groups of scholars by discipline who would commit to refusing to make any visits to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus until such time as Professor Salaita's appointment was reinstated.  

      So far, this effort has borne fruit among philosophers (organized by John Protevi, here) and political scientists (organized by Joe Lowndes, for info see here). Those with appropriate disciplinary affiliations who are inclined to participate in these initiatives should contact the organizers, as noted.  Those in other disciplines who are willing to organize their own list should contact Professor Robin, as detailed here. 

      Update: A statement by professors of English is being managed by Elaine Freedgood (info here.)

      Update 2:  A statement by professors of Sociology is being organized as a petition and a statement by professors of Rhetoric and Composition is being managed by Matthew Abraham (info on both can be found in this post on Corey Robin's site). 

      Update 3: There is now a statement of refusal for faculty in women’s studies, gender studies, and feminist studies being managed by Barbara Winslow and a general statement that is not limited to scholars in any particular field (info on both can be found here.)

      * Please note that this post is offered in an informational capacity, and should not be taken as an endorsement by NewAPPS or any of its individual authors of these campaigns. 

    • The Systemic Implications of the Salaita Case

      By now, readers are likely aware of the case of Steven Salaita, who was hired away from Virginia Tech by the University of Illinois, as a tenured associate professor of American Indian Studies, only to see his position terminated weeks before he was supposed to begin teaching on account of his remarks on Twitter regarding current events in Gaza. If you need to catch up on the details, a good place to start would be this story in the Chronicle. Also, Corey Robin, who has been a leading advocate for Salaita, has written a number of posts tracking the conversation as it unfolds (see his blog here). 

      While this sentiment is not universal, many, many people—including the AAUP—are treating this case as a serious breach of key principles of academic freedom. How that is so has, perhaps, been best summarized in this piece by John K. Wilson over at Inside Higher Ed. 

      Without trying to reproduce a rich set of discussions, it seems important to take note here of several points that have been made in recent days,* and which connect to discussions we've had here previously: 1) that this firing** constitutes a case where statements on social media are being treated as exempt from the principles of academic freedom; 2) that this firing constitutes an example of the way that civility standards (or, shall we say, matters of 'tone') are worrying not only from the point of view of their differential impact on variously positioned members of the profession, but also from the point of view of academic freedom; and 3) that terminating Salaita's appointment at this stage in the hiring process effectively means that the basis on which many people accept new academic jobs (and leave their old ones) has become unreliable. 

      More on each of these points below. 

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    • New Republic article critiquing Women and Gender Studies curriculum

      Thought-provoking essay here* by UC Berkeley's Elizabeth Segran critiquing standard pedagogy in Women and Gender Studies courses. She makes a kind of left wing usage of some of the tropes* that accompanied the slow death of theory (and ascendancy of new historicism and now digital humanities/surface reading) from the mid 90's through now.

      From  my friends who teach these classes, I don't think that Seagran's piece actually works that well as a critique of what is being taught in WGS classes. This being said, it is interesting to think of it in light of the kinds of issues we might teach in practical ethics classes. Too often we either stick to hot button political issues or issues of professional ethics, and ignore some of the most pressing issues that students face, such as hook-up culture, slut shaming, campus sexual assault, the Greek system, college athletics, etc.

      I think there's also something to her point that it's just much easier for all sorts of reasons (involving both students and administrators) to teach broader theoretical/jargony issues that people are less antecedently psychologically invested in. A friend of mine who researches and teaches about hook up culture often has to deal with Beavis and Butt-Head types who half the time are mocking him and the other students and who are usually a priori convinced that anything short of an A+ is evidence that they are being graded for their rebarbative views rather than inability to learn the material. It can be a real drag and I doubt that I would have the courage to put myself in his position. Far easier to swim in the Wide Sargasso Sea of the various neologisms that at this point aren't really new anymore. It's relaxing. The water is warm. You get a nice tan.

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    • On the APA’s method for anonymizing papers for review

      I'm not sure that the APA has this right.

      The APA guidelines for submitting papers state:

      All papers are anonymously reviewed. Author's name, institution, or references pertaining to the identity of the author must be removed from the paper, abstract, notes, and bibliography. Papers containing such identifying references may be rejected.

      There are at least two ways that one might remove one's identity:

      1. One might leave in the references to oneself, but refer to oneself in the third person, e.g., "As Millstein (2009) argues, populations are individuals."
      2. One might delete all references to oneself, e.g., "As I have argued elsewhere (reference deleted), populations are individuals."

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