PEA Soup

Announcement: PIKSI Deadline Approaching

Thanks to a major grant ($600,000) awarded to the APA by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute (PIKSI) program is expanding to Boston -- among other undergraduate diversity initiatives that this grant will make possible over a three year period. 

PIKSI-Boston will take place August 2-8 2015 at MIT, Cambridge, MA; PIKSI-Rock will be held June 13-22 2015 at Penn State University, State College, PA. Applicants may apply to either program, or both. The deadline for applications is this Friday March 13, so please encourage undergraduates/recent graduates who might benefit from these terrific programs to apply (more details are below the fold). 

Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute (PIKSI) needs our help

If, like me, you've been frustrated with all that's going on in Philosophy (or not going on as the case may be) and want to do something positive to help our profession, here's an opportunity. Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute (PIKSI) is a weeklong summer school that brings undergraduates from underrepresented groups into graduate school for philosophy. It has been operating for nine years, in part with funding from the American Philosophical Association. That funding is no longer assured, and so PIKSI needs our help. Its organizers are running a crowd-funding campaign here. They are more than halfway to their modest goal. As noted over at Daily Nous, If everyone who reads this contributes just five dollars they would meet that goal in a day, easy. Go to the site, read about it (some interesting facts there), watch the video, and make a contribution. (Thanks to Serene Khader, the institute’s incoming director for bringing this to my attention.)

CFP: A Networking and Mentoring Workshop for Graduate Student Women in Philosophy

Call for Submissions

A Networking and Mentoring Workshop 
for Graduate Student Women in Philosophy

www.princeton.edu/~mentorship

Co-Directors: Elisabeth Camp, Elizabeth Harman, and Jill North

Female PhD and DPhil students and prospective students in philosophy are invited to submit papers on any topic in philosophy to participate in a workshop at Princeton University, August 21-24, 2014.

Thirty-five students will be selected to participate. Seven students will have their papers discussed; fourteen students will serve as commentators, and fourteen as chairs. In addition to the seven philosophy sessions, there will be five sessions at which professional advice is offered by twelve faculty mentors.

We Need to be Better With Anonymous Refereeing

I've been doing a lot of refereeing for conferences, journals, prizes and such and a recent discussion with some of my co-referees leads me to want to post here about anonymous refereeing.  My main aim here will be to list some of the ways authors screw up in anonymizing papers and also to raise a question or two about trickier points of making a paper truly anonymous.  But I want to state out front that I think all refereed conferences should require that papers be anonymized when they are submitted. I know that in a small profession we will often have some idea who wrote papers, but I think we still ought to do the best we can within that constraint. (Continued below the fold.)

Implicit Bias Conference: call for papers

Implicit Bias, Philosophy and Psychology

Sheffield: April 20-21, 2013

Deadline for Submission: 15 December 2012

Click through for details...

Petition: Philosophy of Race in the PGR

For those of you who have not yet seen it, I'd like to encourage you to consider signing this petition, advocating for the inclusion of the Philosophy of Race as a specialty in the Philosophical Gourmet Report.  There is some discussion of the petition here, at Feminist Philosophers.  One note I'd add is that a number of departments that are already highly esteemed by the PGR -- including, by my count, six of the top seven programs in the overall rankings, which says something -- have people doing interesting and important work in this area, as do a number of other departments.  In any event, it is a thriving, important field, which anecdotal evidence suggests has increasing interest for potential graduate students and hiring schools.

Performance Evaluations in an Entrepreneurial Work Culture

As summer comes to a close and we get ready to return to the classroom, I've been thinking more about the different shapes my colleagues' summers have taken, about how much we've written and how much real holiday we've taken.  As a philosophy department chair, one of my responsibilities is chairing the department's annual performance evaluation committee and each year I'm struck anew by how hard some of my colleagues work. I feel humbled by how much very high quality work some colleagues publish.

Institutions, Systems, Structures

Folks who work on oppression often distinguish oppression attributable to individuals from oppression attributable to institutions.  Thus, there's a lot of discussion about institutional racism or sexism, say, as well as discussion of systematic or structural racism or sexism.  Here's a quick question: anyone have any thoughts on the nature of the relation between the institutional, the systematic, and the structural?  Are these terms just being used as synonyms, at least in the relevant literature?  I have a vague feeling that it is possible to have non-systematic and non-structural institutions, but (since the relevant systems and structures are all social systems and structures, I presume), I'm not sure that there are any non-institutional (social) structures or (social) systems.  Any thoughts?

Black Women in Philosophy

In case you haven't seen it, there is an article on Black women in philosophy in the Chronicle of Higher Ed today:
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=rVDdSShyYzsDdqdVtrhbFS234msgNfm3