Day 9: Reflections on the Public Philosophy Panel at the APA
The APA Committee on Public Philosophy hosted a panel yesterday entitled, “Navigating the Perils of Public Cyberspace: Toward New Norms of Public Engagement.” Read more
Jan 9
5 Comments
Day 8: Advising Students on Applying to Philosophy Graduate Programs
At the Mentoring the Mentors Workshop yesterday, four faculty at philosophy doctoral programs (UNC Chapel Hill, Marquette, University of Oregon and Brown) talked about how to advise students about graduate school. This is the kind of information that is difficult to find in print, although some advice can be found in the blogosphere here and here, and Brown’s program offers advice here. Beware: the one thing I took away is that different programs run their admissions process differently and so advice about how to apply to one program might be the anti-advice for another program. Read more
Day 7: Mentoring the Mentors Workshop at the APA
When I heard that there is a growing trend among public institutions, including my former institution to refuse to count mentoring as service work, I was aghast. How am I still surprised? This move would contradict their stated commitment to retain working class students and students of color. I take it to be a great privilege to work at a place that recognizes the link between successful learning and good mentoring and the link between retention of students at risk of not finishing college and good mentoring, but I really wish these links were more widely recognized. Yet even when we do recognize the importance of mentoring, we don’t necessarily know how to do it well.
So I was delighted to be invited to participate in the workshop organized by previous directors of PIKSI-Rock (Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Institute at the Rock Ethics Institute), Ellen Feder and Mariana Ortega. The workshop aimed to develop a set of best practices and shared experiences for philosophy faculty who send their students to PIKSI and thus demonstrate an investment in attracting and retaining diverse practitioners of philosophy to the major and to graduate school and to graduate students involved in PIKSI. Read more
Day 6: That Time I Worked for Rick Santorum: A Political Conversion
The summer after my junior year at the College of William and Mary, I interned for Rick Santorum in his Washington, D.C. legislative offices. I got the internship because my family had been very involved in anti-abortion activism, like Operation Rescue involved. In high school in Philadelphia, I had worked for a local anti-abortion activist organization and the director, William Devlin, knew Santorum’s Chief of Staff, Mark Rodgers. So he hooked me up. I think I interned for 10 weeks, but maybe it was 8. When I graduated from college, I went to work for Brabender Cox, Santorum’s political consultants who continue to advise Santorum in his presidential campaign. Read more
Day 5: Making of a Murderer and the End of the Symbolic Order
I’ve been watching the Making of a Murderer. I’m on Episode 4. If you haven’t started it yet, don’t worry, there are no spoilers here. I think this is an unspoilable series because, well, you know everything when you start watching. Not everything, but the gist, and that’s why you start watching. The gist is that a man in Wisconsin was falsely convicted of sexual assault, spent 18 years in prison, was exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence, and then, was possibly framed by police when he sued the police department for wrongful conviction. It was that last bit that motivated me to watch. Read more
Day 4: A Gluten-Free Life. Really, It’s Just Been Six Months
I have always been someone who prided myself on being willing and able to eat whatever was put in front of me. Once, the guy who lived in the apartment downstairs from me in West Philly invited me to an after-hours event at Vientiane Café, a Thai restaurant on Baltimore Avenue. He was hosting a private dinner where they were going to serve even more authentic Thai food. This included water bug pâté, which I ate. So the first time I had to positively answer the question whether I had any dietary restrictions, I was embarrassed. Even just last weekend, when a friend asked, “You guys eat everything, right?” I took it as a point of pride that we were thought to be “those kind of people,” the people who weren’t fussy. Then I had to say, well, no, I’m gluten-free. Read more
Day Three: Conversion Practices
On New Year’s Day, I visited my Uncle Jon in Chicago. He is a member of JPUSA, a Christian commune in Uptown. He’s a feminist progressive Christian who is more aware of his white male privilege than any Christian man I know, so it’s refreshing to spend time with him. He was telling us about his changing views on evangelism. He described a certain perspective on efforts at conversion that he called, “dive bombing.” “Dive bombing” is when you come from above and attempt to strip your target of their (false) understanding of the world so that you can then replace it with yours. This approach, he pointed out, is very condescending. And it works by establishing that someone else is wrong. So it’s basically gaslighting evangelism. Read more
Day 2: The Greeks Exhibit at the Field Museum
On New Year’s Eve, I went to the Field Museum in Chicago to see its special exhibit on the Greeks. The Museum has collected 500 artifacts from Greek museums, which cover 3500 years of history, beginning with the Minoans on Crete and other Cycladic islands. I had seen many of these pieces in their home museum, which admittedly, is already pulled from the original context, but seemed at least to beckon to the sense of the place from which they were found. Seeing them all pulled together robbed them of their aura (in the Benjaminian sense), it seemed to me. I’m glad they could pull it together for people to see, but I just want to put the plug in for going and visiting places and the museums in those places.
31 Days of Blogging: January Resolution
I don’t have the resolve for a year long’s resolution, and everyone seems to be poo-pooing resolutions this year anyway, so forget it. I’ve decided to resolve just for a month I’m going to blog every day. I was inspired by Jill Stauffer, who did it every day in December. I am feeling a certain trepidation about this resolution, perhaps that is a sign that it is a good one. I often think about something Jill said at the public philosophy panel at SPEP in 2014 about how things need time to percolate in private before bringing them to the world, and I think this notion influences my public philosophizing. I spend a lot of time ruminating before sending things into the world. I think that is useful, but I think it is also useful to develop habits of daily engagement and thoughtfulness. So that’s what this is. As you can expect, I’m also going to reflect along the way about what’s hard about keeping this resolution, which I expect will have something to do with being a woman in philosophy on the Internet. Stay tuned.
Thanks to Fit is a Feminist Issue for the Calvin and Hobbes find.
Man Up! Exhortations to Masculinity in Film and TV
With some help of some Facebook friends, I’ve collected a list of scenes from film and television of fathers or coaches or other male role models shaming younger men for not being manly enough. Here’s the list. It is surely not exhaustive. Add your suggestions in the comments. Read more
