MAP & Bloomsbury Academic Volume on Structural Injustice in Philosophy
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Editors: Alexandria James (MAP), Milana Kostic (MAP), Maeve McKeown (University of Groningen), and Robin Zheng (University of Glasgow)
Deadline for 500-word abstracts/pitches: July 31st, 2023
We invite submissions on the use of structural injustice as a conceptual tool for explaining underrepresentation and related issues in the discipline of philosophy and related disciplines.
More than any other Humanities discipline, philosophy has an underrepresentation problem (Schwitzgebel et al, 2021). Philosophers have appealed to concepts such as implicit bias and stereotype threat to explain this (e.g., Saul, 2013; Saul & Brownstein, 2016). Recently, these psychological and individualistic explanations have been critiqued. For instance, Haslanger and Zheng have pointed out the need for structural explanations of social phenomena (e.g., Haslanger, 2016; Zheng 2018). Even though the idea that education systems are structured in an unjust way, i.e., that they are structured in a way that promotes reproduction and legitimization of social (gender, racial, class, ability, etc.) inequalities, has existed for a long time (e.g., Bourdieu, 1990), there has only recently been systematic work using structural frameworks to explain the underrepresentation problem in philosophy (e.g., McKeown, 2022). This MAP / Bloomsbury Academic edited collection on structural injustice aims to redress this.
We aim to uncover the exact structures and mechanisms at play in classrooms, conference rooms, conversations, hiring procedures, evaluative practices (e.g., grading, peer review, rankings of philosophy departments) that perpetuate social inequalities in the academic setting and in professional philosophy more specifically, including during undergraduate degrees and grad school, the job market, and temporary and tenured faculty positions. The overarching goal is to present an encompassing framework for understanding how various social-structural processes function to produce and reproduce conditions in which people of color, gender minorities, working class people, people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups are systematically excluded, disadvantaged and their work disvalued (Young, 2011). Topics include, but are not limited to:
- How can structural injustice be used as a tool to explain underrepresentation of social groups and marginalized epistemologies in philosophy?
- What makes unjust structures so persistent in philosophy (i.e., what are the exact mechanisms for creating and reinforcing unjust structures in philosophy specifically)?
- Why is philosophy as a discipline especially susceptible to reproducing racial, gender, class, ability, and other social inequalities?
- Linguistic injustice as structural injustice (e.g., the role of English language as lingua francain philosophy in perpetuating structural injustices).
- Discursive injustice (Kukla, 2014) as structural injustice in philosophy.
- Academic migration, precarity of academic labor, material and socio-economic conditions and their role in reproducing social inequalities in philosophy.
- Harassment, bullying and abuse in academic philosophy and their contribution to structural injustice.
- Metaphilosophy and structural injustice (how do debates on delineating the scope and method of philosophy, i.e., what Kristie Dotson calls the 'culture of justification' (Dotson, 2012), contribute to perpetuating unjust structures in professional philosophy?)
- Why does structural injustice in philosophy matter?
Formats include:
- Standard scholarly articles that theorize or apply the structural injustice framework to philosophy (5000-8000 words).
- More personal accounts (comparable to Hypatia'slong-running collection of 'Musings') on structural injustice in philosophy. While such essays may benefit from being more personal in their content or less scholarly in their style and form, they should remain theoretically rigorous and methodologically sound (3000-5000 words).
To submit your abstract for a MAP & Bloomsbury Edited Volume on Structural Injustice, please complete this form by July 31st, 2023. More info on the MAP website.
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