While Justice Everywhere takes a break over the summer, we recall from our archives some of our memorable posts from 2016-2017.
Here are four good reads on matters of academic practice that you may have missed or be interested to re-read:
Mollie Gerver’s ‘Blind Reviewing for Workshops‘
Bruno Leipold’s ‘6 Tips for Graduate Political Theory Students‘
Maeve McKeown’s ‘Support for Early Career Researchers, Increase Diversity‘
Andrew Walton’s ‘Writing a Good Referee Report for a Journal Article‘
In recent years, there have been a number of notable news stories reporting the extent of Hollywood’s (and now the BBC’s) gender pay gap, whereby female actors tend to earn considerably less than their male counterparts. These stories generate conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, the unequal remuneration involved looks like a troubling case of gender injustice. On the other hand, there is something odd about the conclusion that these multi-millionaires are victims of distributive injustice: many people believe that the super-rich already have more than that to which they are entitled. This workshop considers the different themes that are at play in this apparent conflict of intuitions, such as discrimination, exploitation, sufficiency, feminism, the morality of markets, and expressivism. We invite any scholars working on these questions (or other ones that bear on the workshop topic) to attend.
Confirmed speakers include: Richard Arneson (UCSD), Clare Burgum (UNE), Susanne Burri (LSE), and Anca Gheaus (UPF).
If you would like to present a paper at this workshop, please send an abstract of 500-1000 words to David Axelsen (D.Axelsen@lse.ac.uk) by September 1st 2017. Presenters will be asked to pre-circulate a version of their paper one week in advance of the workshop.
This event is sponsored by the British Academy.
… and why Schulz could be the one
Saying that the right thing to do is for Germany to show more solidarity towards the European South is hardly news. But how can this be achieved in times of populism? In spite of the odds, Martin Schulz (the Chancellor candidate of the SPD) could play a surprisingly refreshing role in this respect.
From June 14th to June 16th, the Amsterdam Centre for Contemporary European Studies (ACCESS EUROPE) organised an international conference on “Solidarity and European integration”. In his contribution to the panel “European solidarity and justice: normative issues”, Andrea Sangiovanni presented his dispositional analysis of the concept “solidarity”. He defines solidarity as a (complex) disposition to sacrifice one’s own self-interest (narrowly understood) for the good of others. In order to distinguish solidarity from utilitarian altruism, love, enlightened self-interest, and fairness, he further specifies it as being a disposition to sacrifice that is impersonal, narrow, and person-directed. It is a disposition to sacrifice one’s own self-interest for the sake of overcoming an adversity faced by other member states or EU citizens. Such a dispositional analysis is, I believe, much more promising than, for instance, an analysis of solidarity as a mental state. It enables us to reach a better understanding of the conditions that are most conducive to the development of solidarity and the factors that hinder it. In this post, I develop some thoughts on how to address this issue in the European context.
Picture a hospital, bringing in thousands of people every day who suffer from a host of different ailments, many of them contagious. If you go there for one reason, there is a risk you will end up suffering from something else by the time you leave: a complex medical procedure could go wrong, or – more likely – you could end up catching something from a fellow patient or a visitor. Working there puts you in an equally dangerous situation, as you spend your days alongside seriously ill people. A hospital, in short, has a “negative baseline” of secondary effects that must be overcome for it to be beneficial to the community it serves. Yet very few people would be bold enough to suggest we would be better off without hospitals.
This is development economist Paul Collier’s (2006, p. 1485) defence of development aid. I believe it strikes at the heart of a common misconception about aid. And it matters when it comes to the philosophical question of what we owe to others.
22nd and 23rd June 2017
The Durham Centre for Political Thought in collaboration with the Global Politics Masters Programme and Global Policy Institute are set to host a 2 day workshop next week to discuss questions of global justice, democracy, power and legitimacy.
The event ‘Global Justice Meets Global Democracy’ is organised by Elizabeth Kahn and Luke Ulas and will take place on the 22nd and 23rd of June at Elvett Riverside 1 (ER148). The workshop will consist in the presentation of ‘work in progress’ papers given by a number of invited speakers, followed by a pre-prepared responses and broader discussion.
Guest editors Julian Culp (Frankfurt) and Danielle Zwarthoed (Louvain)
Submission of abstracts: asap
Submission of papers: October 15, 2017
Direct enquiries and submissions to: Culp@em.uni-frankfurt.de ; Danielle.Zwarthoed@uclouvain.be
Following upon the special issue Refugee Crisis: The Borders of Human Mobility (December, 2016), The Journal of Global Ethics introduces a special issue concerning the responsibilities for education that pertain to international migration. The Journal of Global Ethics invites scholars and practitioners from the disciplines of education, economics, law, philosophy, political science sociology and other fields to submit articles for review.
What’s the best way of digesting student teaching evaluations?
This is a difficult question to answer, even for an experienced teacher. Student evaluations can be very helpful and give you a good sense of what is working and what isn’t, and also perhaps what to do about it. But it can be quite upsetting to receive negative feedback especially if it is flippant or personal, as some of it is.
For these reasons, when we received the student evaluations for our first year compulsory political theory module, I emailed my teaching assistants (all PhD students or recent graduates) with some advice.
I am sure there’s lots more good advice I missed out and perhaps there are things that I say here are mistaken. If so I’d be delighted to be further informed about how best to react to feedback and how I might better advise my TAs in particular. But thinking it might have some useful guidance for others, I post a slightly altered version of the email below.
The Hochschule für Politik München (Bavarian School of Public Policy) advertises an interdisciplinary fellowship in “Global Transformations.” It is open to political theorists with an interdisciplinary bend. Details here:
http://www.hfp.tum.de/fileadmin/w00bwi/www/hfp/News/Post-Doc_Fellowship_Global_Transformations.pdf
Relational egalitarians hold what matters for justice is that all members of a society “stand in relations of equality to others.” The idea that all human beings are moral equals is widely shared: it underlies the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many national constitutions. How will this norm be affected by the arrival of “big data,” the collecting and analysing of huge amounts of data about individuals? Internet companies and government services collect data about individuals’ activities, including geographic locations, shopping behaviour and friendships. Many individuals voluntarily share such information on social media, some also track their physical activities in meticulous details. Experts expect that “people analytics” – big data applied to the measurement of work performance – will have a revolutionary impact on labour markets.
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