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Category: Academia

Academia / General / International / Pedagogy / Public Philosophy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy

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The Difficulty of Doing Non-Western Political Theory

I am currently designing an undergraduate course on ‘contemporary non-western political theory’, a task fraught with difficulties. Ever since I moved to Europe for my postgraduate studies, I have felt a certain discomfort with the ethnocentrism in analytical political theory departments here, that is at once apparent and not-so-apparent. Apparent, because 99% of the authors I read in a ‘global’ justice course or the scholars I meet at ‘international’ conferences turn out to be people who grew up and trained in the ‘west’. Not-so-apparent because the content of the research taught and produced by these scholars is often genuinely universal. Questions such as ‘what justifies democracy’ or ‘is equality inherently valuable’ or ‘what grounds human rights’ can and often do have answers that transcend cultural particularities. That is, in fact, what attracted me to analytical political theory in the first place – it’s concern with some basic, normative issues that presumably affect all human societies. 

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Academia / Education / General / Pedagogy / Public Philosophy / Teaching Philosophy / Technology

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From the Vault: Universities, Academia and the academic profession

While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2023-24 season. 

Trinity College Library, Dublin. antomoro (FAL or FAL), via Wikimedia Commons

Here are a few highlights from this year’s posts relating to academia, the modern university, and the academic profession:

Stay tuned for even more on this topic in our 2024-25 season!

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Justice Everywhere will return in full swing in September with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors (published on Mondays), in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series and other special series (published on Thursdays). If you would like to contribute a guest post on a topical justice-based issue (broadly construed), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.

Academia / Distribution

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An alternative procedure for allocating research grants

This is a guest post by Louis Larue, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Aalborg University.

Applying for external funding is an integral part of academic life. Universities dedicate huge amounts of resources, and often have entire teams of administrators and advisors, to help researchers obtain external grants and manage the immense load of paperwork required to administrate successful applications. Researchers and teachers, at all stages of their careers, spend considerable time and resources to write, read, revise, and submit applications. If successful, they will then have to write various reports and will be required to master the complex and often obscure language of funding agencies. At a more advanced stage of their careers, they will also dedicate a significant share of their time to reviewing and evaluating applications submitted by others and to sit in various selection committees.

In general, the evaluation procedure involves (in one or several steps) the evaluation of the scientific quality of the submitted application, by one or several peers. When all evaluations have been gathered, a selection committee usually selects successful applicants. The ideal behind this procedure (which I have only sketched here and which varies across countries and institutions) is to select, impartially, the “best” applications, that is, those with the highest level of scientific quality, properly defined.

I do not deny the value of this ideal, but it is far from realized in practice. The reform proposal that I defend below is meant to reinvigorate this ideal and salvage it from several threats.

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / Democracy / Distribution / Economics / General / Public Philosophy / Work

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Beyond the Ivory Tower interview with Martin O’Neill

Not only are there more democratic and egalitarian alternatives theoretically, but also policies being pursued successfully at the city and the regional level, in many places, that do give people a sense of control in the economic sphere. It’s not just wishful and abstract thinking; there is abundant proof of concept. We have to remain hopeful; we have to shine a light on those examples and talk about why they represent elements of a different kind of settlement, a more justifiable and more human political and economic system, that we ought to strive to see realized more widely and more deeply.  

(This interview took place at Alma Café, a beautiful family-owned café in York, England) 

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Academia / Education / General / Technology

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What’s really at stake with Open Access research? The Case of Sci-Hub and the “Robin Hood of Science”

A mural dedicated to Sci-Hub at UNAM. Txtdgtl, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This is a guest post by Georgiana Turculet (Universitat Pompeu Fabra).

In his recently published “More Open Access, More Inequality in the Academia”, Alex Volacu aptly criticizes present Open Access (OA) policies for giving rise to structural inequalities among researchers, and increasing revenues only for publishers. His analysis is aimed at contextualizing some recent academic events, that is, the board of the well-known Journal of Political Philosophy resigning due to pressures from publishers to increase the intake of open access publications. However, it would benefit from considering the wider context of recent alternative form of resistance to corporate publishers’ pressures.

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / General

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Dana Mills

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, an interview between Dana Mills and Zsuzsanna Chappell about Mills’s activist work in Israel-Palestine. Dana Mills is a writer, dancer, and peace and human rights advocate. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2014. As an academic, she has held posts, among other institutions, at the University of Oxford, NYU, Northwestern University, American Dance Festival, Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, University of Amsterdam and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Since 2021 she has been working in Israeli-Palestinian civil society on a variety of issues. Mills has written many articles and three books: Dance and Politics: Moving beyond Boundaries (MUP, 2016); a biography of Rosa Luxemburg (Reaktion, 2020) and Dance and Activism: a century of radical dance across the world (Bloomsbury, 2021).

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / Liberty / Public Philosophy

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An Interview with Dorothea Gädeke (Beyond the Ivory Tower Series)

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Davide Pala and Dorothea Gädeke, revolving around Gädeke’s research project “Theorising Freedom From Below”. Dr. Dorothea Gädeke is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Ethics Institute, Utrecht University. She joined Utrecht University in 2018. Before that, she taught at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany, and at TU Darmstadt, Germany and spent time as a visiting scholar at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa and at Princeton University, USA. Her research is motivated by the urge to understand and address current social and political challenges. It is situated at the intersection of political philosophy, social philosophy and legal and constitutional theory. She specialises in domination and structural injustices and analyse how they are connected to practices of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. She is particularly interested in transnational relations between the global north and the global south. Currently, she is setting up a new project on agency and resistance against unfreedom. 

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Academia / General / International

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More Open Access, More Inequality in the Academia

For many political philosophers, the beginning of 2024 has turned out to be – in one respect – rather disconcerting, as it ushers in the widespread boycott of one of the community’s leading publications. Many readers of this blog will no doubt be familiar with the unfolding situation. In April 2023, Wiley decided to remove Robert Goodin from his position as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Political Philosophy at the end of the year. This in turn led to swift resignations from the Editorial Board of the journal, and a statement of non-cooperation signed by more than a thousand political philosophers, pledging not to submit or review papers for the journal, or to join its editorial ranks, unless Goodin is reinstated. Since this has not happened, with JPP’s website not indicating any editorial composition as of the moment when this article was published, the boycott is now in effect. The likely demise of the Journal of Political Philosophy as a consequence of these developments is profoundly distressing. But the wider context which led to it is even more worrying, not only for political philosophers and not only in regard to research quality, but also in regard to the deepening of academic inequality in both philosophy and many other research fields as well.

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Academia / Children / Education / General / Pedagogy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy

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Modern education systems erode trust – this may be a big problem.

Photo by lauren lulu taylor on Unsplash

As teachers, our work is inescapably affected by a range of structural features such as the marketisation and commodification of higher education, the erosion of benefits and of pay, and more. Many of these have been amply studied and debated, including on this blog. Today, however, I want to discuss a relatively underexplored dimension of all this – the slow erosion of trust between staff and students.

In a (higher) education setting, trust is an important value, for several reasons. For one, students are typically young adults and being given responsibility – and being trusted with that responsibility – is an important part of the process of growing up. I’m specifically inspired here by an approach to assessment known as ‘ungrading’. Regardless of the merits of the method, Jesse Stommel’s summary of the core philosophy of ungrading is something that needs to be taken extremely seriously: ‘start by trusting students’.

But it’s also a principled point. From a broadly Kantian perspective, one important aspect of ethical behaviour is respect for others as ‘ends in themselves’. While we all may occasionally jokingly remind each other that students’ brains haven’t fully developed yet, it is important to remember that this does not mean that they lack the capacity for autonomy. Indeed, because of their age, it is perhaps more important than ever to allow them to practice, or exercise autonomy.

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