A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Category: Academia

Academia / General / Rights

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Language, justice, and linguistic prejudice in academia

Guest Post by Sergi Morales-Gálvez and Josep Soler

This post provides a tentative view about the justice issues that arise from linguistic prejudice in academia. It introduces the plights that affect non-native English speakers, and how these may count as forms of epistemic injustice.

Image by Melk Hagelslag from Pixabay (Free to use under Content License)

Have you ever had something to say at the tip of your tongue, but you momentarily forget the correct word to express it? We are sure that’s an experience many of us are familiar with. For people who speak two, three or even more languages on a regular basis, this can be a frequent occurrence. This is, at least, our experience as speakers of Catalan, Spanish, English, and other languages. Although a momentary lapse like this does not mean that someone is not a capable speaker of a particular language, it might be interpreted negatively.

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Academia / Distribution / Economics / General / Work

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Attribution fallacy, incentives, and income inequality

It is difficult to read anything on the justification of high salaries these days without running into catch phrases such as “the hunt for talent”, “attracting the best people to this job”, or “retaining human capital.” The core idea underlying this kind of discourse is one that has got a lot of traction in political philosophy in recent decades, too: It is justified to pay certain individuals – be they neurosurgeons, lawyers, or CEOs – financial incentives, because the productive contribution they will make in response benefits us all.

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Academia / General / International / Public Philosophy / War

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Ukraine Benefit Conference: ‘What Good is Philosophy? The Role of the Academy in a Time of Crisis’

Aaron Wentland (Vision Fellow in Public Philosophy at King’s College London) is organizing a major online benefit event for the Ukrainian academy on 17 and 18 March, entitled: ‘What Good Is Philosophy? – The Role of the Academy in a Time of Crisis’.

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / Democracy / Liberty / Public Philosophy / Work

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An interview with Philippe van Parijs (Beyond the Ivory Tower Series)

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series (you can read previous interviews here). For this edition, Diana Popescu spoke to Philippe Van Parijs, Hoover Chair of economic and social ethics at the University of Louvain. Van Parijs is the author of several books, including Real Freedom for All and Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World. He is a founder of the Basic Income Earth Network, and chair of its advisory board. In May 2012, an article he published, ‘Picnic the Streets’, triggered a movement of civil disobedience which led to the decision to make Brussels’ central lanes car-free

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / Education / General / Public Philosophy / Teaching Philosophy

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An interview with Ciaran Thapar (Beyond the Ivory Tower series)

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series (you can read previous interviews here). Back in February, Aveek Bhattacharya sat down with Ciaran Thapar, a youth worker, educational consultant and author of the recent book Cut Short, which draws on his experience working with young people in London to analyse violence, inequality and criminal justice among other issues. Through the youth organisation, Roadworks, he delivers PATTERN, a storytelling workshop programme based on the themes of Cut Short. Thapar began mentoring young people as a Master’s student in Political Theory at the London School of Economics, and our interview explored the relevance of academic philosophy and the realities of disadvantaged young people’s lives.

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / General

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An interview with Albert Dzur (Beyond the Ivory Tower series)

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Lisa Herzog and Albert Dzur

Albert Dzur is Distinguished Research Professor at Bowling Green State University, where his work focuses on citizen participation and power-sharing in criminal justice, healthcare, public administration and education. 

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

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Should we deprioritize grades? Or not grade at all?

 

A snippet of a 19th century report card

If you have any experience teaching, you likely have experience grading. Grades are often considered an important part of teaching, for example because they are thought to motivate students. However, while grading, ranking and classifying has become the norm in many places (a development which only really kicked off in the late 19th century), many teachers are trying to move away from crude metrics. Some even go as far as doing away with grades completely. For this post in our series on teaching philosophy, Justice Everywhere spoke to Dr Marcus Schultz-Bergin (Cleveland State University), about his attempts to deprioritize grading and his experience with going completely gradeless in one Philosophy of Law course. He has detailed his experience on his blog, and a version of his reflections on gradeless teaching has also been published in a new book about “ungrading”.

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Academia / General / Pedagogy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy

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Teaching Philosophy “Outside the Walls”

A photograph depicting an audience listening to a lecture in a traditional lecture hall

An audience in a lecture hall

How do you get undergraduate students excited about philosophy? How do you show students that studying philosophy isn’t just about reading complex discussions about the nature of reality? Philosophy teachers the world over are increasingly facing external pressures – from Rate my Professor to government funding bodies and everything in between – to make their courses popular, engaging, or “useful”. Many are also aware of other factors that may encourage re-thinking the way in which we teach philosophy and to move away from traditional  styles of teaching, for instance concerns about accessibility or Western-centrism. One of the things this series, Teaching Philosophy in the 21st Century, sets out to do is to canvas different ways of teaching philosophy. We hope that these discussions serve to inspire and provide ideas for those considering adopting different ways of teaching and assessing students.

For this post, we spoke to Dr Sjoerd Griffioen and Dr Merel Semeijn from the University of Groningen (Netherlands). They run a module called Buiten de Muren (Outside the Walls), which is a required module for second year BA Philosophy students. In the module, students identify a societal issue they want to tackle, a relevant ethical theory or concept (broadly construed), and create a creative final product. ‘We really ask them not to write a standard academic paper about it, or do a standard presentation, but to really come up with something else – because it will probably be the only time in their academic career that they can do that’, Griffioen says. ‘Of course we supervise them very intensively. Because it does happen that students start with a brilliant idea but then they run into problems and we have to turn them towards something that might be a bit more pragmatic. But the principle is that we give them a lot of freedom to come up with something other than a standard academic paper. “Outside the Walls” means to think outside the walls of academia – outside the box, if you will.’

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower

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Theory, Politics and Socialism: An interview with Paul Magnette (Beyond the Ivory Tower Series)

Before becoming the president of the Belgian Francophone Socialist Party, Paul Magnette was a renowned scholar in the fields of EU studies and political theory. In addition to analysing the political regime of the European Union, the growing power of the European Parliament, and the issue of citizen participation in EU politics, he wrote a book on the thought of Judith Shklar and another on the history of the idea of citizenship. We met in September 2021 at the headquarters of the Socialist Party to discuss the influence of his academic training on his political activity, the challenges of shifting from theory to political practice, and the practical relevance of political theory. A new interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series.

 magnette

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

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“What I would like is for people to come at the world with lots of different ways of seeing things”; Dr Liam Kofi Bright on the philosophical canon

Detail of Raphael's The School of Athens

Detail of Raphael’s fresco, The School of Athens, depicting among others Plato and Aristotle

In 2020, Dr Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) was interviewed by the Dutch newspaper Trouw [in Dutch]. In that interview, he outlined his case for getting rid of philosophical canons. “The Dutch far right got very angry with me on Twitter,” Bright says. “A quite prominent far-right politician said what a terrible person I am, and a bunch of her followers agreed.” But much of this anger was based on a misunderstanding of Bright’s argument. “They assumed without really reading what I was saying that my objection was to the particular people on the canon, so say Descartes, because he was a white guy from Europe. And they, being the far right, didn’t like that. But actually my objection isn’t really to any particular items on the canon at all.”

To start off our new series of posts about teaching philosophy – titled, unimaginatively, “Teaching Philosophy in the 21st Century” – we caught up with Dr Bright in August 2021 to discuss his argument, and to learn more about what teaching philosophy without teaching to the philosophy canon might look like.

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