Calendar

Mara Marin (Go-In Post-doctoral Fellow in the Exzellenzcluster Normative Orders at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) will give a lecture entitled “Connected by Commitment: Rethinking Relations of Oppression and Our Responsibility To Undermine Them”.

The lecture will advocate for a novel model of thinking of our responsibility to dismantle structures of racial and gender oppression.

From the abstract: I start from the observation that racial and gender oppression in its current form in North American and Western European societies endures in spite of the fact that there are no sexists or racists, which raises a puzzle: How can we explain the endurance of racism and sexism given that, as belief systems, they have been publicly and, to some extent, personally disavowed? What makes structures of oppression enduring, and how do individuals contribute to their endurance? I call this “the endurance question.” I argue that our actions perpetuate oppressive structures regardless of our intentions and beliefs, but rather in virtue of their cumulative effects. While other theorists emphasize the negative aspects of the unwitting support we give to unjust structures, I emphasize its transformative potential: if currently our actions support these structures, we have the ability to transform these structures by acting repeatedly in ways that fail to conform to their norms.

To make sense of this relation between individual actions and larger social structures I propose a new notion I call “commitment.” Drawing on intuitive understandings of friendships and long-term intimate partnerships, I define a commitment as a relationship of obligations developed over time through the accumulated effect of open-ended actions and responses. In commitments agents incur obligations via their voluntary actions but without knowing in advance the precise content of their obligations. I argue that the notion of commitment is necessary to help us address not only the endurance question, but also the related question of our responsibility for transforming oppressive structures.

Mara Marin is a political theorist with interests in feminist theory, the regulation of sexuality, the social contract tradition, theories of oppression, domination, justice, political obligation and authority. She is the author of “Marriage as Commitment: A Revisionary Argument” (published in American Multicultural Studies, ed. Sherrow O. Pinder) and “Care, Oppression and Marriage” (published in Hypatia). She received her PhD in political science from the University of Chicago.

Ross Poole (Adjunct Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, NSSR), will give a lecture entitled “Recovering the Human in Human Rights”

From the abstract:
“In this paper, I defend the old-fashioned idea that humans have rights in virtue of being human. I suggest that this claim requires, not a metaphysical and certainly not a religious conception of human nature, but rather an ethical understanding of what it is to be human amongst other humans. However, this ethical understanding is inadequate on its own. It requires a legal and political form: that of a right attributed to each and every human.”

Nabina Liebow, PhD Georgetown University, gives a lecture entitled:

 “But Where Are You Really From?” Responding to Racial Microaggressions

Liebow will argue that the particular structure of racial microaggressions makes the potential social cost of confronting microaggressors high for microagressees; this is part of what makes patterns of racial microaggressions difficult to disrupt. This difficulty helps make racial microaggressions effective tools for sustaining racial oppression.

In this talk, Professor Russell describes how notions of race have organized the American concept of kinship. She argues that this history of the association of race and kinship in the American imaginary allows race to serve as a proxy for kinship in the contemporary fertility clinic.

Camisha Russell received her PhD in Philosophy from Penn State University in 2013. Her first book, The Assisted Reproduction of Race: Thinking Through Race as a Reproductive Technology, forthcoming with Indiana University Press, explores the role of race and racial identity in the ideas and practices surrounding assisted reproductive technologies. Her primary research and teaching interests are in Critical Philosophy of Race, Feminist Philosophy, and Bioethics. Her publications include “Black American Sexuality and the Repressive Hypothesis: Reading Patricia Hill Collins with Michel Foucault” in Convergences: Black Women & Continental Philosophy, “Questions of Race in Bioethics: Deceit, Disregard, Disparity, and the Work of Decentering” in Philosophy Compass, and “The Race Idea in Reproductive Technologies: Beyond Epistemic Scientism and Technological Mastery” in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. She has held both a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2012-13) and a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship (2013-15). Before attending graduate school, she served as a Peace Corps Volunteer for the Girls’ Education and Empowerment program in Togo, West Africa. She is currently a Riley Scholar-in-Residence in the Philosophy Department at Colorado College.