A memorial celebration reflecting the many talents of Naomi Weisstein, radical feminist activist, psychologist, neuroscientist, author, and founder of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band.
A multi-media event, it will include recordings of the Chicago and New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band, photographs of Naomi by New Haven feminist Virginia Blaisdell, a selection of Naomi’s feminist cartoons.
Confirmed speakers are: Heather Booth (activist, founder of Jane, the early feminist abortion group), Patrick Cavanagh (neuroscientist), Martin Duberman (historian), Amy Kesselman (feminist historian), Jesse Lemisch (New Left Historian / activist, husband), Alix Kates Shulman (feminist novelist), Gloria Steinem (feminist, journalist, activist).
The event is co-sponsored by The Digital Humanities Initiative, Gender Studies, and Historical Studies.
Join bell hooks and Kevin Powell in a discussion about black masculinity in popular culture today.
Kevin Powell is an activist, writer, public speaker and entrepreneur.
bell hooks is an author, activist, feminist and scholar-in-residence at The New School. This fall is her fifth and final week-long visit in a three-year residency.
Visit http://www.newschool.edu/lang/bell-hooks-scholar-in-residence/ for more information.
This Essentialism Which is Not One
Topic areas
- Continental Philosophy
- Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality
- Social and Political Philosophy
Details
Taking its title from Naomi Schor’s text with the same name, this conference reformulates the question that Schor posed 20 years ago concerning feminist debates around the writing of Luce Irigaray: is essentialism in contemporary critical thought still anathema? How can we think about essentialism today alongside and across different disciplines that might both nourish and contest one-another such as philosophy, feminist thought, queer theory, critical race studies, and biology? Have past outright rejections of essentialism undercut political agendas, by denying shared connections that might motivate collectivity? What can we say about essentialist, anti-essentialist, and more contemporary anti-anti-essentialist (or strategic essentialist) stances?
The 2016 Philosophy Graduate Student Conference at The New School for Social Research seeks to explore these questions, and we invite all of you to engage with us in thinking about them. We welcome non-traditional presentations, including works of arts or creative writing as well as traditional philosophical papers. Papers should be roughly 3000 words. Performances should be no more than 20 minutes in length. Any accommodations you may need must be specified in your submission.
Potential topics include considerations of essentialism with respect to: social constructivism, gender/sexuality, nature/animals, race, trans feminisms, femininity, identity, technology, disability, queer theory, revolution/political transformations. Please send all submissions formatted for blind review to essentialism2016@gmail.com on or before December 1.
We look forward to hearing from you!
John Dewey, in his resistance to foundational individualism, declares that individual autonomy so conceived is a fiction; for Dewey, it is association that is a fact. In his own language: “There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in association.” In a way that resonates with Confucian role ethics, the revolutionary Dewey particularizes the fact of associated living and valorizes it by developing a vision of the habitude of unique, defused, relationally-constituted human beings. That is, he develops a distinctive, if not idiosyncratic language of habits and “individuality” to describe the various modalities of association that enable human beings to add value to their activities and to transform mere relations into a communicating community.
In Confucian role ethics, Dewey’s contention that association is a fact is restated in a different vocabulary by appealing to specific roles rather than unique habitudes for stipulating the specific forms that association takes within lives lived in family and community—that is, the various roles we live as sons and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors. For Confucianism, not only are these roles descriptive of our associations, they are also prescriptive in the sense that roles in family and community are themselves normative, guiding us in the direction of appropriate conduct. Whereas for both Confucianism and Dewey, mere association is a given, flourishing families and communities are what we are able to make of our facticity as the highest human achievement.