2019--2020
Friday, December 13th, 3-5 PM
Talia Mae Bettcher (California State University, Los Angeles)
Angell Hall 1171 (Tanner Library)
Dirty Little Secrets: Transphobia and Intimacy
Abstract:
Many trans people face structural difficulties negotiating intimacy – sexual or otherwise – in dominant constructions of intimacy and sexuality. The aim of this talk is to theoretically illuminate the relationship between the construction of trans people as illusions and the attendant foreclosures of intimacy. While some of the results will be more general, much of the focus will concern relations and sexual interactions between trans women and non-trans men.
Friday, April 17th, 3-5 PM
Ann Cudd (University of Pittsburgh)
"Merit in University Admissions"
via ZOOM (email organizers for link)
Abstract:
Admissions to elite universities pretends to be a meritocracy that rewards the most talented students with placement and, often, financial aid based on a set of criteria that are purported to measure merit. Indeed, elite universities justify their claim to be serving a public, democratic mission by sorting out and polishing the best students and by providing a means of social mobility for talented young people. However, this sorting often falls along discriminatory lines that reinforce oppressive social structures preventing students from low income and minoritized communities from joining the elite. Worse yet, in today’s knowledge economy, in which college education is increasingly required for achieving a middle-class income, the merit-based awarding of financial aid has created an arms race in financial aid and raised the cost of education, especially for those not awarded aid. Is the solution to this dilemma to do away with elite universities? Is it to eschew the sorting of students by merit for placement or aid? I argue that there is a place for merit, properly conceived, as the only proper way to populate universities with students. But merit criteria have to be correctly tuned to the mission of higher education in general and the specific missions of the universities that make it up for those universities that claim to serve a social mission and are therefore supported with public money.
POSTPONED until AY 2020-21
Alex Guerrero (Rutgers)
Angell Hall 1171 (Tanner Library)
"Identity Politics, Standpoint, and Representation:
The Impossible Task of Elections"
Abstract:
In this paper, I argue that due to the fragmentation of social experience and the singleness of electoral decision, electoral representative systems face two fundamental obstacles. One obstacle concerns political equality. I suggest that, in an important sense, it is impossible to distribute political power equally through electoral representative democracy under most modern political conditions. The second obstacle concerns epistemic quality. I argue that electoral representative systems will tend to do poorly at drawing on all the politically relevant knowledge held by the political communities in which they exist. I argue that these two considerations, among others, should incline us toward taking seriously the use of random selection of political representatives. I present one such system for doing so--what I call the "lottocratic" system--and discuss how it might fare better in terms of both political equality and epistemic quality. Along the way, I also suggest a way of situating the idea of "identity politics" in a moral theory of politics. In the talk, I draw on and engage with the work of Lani Guinier, John Hart Ely, Patricia Hill Collins, Sandra Harding, Charles Mills, and Alison Wylie, among others.