Work-In-Progress Sessions
Wednesday, March 7, 2:30-4PM
Nausica Palazzo (UM, Law), Angell Hall 1164
How Conservatives’ Animus Toward Same-Sex Couples Has ‘Queered’ Family Law
Abstract: The rates of marriage are falling on a global scale in western countries. However, the level of care and commitment toward other people has by no means diminished in the last few decades: people are investing economically and emotionally in relationships which do not resemble the nuclear, romantic, dyadic, heterosexual family. Examples include committed friends, siblings, relatives, unmarried conjugal couples, queer assemblies, and polyamorous relationships. The paper intends to analyze a relatively underdeveloped issue in comparative public family law: the issue of legal remedies available to protect non-marital relationships. For purposes of that, it will draw from the experience of the United States and Canada, where conservative reactionism toward same-sex couples has led to the adoption of schemes protecting non-normative families. Ironically, though animated by a desire to dilute protection for same-sex couples into a bigger basket of couples (e.g. friends and relatives), such reforms promoted family pluralism and “queered” family law, in the sense that the resulting notion of family was functionalized. As to the United States, the enacted reforms in Vermont, Hawaii, and Colorado, providing designated beneficiary schemes, are of interest. The conservative bills in Oklahoma, Alabama and Missouri, proposing a hybrid system of private contracts and registration for mere clerical purposes will also be considered. As to Canada, the Alberta’s model, enshrined in the Adult Interdependent Relationships Act (AIRA) of 2002, will be examined.
Wednesday, April 4, 2:30-4PM
Guillermo Del Pinal (UM, Philosophy, Linguistics, & Cog Sci), AH 1164
Conceptual Centrality and the Stability of Social Biases
Abstract: How are biases encoded in our representations of social categories? Current philosophical and psychological discussions of implicit bias focus on salient-statistical associations between target features and our representations of social groups. These are the sorts of associations probed by the Implicit Association Test and similar priming tasks. In this talk (based on recent collaborative work, e.g., Del Pinal and Spaulding 2018, Del Pinal, Madva and Reuter 2017), I will argue that current accounts systematically overlook one important way in which social biases are encoded, namely, in the dependency networks that are part of our conceptual representations. Dependency networks encode information about the interdependencies between features, incl. the degree of centrality of features for particular conceptual representations. Importantly, centrally encoded biases can disassociate from biases encoded in salient-statistical associations. In addition, the degree of centrality of a bias determines its resilience across different tasks and contexts. Ultimately, I hope to show that the class of centrally encoded biases has important philosophical and practical implications.