I’ve never met a William Gibson book I didn’t like, and The Peripheral is no exception! I don’t feel like I can do it justice in a short post, so why don’t you take a look at Gibson’s website, which has an excerpt from the beginning of the book to get you started?
All posts by Rachel
Book recommendation: Dear Committee Members
If you are (or care about) an academic, Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members is a bit of fiction that can be read quickly and that reminds one of the less savory / reasonable elements of our profession while provoking loud bursts of laughter. I strongly recommend it for a summer read!
Upcoming Hypatia Conference
At the end of this month, I will be presenting and seeing new research at the Hypatia conference at Villanova University in Philadelphia. If you look at the website for the conference, “Exploring Collaborative Contestations and Diversifying Philosophy,” you’ll see that there is a lot to look forward to! In the meantime, I’ll be working hard on my paper (about the concept of a daughter).
AAUP Annual Report: Economic Status of the Profession
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) just released an important annual report about the economic status of our profession; this one debunks a number of common myths relating to compensation for faculty and the overall economics of higher education. I strongly recommend it!
WOGAP tomorrow
Tomorrow I’m going to be sharing some of my work at WOGAP, the workshop on gender and philosophy that is hosted at MIT. The topic of my paper, moral responsibility and its relation to one’s conceptual repertoire, is one that I have found very interesting and challenging over the past year and change, so I’m eagerly looking forward to the discussion.
I am also grateful for the opportunity to share my work with folks whose company and insights I have so enjoyed during all the other WOGAP sessions I’ve attended these past two years, and for the chance to thank them for the good times in person before I move away this summer.
New job at Ball State University starting Fall 2015
I am simply thrilled to say that this coming fall, I’ll be joining the faculty at Ball State University as Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies! While those who need to know have known about this for a while, there is an extra dose of niceness in sharing the good news publicly.
Though I’ll miss some wonderful people in New Hampshire when I’m gone and I won’t get to continue participating in some important ongoing projects here, moving to Ball State is going to open up lots more opportunities for me to meet my long-term goals (professionally and otherwise), so I am really looking forward to what lies ahead.
National Adjunct Walkout Day
Although I’m a little late in posting this, I want to take a moment to recognize National Adjunct Walkout Day, which took place earlier this week.
Many people outside of academia, and many undergraduate students currently enrolled in college, are not aware of just how much the landscape of higher education has changed in recent decades regarding the proportion of faculty on the tenure track as compared to those in adjunct/contingent/part-time/visiting positions, and exactly what that trend means for educational quality and workplace justice. Nevertheless, this is an issue that affects us all: students, families, citizens, and workers.
To learn more about National Adjunct Walkout Day, you can start by looking here, here, here, here, and/or here.
Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews
Many of my fellow nerds (ahem, professors) have probably already seen or heard about this, but I just have to post a link to this amazing, interactive chart that is chockablock with data about how students writing online evaluations use different words to describe professors of different genders/sexes and in different disciplines.
I linked to one of the iterations of the chart that makes me feel good, but if you search for different words, you can find other patterns that may make you feel good and patterns that may make you want to cry and/or scream. Some of them are unsurprising, but some of them honestly blew my mind. For instance, why would students regularly use ‘the’ more times per million words when evaluating male professors and ‘when’ more times when evaluating female professors?
Lots of food for thought here, so bon appetit!
Exploring Collaborative Contestations and Diversifying Philosophy
Deeply nestled into multiple feet of snow, with more on the way, I’m longing for spring and so looking forward to presenting a paper at the Hypatia and APA Committee on the Status of Women conference being hosted by Villanova University in May. The joint conference is itself a great idea, Philadelphia is a wonderful city, and my last Hypatia conference (the 25th anniversary one in Seattle) was nothing short of stellar, so there is plenty to be happy about right there.
But wait, there is more! I’m adding some extra specialness by taking the train from Boston to Philly. I rode Amtrak from Iowa to Boston with my family as a kid, went back and forth between Portland and Seattle multiple times on Amtrak, made it from Denver to Iowa in a blizzard on a train, and have had some unforgettable trips on trains in Europe and Morocco. Despite the major unpleasantness of that seemingly endless trip out of Denver, I really enjoy the experience of being on a train. Of course, train travel also emits much less carbon than going by car or plane, so that is one more thing to paste a smile on my face (although it doesn’t make my toes any warmer)!
Transgender Day of Remembrance
This past Thursday, November 20th, was the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR), a day on which we make an extra effort to raise awareness of, remember, and protest against past and ongoing violence and discrimination directed at transgender people.
In observation of this day, I went to Concord with a couple of friends to participate in the first annual TDoR event organized by the Concord Feminist Health Center. We walked from the center to the state house carrying candles, spoke a few words to honor the many transgender people who have been subjected to violence and other injustices, then walked back to the warmth, snacks, and good company to be found at the center. For more information about the event, see this article in the Concord Monitor.
I met some great people during the event, and I can’t think of a better way to spend an evening than by making a public stand in support of transgender people and the values of justice, equality, and non-violence.