Symposium:
Critical Philosophy of Race
The Wits Diversity Studies (WiCDS),
and
The Rock Ethics Institute, Pennsylvania State
University, U.S.A.
We invite submissions on the above
topic for a symposium to be held on 13
and 14 January 2014 at the WITS Club,
West Campus, University of the Witwatersrand.
The 21st century is
increasingly described as “post-race.” Yet the signs and effects of “race
trouble” are everywhere in evidence. The gradually diminishing hold of
biological notions of race seems not to have significantly lessened the grip
that the racial has on how society gets to be imagined and organized. How are
we to understand this enduring power of “race?” How may our understandings have
to shift in order to keep track with the apparent elasticity of “race” in the
everyday world? What might not have been understood about “race” within the
dominant epistemological traditions of the Western academy? Where are the
conceptual blind spots? How might “race” be understood differently if the
perspective from which it is theorized is not the prevailing world view within
academia? How does the entry of scholarly interventions, and ways of knowing
and being, that are not driven by elite, white, and male bodies and interests
change the field?
The Critical Philosophy of Race
consists in the philosophical examination of issues raised by the concept of
race, the practices and mechanisms of racialization, and the persistence of
various forms of racism across the world. Critical Philosophy of Race is a
critical enterprise in three respects: it opposes racism in all its forms; it
rejects the pseudosciences of old-fashioned biological racialism; and it denies
that anti-racism and anti-racialism summarily eliminate race as a meaningful
category of analysis.
This symposium aims to explore
philosophical and conceptual questions related to race, racism, and
racialization in contemporary society. While the conference is expected to
concentrate on how questions related to race arise within the South
African/African context and include comparative analyses of race/racism in the
U.S. and the South African/African context, the deliberations are by no means
limited geographically. Papers with different disciplinary and
interdisciplinary and philosophical orientations are welcome, provided they
· Focus on the conceptual/philosophical
underpinnings pertaining to racialised dynamics;
· Employ what can broadly be understood
to be a critical perspective, cognisant of the operations of power in
constructing epistemologies, social dynamics and subjectivities.
We particularly welcome papers that
engage with some of the current concerns within social theory, such as affect,
space, and intersectionality, as well as the various complexities of
postcolonial contexts. We also seek papers that present challenges to some of
the thinking on these issues that are not often questioned.
This symposium will be a platform in
which U.S. and South African race scholars can engage one another on the ways
in which race and racialised ways of knowing and being shape our social world.
As the symposium is also intended to be an incubation forum for
publications, participants whose abstracts are accepted and who are interested
in publishing should submit a working draft of their papers for circulation by
December 15, 2013. The papers will be
circulated to all symposium participants who will be asked to read papers
beforehand so that meaningful conversation can take place and feedback can be
used to refine the paper.
Please submit a short abstract by November 30, 2013. Submit abstracts simultaneously to Melissa
Steyn [melissa.steyn@wits.ac.za] and Nancy Tuana [ntuana@psu.edu]
