As readers may recall, several New APPS bloggers are committed to the Gendered Conference Campaign, which emphasizes the negative effects of conferences and other philosophical events (workshops, summer courses, edited volumes) with all-male lineups of speakers/contributors. Over the years, and thanks mostly to the good work of Jender and the other bloggers over at Feminist Philosophers, awareness of the problem has increased significantly; a few years ago, objections to all-male lineups were often seen as preposterous and absurd, provoking heated adversarial reactions, but now most conference organizers do seem to recognize the importance of the issue. And yet, it can be observed that there are still far too many all-male events being organized, even by organizers who are well aware of the problem. Why is that?
In recent conversation with a friend, two possible factors came up: an overly narrow construal of the theme of the conference/event, and the tendency (especially among young organizers) of going for the ‘safe bets’, the ‘big names’ who have worked extensively on a given topic. Besides the exclusion of women, these two factors have another pernicious effect: several conferences/workshops with similar themes and a much too large overlap of speakers. Truth is a case in point: there have been something like five or more events on truth this year, and a few more planned for next year, all drawing from a more or less steady pool of speakers. To be sure, they are not all identical, but there is considerable overlap of speakers among them. In recent conversation with one of these ‘usual suspects’ for the topic of truth, he confessed himself not to see the point of going to conferences and meeting roughly the same group of people to discuss the same topic(s) so many times in such a short period. Even for brilliant researchers, there are only so many substantially novel ideas that one can produce at a given interval.
This should not be construed as a criticism of there being so many conferences on the same theme (often, there is no way of knowing that there are other similar conferences being organized at the early stages of organization). In particular, all these events simply attest to the fact that truth is again a ‘hot’ theme in philosophy of logic and language. But the fact that the keynote speakers are so often the same people (and usually men) suggests that organizers are not being creative and daring when choosing their speakers.
My suggestion is thus that a narrow construal of the event’s theme is often not conducive to fruitful discussion and progress on a given topic. Instead, why not invite highly competent philosopher X, who works in area Y but not specifically on topic Z (Z falling under area Y) to participate? She/he may well come up with a new, fresh take on the theme, which may enrich and expand the debate in fruitful directions. I suggest that, when organizing a fairly large event (say, beyond 6 speakers), organizers would do well to have one or two speakers who are not ‘obvious choices’ as far as the specific topic is concerned (and thus, not as far as competence is concerned!). And this is also a possible avenue towards a better gender balance at such events: if there are indeed no women working on topic Z specifically, it should not be too difficult to find highly qualified, capable women working in area Y, who might well be able to say something interesting and possibly novel on the topic, even if they have thus far not worked extensively on Z.
In sum, the suggestion is that inviting the same club of usual suspects to speak at conferences is pernicious not only in that it tends to lead to suboptimal gender balance, but (just as importantly) in that it fails to make room for novel, original approaches in a given topic. Conference organizers, be daring and creative! Philosophy can get boring without new interlocutors.
Just to illustrate, here is a conference in logic, with a 50%-50% lineup of invited speakers (yes, you heard it: it’s logic, and half of the invited speakers are women!): the next Colloquium Logicum, to take place in September 2012, in Paderborn. (The Colloquium Logicum is organized every two years by the the German Association for Mathematical Logic and Foundations of the Exact Sciences (DVMLG).) The list of speakers is absolutely top-notch, and although the female speakers are overall more junior than the male speakers, they are all excellent researchers. Who says that only very senior, established names should be keynote speakers? I’m very pleased to see these young and talented women on this list; kudos to the organizers!
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