Signs and languages are very useful tools for social coordination and thus play a central role in most, if not all, social practices, but I doubt they are actually necessary to achieve meaningful social interaction or at least interactions that generate normative expectations, and not just patterns of actions and re-actions. Consider the example of […]
Bart Geurts’ Normative Pragmatics
According to Bart Geurt’s recent work, we, animals, use signals when we want others to behave in a certain way. Others, of course, need to also be motivated if we want them to do what we want. Thus, when we use signals we do not only express our desire to have others do something, but […]
CFP: Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (deadline: Jul. 20, 2020)
A Special Issue of The British Journal of Aesthetics In recent years, there have been heated debates both in the public opinion and in academic contexts over the phenomenon of “cultural appropriation”—i.e. when ‘members of one culture … take for their own, or for their own use, items produced by a member or members of […]
CFP: Feminism and Classics 2020: Body/Language, Wake Forest, May 21-24, 2020 (deadline: Sept. 1, 2019)
FemClas 2020, the eighth quadrennial conference of its kind, takes place on May 21–24, 2020, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at the invitation of the Wake Forest University Department of Classics and Department of Philosophy. The conference theme is “body/language,” broadly construed, and papers on all topics related to feminism, Classics, Philosophy, and related fields are […]
Stop Calling Trump Disabled: Ableist Slurs and Politics
CW: ableism and slurs. This is an issue the world over, but this post is about US politics. During Trump’s time in office, ableist slurs have come up again and again. Why call him “insane”, “psychotic”, “deluded”, a “narcissist”? These are the words people reach for when they are angry and when they want to […]
CFP: Language, Culture, and Colonization, Johannesburg IAS, Sept. 2-4, 2019 (deadline: May 15, 2019)
Language, Culture, and Colonization: the third JIAS conference on the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. 2-4 September, 2019, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, 1 Tolip Street, Westdene 2092, P O Box 524, Auckland Park 2006, Johannesburg, South Africa. Convenors David Boucher, University of Johannesburg and Ayesha Omar, Witwatersrand University. Colonialism and Imperialism imposed alien cultures and […]
Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Richard Moore
Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the forty-seventh installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers […]
‘Microaggressions’: Just Another Word For Practices
In my previous post, I refer to both microaggressions, in general, and linguistic microaggressions, in particular. I also claim that linguistic microaggressions are intentional and nonsubjective tactics, that is, are directed at specific aims and objectives (are intentional) and can seldom be attributed to a given actor who introduced them into discourse and practice (are […]
Ableist Language and Other Everyday Assaults on Disabled People (or, Stop Talking About “People with Disabilities”!)
Language, a ubiquitous sociopolitical mechanism, operates intentionally and nonsubjectively, and can produce microaggressions whose effects are far-reaching. Language, Lane Greene remarks, is a genius system with no genius. “Bound by rules, yet constantly changing,” Greene notes, “language might be the ultimate self-regulating system, with nobody in charge” (Greene 2018). In systems of language, words and […]
CFP: Migration and Poverty, University of Salzberg, Sept. 19-20, 2019 (deadline: Jan. 31, 2019)
Keynote speakers:Ilse Derluyn (Ghent, Social Work)Cathy McIlwaine (King’s College London, Geography)Corinna Mieth (Bochum, Philosophy)Julia O‘Connell-Davidson (Bristol, Sociology)Annelies Zoomers (Utrecht, Geography/Development Studies) The Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research (CEPR), University of Salzburg, invites the submission of proposals for single papers, thematic panels (2, 4 or 6 papers), and roundtable sessions (3-5 discussants plus 1 chair) […]
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