Linda Martín Alcoff
Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her writings have focused on social identity and race, epistemology and politics, sexual violence, Foucault, and Latino issues in philosophy. She has edited 10 books, including Feminist Epistemologies co-edited with Elizabeth Potter (Routledge, 1993) and The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy co-edited with Eva Feder Kittay (Blackwell 2006). She is also the author of two books: Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford 2006), and Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory (Cornell 1996) She is currently at work on two new books: a book on sexual violence, and an account of political epistemology. She is Vice-President elect of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. She was named the Distinguished Woman in Philosophy for 2005 by the Society for Women in Philosophy, and in 2006 she was named one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics in the United States by Hispanic Business magazine. Her book Visible Identities, won the Frantz Fanon Award in 2009.
Professor Martín Alcoff’s latest book: The Future of Whiteness.
Pedro DiPietro
Assistant Professor
Women’s and Gender Studies
Syracuse University
Pedro Javier DiPietro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University. Identifying as a nonbinary, queer, transfeminine, person of color, they work at the intersection of decolonial feminisms, women of color thought, and critical theories of race and sexuality. They are affiliate faculty in the Latino and Latin American Studies Program, Native American and Indigenous Studies Program, and the LGBT Studies Program. DiPietro is an active member of the Association of Joteria Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS), the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), and the Latin American Studies Association (LASA, Sexuality Track Co-Chair 2018-2019).
DiPietro’s main research project examines coloniality’s spatial production of bodily impermeability and insulation, of geographies of viability, worthiness, and social protection. By focusing on counter-geographies of non-normative passions, their project follows networks of aberrant others such as travesti sex-workers, Latinx queer performers and spiritual activists, and mixed-indigenous healers. Under the title Sideways Selves: The Decolonizing Politics of Latinx Space and Passion, DiPietro’s book engages the ways of perceiving, knowing, and fostering community within these networks and it argues that they craft community by constantly returning as spatially other, aberrant and perverse because permeable and porous. They return moving sideways, not as state, identity, or place, but rather as decolonizing economies of passion.
Together with Jennifer McWeeny and Shireen Roshanravan, DiPietro co-edited Speaking face to face / Hablando Cara a Cara: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones, the first book focused entirely on the political and praxical journey of feminist philosopher María Lugones. This book is forthcoming in 2018 with SUNY Press.
Michael Hames Garcia
Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of Oregon
Prof. Hames-García grew up in the Portland, Oregon area, where he graduated from Rex Putnam High School. After leaving Oregon to attend graduate school and then living and working in New York, Indiana, Alabama, and California for 13 years, he happily returned to Oregon in 2005 to join Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. He served as department head from 2006-2011. He was also director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality Studies (CRESS) from 2006-2011 and director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS) from 2014-2015. He is also the author of several books, including Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) and Identity Complex: Making the Case for Multiplicity (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2011).
Kathryn Sophia Belle, (Formerly Kathryn T. Gines)
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Penn State
Founding Director of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers
Professor Gines’ primary research and teaching interests lie in Continental philosophy (especially Existentialism and Phenomenology), African American/Africana Philosophy, Black Feminist Philosophy, and Critical Philosophy of Race. She has also taught in African American Studies/African Diaspora Studies. Some of the major figures she writes about and teaches include Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Anna Julia Cooper and Richard Wright. Professor Gines has published articles on race, assimilation, feminism, intersectionality, and sex and sexuality in contemporary hip-hop. She co-edited an anthology titled Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2010) and is author of Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana University Press, 2014).
Professor Gines is the founding director of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers (CBWP), the former director (2010-2016) of Cultivating Underrepresented Students in Philosophy (CUSP), and a founding co-editor (2013-2016) of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race (CPR). She has been an active member of several professional organizations such as the American Philosophical Association, Society for Phenomenology and Existentialist Philosophy, Caribbean Philosophical Association, and Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora.
Married with four children she has a passion for empowering academics and professionals in the areas of work, life, and wellness balance, and finding bliss. Through Work.Life.Wellness.Balance.Bliss, Gines offers coaching and workshops on work/life balance, academic balance, home balance, and wellness and self-care. She is certified yoga instructor (RYT, 500 with an emphasis on yoga therapy).
Sarah Hoagland
Professor Emeritus
Northern Illinois University
Sarah Lucia Hoagland is a collective member of the Institute of Lesbian Studies in Chicago.
Sarah is a Bernard Brommel Distinguished Research Professor, and Professor Emerita of Philosophy, Women’s Studies and Latino/Latin American Studies, Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.
Overall, Sarah Hoagland’s work has been about articulating conceptual coercion and coercive consensus that deny epistemic credibility to marginalized voices, re-cognizing resistance and sabotage reversed by dominant interpellation, and promoting the creation and maintenance of spaces, discursive and within communities, where non-hegemonic, non-normative, non-dominant sense exists and can thrive. She is author of Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Value. This book’s thesis is that the norms we absorbed from Anglo-European ethical theory undermine rather than promote community, legitimating oppression by redefining it as social organization. Moreover, it is not because we are free and moral agents that we are able to make moral choices. Rather, it is because we make choices, act in the face of limits, that we declare ourselves to be moral beings.
Sarah Hoagland is also co-editor of two anthologies constructed to disrupt dismissals and encourage the discussion to continue: For Lesbians Only: a Separatist Anthology with Julia Penelope, and Re-Reading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly with Marilyn Frye.
Her more recent work in epistemology explores the coloniality of knowledge, arguing that European Modernism, framed by colonialism, animates an epistemology of ignorance. Discursive colonization proceeds in practices where the only agents are advocate researchers and the only discourse for articulating subjects’ lives is an Anglo-Eurocentered one. Moreover, against-the-grain critical epistemic concerns are not about being right, but about being able to engage.
María Lugones
Associate Professor
Comparative Literature and Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture of Philosophy, and of Women’s Studies
Binghamton University
Lecture Title
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Nelson Maldonado-Torres
Associate Professor
Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, and Program in Comparative Literature
Rutgers University
“Traveling with Lugones in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes against Coloniality: On Loving Perception, Faithful Witnessing, Decolonial Love, and the Decolonial Attitude”
Nelson Maldonado-Torres is one of the scholars in what the anthropologist Arturo Escobar called in 2002 the “modernity/coloniality research programme,” also known as the “modernity/coloniality/decoloniality network.” This increasingly international network of scholars explore the connections between Western modernity and coloniality, as well as reflect about the spaces of and the possibilities for decoloniality. A former president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, Maldonado-Torres specializes in the work of the Caribbean and African philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. His contributions include a theorization of modernity/coloniality as a paradigm of war, a development of the concept of the colonialiality of being, a genealogy of the decolonial turn, and an elaboration of an ethico-political conception of decolonization based on a reading of the work of Frantz Fanon in relation to the logic of the gift and colonial damnation. His publications include the monograph Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Duke UP, 2008) and the collection of essays La descolonización y el giro decolonial, compiled by the Universidad de la Tierra in Chiapas, México, in 2011. He is co-editor with Ramón Grosfoguel and José David Saldívar of Latin@s in the World-System: Decolonization Struggles in the 21st Century U.S. and is the guest editors of two special issues on the decolonial turn in the journal Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Production of the Luso-Hispanic World. More recently he has elaborated “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” which appear on the website of the Frantz Fanon Foundation (http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article2360.html). He is currently working on two book projects with the titles Fanonian Meditations and Theorizing the Decolonial Turn, and is co-editing with Yuderkys Espinosa and María Lugones an anthology of Latin American decolonial feminism entitled Decolonial Feminism in Latin America: Contributions and Challenges.
José Medina
Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy
Northwestern University
University José works primarily in critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, political philosophy, communication theory and social epistemology. His books include The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford University Press; recipient of the 2013 North-American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award), and Speaking from Elsewhere (SUNY Press, 2006). His most recent co-edited volumes are The Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (Routledge, 2017) and Cosmopolitanism and Place (Indiana University Press, 2017). His current projects focus on how social perception and the social imagination contribute to the formation of vulnerabilities to different kinds of violence and oppression. These projects also explore the social movements and kinds of activism (including what he terms “epistemic activism”) that can be mobilized to resist racial and sexual violence and oppression in local and global contexts. Current book projects include Racial Violence and Epistemic Activism and Theories of the Flesh: Latin-American and US Latina Feminist Theories (with Andrea Pitts and Mariana Ortega).
Eduardo Mendieta
Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor in the School of International Affairs
Penn State
Eduardo Mendieta was born in Colombia, but grew up in the United States. He studied at Rutgers, Union Theological Seminary, the New School for Social Research, and the Goethe University in Frankfurt. His research interest include: Frankfurt School Critical Theory, especially the work of Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst; Latin American philosophy, Liberation Philosophy, and the work of Enrique Dussel –which he has translated–, and Latino/a Philosophy. He has done work on and with Angela Y. Davis, whom he considers to be part of the Critical Theory traditions, given that her philosophical education took place at the Goethe University, and Brown University, under the mentorship of Herbert Marcuse. He has also been doing research on Latin American urbanism. He recently finished a monograph titled The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism, which is forthcoming with SUNY Press, as well as a Spanish edition, with an extended introduction, to work by Angela Y. Davis on penality and prison abolition. He is already at work on what he considers to be a prequel to his animal book, tentatively entitled, Philosophy’s War: Nomos, Polemos, Topos. Most immediately, however, he is editing his essays on the critical philosophy of race and will gather them under the title of Technologies of the Racist Self. He is also editing a couple of anthologies on the history of Latin American philosophy and its most recent developments. Once these books are out, he would like to pursue two other projects. One has to do with Latin American cities, which takes up work on megaurbanization, megaslums, and the Anthropocene he has done over the last couple of years. He has picked some six or seven Latin American cities to exemplify what he call the Latin American “urban genius.” The second project, which is tentatively titled Philosophy’s Workshop, has to do with what he has called philosophy’s paralipomena. The aim is to study, profile, and unearth the many ways in which philosophy is produced, crafted, thought, written, communicated, and confessed: letters, dialogues, voice, diaries/autobiographies, translations, lectures, and the philosopher’s body (female, male, racialized, lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, disabled, ugly, etc). The aim is to develop a genealogy of the production of philosophy that is attentive to its material spaces of production. His guiding philosophical idea is that philosophy takes place in and through bodies that are always located in unique institutional spaces, which affect its imaginary. Now that he has moved to Happy Valley, he is interested in taking up his work on prisons, hyper-penality and the revitalization of racism reproduction of race and in the U.S.
Mariana Ortega
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Penn State
Mariana Ortega will be joining the Philosophy Department and Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities at Penn State in January 2018. Her main areas of research and interest are Women of Color Feminisms, in particular Latina Feminisms, 20th Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology (Heidegger), Philosophy of Race, and Aesthetics. Her research focuses on questions of self, identity, and sociality, as well as visual representations of race, gender, and sexuality. She has published in various journals including The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, International Philosophical Quarterly, Critical Philosophy of Race, Hypatia, Radical Philosophy Review, and philoSOPHIA. She is co-editor with Linda Martín-Alcoff of the anthology Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader (SUNY, 2009) and author of In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (SUNY, 2016). She is the founder and director of the Roundtable on Latina feminism, a forum dedicated to discussions of Latina and Latin American feminisms. Her current project examines questions at the intersection of visuality, practices of othering in connection to race and sexuality, and the epistemology of ignorance.
Areas of expertise include Latin American Philosophy, Decolonial Philosophy, Race and Ethnicity, Political Philosophy, Aesthetics, 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy.
Currently my research focuses on (i) the intersection of world revolutionary agencies, aesthetics and ethics in the work of José Carlos Mariátegui, (ii) a critical engagement with Dussel’s materialist ethics of liberation and (iii) the encounter between Western philosophy and non-Western philosophies as the result of coloniality, particularly in terms of forms of cultural, social and political liberation and resistance.
Shireen Roshanravan
Associate Professor
Department of American Ethnic Studies
She earned her doctorate from the State University of New York at Binghamton in the interdisciplinary program of Philosophy, Interpretation & Culture where she specialized in feminist/queer of color theory, decolonial praxis and Asian American Studies. Her scholarship has always been rooted in grassroots community and coalition building. Since graduate school, Shireen has been active in the Incite! Women of Color Against Violence movement, co-founding a local Incite! chapter in Binghamton, NY, and has served as co-director for the Escuela Popular Norteña, a popular education school based in Northern New Mexico. Informed by her own struggles as a queer-identified South Asian American woman of color, Shireen has published widely on the politics of women of color coalition building, anti-imperial and decolonial feminist praxis, and the communicative strategies for U.S. South Asian immigrant and queer negotiations with post-9/11 racialized gender formations.
Ofelia Schutte
Professor
University of South Florida
Emertia of Philosophy
“Crossroads, Intersections, Border Zones, In-Between Spaces, and Turns: On Lugones, Decolonial Feminisms, and the Multiplicity of Latina Experiences”
Ofelia Schutte is a Cuban-born Latina philosopher, currently Emerita at USF in Tampa. Her initial area of specialization was post-Kantian continental philosophy. Her first book, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche without Masks offered a critical reading of Nietzsche from a feminist perspective. Today she is known primarily for her work in Latin American feminisms and for her leadership in promoting the field of Latin American philosophy in the United States. Schutte served as Associate Editor of Hypatia for sixteen years and held office on numerous professional association committees and boards, including Chair of the APA Committee on Hispanics/Latin@s, President of the Society for Iberian and Latin American Thought, and a member of the FEAST Steering Committee in its formative years. She was a Fulbright Research Fellow at UNAM in Mexico in 1985 and a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe Research Center in 1993. Her work is also known in Cuba where she has participated in numerous professional meetings for over thirty years.
Schutte’s best-known works are her authored book Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought in which she traces the relationships among a variety of progressive twentieth-century Latin American intellectual and social movements and, as co-editor, A Companion to Latin American Philosophy. Among her many articles some of the best-known are “Cultural Alterity: Cross-Cultural Communication and Feminist Thought in North-South Dialogue” (where she highlights the asymmetrical power relations among differently situated speaking positions and calls for awareness of the concept of incommensurability in cross-cultural communication) and “Negotiating Latina Identities” (where she argues in favor of a multi-faceted contextual analysis of Latina identities that subvert the widespread marketing and objectification of our identities). An early critic of Anglo- and Euro-centrism (“Overcoming Ethnocentrism in the Philosophy Classroom” [Teaching Philosophy, 1985], The Debate on Cultural Imperialism, APA Proceedings, 1986]), in “Continental Philosophy and Post-Colonial Subjects” she has argued specifically for non-Eurocentric approaches to reading European continental philosophy. In “Crossroads and Intersections: A Meditation on Anzaldúa and Beyond (forthcoming in Ortega et al, coeds, OUP), Schutte focuses on Anzaldúa’s exemplary narrative of emotional healing in Borderlands/La Frontera. In that spirit she affirms Latinas’ capacities for forging bridges of understanding and creativity for the future communities that await us.
Alejandro Vallega
Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon
Alejandro Vallega Arredondo is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon and is also a painter. He is the author of Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking On Exilic Grounds (Penn State University Press, 2003), Sense and Finitude: Encounters at the Limits of Art, Language, and the Political (SUNY Press, 2009), and Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority (Indiana University Press, 2014). Among his edited volumes is the English translation of Enrique Dussel´s Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion (Duke University Press, 2013).
His work centers on rethinking philosophical understanding through “aisthetic” experience/sensibilities, this term understood in its original senses (aisthesis), as a fundamental part of understanding that occurs at the concrete, affective, emotional, and memorial dimensions of the psyche and to determinations of consciousness. This work engages Latin American indigenous and popular thought, the history of Latin American philosophy, Philosophy of Liberation, decolonial thought, deconstruction, hermeneutics, and phenomenology; as well as the history of Western philosophy and esthetics, Andean thought and esthetics, and the tradition of Chinese painting and calligraphy of the literati.
Vallega is president of the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics, editor of the World Philosophies Series (Indiana University Press), US coordinator of the Asociación de Filosofia y Liberación (AFyL, México).
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