Diversity Reading List

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The year 2025 will mark the 10th anniversary of the Diversity Reading List’s existence, and we are happy to invite you to celebrate with us the various efforts and projects dedicated to making philosophy a discipline of equal opportunity.

Since 2015, the DRL has aimed to make philosophy more inclusive, diverse, and to promote equality of opportunity in our discipline. Racial and gender disparities in philosophy are significant, and if you are not a white cisgendered man, you are still likely to belong to a group which is significantly under-represented in contemporary Anglophone philosophy. But the landscape has been changing over the last decade and we are proud to have been a part of that change. It that time, the DRL aimed to address inequalities in representation by helping to overcome their cause: the stereotype of a philosopher as a white male. We continue to do so by making it easier for lecturers to find high quality texts written by authors from under-represented groups, by helping students set up reading groups on a diverse range of topics, and by popularising and conducting own original research into the state of the discipline.

At this two-and-a-half-day conference, we would like to celebrate the progress of the last decade and discuss what remains to be done; to bring together academics working on themes relevant to the DRL’s mission, and to make work by authors from under-represented groups more visible in university education and research.

Programme (interactive booklet / recordings)

• Alex Stehn (Texas Rio Grande Valley): “Pluralizing Philosophical Languages and Cultures”
• Anna Klieber (Cardiff): “Silence under Oppression”
• Ayşe Seda Umul (Bilkent University): “Structural Gaslighting and Epistemic Oppression: The Marginalisation of Queer Identities in Patriarchal Societies”
• Cassandra Teodosio (Women Doing Philosophy, UP Diliman): “The Experience of Women Doing Philosophy in the Philippines: Voices and Writings from the Peripheries”
• Clotilde Torregrossa, Quentin Pharr, Simon Fokt (St Andrews/Berlin): “Categorising Philosophy in a new key”
• Frederique Janssen-Lauret (Manchester): “Susan Stebbing’s Arguments Against Metaphysical Determination”
• Ian Kidd (Nottingham): “Vices of Metaphilosophical Myopia”
• Josh Platzky Miller (Witwatersrand): “Legitimacy Debates, the myth of ‘Western Philosophy’, and the Contribution of Ben Kies”
• Lene Vos (Utrecht): “Gabrielle Suchon and Mary Astell on the authority, education and liberty of women”
• Marc Virgile Gwodog (Douala): “Zara Yaqob and Walda Heywat on Gender Equality: Does Sexual Pleasure Matter to Equality?”
• Paul Giladi (SOAS): “Being Epistemically Disobedient: Reflecting on Co-Creating the SOAS Decolonising Philosophy Toolkit and Handbook”
• Philippe Major (Lancaster): “Structural Eurocentrism in Philosophy: An Argument for Sociometaphilosophy”
• Suki Finn (Royal Holloway): “Gender and Reproduction in Philosophy”

DRL adheres to the BPA/SWIP Good Practice Guide for Conferences.

The seminar series on Women in Nineteenth Century Philosophy draws together scholarship rediscovering women philosophers from nineteenth-century Britain who have been unjustly left out of the philosophical canon. The talks introduce these women and their thinking on such topics as feminism, animals, metaphysics, religion, science and Darwinism.

The seminar Creative Resistance & Feminist Ecologies aims to bring researchers and activists from diverse academic traditions and differently situated lifeworlds in order to discuss questions related to ecofeminist futures. For this seminar series, we are interested in ecofeminist theory and praxis, its interconnections with other critical approaches, its relevance and potential for informing creative resistance and the pursuit of environmental and intersectional justice.