The DRL Newsletter is back!
Time flies and the end of term is very near! Read on to find out what we have been up to over the last months. Also, now that the teaching is almost over, why not take all of those interesting texts you taught and contribute them to the DRL, offering some neat teaching comments while it’s all fresh in your mind?
News
The first Northern Diversity Forum
We have just been to York, to the first workshop organised by the Northern Diversity Forum we helped to create. With fantastic talks from Alya Khan (London Met) and Anne-Marie McCallion (Manchester), we spent an afternoon talking about the philosopher’s mythical norm, exploring the concept of dissociative disagreement, and learning more about Women in parenthesis. We also shared some thoughts about the DRL, talking about its history and our future plans. Big thanks to the organisers of the event, and we are looking forward to seeing you at the next NDF workshop in the spring!
Women in Parentesis collaboration
Last time we mentioned that we are planning a collaboration with Women in Parenthesis, a project promoting the work of the Wartime Quartet and constructing reading lists allowing students to learn more about the work of fantastic women philosophers. We now have the first results of this collaboration, as Anne-Marie McCallion (Manchester) helped us add the content from their lists to the DRL. You can see the effects in the Latest Additions list!
Large expansion incoming!
We also have an update on the APA Diversity Grant which is helping us go through all of the public contributions we received in the past, but didn’t have the time to add to the live list yet. Thanks to the fantastic work by Clotilde Torregrosa (At Andrews) and Chris Blake-Turner (Chapel Hill), with the help by Francesca Bruno (Cornell), more than 300 of those will soon be available to you as ‘stub entries’. In place of our usual teaching comment, they will have a note inviting you to expand them with your own notes. Massive thanks to all who contributed all of those texts over the years – please keep them coming!
Volunteer Spotlight: Anna Klieber (they/them)
Even though academia is in theory directed at the (equal) dissemination of knowledge and education, in reality this is, very often, not the case. I’m interested in and getting involved with equality, diversity and decolonization issues because I think this is a way to challenge the problems we are having in a neoliberal, capitalist university-system, and to provide a more equal and accessible space within philosophy to discuss these issues; while of course we also need to continuously reflect within these spaces how we actually are addressing and meeting various problems of exclusion people face.
I hope that the Northern Diversity Forum can, to some extent, be or become such a space. I got involved with the NDF in particular, because, for one, I’ve enjoyed organising events in the past, but especially because I think that projects dedicated to issues of equality, diversity and decolonization are desperately needed. I hope that future events will attract many more people, draw attention to political issues of our time, and provide a platform to philosophically discuss these topics – but also give opportunities to scholars working on these topics to present their work to an interested crowd. Visibility and representation is important, but it is a constant process, and my hope for the future of the Northern Diversity Forum is that we can keep engaging in that process to make the forum and the discussions we want to pursue more accessible and diverse.
Get involved, get funded!
We continuously expand our list and you can help us by contributing papers via our contribution page.
We couldn’t do what we do without the help of our fantastic volunteers. If you would like to join them and volunteer for us please get in touch! There are so many ways to get involved: reviewing public contributions; helping us with small one off jobs; becoming a regular editor; and promoting the DRL at events and online.
You might even be able to access funding to support your time working on the DRL like Emily Paul (see above). We’re keen to support any volunteers in getting this kind of funding. You can read more about this here.
Thanks so much again for all your support,
The DRL Team