CFP-FEAST, The Future of Feminist Ethics: Intersectionality, Epistemology, and Grace
Oct 27, 2018 → Mar 01, 2019
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Future of Feminist Ethics: Intersectionality, Epistemology, and Grace
Oct. 3 - 6, 2019
Sheraton Sand Key Resort, Clearwater Beach, Florida
Submission Deadline: February 28, 2019
The Future of Feminist Ethics: Intersectionality, Epistemology, and Grace
This will be the 20-year anniversary of FEAST’s proto-conference, Feminist Ethics Revisited, and the 10th official FEAST conference.
What challenges do feminists continue to face and what new challenges have arisen since FEAST first began?
How might “revisiting feminist ethics” at this juncture help feminists to confront those challenges while drawing upon lessons of the past?
We offer the following three terms in the subtitle for this conference as generative areas for reflection for feminist ethics and social theory:
Intersectionality
The term intersectionality identifies a long-standing practice within Black feminist thought of attending to multiple axes of oppression simultaneously.
It is a term that has been utilized in multiple contexts and contested in others. To what extent have all feminists fully responded to the call to think and act with an awareness
of how multiple axes of power intersect? To what extent have feminists failed to do so? How have political action and thought been transformed by analyses that are intersectional?
What are some of the obstacles and opportunities for collective feminist action given that feminists are differently positioned in relation to one another along various axes of oppression and privilege?
Epistemology
Feminists have long called attention to the ways in which our political and ethical lives are intertwined with our lives as knowers.
Moreover, feminist thinkers from various disciplines and traditions of thought have analyzed myriad ways in which knowledge production itself can align with or resist oppression.
What sorts of ethical, political, and epistemic questions arise when we practice self-reflexivity, reflecting upon feminist knowledge production and distribution?
How do disciplinary demarcations and boundaries direct epistemic attention in some ways and not others?
What are some examples of productive epistemic disruption, intervention, and resistance?
Grace
How we navigate and negotiate our relations with others seems to evoke questions about grace in more than one sense of the term.
As beings who live interdependently and who err, we are sometimes generous with others despite their failings and at other times we ourselves may be received
with a generosity that is not deserved. How ought we to think about this sort of grace when relations are already fraught due to axes of dominance and oppression?
For example, who is afforded grace and who is not? In a different vein, as feminists we are often trying to occupy spaces in which we are not welcome and to create possibilities
that current regimes relentlessly work against. Given the awkwardness feminist projects may entail, when and how do we maintain grace under pressure, when and how do we sustain
it toward those with whom we work in resistance to oppression? What does “maintaining grace” do? And when ought it to be rejected?
The FEAST program committee seeks papers that engage intersectionally-informed thinking on these and other issues including:
• Overlaps and interactions between ethics, politics, and epistemology
The materiality of ethics and of moral knowing
Ongoing disagreements in feminist philosophy concerning, for example:
Intersectionality
Calling out and calling in
Mainstreamed "White Feminism"
Interdisciplinarity and/or working across disciplines
Where "early" feminist ethics has led us and where we should go from here
Relations (ethical/political/epistemic) among differently non-dominantly situated persons
Loving perception vs. loving ignorance
Epistemic hurdles, but also epistemic gateways, for working intersectionally on particular problems, for example:
Sexual Harassment and Sexual Violence
Disability/Disabling Institutions and Practices
Colonization, Imperialism, and Globalization
Speaking for, about, and/or with
Grappling with the ways in which vulnerability and privilege can intertwine
Please send your submission, in one document (a Word file, please, so that abstracts can be posted),
to
by February 28, 2019. In the body of the email message, please include:
your paper or panel title,
your name,
your institutional affiliation, and
your e-mail address.
All submissions will be anonymously reviewed.
Individual Papers: Please submit a completed paper of no more than 3000 words, along with an abstract of 100-250 words, for anonymous review.
Your document should include: paper title, abstract of 100-250 words, and your paper, with no identifying information. The word count (max. 3000) should appear on the top of the first page of your paper.
Panels: Please clearly mark your submission as a panel submission both in the body of the e-mail and on the submission itself. Your submission should include the panel title and all three papers with abstracts and wordcounts (no more than 3000 for each paper) in one document.