The Politics of Space and Place Conference

CAPPE Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics
University of Brighton, UK
4th International Interdisciplinary Conference
The Politics of Space and Place
Wednesday 16th - Friday 18th September 2009
Keynote speaker: Ilan Pappe, University of Exeter, UK

Having now accepted about 60 proposals in response to our first call for papers we would particularly welcome contributions in the following areas, while nevertheless not excluding others:
* political and philosophical aspects of space and place
* sexual space and place
* space, place and globalisation
* current affairs

Final Call for Papers

In a world where inequality and poverty are growing remorselessly, where you are, and where you happen to have been born, continue to determine, how, and in indeed whether, you live. From the urbanization of the human species and the burgeoning of slums to the rise of the modern gated community; from 'Fortress Europe' and the Israeli 'security wall' to land reform in South Africa; questions of space and place are central to some of today's most bitterly contested political issues. What might an analysis of politics which focuses on the operation of power through space and place, and on the spatial structuring of inequality, tell us about the world we make for ourselves and others? How is power structured and brought to bear on people through space and place? How does power operate locally, nationally and globally and in both its soft and hard forms? How does it operate through urban planning, architecture, housing policy, immigration policy and national borders? How does it work to discipline and exclude some, while insulating others from the excesses of inequality and degradation? How and in whose interests do these divisions function as they pit against each other not only people who live in different parts of the world but also those who live just a few metres apart? What might an analysis of politics through questions of space and place indicate about how power, injustice and inequality could be better understood and more effectively contested?

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be emailed to Nicola Clewer AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AS NUMBERS ARE LIMITED - and by 30 April 2009 at the very latest: nicolaclewer.hughes@ukonline.co.uk Decisions will be communicated by 8 May. The conference fee is £210. This includes refreshments, lunch on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and a buffet dinner on Thursday in a local pub. There remain a few places for graduate students and for people who have no institutional affiliation at the reduced price of £105. Please indicate if you wish to be considered for one of these when sending your abstract; or contact Nicola Clewer: nicolaclewer.hughes@ukonline.co.uk as soon as possible. Please note: the conference fee does not include accommodation. Reasonably priced en-suite accommodation in student halls of residence will be available on a first come, first served basis for a minimum of three nights. (Further information regarding university accommodation will be provided at the registration stage.) Otherwise delegates are welcome to make their own arrangements. Please note: unfortunately we are unable to offer travel grants. For updates and further information about the centre please visit the CAPPE website: www.brighton.ac.uk/CAPPE

Aspiring Academics Event

Details of an interesting free event for postgrads and early career academics...

Tuesday 19th May 2009, Woburn House, London(http://prs.heacademy.ac.uk/view.html/prsevents/429)

This one day event is aimed at those who are relatively new to teaching, or those who are planning to begin a career in academia in the UK, working in philosophy, HPS and theology and religious studies. Speakers will include: Professor Jonathan Wolff, Dr Joe Cain, Dr Mathew Guest and Dr David Mossley

This workshop offers an opportunity for aspiring academics to gather and share information and advice, and to develop the skills necessary for a successful academic career. The event will be useful both for those already teaching and researching in departments, and those hoping to start their academic careers soon. It will also provide a chance to meet fellow academics from all over the country. Topics covered will include:
* Views of the 21st century research landscape
* Subject specific approaches to curriculum design
* Career planning

The event, including lunch and refreshments, is provided at no charge. The sessions will begin at 11:00 and finish by 16:00. Places will be allocated on a first come first served basis. For more information and to register, please visit the event webpage

Danielle Lamb
Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies
School of Theology and Religious Studies
University of Leeds
LS2 9JT
0113 343 8756
http://prs.heacademy.ac.uk

Liberalism and Realism Conference

Forthcoming Conference: May 7th 2009, University of Birmingham, UK
Should Political Theory Get Real? Liberalism and the Challenge of Political Realism

Keynote Speakers:
Professor William Galston (The Brookings Institution),
Professor John Horton (Keele University),
Professor Richard Bellamy (University College, London),
Dr. Adam Swift (Oxford University),
Dr. Mark Philp (Oxford University),
Professor Glen Newey (Keele University)

For full conference details go here.
Registration/attendance is free.
Please register at: www.bhamonlineshop.co.uk/events/

Conference Theme
Drawing on Machiavelli, Hobbes, Nietzsche and Arendt, a number of otherwise disparate thinkers advocate a view of politics that is broadly ‘realist’. This view argues that contemporary liberal political philosophy misrepresents ‘the political’ because it fails to appreciate the depth of conflict and disagreement in modern societies. Political realists call for a re-engagement with the political as a distinct sphere of human activity in which vice, conflict, and competition for power are ineradicable. The purpose of this one-day conference is to bring together leading political theorists who share an interest in the nature of the political. It will provide a platform for discussing the merits of the realist critique of liberalism across a diversity of perspectives.

Schedule
10.15-10.45am Coffee/Welcome

Panel 1:
11.00 – 11.30 Prof. John Horton (Keele University) - 'Modus Vivendi and the Question of Political Legitimacy'
11.30 – 12.00 Prof. Richard Bellamy (University College London) - 'Private Virtue, Public Vice: On the Nature of Political Morality'
12.00 – 12.30 Q & A

Panel 2:
1.30 – 2.15 Prof. William Galston (Brookings Institution, USA) - 'Realism in Political Theory'
2.15 – 2.30 Dr. Adam Swift (Oxford University) Discussant
2.30 – 3.15 Q & A

Panel 3:
3.45 – 4.15 Prof. Glen Newey (Keele University) - 'Two Dogmas of Liberalism'
4.15 – 4.45 Dr. Mark Philp (Oxford University) - 'What is to be Done?
Political Theory and the Place of Realism'
4.45 – 5.30 Q & A

For further information please contact:
Dr. Steve Buckler and Dr. Richard North at: ejpt@contacts.bham.ac.uk.
Department of Political Science and International Studies,
University of Birmingham,
Edgbaston,
Birmingham,
B15 2TT

Peter Singer

Peter Singer
Solving World Poverty/Darwin and the Animals
2 April 09, 18.00-20.00
In association with Explore-At-Bristol, Bristol

A rare opportunity to see the internationally renowned speaker, philosopher and author Peter Singer in a special evening devoted to his work. His new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, discusses the moral implications of greed and poverty. Extreme poverty could be abolished if the world's wealthiest ten percent of people donated a fraction of their income. Following a discussion of his book, Peter will deliver a keynote Bristol Festival of Ideas lecture, 'Darwin and the Animals', as part of Darwin 200.

How to book: BOOKING FOR THIS EVENT OPENS ON FRIDAY 6 FEBRUARY. Price: £10.00 / £8.00. Contact Explore-At-Bristol on: 0845 345 1235 (local rate calls) or 0117 915 5000 (9.00-17.00, Mon to Fri). Book in person at Explore-At-Bristol daily (10.00-17.00 on weekdays; 10.00-18.00 on weekends, bank holidays and daily during local school holidays). A recorded information line is available at weekends.

http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/

Conference: Global Justice in the 21st Century

Conference Announcement
"Global Justice in the 21st Century"
Interdisciplinary Conference
Program on Values in Society and the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington, Seattle, WA (USA)
17-18 April 2009

The Program on Values in Society and the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities invite you to a conference on "Global Justice in the 21st Century". In the twenty-first century, the world will continue to become more inter-connected. Health care, environmental degradation, political violence, human rights, and world poverty are global issues requiring global solutions. These issues will be addressed at a conference on "Global Justice in the 21st Century" to be held at the University of Washington on April 17-18, 2009.T he conference will bring together scholars at the forefront of research on these issues to consider such questions as: What kind of international legal order should we work for inthe 21st century? How should human rights be understood in the 21st century? How should intellectual property rights be balanced against the need for life-saving drugs? What rights should poorer countries have against wealthier ones? How should the international community address global warming? What rights should the world's poor have to be protected from the effects of global warming? How should medical research be done to protect the world's poor from exploitation? The conference is free and open to the public.

Conference Schedule

Keynote Address: 7 pm, Friday, April 17, 2009, Kane Hall, Room 210 (Reception to follow in Kane 245) - Thomas Pogge, Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, with a joint appointment as Professor in the Department of Philosophy and in the Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University - "The Health Impact Fund: Boosting Innovation Without Obstructing Free Access"

Daily Schedule (all in Kane Hall, Room 245)

Friday, April 17, 2009:
8:45 am: Nicole Hassoun, Assistant Professor in Philosophy and International Relations at Carnegie Mellon University - "Libertarian Welfare Rights?"
10:30 am: Dan Wikler, Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health at Harvard University - "Single vs. Multiple Standards in Health Care and Research: An Issue of Global Justice"
1:30 pm: Allen Buchanan, James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and James B. Duke Professor of Public Policy Studies at Duke University - "Innovation and Inequality"
3:15 pm: Angelina Godoy, Helen H. Jackson Chair in Human Rights and Associate Professor in the Law, Societies & Justice Program and in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington - "Intellectual Property, Medicines, and the Right to Health: A View from Central America"

Saturday, April 18, 2009:
8:45 am: Brad R. Roth, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Law School at Wayne State University - "Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement: Premises of a Pluralist International Legal Order"
10:30 am: Joel Ngugi, Associate Professor of Law and Chair of the African Studies Program at the University of Washington - "The Corrosive Effects of Neoliberal Legal Thought on Global Human Rights Discourse"
1:30 pm: Mathias Risse, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Philosophy at the John F. Kennedy School of Justice, Harvard University - "Who Should Shoulder the Burden? Global Climate Change and Common Ownership of the Earth"
3:15 pm: Stephen Gardiner, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Professor in the Program on Values in Society at the University of Washington - "Geoengineering the Climate in a Perfect Moral Storm"

The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation in its services, programs, activities, education and employment for individuals with disabilities. To request disability accommodation contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance at: 206.543.6450/V,206.543.6452/TTY, 206.685.7264 (FAX), or e-mail at:dso@u.washington.edu

The conference is co-sponsored by the Graduate School and College of Arts & Sciences; the Law, Societies, and Justice Program; the Law School; the Treuman Katz Center forPediatric Bioethics; the Center for Global Studies; the Department of Bioethics & Humanities; the Department of Philosophy; the Department of Political Science; and the Program on the Environment.

More information is available on the conference website

Contact: Prof. Bill Talbott, Department of Philosophy, University of Washington, 511 Condon Hall 1100 NE Campus Parkway, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. Phone: +1 206 543-5095. Fax: +1 206 685-8740. Email: wtalbott@u.washington.edu

Institutional Cosmopolitanism Workshop

Cosmopolitanism in a world of interconnected threats and challenges: From a world of states to a world state?

A one-day workshop on moral and institutional cosmopolitanism.
Friday March 6, 2009
Centre for Philosophy of Law, Radboud University Nijmegen

Programme:
9.45-10.15 Coffee

10.15-11.45 First session: Global democracy without exclusion?
10.15 Lecture: Hans Lindahl (University of Tilburg)
10.45 Reply: Wouter Veraart (VU University Amsterdam)
11.00 Discussion

11.45-13.15 Second session: Democratic representation within a globalizing world
11.45 Lecture: Stefan Rummens (Radboud University Nijmegen)
12.15 Reply: Roland Pierik (Radboud University Nijmegen)
12.30 Discussion

13.15-14.30 Lunch

14.30-16.00 Third session: World peace through world law
14.30 Lecture: Stanley L. Paulson (Washington University/University of Kiel)
15.00 Reply: Thomas Mertens (Radboud University Nijmegen)
15.15 Discussion

16.00-17.30 Fourth session: The state of nature and the world of states
16.00 Lecture: Hauke Brunkhorst (University of Flensburg)
16.30 Reply: Sylvie Loriaux (Radboud University Nijmegen)
16.45 Discussion

17.30-17.45 Closing remarks

Participation is free of charge, but registration is required. If you are interested in attending, please contact: r.tinnevelt@jur.ru.nl

CFP: Brave New World 2009

I've been asked to post this CFP for the upcoming Brave New World conference hosted by MANCEPT. BNW is a well-established annual postgraduate conference in political theory which always manages to attract high-profile keynote speakers (this year being no exception):

CALL FOR PAPERS - Deadline for submission of abstract: March 31st 2009

Brave New World 2009, the Fourteenth Annual Postgraduate Conference organised under the auspices of the Manchester Centre for Political Theory(MANCEPT), will take place on Tuesday 23rd and Wednesday 24th June 2009 at the University of Manchester.

We are pleased to announce that our guest speakers this year are:
Professor Chandran Kukathas (London School of Economics)
Dr Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen)

The Brave New World conference series is now established as a leading international forum exclusively dedicated to the discussion of postgraduate research in political theory. The conference offers a great opportunity for postgraduates from many different countries and universities to share experiences, concerns and research interests, to exchange stimulating ideas and to make new friends - all in a financially accessible and highly informal setting. Participants will also have the chance to meet and talk about their work with eminent academics, including members of faculty from the University of Manchester as well as our guest speakers, who will deliver keynote addresses at the event.
Guest speakers in previous years have included Brian Barry, Simon Caney, G.A. Cohen, Cecile Fabre, Jerry Gaus, Peter Jones, Susan Mendus, David Miller, Onora O'Neill, Michael Otsuka, Bhikhu Parekh, Carole Pateman, Anne Philips, Thomas Pogge, Henry Shue, Quentin Skinner, Adam Swift, Philippe Van Parijs, Andrew Williams, and Jonathan Wolff. Papers focusing on any area of political theory or political philosophy are welcome. If you would like to present a paper, please send a 300-word, anonymised abstract, including the title of the paper, to Brave.New.World@manchester.ac.uk, no later than 31st March 2009. Please also include in your email your name and institutional affiliation. Please note that the conference is self-financed and participants are responsible for seeking their own funding. For further details please contact David Birks at Brave.New.World@manchester.ac.uk. Further details to follow here.

Gateway to Philosophy

There seems to been a flurry of new internet resources for philosophers recently (see previous post on the Phil Papers project), and here is another...

Gateway to Philosophy

Based at Boston University, the Gateway to Philosophy project provides users with access to papers presented at the World Congress of Philosophy, as well as other initiatives of a philosophical nature. The site is divided into five primary sections, including "Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy","Existenz", and "Paideia". Visitors may wish to start their journey through the site by clicking through the World Congress section, where they can read all of the papers presented at the World Congress of Philosophy and learn about the media coverage of this event. Moving on, "Existenz" contains the full-text of their online journal, which is inspired by the writings of Karl Jaspers and his "notion of philosophizing on the grounds of possible Existenz, by which he meant philosophical thinking that might elucidate the meaning of human experience and existence." Additionally, visitors also have access to a detailed search engine on the site and information about their upcoming conferences and publications.

Buchanan Lectures

*Allen Buchanan: Leverhulme Lectures 2009 'Ethics in Political Reality'*

We are pleased to announce Professor Allen Buchanan's Leverhulme Lecture Series 'Ethics in Political Reality'. Allen Buchanan is James B. Duke Professor Philosophy at Duke University. His research is in political philosophy, with a focus on international issues, and bioethics, with a focus on the ethics of genetic interventions with human beings. He is visiting Oxford as Leverhulme Visiting Professor for four months, and will be giving the 2009 Uehiro Lectures. The lectures are open to all including the public and there is no need to book. For further information, please email ethics@philosophy.ox.ac.uk

Tuesday 17 February 2009, 12.30 - 2.00 p.m.
*Leverhulme Lecture 1: What Conservatism and Liberalism Have to Say About the Biomedical Enhancement Project--and Vice Versa*
Professor Allen Buchanan
Venue: Seminar Room 1, Old Indian Institute, Broad St (on Corner with Catte St), Oxford (Map)

Tuesday 3 March 2009, 12.30 - 2.00 p.m.
*Leverhulme Lecture 2: The Social Ethics of Believing: Why Practical Ethics Needs Social Moral Epistemology *
Professor Allen Buchanan
Venue: Seminar Room 1, Old Indian Institute, Broad St (on Corner with Catte St), Oxford (Map)

Tuesday March 17 2009, 12.30 - 2.00 p.m.
*Leverhulme Lecture 3: The Egalitarianism of Human Rights*
Professor Allen Buchanan
Venue: Seminar Room 1, Old Indian Institute, Broad St (on Corner with Catte St), Oxford (Map)

Tuesday April 28 2009, 12.30 - 2.00 p.m.
*Leverhulme Lecture 4: Fidelity to Constitutional Democracy and to a Robust International Legal Order.*
Professor Allen Buchanan
Venue: Seminar Room 1, Old Indian Institute, Broad St (on Corner with Catte St), Oxford (Map)

Phil Papers

Extended details from David Chalmers of a very exciting new online resource...

PhilPapers

http://philpapers.org/

I'm pleased to announce the launch of PhilPapers, a virtual environment for philosophical research. PhilPapers has been developedat the ANU Centre for Consciousness by David Bourget and me, with significant help from Wolfgang Schwarz. PhilPapers is an outgrowth of the MindPapers project in the philosophy of mind, but it is much greater in scope and ambition. PhilPapers encompasses all areas of philosophy, and it has many features that MindPapers lacks.

The core of PhilPapers is a database of close to 200,000 articles and books in philosophy, concentrating especially although not exclusively on items that are available online. Around this database, the site has all sorts of tools for accessing the articles and books online wherever possible, for discussing them in discussion forums, for classifying them in relevant areas of philosophy, for searching and browsing in many different ways, for creating personal bibliographies and personal content alerts, and much more. The best way to get an idea of what PhilPapers can do is to go to http://philpapers.org and try it yourself. A casual browser can browse listings for new and old papers, search for papers in a given area or by a specific author, read the discussion forums, and so on. However, we encourage you to create a user account, which enables many more sophisticated features. If you do this, you'll have a profile page from which you can set up personal research tools such as bibliographies, filters, and content alerts (via RSS or email). Your profile page will include a list of your own work (compiled via name matching), which you can edit where appropriate. With a user account, you can also submit new entries (giving publication information and/or a link, and optionally uploading a paper to our repository), edit and categorize existing entries, and contribute to discussion forums.

At the moment, the PhilPapers database includes entries for 188,000 articles (typically via publication information and/or links, with full papers stored elsewhere). The database has been compiled mainly through automatically harvesting many Internet sources. It includes entries for
(i) 124,000 journal articles harvested from the websites of more than 200 philosophical journals,
(ii) 33,000 books harvested from the Library of Congress database,
(iii) 18,000 books and articles from the MindPapers database,
(iv) 7000 papers harvested from more than 1000 personal websites,
(v) 5000 papers harvested from Internet archives,
(vi) 1300 historical e-texts from the Episteme Links database, and
(vii) a few hundred user submissions.
About 95% of thearticles are available online (via links to journal sites, personal sites, archives, and so on), while about 17% of the books are available online (typically via a Google Books preview). The database itself is growing fast. For example, the addition of books has just started and is still in progress (so far we have only added books published after 1970).

A key feature of PhilPapers is a fine-grained category system for philosophical areas. The system is an extension of the MindPapers category system, and now has about 3000 categories under five main clusters with 6-8 main areas each. Of course the category system is still very tentative and is subject to ongoing refinement. To date, there has been only very partial categorization of papers, through limited automatic and manual classification, and through inheriting categories from MindPapers. However, we have developed a number of categorization tools (e.g., a "categorize" link under each paper) that users can use to classify entries themselves. Our hope is that over time, in a Wiki-like way, this will lead to every entry being categorized in 1-3 categories, with resulting dynamic bibliographies for all sorts of areas of philosophy. If you have relevant expertise, please contribute by categorizing papers. The PhilPapers site has much more information under the "help" menu.

Discussion forums are another key feature of PhilPapers. These are devoted to discussing the papers and books in PhilPapers, as well as to discussing other philosophical and professional issues. By clicking "Discuss" under a paper or book, you will be given the opportunity either to create a discussion forum for that item, or to contribute to an ongoing discussion. Each such forum will be included in turn in encompassing forums for associated areas of philosophy, where these encompassing forums can also include other discussion threads, not associated with papers and books. There are also forums for general philosophical discussion, for discussion of professional issues, and for discussion of PhilPapers itself. These forums are something of a grand experiment, but we encourage users to use them, in the hope that these might become a central locus for discussion among philosophers.

PhilPapers is primarily intended for professional philosophers and graduate students, although anyone interested in the field is welcome to use it. Non-professionals are subject to some restrictions in contributing articles (contributions are possible, but they won't be included in the default "professional authors only" filter for listing entries), and in contributing to the discussion forums (for which they are subject to a daily posting limit). We hope that this arrangement strikes a reasonable balance between keeping the site accessible to all, and maintaining a high quality that will maximize the value ofthe site to researchers in the field.

PhilPapers has been through a month or so of beta testing with a limited number of users, who have uncovered various bugs and other issues, but there are certainly many problems that remain. For now,the site remains in "beta" mode, and we encourage all users to report any bugs that they encounter, via the bug report link at the top of every page, or through the bug report forum. (So far we've mainly optimized the site for recent versions of Firefox and Explorer, and there may be problems with other browsers.) There are also numerous glitches in the database, especially for articles harvested from personal websites. In these cases, we encourage users who know the correct information to correct the entries themselves, using the"edit" link under each entry. We'll monitor edits, but we hope that the editing functionality will lead to a self-correcting system over time. (Users might start by correcting any errors in the listings for their own articles.) More generally, we encourage you to give feedback and suggestions in the forums dedicated to discussion of PhilPapers.

Finally, I should say that this site is largely a product of the programming and design genius of David Bourget, who had the idea for the project in the first place and who has done most of the hard work. He has done this in the middle of writing his Ph.D. thesis and having articles published in Nous, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and the Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. (My own role has mainly been limited to designing the category system and to endless discussion.) A major role has also been played by Wolfgang Schwarz, who designed the system for harvesting papers from individuals' websites, and who has contributed some very useful Javascript features to the site.
--David Chalmers.