Feminist and Social Theory Conference 2019 Sheraton Sand Key, Clearwater Beach, Florida October 3-6, 2019

CALL FOR PAPERS Submission deadline: February 28, 2019

The Future of Feminist Ethics: , Epistemology, and Grace

This Year’s Keynote Speakers Dr. Kristie Dotson and a Special Guest Kristie Dotson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. She is part of the coalition #WhyWeCantWait that attempts to challenge the way current visions of racial are constructed to outlaw open concern for women and of color. In her academic work, she researches at the intersections of epistemology and women of color , particularly . Dr. Dotson edited a special issue on women of color for : A Journal of Feminist Philosophy entitled, "Interstices: Inheriting Women of Color Feminist Philosophy" (29:1, 2014) and has published in numerous journals including Hypatia, Comparative Philosophy, The Black Scholar, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society and Social Epistemology. Dr. Dotson is working currently on a monograph entitled, How to Do Things With Knowledge.

Dr. Talia Bettcher Talia Bettcher is a Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Califiornia State University, Los Angelos. Her work integrates critical reflection with tangible and meaningful action in our lived world. Her work in transgender studies flows from personal experience in the trans community subcultures and grass-roots organizing in Los Angeles for the past fifteen years. Her philosophical investigations aim to capture realities that are experienced by flesh and blood people and that can have political and practical consequences (see, for example "Recommended Models and Policies for LAPD Interactions with Trans Individuals". She is a member of the founding editorial board of Transgender Studies Quarterly, the first-ever non-medical journal focusing on transgender issues. She has also served as a judge for the Lambda Literary Awards (2013). She is currently writing a monograph entitled Reality Mare: Reflections on Transphobia, Trans Feminism, and the Structures of Personhood.

Featured FEAST Session: This year we will celebrate the work of Dr. Joan Callahan.

This Year’s Theme 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 ""

• 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:

• 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 [email protected] by February 28, 2019. In the body of the email message, please include:1) your paper or panel title, 2) your name, 3) your institutional affiliation, and 4) 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.