EXTENDED Submission Deadline for FEAST 2019 - The Future of Feminist Ethics: Intersectionality, Epistemology, and Grace

EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE: MARCH 15, 2019

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This Year’s Keynote Speakers are Dr. Kristie Dotson and a Special Guest and Dr. Talia Bettcher 

(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 justice are constructed to outlaw open concern for women and girls of color. and is currently working on a monograph entitled, How to Do Things With Knowledge. )

(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. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Reality Mare: Reflections on Transphobia, Trans Feminism, and the Structures of Personhood.) 

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, Epistemology, and Grace.

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?

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?

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?

Call for abstracts: Difficult Conversations

A signature event of FEAST conferences is a lunch-time “Difficult Conversation” that focuses on an important, challenging, and under-theorized topic related to feminist ethics or social theory.

In acknowledgement of this year’s theme of The Future of Feminist Ethics, this year our topic for the difficult conversation panel is Wrestling with Our Foremothers. This conversation hopes to provide an environment conducive to dialogue for feminists of a variety of different perspectives (native and non-native, women of color and white, cis and trans gendered, with a variety of different access requirements). We hope that we can openly discuss the concerns about how feminist intellectual history has both informed and blocked progressive trajectories for its future.

We are soliciting abstracts (see below) that address classist, racist, heteronormative, transexclusionary, and/or ableist tendencies in feminist thought, what from the intellectual history of feminism can be preserved and what must be jettisoned, the challenges of progressive engagement in the callout era, addressing problems of objectification (speaking for and about rather than to and with other women) in contemporary feminist thought; erasures and unjust epistemologies of feminist thought, strategies for correcting harmful epistemologies and scholarship in feminism.

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