Symposium on: Race, Culture, and the Ethics of Assimilation
Organized by Kathryn Gines: kathryn.t.gines@vanderbilt.edu)
Thursday, Sept. 20, 2007, 4:00 to 6:00. (new time), Buttrick Hall 101
About the Panelists:
Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University, Cleveland. Her interests include Existential Phenomenology, in particular Heideggerian Phenomenology, U.S. Third-World Feminism, Latina Feminism, and Race theory. Her publications include “Phenomenological Encuentros: Existential Phenomenology and Latin American and U. S. Latina Feminism”, Radical Philosophy Review, Vol. 1 No. 9 2006; “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: Feminism and Women of Color”, Hypatia, Summer 2006, 21(3); and “‘New Mestizas’, ‘World-travelers’, and Dasein: Phenomenology and the Multivoiced Multicultural Self”. Hypatia, Summer 2001. Her current projects include the article “On the Phenomenology of Worldtraveling: How to be a ‘Good’ Mestiza”, forthcoming in Goldberg and Lott, eds., The Color Line: DuBois on Race and Culture, Blackwell, 2007, and the anthology co-edited with Linda Martín- Alcoff, "Race and Nationalism in the New “United ‘America’” forthcoming from SUNY University Press 2007.
David Kim is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the U. of San Francisco. His current work focuses on race and imperialism in 20th century American political thought. He is also editing a volume of essays on race and moral psychology, entitled Passions of the Color Line, and co-editing a collection of essays on Asian American philosophy.
Howard McGary is Professor II (Distingished Professor) of philosophy at Rutgers University--New Brunswick. He has published numerous articles and the following books: Race and Social Justice (1999); Social Justice and Local Development Policy (with others) (1993); Between Slavery and Freedom: Philosophy and American Slavery (with Bill Lawson) (1992). He has lectured extensively in this country and abroad.
Falguni A. Sheth received her Ph.D. from the New School and is an assistant professor at Hampshire College. During 2006-7, she received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for Junior Faculty. Since 2006, she has been a Visiting Scholar in the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley and the Philosophy Department at University of San Francisco. She has just finished a book entitled, Towards a Political Theory of Race: Technologies and Logics of Exclusion (forthcoming, SUNY Press). In it she draws upon the situations of early South Asian immigrants to the U.S. and current Middle Eastern and Muslim immigrants, and the practice of veiling in relation to the framework of liberalism, in order to illustrate how racial divisions are a fundamental to any polity. She has published articles on Heidegger, Foucault and race as a technology of juridical and political institutions; racial and intra-racial dynamics in the U.S. political imaginary; the tendency of liberal polities to locate "exceptions" to its ethos of universalism and equal rights; the feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and ethics of various public policy issues.