Working Through Political Change

Happy Easter, a good pagan and Christian holiday signifying rebirth, something I take very metaphorically.
Barack Obama’s speech last Tuesday on race could be read in this light as calling for a renewal of the American ideal — a renewal that will require very uncomfortable work: “working through” as a nation the trauma of racism. [...]

Symposium on “Two Feminisms”

An article of mine that I wrote a few years ago, “Two Feminisms,” found a new life as the subject of the fall symposium of the online journal, Symposia on Gender, Race, and Philosophy. Every season the editors pick an article for a symposium and also four scholars to critique it. Then the [...]

Five Years

Enough is enough. We are so over Bush. I hear his voice on the radio, his speech on this fifth anniversary of our war in Iraq, saying he doesn’t regret it even though 70% of the American people do. Enough.
This is an all-too-familiar sensation. Most of my teenage and adult life I have had [...]

Barack’s Mother

What an impressive woman Barack Obama’s mother — Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro — was, much more than just “the white woman from Kansas.”  From today’s New York Times:
Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. [...]

Beyond the Academy Conference June 9-10

Check out the call for abstracts for an upcoming conference that I am helping organize,

Beyond the Academy: Engaging Public Life
Call for Abstracts
June 9-10, 2008
George Mason University Arlington CampusMeeting just outside the nation’s capital in the midst of a presidential campaign year, public scholars from across the country will discuss the ways in which their [...]

March 11

All day yesterday I kept looking at the date, March 11, March 11, March 11, and thinking: why does this date mean something to me? Is it a friend’s birthday?   3/11.   March 11.   A blank.
Today it just hit me, March 11, 2004, the day of the Madrid train bombings, the day I heard [...]

Val Plumwood

The feminist philosophy community is mourning the loss of Val Plumwood. I wish I’d known her. The Canberra Times reports,
A renowned ecofeminist who survived a harrowing crocodile attack in the mid-1980s has been found dead at her property near Braidwood, possibly falling victim to a snake bite.
Val Plumwood’s body was found on Saturday [...]