Annual Meeting & Invited Talk: Prof. Helga Varden

The agenda for the meeting:

•    Election of new leaders of the network. Francesca Scapinello and Anita Leirfall are suggested as co-leaders.

•    Updating of the statutes of the network: https://www.uib.no/en/bnwp/132191/statutes Suggested additions to the statutes:
- In cases where there is more than one leader, one of the leaders may be elected from the "or" category.
- Given that the co-leaders are not constituted otherwise, the leaders are equal in authority.
- The annual meeting will elect the leader(s).
- The leader(s) send(s) out the call for the annual meetings once a year.

•    Regarding the scope of the network: The network wants to discuss what criteria we should apply regarding future recruitment to the BNWP. We want to clarify whom we think should be included under the category "marginalized persons" in academia (and in the society, more generally).

•    Open category.
After the annual meeting we invite you to attend Professor Helga Varden’s (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign) talk “A Kantian Theory of Intersectionality” at 5:15 pm (still in the Meeting Room - the talk will take place on Zoom) We plan to end the meeting n later than 6:45 pm so that those who want to attend the concert in Grieghallen (the UiB Rector’s invitation) are able to do that. (You find prof. Varden’s abstract and bio below.)

Everyone interested, including those who don't identify as cis-persons, are heartily welcome - coffee, wine, and snacks will be served!

Best regards,

Francesca and Anita 
 

KANTIAN THEORY OF INTERSECTIONALITY 

by Professor Helga Varden (UIUC)

Abstract:
Kimberlé Crenshaw arrived at her famous phrase “intersectionality” by carefully thinking through speeches and writings given to us by early Black feminists, such as like Sojourner Truth and Anna J. Cooper. In this paper, I expand on this groundbreaking work in two somewhat surprising ways. First, I bring the ideas of these early Black feminists together with important, related proposals from W.E.B. Du Bois, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Simone de Beauvoir. Second, I relate these works to central ideas in Kant’s practical philosophy in an effort to develop a Kantian theory of intersectionality. In addition to grasping the distinctive, destructive directions of oppressive forces aimed at women, the poor, and minorities, I seek to understand better the new, violently destructive elements found in European modernity, as evidenced both in European colonialization as well as the Holocaust.

Bio:
Helga Varden is Professor of Philosophy, of Gender and Women Studies, and of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of St. Andrews and she is one of the executive editors of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Her main research interests are Kant’s practical philosophy, (the history of) legal-political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of sex and love. In addition to her Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020), Varden has published on a range of classical philosophical issues including Kant’s answer to the murderer at the door, private property, care relations, political obligations, and political legitimacy, as well as on applied issues such as privacy, poverty, non-human animals, and terrorism. The talk delivered here—“A Kantian Theory of Intersectionality”—points both backwards to a theme running through Sex, Love, and Gender and forward to a central theme in her new book project on a Kantian transformation of the social contract tradition. The topic is how to theorize philosophically historically oppressed identities.