IAPh Helsinki Summer Symposium on Feminist Philosophy
17th - 18th June 2011
University of Helsinki
Metsätalo, Unioninkatu 40 (U 40)
Friday 17th June
Venue: U 40, 3rd floor, sali/room 6
10.30 – 12.00
Welcome: Tuija Pulkkinen
Key note
Denise Riley: ‘Time lived, but without its flow’: on an altered experience of temporality, after a child’s death
Annemie Halsema: Understanding the Body. The Relevance of Ricoeur´s View of the Body for Feminist Theory
12.00 – 13.30 Lunch
13.30 – 15.15
Stella Villarmea: Conceptual change and critical rationality in emancipatory languages
Waltraud Ernst: Explicit laws and implicit rules: epistemological considerations on gender and the erotic
Tuija Pulkkinen: The Role of Darwin in Elizabeth Grosz’s feminist thought
15.15–16.00 Coffee break
16.00 – 18.00
Helsinki Doctoral students’ presentations (PPhiG):
Sanna Karhu: Judith Butler on Norms and Subjectivity
Heini Kinnunen: The Term “Public Sphere” in Iris Marion Young’s Work
Jacek Kornak: “Queer” as a Political Concept
Eeva Urrio: Elizabeth Grosz and the Feminist Politics of Unpredictability
Saturday 18th June
U 40, 2nd floor, sali/room 2
10.30 – 12.15
Penelope Deutscher: Briefly, Precarious, Immune: Reproductive Biopolitics, Judith Butler and Roberto Esposito
Veronica Vasterling: The Political Hermeneutics of Hannah Arendt
Federica Giardini: Difference after Queer Theory
Lunch 12.15 – 13.30
13.30 – 17.00
IAPh Board Meeting: (with a coffee break)
Chair: Veronika Vasterling
Symposium is organized by IAPh, PPhiG and Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki.
Symposium is open to public and attendance is free of charge.
The International Association of Women Philosophers (IAPh) is a professional association and network that provides a forum for discussion, interaction and cooperation among women engaged in teaching and research in all aspects of philosophy, with a particular emphasis on feminist philosophy. Founded in 1976 in Würzburg (Germany) as APh (Association of Women Philosophers) the IAPh has gradually grown into an international organization with members all over the world. Currently the IAPh has 380 members from as many as 35 different countries, although most of our members are from continental Europe, Canada and the United States.
Politics of Philosophy and Gender (PPhiG) is a research the team within the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change. PPhiG work focuses on conceptual contingency and politics of theory within discourses on gender and sexuality in philosophy, history and politics.
http://www.coepolcon.fi/pphig/
Speakers
Keynote speaker
Denise Riley
Denise Riley took degrees in philosophy at the universities of Cambridge and Sussex. She was Professor of Literature with Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, and is currently A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She teaches occasionally for the London Consortium and for other parts of the University of London, including Birkbeck and Goldsmiths. Riley is a member of the scientific advisory board of PPhiG. Her recent writing is concerned with the immediate emotionality of language, and has included investigations in the philosophy of language and the nature of self-description and irony. Her main books are War in the Nursery: Theories of Child and Mother [1983]; ‘Am I that Name?’ Feminism and the Category of Women in History [1988]; The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony [2000]; The Force of Language, with Jean-Jacques Lecercle [2004]; and Impersonal Passion: Language As Affect [2005]. She has also published many collections of poetry, including Penguin Modern Poets 10 with Douglas Oliver and Ian Sinclair [1996] and Denise Riley: Selected Poems [2000]. She edited Poets on Writing; Britain 1970-1991[1992] and co-edited the Language, Discourse, Society Reader [2004]. Formerly Writer in Residence at the Tate Gallery, London, her teaching has included European modernism and art movements, political philosophy and phenomenology, poetry and poetics.
Speakers
Penelope Deutscher is professor at the Department of Philosophy in the Northwestern University, USA. She specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary French philosophy and philosophy of gender. Her main publications include Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy (Routledge 1997); A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Cornell University Press, 2002), How to Read Derrida (Granta/Norton 2006), and The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2008). She is co-editor with Kelly Oliver of Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman (Cornell University Press, 1999), and, with Françoise Collin of Repenser le politique: l'apport du féminisme, an anthology of French translations of contemporary Anglo-American women political philosophers (Paris: Campagne première /Les cahiers du grif, 2004.). She also guest edited for Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy the special issue 'Contemporary French Women Philosophers' (15:4, 2000). Other areas of special interest include theories of genealogy and biopolitics (Nietzsche, Foucault, Agamben).
Waltraud Ernst, Ph.D, works at the Department of Gender Studies at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. She specializes on concepts of gender in natural sciences and technologies, feminist epistemology and methods of gender studies. Her current research project on “Erotic economies of science. Concepts of the erotic in the emerging european life sciences 1750-1850.” Her publications include: Diskurspiratinnen. Wie feministische Erkenntnisprozesse die Wirklichkeit verändern, Wien: Milena Verlag 1999. She has been the treasurer of the IAPh since 2008.
Federica Giardini teaches Political Philosophy at the Università Roma Tre. She graduated in Philosophy at the University of Pisa with a dissertation on Luce Irigaray’s work (1992). She then worked on the relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Her latest investigations use the category of difference to recombine the significations of contemporary issues such as the political realm of relations between human and non human (cosmopolitics) or relations of obedience and disobedience. She co-founded the Italian feminist journal in philosophy Sofia. Materiali di filosofia e cultura di donne and is a member of the philosophical community “Diotima”; of the directory board of IAPh (Internationale Assoziation von Philosophinnen); of the editorial board of the most ancient Italian feminist journal, DWF.donnawomanfemme; of the international editorial board of European Journal of Women’s Studies, for which she is review editor (www.ejws.uk) . She has authored: L’inquieta alleanza. Dimensioni politiche del linguaggio (“On the political dimensions of language”, Firenze: Le lettere, 2011) and Relazioni. Differenza sessuale e fenomenologia (“Relations. Sexual difference and phenomenology”. Roma: Sossella, 2004); has edited Sensibili guerriere. Sulla forza femminile (“On feminine force”, Roma: Jacobelli, 2011) and co-edited Il pensiero dell’esperienza (“Thinking experience”, Milano: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2008), a selection of the papers presented at the XII IAPh Symposyum she directed in Rome in 2006. She works with Luce Irigaray and Françoise Collin, and has translated in Italian several of their texts.
Annemie Halsema, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy of VU-University Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the relationship between hermeneutics and feminist philosophy. She is especially interested in the notion of the (embodied) self in the work of Ricoeur, Irigaray, and Butler. She published in the field of feminist philosophy, and is member of the board of the International Association of Women Philosophers (IAPh). Publications include: ‘The Gift of Recognition. Self and Other in the Multicultural Situation’. (In: H. Fielding, G. Hiltmann, D. Olkowski, A. Reichold (Eds.), The Other. Feminist Reflections in Ethics. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007, pp. 23-41.), Luce Irigaray and Horizontal Transcendence (Utrecht: SWP, 2010), ´The Time of the Self. A Feminist Reflection on Ricoeur´s Notion of Narrative Identity´ in: C. Schuess, D. Olkowski, H. Fielding (Eds.), Time in Feminist Phenomenology. Indiana University Press, 2011.
Tuija Pulkkinen, is Academy of Finland Academy professor (2011–2015) and professor of Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki. She is the leader of the research team Politics of Philosophy and Gender (PPhiG) within the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change, and she works on feminist theory, political theory and history of feminist thought. Her recent publications include Pulkkinen & Sorainen (eds) Siveellisyydestä seksuaalisuuteen – poliittisen käsitteen historia [From Sittlichkeit/sedlighet to sexuality – history of a political concept] (SKS, 2011); Hutchings & Pulkkinen (eds) Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought (Palgrave 2010); Palonen, Pulkkinen, Rosales (eds) The Ashgate Reseach Companion to the Politics of Democratization in Europe: Concepts and Histories (Ashgate, 2008). Pulkkinen is a member of the Board of the International Association of Women Philosophers (IAPh).
Veronica Vasterling is associate professor at the Department of Philosophy and the Institute for Gender Studies of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She is speaker of the board of the International Association of Women Philosophers. She has published numerous articles in gender and feminist theory, political philosophy, philosophical anthropology and hermeneutic phenomenology. She is co-editor of Feministische Phänomenologie und Hermeneutik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2005), Practising Interdisciplinarity in Gender Studies (York: Raw Nerve Books 2006).
Stella Villarmea is Associate Professor at University of Alcalá, Madrid, Spain. She has conducted research at St. John's College, Oxford, and taught philosophy at Saint Louis University, Humboldt Universität and Lund University. She is the author of Las direcciones de la mirada moral (Directions of the moral view) (2003), El problema del escepticismo en la epistemología analítica (Scepticism in analytic epistemology) (2003), and of "Good, Freedom and Happiness" (2005), "So you think you can tell sense from nonsense, real doubts from sceptical games" (2006), and "Rethinking the origin: birth and human value (2009). She has published on scepticism, Wittgenstein, hermeneutics, ethics, and feminist theory. She is currently doing research on the moral justification of our beliefs, and the relationship between knowledge and emancipatory action. She is member of the Board of the International Association of Women Philosophers (IAPh).
PhD workshop speakers
Sanna Karhu,
Heini Kinnunen,
Jacek Kornak,
Eeva Urrio
are PhD students in Gender studies at the University of Helsinki and prepare their dissertations within the research team Politics of Philosophy and Gender (PPhiG).