Saray Ayala-López, "Norms of Philosophy"

Saray Ayala-López (California State)
Norms of Philosophy
25 July 2022
Linguistic Justice Society Webinars
hiw.kuleuven.b...
ABSTRACT: What should we do with the dominance of English in education, and in particular in analytic philosophy? Should we fight it? Should we embrace it and negate the costs to nonnative speakers? Should we rather acknowledge the costs and provide appropriate tools to nonnative speakers to deal with them? How should we talk about those costs, in terms of justice or rather (unfortunate) disadvantages? Here I want to focus on a different question: What can we learn from the experience of philosophers who are nonnative speakers of English. Their experience can help us question some of the ineffective norms of the philosophy profession and expand both the practice and instruction of philosophy.
SPEAKER BIO: Saray Ayala-López is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University Sacramento. They previously worked at San Francisco State University, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. After doing research on apolitical cognitive science, they decided to address the social justice hiccup that was deliberately banned from their philosophical armchair, and started including moral questions in their research. They are especially interested in explanations (structural explanations are a favorite) and the absence of them, conversational dynamics and the many things we can do with words, the metaphysics and epistemology of sexuality and gender identity, the intricacies of crafting collective conceptual resources, and the challenges of doing (trans)feminism from the margins.
LJS Webinar convenors: Matteo Bonotti (Monash University), Filippo Contesi (University of Barcelona), Ethan Nowak (Umeå University) & Seunghyun Song (KU Leuven)