The Philosophy Equity Collective is a group of graduate students in Philosophy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Our mandate is to promote marginalized philosophical thought, equity in philosophy programs, and to build community and comradery in the process! In the spirit of this, we are hosting our first conference Imagining Otherwise: Radical Alterity, Social Justice, and Philosophies of Difference. This conference will provide graduate students with creative approaches to philosophy, offer the opportunity to present relevant philosophical work, and to engage with like-minded individuals.
The philosophy of difference as broadly construed for the purposes of this conference includes political, epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical ideas that allow us to consider the position of the other and to think alterity in diverse ways. This may involve approaching philosophical concepts from artistic avenues or from non-Western perspectives; it may emphasize embodied social justice work, or the structures that re-inscribe oppression; it may follow Levinas’ assertion that “the whole of philosophy is only a meditation on Shakespeare” and utilize non-philosophical texts to explore these issues. Difference here simply implies the refusal to subsume other cultures into the Western perspective while noting the uniquely human experiences that we share.
The conference will run from 9 a.m.-5p.m. on Saturday Feb. 9, 2019, and 9a.m.-4p.m. on Sunday Feb. 10, 2019 in WAT 517.