Philosophy and Waste
14th Annual Building Bridges
Graduate Student Philosophy Conference
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
November 4-5, 2011
Keynote Speaker: Professor Timothy Morton
Professor of English (Literature and the Environment) at University of California Davis
Guest Speaker: Professor Elizabeth V. Spelman
Professor of Philosophy and Barbara Richmond 1940 Professor in the Humanities, Smith College
Deadline for submissions:
EXTENDED to September 30, 2011
This year’s Building Bridges conference will be held at Southern Illinois University Carbondale on November 4-5, 2011. The topic is the the concept of “waste” – the useless, used up, decayed, disgusting, and/or dismissible. Today we speak of wasting food, time, words, and lives; we produce waste that piles up in landfills, oceans, and homes. What does philosophy have to say about this concept, its presuppositions, and its consequences for contemporary life? How has philosophical thought conditioned and contributed to our thinking about or creating waste, and what effect does that have on how we think and create relationships with ourselves, others, and our world? How radically can or should we go in rejecting this concept in light of ecological thinking?
We welcome contributions that explore different styles, forms, and media. We construe this topic broadly and invite papers and presentations from all areas of philosophy, as well as philosophically interesting papers from other disciplines. Presenters should feel free to explore the concept of waste in unexpected ways. Professor Morton will be discussing his books Ecology Without Nature and The Ecological Thought, and Professor Spelman will share with us some of her ongoing research into “homo trasho”: humans as beings who are makers of waste.
All accepted papers will be published in a special issue of Kinesis: a graduate journal in philosophy.
Submission Guidelines:
Papers should not exceed 3000 words and should be prepared for blind review. Please do not include any personal information in the paper. On a separate cover page include the following items:
- The paper’s title
- The author’s name
- Institutional affiliation
- E-mail address
- Word count (3000 words maximum)
- An abstract (150 words maximum)
E-mail a copy of your paper and your personal information, as attachments, in MS Word format (.doc) or in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) to nsmaligo@siu.edu. Please title the file of your paper with an abbreviated paper title and title the file of your contact information with your last name and first initial.
Conference Statement:
The purpose of “Building Bridges” is to bring into dialogue diverse elements not commonly associated. We seek interdisciplinary as well as intra-disciplinary themes that address problems from multiple philosophical standpoints, from different traditions, or in which two or more thinkers not customarily brought into conversation are compared. Our goal is to provide a pluralistic forum for constructive and critical communication across boundaries.