CNNP & Columbia Grad Students Awarded APA’s Diversity and Inclusiveness Grant

We are pleased to announce that Columbia University graduate students, in partnership with Columbia’s Center for New Narratives in Philosophy (CNNP), have been awarded a grant thanks to the APA’s Fund for Diversity and Inclusiveness.

In her recent APA blog post about diversifying the canon on August 13th 2018, Lisa Shapiro writes: “[t]he challenge of revitalizing the curriculum in the history of philosophy is twofold: there is a lack of resources and the labor is often undertaken in isolation.”

We are launching a project called “New Narratives Graduate Symposia in Philosophy,” which will allow graduate students to join forces in diversifying the canon. Our project consists of a series of workshops, organized by Columbia University graduate students and Columbia’s Center for New Narratives in Philosophy (CNNP).

We are bringing together experts in non-canonical figures and graduate students from local universities to discuss practical steps toward making our research and courses more inclusive. Our workshops will also allow students to develop rewarding working relationships with professors and peers.

There is a growing awareness that philosophy’s past is richer and more diverse than previously understood. It has become clear that canonical figures are best studied in a broad context, and moreover that our philosophical heritage contains long-forgotten ideas, movements, and thinkers which are worth a second look. There is also a mounting sense that the practice of philosophy in general benefits when the ‘canon’ reflects the diversity of historical and contemporary practitioners alike. To give these insights their proper due, it is necessary to create a sort of ‘philosophical infrastructure’ to assist in the timely implementation of diverse curricula and research programs.

Graduate students in philosophy – regardless of whether their main interest is history or not – want to gain a working familiarity with figures from philosophy’s diverse past in order to put our commitment to inclusivity into practice. The New Narratives workshops will help graduate students build professional support and contribute to this effort by providing them with both the resources they require to begin diversifying their work, and the social and professional support needed to continue.

There will be three workshops during the 2018-19 academic year. Each workshop will bring together up to 15 graduate students from Columbia and area universities. The first event, which is already in the planning stages, will feature faculty presentations on Marie de Gournay, Émilie du Châtelet, and Mary Shepherd. Graduate students will prepare comments as well as participate in break-out discussion groups concerning the incorporation of these and other figures into coursework and writing.

The main goal is to build pipelines of work on women philosophers and philosophers of color, with the aim of supporting research and teaching that will eventually establish more diverse and historically accurate interpretations of philosophy’s canon.