Glasgow MAP Workshop 2019 - Us and Them: Violence, Discrimination and Minorities

The Minorities and Philosophy chapter of the University of Glasgow is pleased to announce its annual workshop. This year, we will focus on violence and discrimination as experienced by minorities.  

Members of minorities, here broadly understood, are subjected to systematic forms of violence at the personal as well as institutional level. Recently unveiled cases of sexual abuses against women and members of the LGBTQ+community in diverse contexts, the rise of hate speech from nationalist movements, and the increasing popularity of publicly discriminatory politicians in western democracies are only some of many instances that make analysing the issues urgent and necessary.  

It appears that violence against minorities, whatever form it takes, has a discriminatory role: it aims to preserve a difference between “us” and “them”—namely, between targeted minorities and those who do not belong to them. Such a discriminatory role is meant to affirm and reiterate power structures that are in place with the purpose of differentiating between the violence perpetrators and those who are targeted.  

Violence comes in a variety of forms and magnitudes, which include bodily harms, psychological abuse, derogatory language, ethnic cleansing, and countless more. Discrimination against minorities offers a ground for violence against its members. Therefore, it seems that there is a mutual relation between violence and discrimination against minorities. Such a relation has significant implications at both the personal as well as collective level for the targeted individuals. Yet these implications are largely unexplored.  

The workshop “Us and Them: Violence, Discrimination and Minorities” aims to address two dimensions regarding these issues: (i) an analysis from the viewpoint of different philosophical approaches of violence and discrimination as experienced by minorities; (ii) the challenges that violence and discrimination pose to academic philosophy.  

An exploration of (i) requires us to consider various implications—moral, epistemic, epistemic, political, and others—of violence and discrimination at both the individual and collective level. In order to investigate (ii), we seek to discuss shortcomings, opportunities, and strategies to tackle violence and discrimination within academic philosophy.  

We believe that an effective approach on (i) and (ii) must be informed by views from the philosophy of disability, of race, of gender, and other related fields that focus primarily on discrimination and minorities.   Below you can find some of the questions that we wish to discuss:

• What is the relation between discrimination and violence against minorities?
• How does violence against minorities differ from other forms of violence?
• What is the impact that violence and discrimination have over to the receiving agent’s self-perception?
• What kind of role do social and political structures play on the exercise of violence and discrimination against minorities?

To analyse the challenges that violence and discrimination pose to academic philosophy, we aim to discuss questions such as:  

• How prone to violence and discrimination is the philosophical academic environment?
• Are there structural or relational vices or virtues that we should acknowledge?
• To what extent issues of violence and discrimination factor and affect academic philosophical research?
• Is there an intended emphasis in promoting philosophical analysis from the perspective of minorities?

The goal of the workshop is to bring together experts to investigate the moral, epistemic, political, and other implications of the above issues. Our aim is to provide a diverse, collaborative, and inclusive environment to foster dialogue and exchange of ideas about violence and discrimination as experienced by minorities.  

The MAP 2019 Workshop is generously is sponsored by The Mind Association and the Scots Philosophical Association  

For more information about the programme and registration, please visit the workshop website.