CFP: AMINTAPHIL 2020

AMINTAPHIL 2020 Conference on Education, Inclusion, and Justice

October 22-24, 2020
Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL
Due Date: July 30, 2020

We invite submissions for the 2020 biannual conference of the American Section of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (AMINTAPHIL) on the topic of Education, Inclusion, and Justice. Suggestions for specific paper topics have been developed by the Program Committee and are listed below.

AMINTAPHIL is an interdisciplinary society of philosophers, legal theorists, political scientists, and economists who are interested in normative questions about justice, society, the economy, and democracy. It is affiliated with the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR), which meets biannually in years opposite to AMINTPHIL meetings. All members of AMINTAPHIL gain membership in IVR.

AMINTAPHIL conferences follow a distinctive format, in which “principal papers” aresubmitted and distributed in advance. “Comment papers” are then submitted, also in advance ofthe conference, and the meeting proceeds in discussion format. Attendees are expected to readthe papers prior to the conference. The Program Committee will group papers on related themes into distinct sessions for the conference, and all sessions are plenary (i.e., there are no breakouts). This conference format lends itself to gaining deep, multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary perspectives on the chosen topic, and engaging in rich dialogue with other attendees. All on-topic submitted papers are included in the conference, and selected papers are published in a subsequent, peer reviewed volume of essays by Springer.

AMINTAPHIL members are eligible to submit papers. (Membership information is now online at http://www.pdcnet.org/amintaphil.) Principal papers, due by July 30, 2020 should be no more than 5500 words, and should begin with a brief abstract; comment papers will be due by September 5, 2020 and should be no more than 2200 words. All members of AMINTAPHIL will be notified when principal papers are available for download. Submit papers to Mark Navin at [email protected] with the subject line: “AMINTAPHIL 2020 submission.”

Please direct inquiries to:
AMINTAPHIL Executive Director: Mark Navin, [email protected].
Local Host: Heidi Malm, [email protected]

Suggested Topics

The following is a list of topics and sub-topics for the AMINTAPHIL 2020 conference. The list serves to provide suggestions and give more definition to the general topic of the conference. It is not intended to be either exhaustive or exclusive. Nor is it intended to be the template for the final program of the conference or the grouping of papers and commentaries into sessions.

 Education

·         What roles should education play in a pluralistic democracy, such as developing the skills of citizenship and combating segregation and other social ills?

o   Are they all compatible?  

o   How should we think about educational practice and policy in light of them?

• Do public schools, charter schools, and homeschooling each achieve these goals of education?
• Do public school boards succumb too much to pressure by parents and other advocacy groups, affecting exposure to subject matter such as sex education, evolution, etc.?
• Were pivotal court cases such as Wisconsin v. Yoder, Brown v. Board of Education, and Mozert v Hawkins correctly decided?
• What rights and how much control should parents have over the education of their children?
• May parents’ first amendment beliefs over school curriculum be limited?
• Do children have the rights they should have?

·         What sorts of harms does the education system inflict or countenance?

o   What, if anything, should be done to mitigate or compensate for them?

o   What is the role of education in addressing cultural phenomena such as bullying and harassment, which may entail legal consequences for students and teachers?

·         Are teacher strikes ethical and, if so, are there ethical constraints on how and why teachers can strike?

·         Schools in peer countries tend overall to have ‘better’ outcomes in terms of subject-matter competence than American schools as revealed in test scores.  Do we impose on the mission of schools by asking them to educate for all of the following: knowledge acquisition, citizenship, inclusion?

Inclusion

• What is the role of education in achieving full inclusion of the races, sexes, genders, and other historically marginalized groups in America’s democracy?
• What does inclusion mean? Who should be included?  Included where?
• May different educational institutions adopt different principles of inclusion, or adhere to similar approaches and goals? 
• How should schools inculcate the principle of freedom of speech, while simultaneously educating against racist, nationalist, misogynistic, homophobic, and other undesirable views on campus?
• Should teachers/college professors work to make their classrooms more inclusive, even if that means representing views they disagree with?
• What are the relationships among inclusion, pluralism, equality, and disagreement?
• In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Supreme Court ruled that it is constitutional to use race as a part of criteria for college admissions.  Later, in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the Court ruled that the 14th Amendment does not preclude race from being used as a part of criteria for law school admissions.  Finally, in 2013, the Court “punted” the question back to the lower courts in Fisher v. University of Texas, a question raised most recently by the just decided lawsuit against Harvard University, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., v. Harvard University.
• Are preferential treatment in college admissions based in race, ethnicity, or gender justifiable?
• What are the parameters of an acceptable preferential treatment program for college admissions?

·         Is inclusion a condition of a just education?

Justice

• What does justice require of education in a liberal-democratic society?
• What may the public rightly demand of public education?
• What values, democratic or otherwise, is it realizing?
• Which values are thwarted by our current educational system or aspects of it?
• What changes, if any, are necessary for the American educational system to live up to its ideals?
• Does the American educational system improve or detract from equal opportunity?
• Do we, or should we suppose we have a meritocracy?
• Does justice require access for everyone to an education?
• What sort of inclusion does justice require?
• How do the recent scandals of wealthy parents paying to get their children into “elite” schools, legacy admits, and related practices militate against the claims of equal opportunity and merit that the admissions process is supposed to be based on?

·         Is (higher?) education a private or a public good?

• Is there a theory of justice in education that best addresses conflicts between competing claims to education, such as among knowledge acquisition, citizenship, inclusion?