The University of Pennsylvania’s chapter of Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) is pleased to announce our ninth annual conference, taking place online April 4-5, 2025: MAP-Penn Conference on Displacement(s).
Register here. You can find more information on PhilEvents.
Ronald R. Sundstrom is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco. He is also a member of USF’s African American Studies program, teaches for the university’s Honors College, and is the Humanities Advisor for the SF Urban Film Fest. His research focuses on the philosophy of race and the related areas of racism, xenophobia, and mixed-race identity; political philosophy and urban policy; and figures in African American political theory, especially Frederick Douglass. He published several essays and two books in these areas, The Browning of America and The Evasion of Social Justice (SUNY 2008) and Just Shelter: Integration, Gentrification, and Race and Reconstruction (Oxford 2024).
Serena Parekh is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Northeastern University in Boston. She is the author of three books, including her most recent book, No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis (Oxford 2020), which won the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award, the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award, the Falling Walls Global Call Award (Berlin, Germany), and was a finalist for the PROSE award for Philosophy from the Association of American Publishers. Her other books include Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement (Routledge in 2017) and Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights (Routledge 2008). Her primary philosophical interests are in social and political philosophy, feminist theory, and continental philosophy.
Kas Bernays is a philosophy student of the University of St Andrews and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a committed volunteer in refugee solidarity, with experience working with displaced people in Calais, France and Samos, Greece. In addition to displacement, she chiefly works on environmental philosophy, on which she has previously presented at the University of Oxford, the University of Coimbra, and The International Association for Environmental Philosophy. She is also an editor at the Oxford Public Philosophy journal.
Elizabeth Wong (she/her) is a PhD student in American Studies at Brown University. Her research interests include climate migration law and politics, mobility justice, and rights claims.
Laura Santi Amantini is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy. Her research interests lie in normative political philosophy, particularly in the ethics of migration and displacement.
Kate Yuan is a PhD student in philosophy at Yale University. Her research explores the intersection of global justice, migration, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of race.
Pilar Lopez-Cantero
Sena Arslan
Irene Olivero
Friday, April 4
10:00am - "Where Are the Displaced in the Philosophy of Poverty?" - Kas Bernays
11:00am - "Digital Nomads, Displacements, and the Erosion of Intergenerational Reciprocity" - Kate Yuan
12:00pm - Break
12:30pm - Keynote, "Open Cities and Open Communities," Ronald Sundstrom
Saturday, April 5
10:00am - "The Distinctive Rights of Forcibly Displaced People" - Laura Santi Amantini
11:00am - "Legal Ambiguity and the Ethics of Climate Displacement" - Elizabeth Wong
12:00pm - Break
12:30pm - Keynote, "Moral Obligations in a World Afraid of Refugees," Serena Parekh
The conference will take place on Zoom for a few hours each day with breaks in between talks. We will provide Zoom captioning (but not ASL interpreters unless otherwise requested). Abstracts for each talk will be published on our website, and we will invite our presenters to distribute their slides/handouts one day in advance.
You can find more information on Zoom's accessibility features here: https://explore.zoom.us/en/accessibility/
We aim to make the conference as accessible as possible. Please contact us about any other access needs as soon as possible. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us via yuzhwill@sas.upenn.edu.
Britta Bolander, Idil Cakmur, Kordell Dixon, Junhyung Han, Raul Ibarra Herrera, Lauren Perry, Maja Sidzińska, Ezekiel Vergara, Jacqueline Wallis, Will Yu