This talk synthesizes recent historical research demonstrating the close relationship between developments in statistical methods and debates over racial categories and racial admixture in human genetics. I focus on three temporal snapshots, beginning with the early 20th century peak in the collection of quantitative data by physical anthropologists for the purpose of classifying racial groups and detecting histories of human migrations and admixture. In this period, Indian statistician P. C. Mahalanobis formulated his famous distance function—still in use today for applications ranging from finance to machine learning—in order to answer questions about racial admixture in colonial India. By the postwar period, human geneticists collected different kinds of data and developed new statistical approaches, but still largely aimed to address similar questions about “populations” or “ethnic groups” shaped by concepts of racial difference. For example, major scientific disputes emerged between the 1950s and 1970s about the validity of statistical methods used to estimate racial admixture in communities of African Americans and Ashkenazi Jews. I conclude with a reflection on recent computational methods used to analyze “biogeographical ancestry” and the enduring problem of categorizing populations in human genetics.

This event will also be streamed live here!

This event will also be streamed live here!

A growing program in political philosophy champions social experimentation as a way of justifying normative principles. But a clear methodology of how social experiments can justify normative principles has not yet been developed in full. We reconstruct and assess two existing methodologies, before developing a third methodology.  A first methodology—evidential experimentalism—claims that experiments provide justification by generating evidence for what “works.” This is plausible but doesn’t depart as far from mainstream political philosophy as some of its proponents may hope. A second methodology—iterative experimentalism—claims that experiments can, over time, justify initially controversial normative principles. But, we argue, iterative experimentalism is susceptible to a regress problem. We develop a third methodology—procedural experimentalism—that shifts the attention of normative theorizing significantly but avoids the regress problem. Procedural experimentalism is a variant of procedural justification at the level of mid-level normative principles. We illustrate this methodology using a case study about central banking. This type of justification is widely applicable across the administrative state but has, so far, been overlooked.

Many hold the belief that work, as appearing around us in advanced economies, compromises freedom. But this claim raises a number of theoretical difficulties and puzzles. The talk, first, surveys the different articulations of this freedom problem that the philosophical literature has offered, and argues that they are all unsatisfactory—for either analytic shortcomings or empirical inaccuracies. But this doesn’t entail that this intuition is mistaken. I present an alternative formulation—an argument from conformity pressures. I suggest that the structure of work in advanced economies is inconsistent with our freedom intuitions because market environments, in an overlooked manner, attempt to maximize the diversion of people from their own plans and projects. This new diagnosis also implies new remedies; I conclude by offering four modest “imaginaries” for enhanced individual autonomy inside a market-centred world of work.

This event will also be streamed live here!

There is a rich philosophical literature on skills (e.g., chess, ballet, cricket) which focuses both on the mental states of performers (e.g., what is the phenomenology of doing something well?) and on the evaluative dimension of skill and talent (e.g., what makes skilled achievements valuable?). Within this literature, there is a glaring omission of any discussion of skills acquired and expressed in standard workplace contexts, from cafés to warehouses. This talk considers the significance of that omission, both for our philosophical conception of skill and our understanding of action in the workplace. I argue that the phenomenology of workplace skill (which should account for feelings like boredom and fear) complicates our evaluative notions about skill and talent, mainly because it elucidates and reveals as untenable certain assumptions within the philosophy of skill about the evaluative implications of phenomenological states.

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This workshop brings together Australia and Canada-based philosophers to examine how families, schools, and societies negotiate the responsibilities and expectations of raising children. Presentations will explore the evolving landscape of parental rights and identities, the impact of low expectations on children’s development, and the processes through which values are transmitted across generations. Speakers will also analyse how educational systems reproduce or challenge social class hierarchies, and debate who should bear the financial and social costs of childrearing. Together, these discussions aim to illuminate the tensions and possibilities at the heart of contemporary childhood and family policy.

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In a moment in which anti-migrant rhetoric, ethnonationalism, and authoritarian populisms are on the rise, it becomes increasingly important that political theorists do more than offer a moral indictment of racism and xenophobia. In this talk, I contend that Frantz Fanon’s sociogenic approach to the critique of ‘race’ and racialization makes a valuable contribution, even in postcolonial conjunctures that have moved beyond colonialism’s crude Manichean binaries. I read Fanon as a diagnostician of the social pathologies produced by colonialism and white supremacy, showing how he worked from the colonized subject’s experiences of inferiorization and the colonizer’s experiences of racial superiority and self-mystification to advance a negative critique of racial hierarchies.