Academic Migration, Linguistic Justice, and Epistemic Injustice*

Abstract Contemporary political theory is a game. Individuals compete to publish in ‘top’ journals, to amass greater numbers of publications than their peers; then journal-ranking is combined with number of publications generating scores. The aim is to get the most points. Whoever gets the most points wins: they get the best jobs and the most prestige. This Hunger Games –like contest has serious consequences for people’s lives, determining who can make a living from academia, who will be relegated to the academic precariat or forced out of the profession. In this article, I argue that, aside from the chilling effect that job insecurity and the gamification of academia has on the precariat, these conditions are stifling intellectual creativity, diversity, and dissent in political theory/philosophy. I discuss how privatization and deregulation of universities has created unbearable working conditions, why academics are forced to publish in so-called top journals and why this is detrimental to our field, marginalizing people, topics, and methodologies these journals do not support (which usually align with already structurally marginalized peoples and modes of knowledge). I explain why we are engaging in this game and how it perpetuates itself. I conclude with some suggestions for breaking this vicious cycle, as well as a discussion of who is really benefitting from it, namely, the corporate elites who run many universities and most academic publishers. 

/pdf/the-view-from-below-how-the-neoliberal-academy-is-shaping-2gc2ff4q.pdf

The View from Below: How the Neoliberal Academy Is Shaping Contemporary Political Theory

Trust in vaccination is eroding, and attitudes about vaccination have become more polarized. This is an observational study of Twitter analyzing the impact that COVID-19 had on vaccine discourse. We identify the actors, the language they use, how their language changed, and what can explain this change. First, we find that authors cluster into several large, interpretable groups, and that the discourse was greatly affected by American partisan politics. Over the course of our study, both Republicans and Democrats entered the vaccine conversation in large numbers, forming coalitions with Antivaxxers and public health organizations, respectively. After the pandemic was officially declared, the interactions between these groups increased. Second, we show that the moral and non-moral language used by the various communities converged in interesting and informative ways. Finally, vector autoregression analysis indicates that differential responses to public health measures are likely part of what drove this convergence. Taken together, our results suggest that polarization around vaccination discourse in the context of COVID-19 was ultimately driven by a trust-first dynamic of political engagement.

/pdf/polarization-and-trust-in-the-evolution-of-vaccine-discourse-2hx79e0f.pdf

Polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on Twitter during COVID-19

Communication is about bridging gaps, where the gap may be conceptual or spatial. A conceptual gap exists between the computer and human users. Modes of conversation between people assume certain conventions such as visual clues, tone of voice and a dialogue between the participants. To use computers, people have had to adapt by becoming computer literate. In the first section of this chapter we look at some ways in which computer programs can be written so as to meet the user half way and enable the computer to become person literate.

How to Communicate

Animal culture: But of which kind?

‘‘Call no one happy until they are dead.’’ ‘‘Never speak ill of the dead.’’ If we still heed the injunctions of Solon and Chilon of Sparta, then obituaries, which represent a prominent way of expressing the human universal of grief, are a resource for philosophical anthropology. Philosophers have emphasized that we can determine what counts as a virtue for a given type of person in a given cultural context by analyzing what people say about the dead [1]. Such judgments summarize the deceased’s life and place it in a meaningful narrative context. This is why practitioners of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ask patients to write their own obituaries: doing so helps people clarify what they value, how they want to live, and what their lives mean [2]. In popular culture, this attitude has recently cropped in the Black Obituary project, which was founded by Ja’han Jones in 2016 to enable Black Americans to write their own obituaries in case they become the victims of lethal police violence. He characterizes the texts as ‘‘agonizingly introspective works,’’ saying, ‘‘These are Black lives, as told by those who experience them in all their glory—tragedy—frustration—triumph.’’ The ability —

/pdf/identifying-virtues-and-values-through-obituary-data-mining-lc5778d9xy.pdf

Identifying virtues and values through obituary data-mining

We present evidence that mainstream Anglophone philosophy is insular in the sense that participants in this academic tradition tend mostly to cite or interact with other participants in this academic tradition, while having little academic interaction with philosophers writing in other languages. Among our evidence: In a sample of articles from elite Anglophone philosophy journals, 97% of citations are citations of work originally written in English; 96% of members of editorial boards of elite Anglophone philosophy journals are housed in majority-Anglophone countries; and only one of the 100 most-cited recent authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy spent most of his career in non-Anglophone countries writing primarily in a language other than English. In contrast, philosophy articles published in elite Chinese-language and Spanish-language journals cite from a range of linguistic traditions, as do non-English-language articles in a convenience sample of established European-language jou...

The Insularity of Anglophone Philosophy: Quantitative Analyses

Natural Language Processing and Network Visualization for Philosophers

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Andrew Higgins

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

Identifying virtues and values through obituary data-mining

The Insularity of Anglophone Philosophy: Quantitative Analyses

Natural Language Processing and Network Visualization for Philosophers