TOPIC

The XII Symposium of the International Association of Women Philosophers will take place in Rome. It will provide an opportunity to highlight the geopolitical position of Italy — in the very heart of Mediterranean Europe, close to Africa and to the Eastern countries . It will thus transform the idea of Europe in a larger sense — and highlight the particular flavour of Italian feminism.

In Italy women's politics and theorizing have not followed the direction “from the movement to the institutions” in the way this has happened in other countries where Women's or Gender Studies departments were established. Italian feminists have recognized the skill, sensitivity, and authority of women's thinking, as it is manifest in their activity in social spaces other than the academy: women in trade unions, associations, public administration, hospitals, media, business.

When feminist discourses become mere cultural theories, they risk turning into abstract and artificial discourses. Thinking becomes an exercise of conceptualisation of, or affiliation with, dominant theories. We have broader expectations for this Symposium. We invite women who work in academic institutions to show how they literally “do” their work of thinking — in teaching, in theorizing, in all the relations and situations they deal with.

More generally we welcome the surprises that experience — behaviours, actions and passions — has in store for established theories and systems of thought. Discourses embedded in experience often have transformative potential. We know that feminist words have had political effects and changed many important aspects of society and culture. How was this possible? How can experience have political force?

A first answer is provided by the “practice of starting from oneself” (pratica del partire da sé ) in which words refer to one's own situation and relationships, but are not concerned only with subjective issues. The expression “starting from” has the double sense of providing a starting place, and departing from one's own situation, because words enable communication that goes beyond particular circumstances.

In our times we are in need of embodied and transformative words: of restoring sense, undoing unjust orders of discourse and living, opening up new forms of relations. The political proposal of the Italian version of the IAPh Symposium is to foster the development of “thinking experience” toward innovative political practices and styles of behaviour.

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CALL FOR PAPERS

This call for papers is therefore addressed not only to academic philosophers but to “thinking women”, to those who are able to demonstrate the meaning of their activities and the thought that informs them, wherever they are.
We invite to contribute to one of the following fields of experience that present themselves as also political challenges in the becoming of our civilization:

• work: all the activities, recognized and remunerated or not
• government, rules and relations: the public activity to which women are now called, sometimes welcomed, but often in startling or unexpected ways. An extremely urgent set of matters, especially when politics is reduced to claiming for rights
• education: traditionally acted by women more than men, necessary to social growth, but today considered as an unproductive expense
• science and technologies: a political and ethical concern, differently debated among women too
• art: all the expressions that can show other orders of living
• daily life: the ordinary experiences we often miss to think of
• history and memory: two fundamental aspects of human beings, today manipulated or cancelled
• sexuality: the metamorphoses of subjects and desires
• divine: because a free spiritual or religious experience can show ways out of this fundamentalist times

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