AICRE+PHILOSOPHY

Introducing AICRE+Philosophy

Next Event

Rather than remain silent on race, Western philosophy has often situated African and Black life particularly as degraded, an exception, or outside life itself. What genealogies have enabled and continue this history? What genealogies, both within the academy and without, offer us tools for resistance? Aiming to cultivate vocabularies at precisely this intersection, AICRE+PHILOSOPHY is a year-long series collaboration between The Africana Institute for Creation, Recognition, and Elevation (AICRE) and the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. Featuring guest lectures from philosophers from around the world in conversation with lecturers, graduate students, and faculty within the department, AICRE+PHILOSOPHY facilitates a space to engage the impact of antiblackness within Western philosophies through shared scholarship, reflection, and discussion.

Register HERE.


Past Events


Participants

Jose Cossa

José Cossa, Ph.D., is a Mozambican scholar, writer/author, researcher, poet, blogger, “twitterer”, podcaster, entrepreneur, and an Associate Professor in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University. Cossa holds a Ph.D. in Cultural and Educational Policy Studies with a depth area in Comparative and International Education from Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of the book Power, Politics, and Higher Education: International Regimes, Local Governments, and Educational Autonomy, the recipient of the 2012 Joyce Cain Award for Distinguished Research on People of African Descent, and a Co-Founder of AI4Afrika. Cossa’s research focus is on power dynamics in negotiation over educational policy; unveiling issues inherent in the promise of modernity and working towards de-colonializing, de-bordering, de-peripherizing, and de-centering the world; higher education policy and administration; system transfer; international development; and, global and social justice. Currently, Cossa is engaged in a new (exterior to modernity) theorizing, i.e., Cosmo-uBuntu.

Michael McEachrane

Michael McEachrane is a visiting researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights in Lund, Sweden, and co-founder of the European Network of People of African Descent (ENPAD). Among his publications are Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe (Routledge, 2014), “Pan-Africanism and the African Diaspora in Europe” in the Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism (2020), “Meanings of Words and the Possibilities of Psychology” in Respect for Thought: Jan Smedslund’s Legacy for Psychology (Springer, 2020), “Universal Human Rights and the Coloniality of Race in Sweden” in the Human Rights Review (2018) and Emotions & Understanding (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). He is also a seasoned international human rights advocate, deeply involved in the UN International Decade for People of African Descent 2015-2024 and a frequent media commentator.Sverige Och De Andra : Postkoloniala Perspektiv

Anand Bertrand Commissiong

Dr. Anand Bertrand Commissiong is a political theorist specializing in moral political philosophy and social movements. He received his PhD from Rutgers University in 2005. Dr. Commissiong is the author of Cosmopolitanism in Modernity, a study of the ancient cosmopolitan ideal as it has been reconceived in contemporary political thought for our world. His current project examines transnational cross-pollination in African diasporic political and economic movements, focusing specifically on the Anglo Caribbean and the United States.

Aug. 21, 2018 – Anand Commissiong, CLA, Political Science New Faculty Portraits Mandatory Credit: Sean DuFrene/Photographer Marketing and Communications Long Beach State University

Publications

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Book Chapter

The Curious Case of “Cosmopolitan Sensibility.”: Rational Radicalism and Political Theory: Essays in Honor of Stephen Eric Bronner.

Articles

Cosmopolitan Patriotism. Politics, Bureaucracy & Justice, 4(2), 34-44.

Hanétha Vété-Congolo

Hanétha Vété-Congolo is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College, Maine and President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. She is affiliated to the Africa Academic Hub, the Africana, the Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx and the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Programs of her institution. She is also Chercheure Associée at the Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, France (CRESEM/GRENAL, Langages et identités). Her scholarship focuses principally on Caribbean and African thought, philosophy, literature, culture and orality and, on discourses by women and about women of the Caribbean and, West and Central Africa. She is author of L’interoralité caribéenne: le mot conté de l’identité (Vers un traité d’esthétique caribéenne) and editor of Le conte d’hier, aujourd’hui : Oralité et modernité (Academia-L’Harmattan, 2014), Léon-Gontran Damas : Une Négritude entière (L’Harmattan, Espaces Littéraires, 2015) and, The Caribbean Oral Tradition (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).

Paul C. Taylor

Paul C. Taylor is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He received his undergraduate training at Morehouse College and his graduate training at the Kennedy School of Government and at Rutgers University. His research focuses primarily on aesthetics, social and political theory, American philosophy, race theory, and Africana philosophy. His books include On Obama and Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, which received the 2017 monograph prize from the American Society for Aesthetics.

Dr. Jason J. Campbell

A decade later, Dr. Jason J. Campbell remains as one of the first global leaders to utilized distance education. His YouTube channel remains as a great resource for independent philosophical lectures, curated for both domestic and international students alike.

Publications

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Books
  • On the Nature of Genocidal Intent.
  • Peace Education and the Adult Learner: Educational Trends in a Globalized World.

Ndumiso Dladla

Has taught philosophy at the University of South Africa for almost a decade. Specialises in African social, legal and political philosophy and has published numerous articles as well as a book in these fields. Understands African philosophy as having a necessary praxeological dimension which in our case has found part of its expression in the political confrontation of the almost exclusively white and European philosophy academy in a South Africa with more than 85 percent of the indigenous people conquered in the unjust wars of colonisation.

Publications

Olufemi Taiwo

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s theoretical work draws liberally from the Black radical tradition, anti-colonial thought, contemporary social science, histories of activism and activist thinkers. He is currently writing a book entitled Reconsidering Reparations that considers a novel philosophical argument for reparations and explores links with environmental justice. He also writes public philosophy, including articles exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism.

Vanessa Wills

Vanessa Wills is a political philosopher, ethicist, educator, and activist working in Washington, DC.

She is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University. In 2019/20, she was additionally the DAAD Visiting Chair in Ethics and Practice at Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität’s Munich Center for Ethics.

Her areas of specialization are moral, social, and political philosophy, nineteenth century German philosophy (especially Karl Marx), and the philosophy of race. Her research is importantly informed by her study of Marx’s work, and focuses on the ways in which economic and social arrangements can inhibit or promote the realization of values such as freedom, equality, and human development.

Dr. Wills is on the editorial board of Spectre Journal, a biannual journal of Marxist theory, strategy, and analysis.

Jeanne Morefield

Jeanne Morefield is a Senior Lecturer / Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and a Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington D.C. Her intellectual interests sit at the intersection of political theory, international relations, and history with a particular focus on the relationship between liberalism, imperialism, and internationalism from the First World War through today. She is the author of Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo American Decline and the Politic of Deflection (2014) and Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (2005), and is currently completely a book on the political thought of Edward Said. Her next project, “Sex Trafficking: A Contemporary History,” examines the salience of trafficking narratives for both the politics of liberal world ordering and the politics of right wing anti-globalism, from the League of Nations through QAnon. Morefield has written multiple academic articles, chapters in edited volumes, and her popular work has appeared in The Boston Review, Jacobin, Responsible Statecraft, and The New Statesman.

Jasmine Noelle Yarish

Dr. Jasmine Noelle Yarish is Assistant Professor of political science at the University of the District of Columbia. Her expertise is in the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and democratic theory. Her research aims to extend the idea of abolition democracy theorized by W.E.B. Du Bois to include the political and intellectual contributions made by Black women to the era of Reconstruction (1850-1880). Her archival commitments to revisiting that early period of contemporary political thought, the primary democratization period in American political development, and the unique case of Philadelphia in rethinking the significance of Reconstruction for the discipline of political science place Dr. Noelle Yarish’s scholarship as part and parcel of the growing literature on the “Third Reconstruction.”