Keynote Speakers
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Conference title:
Other worlds are possible—but which are gender just?

Abstract

Many people endorse gender justice but how do we know what it is? One problem in addressing this question is that the unjust social arrangements that motivate our questioning also bias our thinking about possible answers. This talk explores some strategies for reasoning about justice in the unjust meantime. I draw on recent work by Elizabeth Anderson to suggest how we might move to better understandings of global gender justice. 
Prof. Alison M. Jaggar (University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Birmingham, UK)
(go to Prof. Jaggar's page >>)

Alison M. Jaggar (PhD, Buffalo, 1970) joined the faculty at CU Boulder in 1990 and holds a joint appointment with the Women and Gender Studies Program. She is a College Professor of Distinction and a Research Coordinator at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo, Norway.  In 2011, Jaggar won the University of Colorado Gee Memorial Lectureship for advancing women, interdisciplinary scholarly contributions and distinguished teaching.
Alison M. Jaggar currently studies gender and globalization. She works on three levels, normative, methodological, and epistemological: 
  • Normatively, Jaggar has published many articles exploring how global institutions and policies interact with local practices to create gendered cycles of vulnerability and exploitation. She is interested what these interactions might mean for responsibility and policy. Currently she is co-authoring an article on complicity with structural injustice.
  • At the methodological level, Jaggar recently participated in a multi-disciplinary research project which aimed to develop a new poverty measure capable of revealing the gendered dimensions of global poverty. The measure is methodologically innovative because it incorporates the perspectives of poor people.
  • At the epistemological level, Jaggar is working with Dr. Theresa Tobin, Marquette University, to figure out how moral claims may be justified in real-world circumstances of diversity and inequality. Jaggar & Tobin’s work proposes a new mission and a new method for moral epistemology. 
Overall, Jaggar seeks to reframe traditional philosophical debates about justice and justification in terms that are responsive to gender, globalization, and decolonization.
Conference title:
The Democratic Boundary Problem

Abstract
Who should have a right to take part in which decisions in democratic decision making? This “boundary problem” is a central issue for democracy and is of both practical and theoretical import. If nothing else, all different notions of democracy have one thing in common: a reference to a community of individuals, “a people”, who takes decision in a democratic fashion. However, that a decision is made with a democratic decision method by a certain group of people doesn’t suffice for making the decision democratic or satisfactory from a democratic perspective. The group also has to be the right one. But what makes a group the right one? The criteria by which to identify the members of the people entitled to participate in collective decisions have been surprisingly difficult to pin down. Moreover, although the boundary problem is a fundamental issue in democratic theory, surprisingly little attention has been given to it in the classical canonical treatises on democracy. As Robert Dahl put it in the seventies, “how to decide who legitimately make up ‘the people’ … and hence are entitled to govern themselves … is a problem almost totally neglected by all the great political philosophers who write about democracy”, which is rather surprising. Actually, very little had been written about this topic until Dahl’s own work on it and Frederick G. Whelan pioneering paper in the eighties. In the last ten years or so, however, there has been a significant and welcome improvement and there is now a bourgeoning literature in the area. In this paper, I shall revisit some of the problems discussed in my 2005 paper and discuss some new issues.
Prof. Gustaf Arrhenius (Stockholm University/Institute for Futures Studies) 
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Director of the Institute for Future Studies. Professor of Practical Philosophy. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto and his FD in practical philosophy from Uppsala University.
His research interests are primarily in moral and political philosophy He is specially interested in issues in the intersection between moral and political philosophy and the medical and social sciences (e.g., economics, law, and political science). He is best known for research on our moral and political obligations to future generations and on issues in democratic theory.
At the Institute for Future Studies, he is head of the research program “Which future? Challenges and choices for the 21st century”. He recently directed the Franco-Swedish Program in Philosophy and Economics at the Collège d’Études Mondiales in Paris and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) in Uppsala.
He is visiting researcher at several universities and institutes, for instance, University of Oxford, CNRS, l’Institut d’Études Avancées-Paris and Collège d’Études Mondiales. He is honorary professor at Aarhus University and member of Academia Europaea, Tampere Club and the Young Academy of Sweden.