The Diversity Reading List

Ten-Herng Lai (University of Melbourne), a volunteer at the Diversity Reading List, writes in:

I am writing to promote the diversity reading list.

https://diversityreadinglist.org

The diversity reading list is an organisation dedicated to promoting diversity in philosophy by collecting information on articles written by authors from diverse backgrounds, and articles discussing issues that are of a diverse nature. The organisation also has a “Reading group blueprint” program

https://diversityreadinglist.org/blueprints/

where volunteers compile several articles fit for a reading group. Recent additions include 

• Statues and monuments
• People and proofs
• Race and aesthetics

Just to name a few. The blueprints provide invaluable opportunities for students in philosophy to discover important information outside their current curriculum.

I believe that it would be awesome if the diversity reading list can be promoted on the philosophers’ cocoon. The diversity reading list is calling for article information to be added to the organisations database, and for volunteers to compile new and useful reading lists. 

I think this is a fantastic resource!

Comments

[pedant]

It might seem pedantic, but I think it's important to remind people that backgrounds and natures are not themselves diverse (in the sense relevant here). Rather, they have the potential to contribute to diversity (whether they in fact do depends on what else is included). Thinking of things themselves as diverse or not creates the temptation to denigrate individual readings (etc.) as failing in some way for not themselves contributing to diversity. But it's never been the job of individual readings to contribute to diversity--that's the job of people curating syllabi, anthologies, bibliographies, etc. The job of an individual reading is to make an argument in defense of a thesis.

[re pedant]

"it's never been the job of individual readings to contribute to diversity..." perhaps, but it would be problematic if individual readings contribute to a narrative that people of different genders or skin colours are irrelevant, for example, through citation practices.

"Despite being educated and then publishing in the same venues as their male counterparts, female philosophers were and continue to be much less cited and discussed than male philosophers"

https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/09/07/the-lost-women-of-early-analytic-philosophy/