The annual meetings of the American Philosophical Association are the “flagship” conferences for the profession. Faculty and graduate students seek highly prized spots on the program and look forward to networking with their peers and mentors. It’s exceedingly rare to see any undergraduates at the conferences, and even rarer to encounter any who are presenting.
And then there are Geneseo students.
At last month’s Central Division meeting in Chicago, Alexis Flint and Alexis Patrick presented “Beyond the Canon: Understanding the Student Cost of Excluding Marginalized Thinkers” as part of the Teaching Hub session. Combining work that Alexis P did for the Modern Philosophy course with research that Alexis F has done on Non-Violent Pedagogy, their project led faculty and graduate students through a simulation designed to help them understand how students’ research experiences are frustrated when resources do not adequately represent less commonly taught figures (such as women philosophers from the Early Modern period).
In introducing them, session chair Jennifer Lobo Meeks commented on how appropriate it was to have undergraduate students leading this workshop; she also noted that they were the first ever undergraduates to do so in the entire history of the Teaching Hub sessions (which began in 2017).
The students’ participation in this conference was made possible by generous support from the Department of Philosophy and an Undergraduate TRAC Grant (supported by both the Student Association and the Geneseo Foundation).