SIGNATURE EVENTS

Each spring, the Philosophy Graduate Students host a conference. This event, organized entirely by the doctoral students in philosophy, has been happening annually for more than 25 years. The conference features a keynote address, as well as peer reviewed papers with commentaries.

Learn more about the annual conference.

Mommy-Daddy-Me:
Social Critique and Kinship

Philosophy Graduate Student Union Annual Conference

Villanova University, Saturday April 9, 2022
Garey Hall Room 10A
Keynote address by Professor Robyn Marasco
(Hunter College & CUNY Graduate Center)

A central image in utopian and dystopian thought, “the family” has a rich and diverse political and philosophical history.  Recent scholarship on models of family, kinship, and care has included historical surveys of how the family has been resituated as the core economic unit in the neoliberal era, experiments with familial structures and alternatives to them, and even direct calls for abandoning hegemonic forms of the family. 

We invite presentations that engage recent scholarship on topics including but not limited to:

• Historicizing economic, cultural, and geographical iterations of the family
• Historic philosophical accounts of the family
• Marxist analyses of the structural role of family forms under capitalism
• Feminist, queer, trans, psychoanalytic, critical race, and disability theoretical approaches to the study of families and kinship
• Reflections on family, kinship, and community
• Exploring alternative forms of care and kinship