Dear Friends and Colleagues
It has been a busy year and with the PSA Biennial Meeting in New Orleans (14-17 November 2024) approaching fast, I am writing with an update on various PSA matters starting with some highlights for the upcoming Biennial Meeting.
We received a particularly high volume of submissions this year and Program Chair David Danks, Poster Session Chair Charbel El-Hani and Cognate Societies Session Chair Mary Morgan have all been working hard with their respective committees to produce a fantastic and diverse program, which is now available online. I want to thank them all for the sterling work done. And invite you all to register for the conference— early bird pricing ends on September 30th.
I am delighted to announce two events that have become a staple of the PSA Biennial Meetings. The first is the PSA Public Forum (organised by President-Elect Craig Callender) will take place on Thursday 14th November at 7pm at The Joy Theater 1200 Canal St, New Orleans, LA 70112 on the theme of
Disinformation: At the Intersection of Science and Society
Speakers
Manuela Fernández Pinto
Associate Professor, Jefe Centro de Ética Aplicada
Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
Cailin O’Connor
Chancellor's Professor, Logic & Philosophy of Science
University of California, Irvine
Naomi Oreskes
Henry Charles Lea Professor, History of Science
Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Harvard University
James Owen Weatherall
Chancellor's Professor, Logic & Philosophy of Science
University of California, Irvine
Moderator
Dan Burnston
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy
Tulane University
The second is the PSA President’s Plenary Symposium, which I am personally very pleased to announce and which is kindly sponsored by Simon Fraser University.
It will take place also on Thursday 14th November at 4.30pm in the PSA hotel venue (Bissonet Ballroom) on the topic of Making and Remaking the Mississippi River. Responsibilities, injustices and obligations in community-based land management and wetland restoration
The panel will include:
John L. Sabo, (Director of ByWater Institute, Professor, Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering, School of Science and Engineering Tulane University)
Michael Kotutwa Johnson (Assistant Specialist-Indigenous Resiliency Center, School of Natural Resources and the Environment, University of Arizona)
Holly Andersen (Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University)
Catherine Kendig (Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University — Chair of the panel)
Emily Parke (Department of Philosophy, Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland)
The panel will discuss the intertwining of land and water management decisions which include wetlands restoration and fisheries management; watershed to Gulf and agricultural farmland; the intersection of food systems and how they interact with marine resources and water rights of the river and gulf; and the diverse interests in both the US which focus on the Mississippi and communities along it to the Gulf as well as other watershed communities.
I am very grateful to Catherine Kendig for chairing this panel and also to Holly Anderson and Emily Parke for all the thoughts that went into shaping the topic for what promises to be a fascinating session on a timely topic–a perfect fit for our hosting city of New Orleans. I hope to see many of you at these two events (President’s Plenary Symposium at 4.30pm and Public Forum at 7pm) on Thursday 14th November at the PSA Biennial Meeting.
On November 14th at 9.15pm we will also have the Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars reception in the PSA Hotel Venue Riverview Room. I want to extend my warm welcome to all graduate students and early career colleagues who will join us for the first time. I hope the conference proves a fruitful and intellectually stimulating opportunity to present your work and to get to know the wider community of philosophers of science.
On November 16th at 11.45 there will be the DEI Caucus Luncheon. I take this opportunity to thank the current Co-Chairs of the DEI Caucus, Cailin O’Connor and Kino Zhao for the terrific work done over the past two years and to give a warm welcome to the new Senior Co-Chair, Soazig le Bihan, who will succeed Cailin as of January 2025. The Caucus continues to look for new affinity groups to be formed and existing groups to join in. A list of currently active groups can be found on our website and anyone interested in starting new ones should contact the Co-Chairs.
The Biennial Meeting will also see the launch of the Ron Giere Society for Legacy and Planned Gifts. This is a new initiative of the PSA Fundraising Committee chaired by Alison Wylie. We will run a dedicated event on Friday 15th November at 5.30pm to celebrate the life and work of the late Ron Giere (PSA President 1993-94), who left a substantive donation to the PSA, very important for the long-term sustainability of our association. You can read all the details of this new initiative and ways in which any PSA member might contribute to it here.
The PSA Biennial Meeting will also include on Saturday 16th at 6pm my Presidential Address that will be on the topic of Local Knowledges and the Right to Participate in Science, and the Awards Ceremony where we will announce the winner of the 2024 Hempel Award for lifetime scholarly achievements in philosophy of science, in addition to the Mary Hesse Graduate Award, the Nagel Awards and the UPSS Prize for Philosophy of Race. I hope you will all join us for this occasion.
I am also very pleased to report that PSA Underrepresented Philosophy of Science Scholars’ (UPSS) Committee has now completed the reviewing process and selected the four UPSS scholars who will present their papers at the UPSS Session of the PSA’s Biennial Meeting in New Orleans. This year’s UPSS session will take place on Saturday, November 16th from 1:15-3:15 p.m. in Studio 1, and will feature the following presenters and talks:
Ian Peebles (Arizona State University), "Solving the Racial Health Disparities Problem"
Vanessa Schipani (UPENN), "A Morally Decent Model of Trust in Science"
Lida Sarafrazarpatapeh (University of Texas - San Antonio), "Double Colonized: On the potential harms of mediators in minority community-engaged research"
Banin Diar Sukmono (UC Irvine), "A persistence mechanism: an individuating mechanism in light of natural selection through survival alone"
Congratulations to these four scholars and thanks to them and their mentors, Quayshawn Spencer, Maya Goldenberg, Leah McClimans, and Rose Novick, for participating in the UPSS mentoring program! Scholars participating in the UPSS mentoring program work with their mentors to develop and refine their papers for presentation at the meeting.
Special thanks also to UPSS Subcommittee members Alisa Bokulich, Soazig le Bihan, Mathias Frisch, and Jackie Sullivan for reviewing abstracts for the UPSS session and to PSA Executive Director Max Cormendy for his efforts to ensure the availability of travel funding for the UPSS session presenters.
If you are interested in finding out more about the UPSS Mentoring Program and its related initiatives and/or participating in the program as either a mentee or a mentor, please visit: https://www.philsci.org/upss.php.
On other news (not directly related to the Biennial Meeting), five further brief announcements.
The PSA International Syllabus Prize led by the PSA International Relations Committee “invites submissions of course syllabi that showcase effective and creative teaching of the philosophy of science that reaches beyond the Anglophone mainstream.” Entries may be submitted at any time to the Chair of the PSA International Relations Committee, Prof. Hasok Chang, University of Cambridge, by e-mail to <hc372@cam.ac.uk>. The deadline for submission of syllabi has been extended to 1 October 2024.
The working group on the PSA Strategic Plan has completed the task and the document will be presented at the launch event of the Ron Giere Society on the 15th It will also be available online on the PSA website. Many thanks to all the colleagues who generously contributed their time and feedback on this document.
After the success of the inaugural PSA Around the World 2023, I am delighted to announce that the next PSA Around the World 2025 will be led by the East European Network for Philosophy of Science (EENPS). This online conference in November 2025 will be organised by Co-Chairs Tomas Marvan and Magda Malecka with the following program committee: Ave Mets (Tartu), Maria Panagiotatou (Athens), Michal Hladky (Geneve), Martin Zach (Prague), Joanna Karolina Malinowska (Poznan), Elena Popa (Cracow), Borut Trpin (Munich), Daniel Kostic (Leiden), Tamas Demeter (Budapest), Vasso Kindi (Athens), Vassilis Livanios (Nicosia), Lilia Gurova (Sofia), Miklos Rédei (London), Marcin Milkowski (Warsaw), Tetiana Bilous (Kyiv/Prague), Maria Kronfeldner (Vienna). A call for papers will go out in October 2024 and more announcements will follow. I want to thank Tomas Marvan and EENPS colleagues for their time and willingness to host the next iteration of this new initiative that aims to reach out to the community of philosophy of science worldwide and celebrate different research cultures in our field.
Along the same lines, we warmly welcome to the PSA International Relations Committee chaired by Hasok Chang, six new members that will further foster the work of the committee in representing diverse voices and communities worldwide. The six new members who will join the existing 10 members are:
Nuhu Osman Attah, Graduate Student, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Manuela Fernández Pinto, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and the Center for Applied Ethics, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Gürol Irzik, Professor, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Sabancı University, Turkey
Zinhle Mncube, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts (Amherst), USA
Ryan Nefdt, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Salah Osman, Professor of Philosophy and Head of Department, Menofia University, Egypt
Many thanks to them all for their time and work!
Last but not least, my gratitude goes as always to Kerry McKenzie for organising the next series of PSA Office Hour initiative which continues with a series of fantastic upcoming events starting on 27th September on Philosophy of Climate Science and continuing with Careers Spotlight in October and Philosophy of Psychology in November and many more, which you can all find We invite all PSA members especially graduate students but also postdocs to join these office hours, ask your questions, and share your experience by registering through the link in the webpage above. Many thanks to all the colleagues involved for their generous time to run this initiative.
I very much look forward to seeing everyone in New Orleans in November!
Michela Massimi
(PSA President 2023-24)
