Dr Ella Whiteley | University of Sheffield

Prior to that, they worked on the interdisciplinary 'Invisible Labour Project' at the University of Cambridge, which analysed and developed methods for recording undervalued and underpaid work in academia. In 2019, they completed their PhD in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, investigating the role of salience and attention in ethics and epistemology.

Ella's research interests are primarily in ethics, social epistemology, and political philosophy. Specific areas include the normative dimensions of salience and attention, as well as the philosophy of work.

Title | 'Tackling Underrepresentation: Salience-Based Tensions'

Abstract:

Discussing sexism in philosophy, Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting (2021, The Philosophers’ Magazine) comment on the fact that "women are often remembered as women first: they are seen more as women than they're seen as philosophers”.

This sort of complaint is common from those who are underrepresented in a given domain; these individuals tend to receive a surplus of attention on their marginalised identity. There are many helpful and important initiatives existing in part to combat this issue, including 'Women in Philosophy' groups and books like ‘Women Philosophers’.

In this talk, I suggest that certain salience-based tensions can arise for initiatives designed to address underrepresentation. In combatting the ‘salience structure’ that treats an individual’s marginalised identity as their most prominent feature, these initiatives can end up replicating that salience structure; they draw attention to this marginalised identity in, for instance, the names chosen for those initiatives.

This can counterproductively make that salience structure feel apt, which in turn can trigger conventional ways of making sense of that aptness—for instance, womanness might be considered aptly salient in philosophy because it is thought to be exotic and/or deviant.

I conclude with suggestions regarding how these initiatives can continue the valuable, urgently-needed work they perform, in ways that might mitigate this problem.