Philosophy and Waste
14th Annual “Building Bridges”
Graduate Student Philosophy Conference
Southern Illinois University Carbondale

November 4-5, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Professor Timothy Morton
Professor of English (Literature and the Environment) at University of California Davis

Guest Speaker: Elizabeth V. Spelman
Barbara Richman 1940 Professor of Philosophy, Smith College

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2011
(note new deadline)

This year’s Building Bridges conference will be held at Southern Illinois University Carbondale November 4-5, 2011. The topic is the the concept of “waste” – the useless, used up, decayed, disgusting, and/or dismissible. Today we speak of wasting food, time, words, and lives; we produce waste that piles up in landfills, oceans, and homes. What does philosophy have to say about this concept, its presuppositions, and its consequences for contemporary life? We welcome contributions that explore different styles, forms, and media. We construe this topic broadly and invite papers and presentations from all areas of philosophy, as well as philosophically interesting papers from other disciplines. Professor Morton will be discussing his books Ecology Without Nature and The Ecological Thought, and Professor Spelman will share with us some of her ongoing research into “homo trasho”: humans as beings who are makers of waste.

Submission Guidelines:

Papers should not exceed 3000 words and should be prepared for blind review. Please do not include any personal information in the paper. On a separate cover page include the following items:

The paper’s title
The author’s name
Institutional affiliation
E-mail address
Word count (3000 words maximum)
An abstract (150 words maximum)

E-mail a copy of your paper and your personal information, as attachments, in MS Word format (.doc) or in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) to nsmaligo@siu.edu. Please title the file of your paper with an abbreviated paper title and title the file of your contact information with your last name and first initial.

Conference Statement:
The purpose of “Building Bridges” is to bring into dialogue diverse elements not commonly associated. We seek interdisciplinary as well as intra-disciplinary themes that address problems from multiple philosophical standpoints, from different traditions, or in which two or more thinkers not customarily brought into conversation are compared. Our goal is to provide a pluralistic forum for constructive and critical communication across boundaries.