Impact — Summer 2023

Latest Announcements

Impact Essay Competition

Every December, the editors of Impact: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning invite submissions of scholarly and creative non-fiction essays between 1,000 and 5,000 words on any aspect of interdisciplinary teaching or research. The author of the winning essay will receive a $250 award and publication in Impact.

Essays should be readable to a general, educated audience, and they should follow the documentation style most prevalent in the author’s disciplinary field. Essays for this contest should be submitted by the first Monday in December to http://CITL.submittable.com/submit. See our general submission guidelines in Submittable.

CITL reserves the right to not publish a winner in any given year. Faculty and staff from the College of General Studies are not eligible to submit to this contest.

Call for Papers

Diversifying Philosophy 101: A Teaching Practicum

As Jay Garfield and Bryan van Norden argue in a recent New York Times op-ed, the discipline of philosophy “remains resolutely Eurocentric.” Of the top fifty philosophy doctoral programs in the English-speaking world, only 15% have any faculty members who regularly teach any non-Western philosophy. This lack of curricular diversity in part springs from the lack of embodied diversity among philosophy PhDs, who in the United States are 86% non-Hispanic white. Further, women currently make up only 20% of full professors in philosophy departments, a statistic that has remained essentially unchanged since the 1980s. This curricular and faculty homogeneity often leaves instructors looking to diversify their syllabi with few resources on which to rely.

To help rectify this problem, Boston University’s College of General Studies will host a day-long teaching practicum for those interested in making their philosophy curricula more inclusive. We seek instructors interested in giving 45-minute presentations on how to incorporate a figure from an underrepresented group from before 1900 into an introductory course. Special preference will be given to presentations on women or thinkers from the Global South. Proposals should be practical, not theoretical, providing other instructors with useful strategies for efficiently integrating relevant figures into existing curricula. Presentations should feature specific suggestions regarding course materials and assignments.

The event will take place on November 4 at Boston University’s College of General Studies. Submit a 250-word proposal to Joshua Pederson (pederson@bu.edu) by September 15, 2023.