“Climate Advice,” The Pluralist Guide to Philosophy:
Includes: notes on climate surveys, guidance for individuals experiencing difficult times, guidance for departments. You can also navigate the Pluralist Guide to Philosophy website. Also relevant in this context are Linda Martín Alcoff’s “The Climate of Climate Studies,” in the old page of the Pluralist Guide, and Alcoff’s related reflection where she underlines the challenges and risks in climate studies, and emphasizes the importance for departments to engage in pro-active action. She asserts that “What these might be may include changing hiring priorities, addressing gender and pluralism issues in pro-seminars, having some recent work in social psychology (Claude Steele’s research is great), and so on.” See also Alcoff’s “A Call for Climate Change,” which appears in a 2011 issue of the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy. The issue also includes related relevant articles.

“Resources on Diversity and Inclusiveness,” American Philosophical Association.
Includes: sample syllabi, APA membership demographics, advice for undergraduates from underrepresented groups, diversity in philosophy bibliography, best practices for preventing and addressing sexual harassment, anti-racist teaching resources for philosophers, links to relevant groups and organizations, among many other resources.

Women in Philosophy, The Stone, New York Times
Five opinion pieces: Sally Haslanger, “Women in Philosophy? Do the Math”; Linda Martin Alcoff, “What’s Wrong with Philosophy?”; Rae Langton, “The Disappearing Women,” Louise Antony, “Academia’s Fog of Male Anxiety,” and Peg O’Connor’s “The Double Bind.”

Decolonizing philosophy is a long-standing project with contemporary relevance that challenges certain limits and presuppositions in discourses that are centered on diversity and inclusion. It is a framework that contributes to the understanding of the coloniality of knowledge, epistemic racism, the coloniality of gender, reparations, the continued practical and theoretical relevance of abolition, philosophical pluralism, and epistemic justice among other themes that are relevant to issues of climate in philosophy and to both, philosophy and decolonization at large.

Selected bibliography:

• Burkhart, Brian. Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures. Michigan State University Press, 2019.
• Copeland, Huey, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Pamela M. Lee, et. al. “A Questionnaire on Decolonization: 35 Responses.” October 174 (2020): 3-125.
• Espinosa-Miñoso, Yuderkys, María Lugones, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, eds. Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala: Caribbean, Meso, and South American Contributions and Challenges. Rowman and Littlefield, 2022.
• Gordon, Lewis R. “Decolonizing Philosophy,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 57 (2019): 16-36.
•                 . “What Does it Mean to Colonise and Decolonise Philosophy?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements. 93 (2023): 117-135.
• Lugones, María. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25.4 (2010): 742-759.
• Kim, Ruthanne. “Decolonizing Philosophy: The Contributions of Françoise Vergès.” Blog of the APA. September 6, 2023.
• Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “Notes on Decolonizing Philosophy: Against Epistemic Extractivism and Toward the Abolition of the Canon.” APA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy. 21.1 (Fall 2021): 11-15.
• Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, Rafael Vizcaíno, Jasmine Wallace, and Jeong Eun Annabel We, “Decolonising Philosophy,” in Decolonising the University, ed. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Delia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancioğlu. Pluto Press, 2018.
• McCall, Corey, and Phillip McReynolds, Decolonizing American Philosophy. SUNY Press, 2021.
• “Philosophy and Coloniality.” Special issue. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 41.1 (2020): 75-232. (Selected papers from the 2018 Hannah Arendt and Reiner Shürmann Annual Symposium in Political Philosophy, Philosophy Department, New School, New York City)
• Rosenlee, L.-H. L., A.K Donahue, D. Kim, N. Maldonado-Torres, and K. Sealey. “Symposium: Why Historicize the Canon?” Journal of World Philosophies 5.1 (2020): 121-176.

While there are resources for diversifying philosophy syllabi and bibliographies under all the headings on section of the webpage, these sites focus on both of those themes.

Sample syllabi, American Philosophical Association.

Best Practices for the Inclusive Philosophy Classroom
“The website offers methods for increasing inclusiveness in the classroom and for decreasing the effects of biases more generally. It includes the results of research about minority groups in philosophy. It also lists resources for teachers of philosophy who are committed to including in their syllabi readings about issues often overlooked in philosophy classrooms and readings written by philosophers belonging to groups that are typically under-represented in professional philosophy.”

Diversity Reading List in Philosophy
Includes: thematic lists in philosophy with bibliographic resources with the goal of “helping you include authors from under-represented groups in your teaching.”

Slurs and offensive language are sometimes part of assigned readings. Other times, like in Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Race, and Philosophy of Gender classes, slurs and offensive language are taken as objects of reflection and analysis. We ask our community of instructors to follow these guidelines when designing their courses and their lessons. The guidelines address how to approach and handle slurs and offensive language inside and outside the classroom. These guidelines draw considerably from and keep many of the formulations of the University of Wisconsin’s “Guidelines for Pedagogical Use of Offensive Language,” which were inspired by Ruth A. Starkman, “Dropping the N-Word in College Classrooms,” Inside Higher Ed. 24 July 2020. We have made some changes that reflect exchanges by members of the Climate Committee as well as feedback from the Chair and from the faculty.

• Review older texts to evaluate potentially outdated language. Make a plan in advance using these guidelines as to how you will address it.
• Out of respect for your students and colleagues, avoid using in speech or writing derogatory terms to refer to any given community (e.g. the “n-word”).
• As much as possible, substitute those terms with dashes or asterisks, or using some other way of denoting them without replicating them. Ask your students to do the same.
• Familiarize yourself with current accepted terms for various social identity groups.
• If you anticipate a problematic word or phrase coming up in course material or discussion, plan in advance which alternatives you will use and which you will ask your students to use.

Here is an example: when teaching a unit on slurs in a philosophy class, one of our instructors told the class that some of the readings included quotations of racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs. The professor acknowledged that reading some of these words can cause harm, yet how the words have this insidious power is something worth seeking to understand. The instructor explained that the authors decided that this justifies quoting the words in their scholarly work. The professor explained that, while this line of reasoning is understandable, that uttering those slurs in classroom is a completely different matter. The professor stressed that slurs would not be uttered, not even as “mentioned,” by anyone in the class, including the instructor. The professor also asked everyone not to refer to slurs by their first letters, but rather to use the letter “X” to stand in for a slur. The professor also made available anonymous feedback forms and encouraged students to bring to their attention any concerns about the material and how it was handed in the class. The professor made available a podcast where students would learn more about research on slurs. Finally, the professor made available two versions of the readings with slurs: one with the slurs visible, and the other with the slurs hidden behind a dark or opaque box.

The University of Wisconsin’s “Guidelines” include the following sample syllabus policy for addressing offensive or archaic language. Note that where the syllabus included the term “minority” we replaced it with “minoritized and/or racialized”:

SAMPLE SYLLABUS POLICY FOR ADDRESSING OFFENSIVE OR ARCHAIC LANGUAGE

Throughout this class, we’ll read texts by authors from [minoritized and/or racialized] communities. In telling their stories, some of these writers use offensive slurs. I will always provide you with advance warning when this is the case. If such terms are triggering to you, please let me know so that we can decide how to proceed.

I will refrain from replicating offensive language in my lectures, class discussions, and written course materials. If I must reference an offensive term (in speech or in writing), I will do so elliptically--for example: n-word, f-word, etc. I ask that you do the same in your discussions and in your written work. If, in a written assignment, you are quoting from a section of our reading that makes use of an offensive term, please use dashes or asterisks rather than writing out the word (ex: n----- or f**). If you are uncertain whether or not a term is offensive, please email me to ask. If by chance someone accidentally replicates such a term, I will correct the error and ask them to avoid using it in the future, and/or ask the student to resubmit written work after deleting the term in question.

Additionally, some of our readings are historical. As such, they will make use of archaic terms when referring to specific [minoritized and/or racialized] groups. I will provide advance warnings when this is the case, and I will use contemporary terms for various identities in all lectures and discussions. I ask that you do the same. If you are unsure of the correct terminology for specific groups, please email me to ask. If by chance someone uses an archaic term during discussion, I will correct the error and ask them to use the contemporary term in future conversations.

As a class, we will discuss and collectively decide how to handle archaic terminology in our writing. Options might include only using such terms when quoting directly from our readings, or replacing outdated terminology with the contemporary vocabulary by using brackets--for example [African American] or [LGBTQIA+]. Once we mutually agree upon how we would like to handle such terms in our writing, I will expect everyone to abide by that decision. Those who do not will be asked to correct their work and resubmit it.