by Ingrid Robeyns on May 7, 2012
An American friend asked me recently whether Dutch universities have a practice of accommodating spouses when they offer an academic a job. Spousal accommodation could take many forms – either offering a job to the spouse, or making a serious effort in finding a job for the spouse, or supporting the spouse in his or her own job search. Yet I have never heard that there is a practice of spousal accommodation at European universities — whereas it does happen in the US.
Is the impression I have correct? Are there any signs this is changing in Europe? And is it in the US only a matter for certain academic jobs – say: you want to make an offer s/he can’t refuse to a brilliant established professor, or does it also occur at entry-level positions? I’d love to read your views and experiences.
As to the desirability of the practice of spousal accommodation, I have not made up my mind yet. One the one hand, I see around me excellent young academics who are virtually unemployed because their spouse is in a place where there is no job for them, and they don’t want to be living far away from their family; on the other hand we tend to think that jobs should be allocated on a fair equality of opportunities principle — and it is unclear whether spousal accommodation meets this principle. It probably depends on the exact nature of the spousal accommodation: if it merely entails supporting one’s job search on the existing job market, then it seems fine; if it is the actual creation of a job for a spouse, or the striking of a deal with another department that they hire the spouse for a vacancy that is about to be opened, it seems more problematic.
by Ingrid Robeyns on April 6, 2012
Following up on the last post on Autism, one important way to get some glimpses, or some partial sense, of what it can be to living with autism, are movies. If you ask the vast majority of people whether they have every seen a movie on autism, I suspect they will say they’ve seen Rain Man. I haven’t seen this movie for many years, so shouldn’t talk about it in detail, but what I can say is that it so much skewed my understanding of autism that I wonder whether it may have been better if I had not seen this movie at all. I have, by now, met many people with autism, but not a single one that resembles Rain Man. Yet it does point to a much more general issue, which is that given how radically different people with autism can be, one single portrait of a person with autism will inevitably lead to a very limited understanding of what autism is. But except if one were to make a movie on an organization (a school, or a company) that has many members who have autism, I don’t see a way around this problem.
So, here are two other movies I’ve seen recently, that I’d like to mention for different reasons.
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by Ingrid Robeyns on April 3, 2012
I have recently become more and more interested in the relevance of an epistemological question for its consequences for social and political philosophy, namely: To what extent are certain types of knowledge only accessible to those who have had certain experiences? And how do one’s values, judgements, etc. change (or not) after having lived through certain experiences? Intuitively, it seems so obvious to me that some sorts of knowledge (or perhaps ‘understanding’ is a better word?) cannot, or can only in an extremely difficult way, be reached without having had certain relevant experiences. We can all think of concrete examples in our own lives (e.g. how one’s views on death and sorrow change if for the first time one loses a very dear loved one; how views on human vulnerability change if one becomes a parent etc). But this also holds for knowledge/understanding of less personal and more social/political issues. For example, my colleague Constanze Binder once lived with Indigenous women in Oaxaca in Mexico, and recently wrote a short piece about how their practice to switch roles between men and women one day a year (on international women’s day) has lead to most progress in the fulfillment of their demands. Understanding can be an important factor in creating willingness to chance.
How does this question of knowing and understanding applies to autism?
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by Ingrid Robeyns on April 2, 2012
Today is World Autism Awareness Day. Autism manifests itself in many different ways, and it is a saying that each person with autism is not only different (we are all different!) but rather experience autism differently, and has different aspects of autism which affect him or her. In this series of post around Autism, I do not just want to discuss issues around autism from a third-person perspective (like the over-diagnosis question, or new scientific advances, or new books we’ve discovered), but also give the floor to those who live with autism, or those caring for & working with people with autism. I’d like to ask one question: What are the most important changes which you’d want to see related to autism, given your life and the context in which you operate? My (very particular and context-depedent) answer to this question is below the fold.
update: There is an excellent post over at Neurotribes written (and in part edited/collected) by Steve Silberman, which addresses exactly the question what needs to change. DO go read it.
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by Ingrid Robeyns on April 1, 2012
In this first of a series of post on autism, I want to talk about the blaming of parents and teachers which has been going on in the Netherlands for a while. It’s not the most uplifting post of what I am planning to write over the next week, but I think it nicely illustrates why we need this Autism Awareness week in the first place. One of the things that I’m curious to find out is whether this is a particular Dutch phenomenon – I fear not, but don’t know. [click to continue…]
by Ingrid Robeyns on March 31, 2012
Monday April 2nd is World Autism Awareness Day. Yet in the Netherlands (and I suspect other countries as well), today starts the ‘Autismeweek’ (no translation needed!) – a full week in which people who care about people with autism (which includes people with autism as well!) try to put autism in the spotlights, raise awareness, inform the wider public, and speak up or speak out.
So I am hoping to post one autism-related post every day, covering various aspects – scientific discussions, books and films on autism, a thread on the bright/funny sides of autism, and a few more. If anyone has additional suggestions or special requests, feel free to make suggestions.
This opening post also serves as a place where all of you can post links to your own contributions to autism awareness day/week, and to activities (whether in cyberspace or beyond) that are organized within the frame of World Autism Awareness Day.
by Ingrid Robeyns on March 21, 2012
Today is World Poetry Day, and as previously announced we will celebrate it here at Crooked Timber by having an open thread where all of us can post poems, with or without translations, of our own making or borrowed from someone else. Here’s mine, which dates back to my student days, but I am pretty sure I didn’t write it myself – I think it read it somewhere in the form of street poetry or in a students’ magazine. The original is in Dutch, the English translation mine. Enjoy!
Ze schreef een klein gedichtje
het had niet veel om handen
maar het was als een klein lichtje
dat in het donker brandde.
*****
She wrote a little poem
it didn’t mean much at all
yet it was like a tiny light
glowing in the dark.
by Ingrid Robeyns on March 8, 2012
Around 1996, when I had my first paid job in Leuven, and we were all still paying and being paid in francs, guldens, pesetas or deutschmark, I bought this wonderful piece of art from an emerging artist (she may actually still have been a student of art). As the picture shows, her name was Elke, and that’s all I remember, apart from the price (1.000 Belgian francs, which nowadays would be 25 Euros plus inflation). And I also recall that Elke was delighted that I bought her work. Elke, I hope you have made many more of these pieces of art, and that you allow me to reproduce this one here to celebrate International Women’s Day!
by Ingrid Robeyns on January 29, 2012
Last Thursday, we celebrated national poetry day in the Netherlands. The cultural office of my university asked all staff teaching on that day to read a poem during class. I selected a couple from a volume edited by Amnesty International, which has translations of wonderful poems by great poets like Nazim Hikmet or Pablo Neruda. Yet since I forgot the book at home, I took refuge to the internet, where I found some lovely poems by Miriam van Hee, a Belgian/Flemish poet who writes in a sober and accessible style and whose poems I read quite a bit in my youth. That’s how I ended my teaching that day, and I hope to be lucky that next year national poetry day is again on a day when I teach.
All this reminded me of a delightful thread we had here at CT a while back, in which Trane suggested we could all come up with translations of our own favorite poems. In slightly amended fashion, I suggest the following: on 21 March, World Poetry Day, I will open a thread where everyone can post a poem of their own making or their favorite poem by someone else – and in both cases with or without translation into English/Globish. Go write, people!
by Ingrid Robeyns on January 13, 2012
Hear hear! What a wonderful short interview with Sanjay Reddy by Perry Mehrling from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET):
Reddy defends the position that economics is a profoundly value-entangled science, and that “Good theory is theory which illuminates the world, and good theory cannot start from a-priori premises which are disconnected from the world. Good theory has to start in part from observation from the world.”
I agree with every word Reddy says, but am a bit puzzled why Mehrling sees Reddy’s position as ‘a strong position’. In my view, if it is regarded (by economists?) as a ‘strong position’, that is just because economics has so forcefully tried to distance itself from any evaluative or otherwise ethical concerns; but in truth, economics has never been value-free, it has only fooled itself that it could be so. I’m really glad that Reddy is contributing to a better understanding of economics as value-entangled. Can’t wait to read the result of his INET project, “a book making a broad case for the resurrection of normative reasoning in economics”.
by Ingrid Robeyns on December 7, 2011
That’s the name of the new government of Belgium, inaugurated yesterday, which got off the ground after fivehundredfourthyone (that is: 541) days of negotiations (mind you: that number is written in Globish, not Oxford English). Elio di Rupo, leader of the Francophone social-democrats, had been trying to form a coalition for quite some time, but whether by coincidence or not, soon after Belgium’s credit rating worsened about 10 days ago, the agreement between the 6 negotiating parties quickly emerged. For those of you thinking that 6 parties make a government unworkable: a 6-party coalition is not unusual for Belgium. In fact, until quite recently this would be better formulated as 3 ‘party-families’, since it was assumed that the ideological line (being green, liberal, Christian-democrat or social-democrat, for example), was overwhelmingly more important than the linguistic identity of a party. But those days are gone, which means that we now do have 6 parties, rather than 3 party-twins.
I haven’t been following the coalition negotiations in detail, so mainly want to open up space for those of you who want to discuss whatever you want to discuss regarding the new coalition. Just three brief observations below the fold.
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by Ingrid Robeyns on November 29, 2011
by Ingrid Robeyns on October 26, 2011
Over the last two years, I’ve given a couple of interviews to journalists, mainly about my research on issues of justice, or, sometimes, about my reasons to swap economics for political philosophy, and my views on those fields. But now those same journalists are calling or e-mailing me back with questions where I really don’t have any expertise at all. They could ask any of us, really. Here’s one, that I thought is interesting to share.
A religiously-inspired progressively-leaning magazine is starting a new series, namely asking people which book “provides support, or is a book to which one often returns”. And the answer cannot be the Bible. I actually don’t think I can answer this question. Most fiction, with very few exceptions, I’ve only read once. Non-fiction I read is either informative (like King Leopold’s Ghost, or Joris Luyendijk’s book on the Middle East), or else it is scholarly, but then I don’t think I see it as providing (moral) support or as an inspirational book. Of course, I’ve opened A Theory of Justice or Inequality Reexamined or Justice, Gender and the Family many times, but that’s mostly because I want to return to the arguments to examine them. Moreover, most of the (non-professional) reading I do is on blogs and the internet.
So what, if anything, could be similar to an atheist as the Bible is to a Christian? I really don’t know. But if I’m forced to give an answer, I would say: I prefer talking to people over reading books if I need (moral) guidance or support, and if I need inspiration or some distance and non-analytical reflection, I turn to poetry. I still have, ripped from a student’s magazine when I was studying in Göttingen in 1994/5, a page with a Poem written by Nazim Hikmet, translated in German – a poem to which I have returned many, many times:
Leben
einzeln und frei
wie ein Baum
und brüderlich
wie ein Wald
ist unsere Sehnsucht.
So give me poetry and people if I need inspiration or support. And you?
by Ingrid Robeyns on October 17, 2011
Via several blogs where it was mentioned (I saw it on NewApps and Feminist Philosophers), a link to a new blog, called Occupy Philosophy. I’m no longer sure what the word ‘Occupy’ is supposed to mean when we are not only using it in connection with seats of capitalist power (as in ‘Occupy Wall Street’) but also in connection with seats of systematic/critical reflection (‘Occupy Philosophy’). But let’s not spend our energy on that quibble, but rather applaud efforts to involve professional philosophers (and other academics) in contributing to the discussion of the issues that the Occupyers are trying to put on the political agenda.
Two related things perhaps worth mentioning.
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by Ingrid Robeyns on September 14, 2011
I haven’t been reporting or commenting for a while on the ongoing political crisis in Belgium, which most recently started with the elections 15 months ago and the inability to form a government afterwards, but in fact genuinely started after the elections in June 2007 and the inability of the subsequent government to tackle some major socio-economic and political problems. In essence, the country has been politically unstable or incapable of effective governance for the last 4 years (In case you lost the story, here are my earlier posts on Belgian politics (starting with the oldest): “one”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/19/the-ingredients-of-the-belgian-cocktail/ “two”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/07/one-hundred-and-fifty-days-after/ “three”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/02/175-days-and-still-counting/ “four”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/19/belgium-time-out-of-the-political-crisis/ “five”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/19/belgium-no-longer-exists/ “six”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/09/22/15-months-of-belgian-political-mess/ “seven”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/12/22/a-dramatic-turn-in-the-belgian-political-crisis/ “eight”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/07/30/if-language-trumps-reasonableness-we-must-be-in-belgium/ “nine”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/11/19/whether-or-not-it-is-good-for-europe-it-is-very-bad-for-belgium/ “ten”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/06/13/belgian-elections-strong-victory-for-nva/ “eleven”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/02/18/thanks-to-250-days-nogov-surrealism-flourishes-in-belgium/).
The last months were filled with one attempt after the other to find a coalition, all in a climate of the absence of trust between the two main linguistic groups, and also in what I’d call the ‘bad-divorce-atmosphere’. With that latter I mean that if one listens to the interpretation or explanation of a certain event by either the Flemish or the Francophones, it is just like listening to two spouses in the middle of a very ugly divorce: it is as if they live in two completely different realities. This, in fact, is probably the factor that makes me most pessimistic regarding the odds that the two linguistic groups will stay in the same country in the long run: just like a bad marriage, they no longer have enough valuable things in common, and their common past may no longer be enough to keep them together.
So now, in this mess, another event was just announced that may cause Belgium to sink even deeper: Yves Leterme, the Christian-Democratic former Prime-Minister, who has been been running the daily affairs for the last 15 months waiting to be succeeded by the new PM, has announced that he is moving to the office of the OECD.
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was released by his publisher. Since he’s coming to my university to give