As the month of September ends, we have officially welcomed the start of fall and two additional postdoctoral fellows to the institute. Please join us in welcoming Mike Cuffaro and Kyoko Wada. For a chance to learn more about their backgrounds and research interests, stay tuned for the series of postdoc interviews we’ll begin publishing next month on our blog.

Please also join us in congratulating Charles Weijer (pictured above), who was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. RSC Fellows are peer-elected scholars recognized for their contributions to the arts, humanities, and sciences.

Rotman members have been busy this month, with new publications, conferences, media outreach, and more. September news and updates are listed below in alphabetical order:

  • Samantha Brennan and Rotman alumna Jennifer Epp have a forthcoming handbook entry titled, “Sexuality and Childhood,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children by Gideon Calder (Editor), Jurgen De Wispelaere (Editor), Anca Gheaus (Editor).
  • Samantha Brennan organized a panel on Shay Welch’s book Existential Eroticism at the Society for Analytical Feminism Conference in Lowell, Massachusetts on September 16-18. Panelists included Western’s Tracy Isaacs, Tempest Henning and Anita Superson.
  • This month, Justin Donhauser began meeting with, and interviewing, representatives from relief organizations and other community outreach organizations around Lake Erie (mostly in London and Buffalo) to get data for a multi-project initiative that examines how to best realize ‘facilitative’ institutional responses to climate change losses and damages in North American citites. These are the first steps in the pilot project of the Facilitative Climate Change Response Working Group, in addition to advancement of the sociopolitical aims of the Geofunctions Project.
  • Erlantz Etxeberria presented a talk titled, “Can Models Explain?” at the 2nd Potuguese Congress of Philosophy celebrated on September 8-9 at the University of Porto (Portugal).
  • Jaclyn Lanthier recently published a book review of Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy by Mazviita Chirimuuta in Dialogue.
  • In November, Tony Weis will be appearing as an expert witness — focusing on environmental dimensions of industrial pig farming — in the trial of animal rights activist Anita Krajnc, who tried to give water to pigs in a tractor-trailer bound for a pork processing plant. Krajnc’s legal team intends to use virtual reality headsets during the trial “… to expose the conditions faced by farm animals heading to the slaughter.”