The annual Sanders Graduate Student Awards are three prizes awarded to each of the three best papers in mind, metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics submitted for the annual APA Eastern Division meeting by graduate students, as chosen by the Eastern Division program committee. This prize is funded through the generosity of the Marc Sanders Foundation.
Lucas Battich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich)
“Opening up the Openness of Joint Attention”
Lucas Battich is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences and the Faculty of Philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Before coming to Munich, he received a B.A. (honours) in philosophy at the University of Dundee, an M.A. in communication at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, and a Research M.A. in philosophy of mind and language at Radboud University Nijmegen. He works on philosophy of mind, of perception, and of cognitive neuroscience. In his current research, he aims to clarify the role of perceptual experience and multiple sense modalities in socially shared attention, combining tools from philosophy and experimental psychology.
Kathleen Connelly (University of California, San Diego)
“Blame and Patronizing”
Kathleen Connelly is a PhD candidate in Philosophy and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Her research is in ethics and moral psychology, exploring the nature of blameworthiness and the ethics of blame. In particular, she focuses on ways that our theorizing about moral responsibility can be informed by the philosophy of science—particularly philosophy of psychology and philosophy of psychiatry—as well as by the history of medicine, the sociology of psychiatry, and disability theory. Her dissertation aims at explaining how it is that withholding blame can be patronizing, as when blame is withheld from disabled people on the basis of negative stereotypes about disabled agents’ irrationality. Other work explores the relationship between accountability and consciousness, the prospects of non-carceral collective sanctions, and methodological pitfalls in philosophical approaches to the testimony of psychiatric patients. She is also a former co-director of UC San Diego’s Summer Program for Women in Philosophy. Non-philosophical interests include museums, karaoke, bar trivia, and doggedly seeking COVID-friendly alternatives to museums and karaoke and bar trivia.
Madeleine Ransom (University of British Columbia)
“Perceptual Learning of High-Level Properties”
Madeleine Ransom is a philosopher who works on understanding the varieties of bias in perceptual learning, and how these biases can help or hinder our quest for knowledge of the world. Her work bears on the perceptual foundations of some implicit biases, and our understanding of bias in machine learning. She defended her dissertation, “Perceptual Learning for Expertise,” in March 2020 at the University of British Columbia. She is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral researcher in the Cognitive Science Department (Goldstone Percepts and Concepts lab) at Indiana University, Bloomington. Beginning January 2021 she will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She has published in journals including Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Cognition. Her most recent publication is “Expert Knowledge by Perception” in Philosophy.
