The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest:
- Kimberley Brownlee (University of British Columbia), “Social needs are a human right,” OUP Blog
- Megan Craig (Stony Brook University), “The Courage to Be Alone,” The New York Times
- Iskra Fileva (University of Colorado Boulder), “What Do We Owe the Dead?” The New York Times
- S. Andrew Schroeder (Claremont McKenna College), “How Many Have Died?” Issues in Science and Technology
- Annette Zimmermann (University of York & Harvard University), “The A-level results injustice shows why algorithms are never neutral,” The New Statesman
The APA committee on public philosophy sponsors this annual contest, which includes a $100 monetary award per essay, for the best opinion-editorials published by philosophers. The goal is to honor standout pieces that successfully blend philosophical argumentation with an op-ed writing style.
Kimberley Brownlee holds the Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political & Social Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. She received her DPhil from Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar). Her current work focuses on loneliness, belonging, social human rights, and freedom of association. Her previous work focused on civil disobedience, punishment, and restorative justice. She is the author of Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms (Oxford UP, 2020) and Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience (Oxford UP, 2012). She is the co-editor of Being Social: The Philosophy of Social Human Rights (Oxford UP, forthcoming), The Blackwell Companion to Applied Philosophy (Wiley, 2016) and Disability and Disadvantage (Oxford UP, 2009).
Megan Craig is a multimedia artist, essayist, and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University in New York, where she is one of the core faculty members in the department’s Master’s Degree Program in Philosophy and Art. She is the author of Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology (Indiana University Press),and co-editor, with Marcia Morgan, of Richard J. Bernstein and the Expansion of American Philosophy: Thinking the Plural (Rowman & Littlefield). Craig is also the Graphic Designer for Firehouse 12 Records in New Haven, Connecticut.
Iskra Fileva is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder. She specializes in moral psychology and issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry. She also does some work in aesthetics and epistemology. Her articles have appeared in such journals as: Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Synthese, Philosophical Studies, and American Philosophical Quarterly. In addition to her academic work, Iskra enjoys writing for a broad audience. She has written op-eds for the New York Times and maintains a column at the popular site Psychology Today, where she has published more than 70 essays on a wide variety of topics, including self-sabotage, parents who envy their children, asymmetrical friendships, fear of death, love without commitment, and many others. She has also given a number of radio and podcast interviews.
Andrew Schroeder is an associate professor of philosophy and incoming associate dean of the faculty for research at Claremont McKenna College. His research and teaching cover a range of topics in ethics, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of disability. Currently, he is looking at the value judgments that are a part of scientific research – the value judgments involved, for example, in operationalizing a concept like poverty, developing a classification scheme for infectious diseases, or balancing the risk of error in a climate model. Much of Schroeder’s work seeks to assess decisions like these using tools, concepts, and principles from political philosophy, with the aim of figuring out how scientists can best contribute to democratic governance. His work on these topics has been supported by a Burkhardt Fellowship from the ACLS.
Dr. Annette Zimmermann is a political philosopher working on the ethics of algorithmic decision-making, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Additional research interests include moral philosophy (particularly the ethics of risk and uncertainty), the philosophy of law (the philosophy of punishment), and the philosophy of science (models, explanation, abstraction). Zimmermann’s current research explores how disproportionate distributions of risk and uncertainty associated with the use of emerging technologies like AI and machine learning impact democratic values like equality and justice. They are currently working on a book manuscript titled “The Algorithmic is Political.” Zimmermann is a permanent Lecturer (US equivalent: Assistant Professor) in Philosophy at the University of York, as well as a Technology & Human Rights Fellow (2020-22) at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. They conducted their postdoctoral research at the Center for Human Values and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University (2018-20). Zimmermann holds a DPhil (Nuffield College, 2018) and MPhil (St Cross College, 2014) from the University of Oxford, as well as a BA from the Freie Universität Berlin (2012). They have spent time as a visiting researcher at Stanford University (2020), the Australian National University (2019), and Yale University (2016).
