Graduate Studies in Latin American Philosophy
Every year I get a few emails from students who are interested in studying Latin American philosophy. Elsewhere on this website I have started cobbling together some resources to provide something of a guide to the study of Latin American philosophy, though that project is in its infancy. This page is concerned with graduate studies in Latin American Philosophy, and in particular, those interested in getting a Ph.D. in philosophy, specializing in Latin American philosophy.
This guide presumes that (1) you are interested in Latin American philosophy and a graduate degree in philosophy, and (2) you want the option of employment in the academic world of the United States after you have finished your studies. Effectively, that means going to graduate school in the United States (though I imagine it is at least possible elsewhere). You can, of course, study philosophy in various places in Latin America where you would be in the thick of things. However, it is extremely difficult to get a job in the United States (at least in philosophy) if your degree comes from a university in a country where the predominant language is Spanish. So, these thoughts presume an interest in graduate programs in philosophy in the United States.
Topics discussed below:
Where
should
I go to school?
Other considerations
How to study Latin American philosophy
What
are job prospects like
for people who work in Latin
American philosophy?
The bad news is that there are comparatively few postings of jobs that are explicitly looking for someone who works on Latin American philosophy (as opposed to, say, ethics). But that isn't the important figure, because the overall situation is comparatively good. Over the past 10 years or so, there have been more jobs advertising an interest in hiring someone who works in Latin American philosophy, or with a job description friendly to Latin American philosophy, than there are people who specialize in Latin American philosophy. This does not include general open area jobs, or jobs that specify "non-Western" (though I suspect that many people would be happy to think of Latin American as non-Western, even though that is a conceptual error). Hardly any fields in philosophy have anything like that ratio of jobs to candidates. My sense is that philosophers with demonstrated ability to teach Latin American philosophy disproportionately tend to be able to find employment somewhere in the academic world, because the need outstrips the supply of comptent teachers.
That said, there are several things to know about these jobs. First off, very few (if any) of these jobs will be in places where they have Ph.D. programs. Second, what jobs there are will frequently be in state schools, and often in regions where the cities or the people have a lot of Spanish names.
There are other upsides to studying Latin American philosophy. If you are willing to work outside of a philosophy department, you may have considerably more job options than the average philosophy job-seeker. You are also likely to be in a better position to get grants and the like from various sources. Finally, demand for Latin American philosophy is only going to go up, so job options are only likely to increase over the course of your career.
Where
are Ph.D. programs
with people who work in Latin
American philosophy?
At
the time of writing (2011) there are at least 7 U.S.
Ph.D. programs
(that I know about- please email me if you know of others), where at
least one
tenured faculty members works and
teaches with
some regularity in Latin American philosophy. Here they are, in no
particular
order, with the relevant faculty members with appointments in
philosophy. I
don't list places that have faculty that would be relevant to a
dissertation
committee but aren't in the philosophy department (for example, Duke w/
Walter Mignolo), nor departments with untenured faculty members.
SUNY
Buffalo- Jorge
Gracia
University
of South
Florida-
Ofelia Schutte
SUNY
Stony Brook-
Eduardo Mendieta
Hunter College/CUNY
Grad Center-
Linda Alcoff
Texas
A&M- Gregory
Pappas
Vanderbilt-
Jose Medina
DePaul- Elizabeth Mill‡n
Recommendations
by
people who
don't know the details of your life and interests are always to be
taken with a
grain of salt, maybe even a whole box of salt. That said, here are some
recommendations based on considerations solely driven by what would
tend to
maximize a population of average candidates' chances of getting a job
at a
place with a reasonable teaching load in a geographically and
culturally
desirable part of the world.
For
someone with an
analytic bent,
I recommend that you go to the best analytic program you can get into
where (1)
you can pursue Latin American phil without being actively hindered by
the
department and (2) there is a reasonable chance that you will be able
to get
financial support for studying Latin American philosophy in Latin
America
(e.g., during summers, or for a year abroad). There are obvious
drawbacks to
this approach: you typically won't have anyone to work with, you will
likely
need to write a dissertation in another field, and you will need to be
strongly
self-motivated to keep up a real area of specialization or
concentration in a
field often not serviced by your department. The overwhelming benefit
is that
you will be maximally employable after it is all over, more so than
nearly any
other option. (That's what I did, and it worked out reasonably well. It
would
have been a disaster, though, if my graduate program didn't have the
money for me
to go
abroad ever summer and didn't tolerate my teaching classes in Latin
American
philosophy).
That said, if you are facing a choice of where to go between roughly
comparable schools, but one has someone who works in Latin American
philosophy and another doesn't, you should (duh!) go to the
one
where there is faculty who work on Latin American philosophy.
When deciding where to go to school,
you should
also look
into whether or not the school has a Latin American Studies program,
center,
major, etc.. If they do not, you should think of this as a very big
negative because Latin
American Studies
groups will typically
bring with them resources and opportunities that might otherwise be
lacking.
Similarly, if one was interested in the Caribbean branches of Latin
American
philosophy, places with faculty working in Africana thought or a good
Caribbean
Studies faculty would be a major plus. Depending on your interests, you
could
find that there are terrific resources outside of philosophy to study
the kinds
of things you are interested in (e.g., Romance Languages departments,
or a
Religious Studies department). This could give you reason to go to grad
school
in some field other than philosophy, but be aware that it is very
difficult to
get back in to philosophy if you have been outside of it or if you get
your
degree in some other field in the humanities.
Since Latin American philosophy is field with very limited visibility in the profession, you either have to
1. Be a two-headed beast (Latin American as an second AOS or a really strong AOC)
2. Write a dissertation that is both a piece of Latin American philosophy and something more recognizable to U.S. conceptions of philosophy (Brazilian para-consistent logic! History of biology in Mexico! Race in Brazil! Metaethics and Positivism in Argentina! German Romanticism and Latin American Liberalism!)
You could write a straight up dissertation in Latin American philosophy (on Vasconcelos' aesthetic monism, e.g.), but given the current situation in philosophy, you will have lots better job prospects overall if you do (1) or (2) because you will be able to apply to other jobs as well.
For what it is worth, my sense is that most of the philosophers in the
U.S. who do work in Latin American philosophy went the first route, or
worked outside of Latin American philosophy and then later acquired an
interest in it.
Last updated: 08/15/11.