I am pleased to announce (after some delay) that George Yancy (Emory University) and Emily LaRosa (Michigan State University) have been awarded PPN’s 2024 Leadership and Early Career Excellence Awards. We received a number of outstanding nominations, but the decision of the committee was unanimous.
George Yancy needs no introduction. From his field-defining African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations (Routledge: 1998), to over 100 publications for a general audience in venues ranging from Truthout to The New York Times, to his participation in multiple documentaries (including most recently Yance Ford’s Power, a critical history of policing), Yancy is one of the most prolific and impactful public philosophers of our time. In her nominating letter, Nancy McHugh writes of Yancy’s interviews, “Frequently George is interviewing incredibly high profile philosophers, such as Cornel West and Judith Butler. However, he also creates a space and readership for less well-known, but also important philosophers, such as Todd Franklin and Christina Wheeler. Multiple important things happen for philosophy from this work: 1. It shows how philosophy and philosophers are ready and adept at engaging critical social issues. 2. It shows that it is not just the ‘heavy hitters’ that are poised to be engaging in public facing work. Many philosophers are positioned to do so.” Yancy is a model of how to practice, in the words of his keynote address at the 2018 Night of Philosophy, “philosophy with a human face.” No one could possibly deserve this Leadership Award more than him.
In recognition of her innovative, high-impact work with a range of community partners in artificial intelligence and robotics, Emily LaRosa has received the Early Career Excellence Award. LaRosa, a graduate student at Michigan State University, is currently serving as a member of AgAID, an NSF/USDA-NIFA working group, on issues across the world of agriculture, land management, and AI adoption, with her own focus on autonomous harvesting systems. As Samantha Noll wrote in her nominating letter, “She is investigating how to best anticipate social concerns, pushing for inclusivity, and usefully responding to system concerns which arise to ensure a healthful deployment of a system. When I met her at extension events, Emily LaRosa was shadowing a robotics lab that houses an AI created to meet manual labor needs, and helping to determine what ethical questions are not being asked. As an embedded public philosopher in this lab, she is helping to create guidelines of inquiry into a system’s impacts and to anticipate potential frictions and negative outcomes prior to a systems deployment. I saw firsthand how important LaRosa’s research was, as various stakeholders, from labor union leaders to roboticists sought her out for her ethical and epistemological expertise, when grappling with troubling impacts in the field.”
Excellent public philosophy is not always as celebrated within the field as it should be. We hope the PPN Awards can do something to change that.
Please join me in congratulating George and Emily!
