Voting Is Now Open for ASA Elections for Trustees

Voting is now open for members of the American Society for Aesthetics to elect two new trustees.  As provided in the ASA By-laws, Article VII, the current Board of Trustees has nominated four ASA members to stand for election. No additional nominations were received from members of the Society. The two trustees stepping down on January 31, 2022, are Keren Gorodeisky and Monique Roelofs. 

The nominees are: Sondra Bacharach, Jennifer Judkins, Mariana Ortega, and Sonia Sedivy. The two trustees elected will serve for three-year terms (February 1, 2022 - January 31, 2025).

The candidates for trustee (elect two):

Sondra Bacharach is an Associate Professor at Victoria University of Wellington. She been an active member of the aesthetics community since 1999, having served as the ASA Newsletter Editor, a Trustee, program committee member, Feminist Caucus co-chair, mentor for ASAGE, and a regular member of the Diversity Caucus. She’s published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the British Journal of Aesthetics, Monist and the Journal of Aesthetic Education, on topics like authorship, collaboration, street art, and hair and appropriation. She is grateful to the ASA for welcoming her into the aesthetics community. As a Trustee, she would like (1) to help the ASA be more inclusive in terms of its members and its research; (2) to increase the visibility of aesthetics to the broader philosophical community; (3) to support aestheticians whose jobs are at risk.

Jennifer Judkins is newly retired from the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, where she was Adjunct Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program in Musical Performance. An orchestral percussionist, she has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and New Music Group, and the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra, among other ensembles. Her ASA experience includes co-chairing an ASA Pacific Division meeting, serving on the Finance Committee (2015-2020) and on a National Program Committee (Toronto 2017), in addition to two separate terms as a National Trustee. Recently, she had the pleasure of co-editing (with Jeanette Bicknell and Carolyn Korsmeyer) Philosophical Perspectives on Ruins, Monuments, and Memorials (Routledge 2020). Her goals for the ASA include maintaining our commitment to diversity in substance and membership, and in particular increasing our engagement with the performing arts.

Mariana Ortega is Associate Professor of Philosophy; Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies; and Latina/o Studies at Penn State. She specializes in Latina/x Feminisms, Phenomenology, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Aesthetics. Her books include In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self; Theories of the Flesh, Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation and Resistance (with Andrea Pitts and José Medina); and Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader (with Linda Martín-Alcoff). Currently, she is working on an anthology on phenomenology and aesthetics, and on a book-length project about phenomenology, photography, and Latinidad. She has served on the ASA Program and Diversity Committees and the Feminist Caucus. Her goals for the ASA include fomenting diversity and equity practices to welcome and support more scholars of color. Another goal is creating opportunities for discussing the intersection between philosophical aesthetics, artistic practices, and popular culture to foment interest in aesthetics.

Sonia Sedivy is Professor in the tri-campus Department of Philosophy the University of Toronto and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at University of Toronto Scarborough. Her primary research interests are in the philosophy of mind, especially the philosophy of perception, in aesthetics with focus on visual art, and in the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Like much of her research, her Beauty and the End of Art: Wittgenstein, Plurality and Perception strives to integrate all three areas. She has recently edited Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton. She was Program Chair for the 2021 Annual Meeting of the ASA. She is committed to diversity and would strive to promote greater inclusivity and outreach, as well as more dialogue with other areas of philosophy.

Voting is being conducted on the ASA web site from December 5 – December 31, 2021. All current members of ASA are eligible to vote by logging into the web site, looking for the “Members” tab in the upper-right, and clicking the “Trustee elections” sub-menu.

Cumulative voting is allowed (i.e., you may cast both of your votes for trustee for the same person).

This web site will only let members who have logged in vote in this election. You will only be permitted by the site to vote once. Please vote carefully, as it will not be possible to change your vote later. The site administrators will know who has voted, but not how they voted. Although the site gives you the option of identifying yourself, you are NOT required to do so in order to submit your vote.

Results will be announced as soon as possible after voting closes December 31, 2021.

Voting instructions:

• FIRST log in as a member on the ASA web site.
• Look for the red Members tab in the upper-right
• Click the Trustee Elections sub-menu and follow the instructions.