ASA Announces Irene H. Chayes New Voices Awards

The American Society for Aesthetics is pleased to announce the winners of the Irene H. Chayes New Voices Awards for 2023. Alice Harberd, a PhD student at the University College London, and Zoe Walker, a Career Development Fellow in Philosophy at Trinity College, University of Oxford, who received her PhD in Philosophy from Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge.

Harberd's winning essay is "The Aesthetic Causes of Epistemic Injustice."  Her research has tackled a key mechanism behind the exclusion of underrepresented groups from higher education. A central cause of this underrepresentation, she argues, is failure to see the full epistemic characters of those in underrepresented groups, including their virtues and expertise. Another element of this project was presented at the 2022 Virtual Summer Aesthetics Festival.

Walker's winning essay is "Seeing the Funny Side: sexist humour, attention and harm." She argues that sexist jokes  structure our thinking about women according to particular frames which activate sexist stereotypes and obscure the collective understanding of women's experiences. Her research investigates the role of humour, and artistic representations more generally, in perpetuating sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression.

Both papers will be presented at the 81st ASA Annual Meeting November 15-18, 2023, in Arlington, Virginia. The awards were established in 2018 to nourish and sustain an ethos of inclusivity in all aspects of the Society's activities, and in the discipline of aesthetics more broadly. The next deadline for the awards will be March 1, 2024. Guidelines.

Previous winners of the Prize:

• 2022: Claire Anscomb, University of Liverpool
• 2022: Corbin Covington, Northwestern University
• 2021: Irene Martínez Marín, Uppsala University
• 2021: Nicholas Whittaker, CUNY Graduate Center
• 2020: Christopher Jenkins, Oberlin College
• 2020: Hannah Kim, Stanford University
• 2019: Shannon Brick, CUNY Graduate Center
• 2019: Zoë Cunliffe, CUNY Graduate Center
• 2018: Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo, University College, London
• 2018: Daniel Wilson, University of Auckland

These awards have been made possible by the generosity of a large bequest from the estate of Irene H. Chayes to the American Society for Aesthetics. Irene Hendry Chayes (1916-2014) received her B.A. and M.A. from New York University and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. She taught literature at the University of Maryland, Hollins College, and SUNY Binghamton.