CPA Statement on U.S. Executive Order

February 3, 2017

Dear CPA Members:

The Caribbean Philosophical Association strongly denounces the January 27, 2017 Executive Order banning citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. We implore the US federal government to reverse its position and immediately remove the ban.

“The principal goal of the CPA,” as our mission statement states, “is to support the free exchange of ideas and foster an intellectual community that is truly representative of the diversity of voices and perspectives that is paradigmatic of, but not limited to, the Caribbean. The Caribbean is thus understood not solely as a geopolitical region, but more generally as a trope to investigate certain dimensions of the multiple undersides of modernity.”  Furthermore, the CPA “invites theoretical engagements with all such questions, thematic areas, and genres with emphasis on any given discipline or field, but with a common interest in ‘shifting the geography of reason,’ by which we mean approaching the Caribbean and the global south in general as zones of sustainable practices and knowledges.”  In advancing these ideals, we aim to foster the cultivation of freedom, rights, and human dignity.

Our organization comprises members living and working across the globe, and the scholarship of our membership depends on the continual exchange of ideas that includes travel in order to implement those important exchanges.  The executive order inhibits the necessary physical travel of many of our members and it contradicts the CPA’s fundamental principles, which we believe also pertain to immigrants, refugees, and all humans.

The CPA stands in solidarity with other organizations that uphold academic freedom and object to the executive order and its harmful effects on refugees and immigrants.

Our leadership is currently thinking through how we may help members adversely affected by the travel ban and we invite suggestions on ways to best to assist. We also welcome CPA members to contact us at caribphil2017@gmail.com should the executive order affect your participation in organization activities.

We appreciate your reading this statement and please share it widely.

—President Neil Roberts, on behalf of the CPA Board and Secretariat