Oxford Bibliographies are something like annotated bibliographies which are intended to give you a curated reading list introducing you to the foundational and a sample of important arguments that have been made in a particular field, on a particular topic. They generally offer a short introduction to the topic at the beginning and then break down into more specific aspects of it, but throughout will provide a number of citations of scholarly books and articles (etc.) along with a brief description of that source, its relevance or significance, and the like.
As we discussed--but on account of your bumbling librarian not checking a box did not successfully see!--one really useful way to approach Oxford Bibliographies is to search through the works that are cited within them.
Because a lot of the most interesting work in feminist philosophy, philosophy of sex and gender, trans philosophy, and other areas which connect with your class may not map in a really obvious way on to "traditional" (definitely in scare quotes) philosophical areas of study, it can be useful to find where works that interest you show up inside these articles.
For example, we might want to see if Sara Ahmed's work has been cited in any of the Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy.
We can do that by first clicking on the link for the Advanced Search feature.
Next, enter the desired author's name or text in the top search text field. Here we'll enter in Sara Ahmed.
Then, I want to select Citations Only in the Content Type area.
Now I need to select (this was the whoops! today) options underneath. Here I will select Books and Journals.
Lastly, I'll select the options telling the search engine to look within Philosophy and also Literary and Critical Theory.
One of the results is in the Philosophy section and is for Critical Phenomenology. I'll click on this to see where Ahmed might be mentioned, and this might give me an idea of how other scholars situate Ahmed's work, what they see it as being in conversation with, and so on.
Within that page, I can then use the Find feature on the left side to look for Ahmed's name, or I can simply use Ctrl + F (or Command + F on Mac) to look. Either way, I will be led to a short description of Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology.
(I can then follow the Find It button to see if we have the book within the Trico. We do!)
But what interests me more than finding other works by Ahmed is of course what else the bibliography author thinks might be similar.
Scrolling down in this section, I see a scholarly article which appears to link the kind of project Ahmed engages in with directions and themes which are perhaps implicit in earlier phenomenological thinkers and texts. This might be really useful for orientation.
Use the Find this resource > Find It links to see if you can access this resource through Tripod.
In this case, we don't -- but this could be an article you request through interlibrary loan, if you thought it looked interesting.
