Flooding the Desert: Religious-Based Mobilizing to Save Lives Along the Sonora-Arizona Border

Kraig Beyerlein, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Notre Dame University, will be speaking November 26^th as part of the Monday Seminar Series from 12:00-1:30 in room 101, West Duke Building.

The talk will address the nature and origins of congregation-based support for humanitarian aid in the desert and the different models of congregation-based activism. Additionally, he will explore why some congregations resist supporting/participating in the humanitarian aid movement, and the consequences of congregation-based humanitarian service for activists, especially non-religious participants.

Beyerlein teaches and engages in research in the areas of collective behavior/social movements, civic engagement/volunteerism, social networks, and the sociology of religion, especially congregation-based mobilization. He has published articles on these topics in such journals as the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Mobilization, Social Forces, and Social Problems. Before coming to Notre Dame in the fall of 2009, he spent three years in the Sociology Department at the University of Arizona as an assistant professor. He received his Ph.D in 2006 from the Sociology Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Understanding Skepticism about Climate Change

Simon Keller, Associate Professor of History, Philosophy, Political Science & International Relations at Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand (currently on leave at Rice University), will be speaking November 19^th as part of the Monday Seminar Series from 12:00-1:30 in room 101, West Duke Building.

Skepticism about climate change is a strong and surging political force, and more than any other factor it stands in the way of serious global action on climate change. Why is skepticism about climate change so widespread, and why is it most prominent on the conservative side of politics? Keller will approach disagreement about climate change as a special case of the wider problem faced by laypersons who need to decide which experts to trust. It is understandable that those of a certain ideological orientation should place their trust in the putative experts who deny climate change – and hence that the move to climate change skepticism can be construed as an exercise of rationality. This result offers a new and more optimistic view about the possibility of rational progress in the political debate about climate change.

Keller works on various topics in ethics, political philosophy and metaphysics. He lived in Wellington as a child, and has since lived in Melbourne, then the US, then Melbourne again, and now back to Wellington. He spent five years working in the Philosophy department at Boston University and two years at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. During his time in Boston, he also held a faculty fellowship at the Center for Ethics at Harvard University and taught in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Peter Euben’s work has been at the forefront of both democratic and ancient political theory for several decades, and he is largely responsible for the renewed interest in Greek tragedy within academic political theory today. As a scholar Euben demonstrates the importance of tragedy as an institution of Athenian democracy, but perhaps more importantly he articulates the enduring relevance of the tragic sensibility for how we currently think about ethics and politics. He also continues to be a first-rate mentor of graduate students, and was a celebrated teacher of undergraduates both at Duke and at UC Santa Cruz before that. Duke University is honored to celebrate his life and work with this two-day event.

This conference is co-sponsored by:
Trinity College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Classical Studies
Kenan Institute for Ethics
Program in Democracy, Institutions and Political Economy
Humanities Division, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences
Center for European Studies

For additional information please contact:
Stefan Dolgert at sdolgert@gmail.com
Or visit the conference website

Climate Change and the Church in the Southeast:  Exploring Moral and Theological Resources and Principles, November 29, 2012

Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke Divinity and Nicholas Institute faculty as well as theologians and clergy members from other institutions to discuss strategies for engaging religious communities in discussing and leading efforts to fight climate change. Due to limited space, participation is invitation-only.

Aid Agencies, Bureaucracy, and the New Legalism in South Sudan: From Civil War to Spreadsheets

Mark Massoud, Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and Legal Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will be speaking November 5^th as part of the Monday Seminar Series from 12:00-1:30 in room 101, West Duke Building.

Legal scholars and policymakers studying the development of law in post-conflict settings have focused largely on the role of state institutions, particularly courts. This emphasis on state-produced law has detracted from an examination of the variety of non-state actors and institutions that contribute to the development of legal order in post-conflict settings and weak states. Based on literature in public law and organizational behavior, as well as field research in South Sudan, Massoud argues that international aid groups impose legal norms related to corporate behavior on the local organizations they fund and local people they hire. Civil society actors in South Sudan experience the power of law, not through the courts, but through their tangible and daily contact with aid agencies. These actors are subject to contracts and other rules of employment, work under management and finance teams, document routine activity, and abide by organizational constitutions. In analyzing how South Sudanese activists confront, understand, conform to, and resist these externally imposed legal rules, Massoud exposes how aid organizations themselves become significant sites of legal and political struggle in post-conflict settings.

Massoud’s research focuses on law in authoritarian and war-torn states. He is currently completing a book tentatively titled, Fragile State of Law: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legal Politics in Sudan (under contract, Cambridge University Press), and his work on rights in authoritarian regimes appeared in Law & Society Review (2011). Previously, he taught law at McGill University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.