Nov 302012
 
 November 30, 2012

“Religion and Development”

Katherine Marshall, senior fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, will be speaking March 5th at 5:30 pm as part of the Religions and Public Life speaker series.

Marshall has worked for over three decades on international development, with a focus on issues facing the world’s poorest countries. She is also currently a Visiting Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her long career with the World Bank (1971-2006) involved a wide range of leadership assignments, many focused on Africa. From 2000-2006 her mandate covered ethics, values, and faith in development work, as counselor to the World Bank’s President. She led the Bank’s work on social policy and governance during the East Asia crisis years. Marshall has been closely engaged in the creation and development of the World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD) and is its Executive Director. She serves on the Boards of several NGOs and advisory groups, including AVINA Americas, the Niwano Peace Prize International Selection Committee, and the Opus Prize Foundation.

The Religions and Public Life initiative is sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Divinity School, and Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.

March 5, 5:30 pm
Westbrook Building room 0014

 

Nov 302012
 
 November 30, 2012

What Philosophers Believe (about Ethics, and other things)

Kieran Healy, Associate Professor in Sociology and the Kenan Institute for Ethics, will be speaking March 4th as part of the Monday Seminar Series from 12:00-1:30 in room 101, West Duke Building.

Healy’s presentation will include results from a survey about the beliefs and intellectual commitments of professional philosophers. Although the data is noisy, some patterns emerge, particularly around questions of religious belief and scientific naturalism, as well as other areas relevant to ethics. These findings are linked to ongoing debates in the U.S. about the moral and political beliefs of faculty. Amongst philosophers, while some consensus is apparent, there is little evidence that the social location of philosophers (e.g., the prestige of their employer) is systematically connected to particular ideological commitments.

Healy’s research interests are in economic sociology, the sociology of culture, the sociology of organizations, and social theory. He is the author of Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs. Healy earned an undergraduate degree in sociology and geography at the National University of Ireland (Cork) and a Ph.D in sociology from Princeton University. His current focus is on the moral order of market society, the effect of quantification on the emergence and stabilization of social categories, and the link between these two topics.

Nov 302012
 
 November 30, 2012

The International Comparative Studies program is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a conference on international migration. The three-day schedule includes panel discussions, a film, a performance, and a keynote address. For full details and registration information, please visit the conference page at the ICS website.

Conference sponsors include: Department of African and African American Studies, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Department of History, Department of Sociology, Duke Islamic Studies Center, Duke University Center for International Studies, Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke Human Rights Center @ FHI, Kenan Institute for Ethics, Office of Dean of Academic Affairs – Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Office of the Dean of the Humanities, Office of the Dean of Social Sciences, Office of the Provost, Program in Arts of the Moving Image, Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South, Program in Literature, Women’s Studies.

Nov 292012
 
 November 29, 2012

“Pentecostalism, Poverty, and Power”

 

Ruth Marshall, Assistant Professor in the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, will be speaking February 26th at 5:30 pm as part of the Religions and Public Life speaker series.

Marshall’s academic interests include religion and politics, African politics and post-colonial theory, political philosophy, transnational religion, and Pentecostalism. Her research focuses on Africa, especially West Africa, with a focus on transnational religion, war and violence, youth militias, citizenship, ethno-nationalism, autochthony, and international interventionism.  Some of her publications include “Prospérité Miraculeuse: Les pasteurs pentecôtistes et l’argent de Dieu au Nigéria”; “Mediating the Global and Local in Nigerian Pentecostalism”; and “‘God is not a Democrat’: Pentecostalism and Democratisation in Nigeria” in  Paul Gifford (ed.) The Christian Churches and the Democratisation of Africa.

The Religions and Public Life initiative is sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Divinity School, and Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.

February 26, 5:30 pm
Westbrook Building room 0014

Nov 292012
 
 November 29, 2012

Elite climate policy and finance after Doha: Catastrophic consequences & continued marginalized resistance

Michael Dorsey, Visiting Fellow and Professor, Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University, College of the Environment, will be speaking February 25th as part of the Monday Seminar Series from 12:00 – 1:30 in room 101, West Duke Building. This talk is also part of the Environmental Justice Initiative in collaboration with the Nicholas School of the Environment.

Dorsey’s talk will address the need for scholarly inquiry to better understand the ways in which elite policy making—characteristic of the UNFCCC process—enables and entrenches particular interests, to the detriment of the poor. Dorsey will explore the changing climate policy regime and its continued reliance on failed neoliberalism and elaborate on the failure of carbon trading in reducing emissions levels, as well as question “new market mechanisms.” He will also evaluate what might be expected from the new Green Climate Fund and discuss examples of  marginalized resistance to elite climate strategy—from indigenous resistance to REDD/REDD+, to urban waste-picker dissent against continued carbon trading. The talk will conclude with suggestions of roadmaps for climate justice inspired by the world’s poor.

Prior to Wesleyan he was an assistant professor in Dartmouth College’s Environmental Studies Program and the Director of the College’s Climate Justice Research Project. Dr. Dorsey is a co-founding board member of Islands First—a multilateral negotiating capacity building organization for small island developing states facing disproportionate threats from unfolding climate change. Since 2008, Dr. Dorsey has been an Affiliated Researcher on the Sustainability and Climate Research Team at Erasmus University’s Research Institute of Management inside the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM-ERIM, The Netherlands). Dr. Dorsey’s work focuses on global environmental governance and sustainability, with particular attention to how multilateral finance instruments impact climate and biodiversity policy.

Nov 292012
 
 November 29, 2012

Selection processes aren’t just for the admissions office; they happen all the time across campus and beyond. Rush season spurs all kinds of group decision-making within campus organizations, but the way we form social groups has implications for student life—and life after college. Are you intrigued by student-run selective processes and how they impact students and campus as a whole? What social and psychological factors contribute to the ways students (and people more generally) make decisions about the groups with which they affiliate? When is group diversity desirable and when might it be problematic? Join Team Kenan for a panel discussion over dinner in the Gothic Reading Room. Panelists include Donna Lisker (Office of Undergraduate Education), and Gary Glass (CAPS).

Be sure to RSVP to guarantee a free and delicious dinner of your choice from NOSH restaurant!

What: The Science of Selection
When: February 21st at 7:30pm
Where: Gothic Reading Room, Perkins Library
RSVP: Here

Dinner guaranteed for those who RSVP by Feb. 19th at noon.

Nov 282012
 
 November 28, 2012

“Post-secularization, Globalization, and Poverty”

José Casanova, Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University and head of the Berkley Center’s Program on Globalization, Religion and the Secular, will be speaking Tuesday, February 12th at 5:30 pm as part of the Religions and Public Life speaker series.

Casanova is one of the world’s top scholars in the sociology of religion. He has published works in a broad range of subjects, including religion and globalization, migration and religious pluralism, transnational religions, and sociological theory. His best-known work, Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), has become a modern classic in the field and has been translated into five languages, including Arabic and Indonesian. In 2012, Casanova was awarded the Theology Prize from the Salzburger Hochschulwochen in recognition of life-long achievement in the field of theology.

The Religions and Public Life initiative is sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Divinity School, and Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.

February 19, 5:30 pm
Westbrook Building room 0014

Nov 282012
 
 November 28, 2012

Changing Attitudes toward Homosexuality: Do Policies Matter?

Attitudes toward homosexuality have been changing rapidly in the last three decades, amidst activism and conflict over lesbian and gay rights. Americans have fought about whether workplaces should have the legal right to fire a lesbian or gay employee. We argued whether it should bea crime for two men or two women to have sex with each other, consensually, in the privacy of their own home. And we debated whether same-sex marriage should be legitimated by the state.Various U.S. states have made different choices about lesbian and gay rights. Using ANES (American National Election Survey) data and multilevel modeling, my colleagues and I test whether the adoption of pro-gay or anti-gay policies at the state level as an impact on the attitudes of residents of those states.

Tina Fetner is Associate Professor of Sociology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She teaches introduction to Sociology, as well as the sociology of sexualities, social inequality, and gender. She does research on sexualities and social movements. Her book, How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism, explores the history of contentious politics around lesbian and gay rights in the United States and examines the dynamics of opposing movements. in other work, co-authored with Robert Andersen, she examines the role of social forces in changing attitudes toward homosexuality. She has active research projects on Gay-Straight Alliance student groups in high schools, and on same-sex marriage in Ontario, Canada, with Adam Green and Barry D. Adam. She received her PhD in Sociology from New York University in 2001.

Nov 282012
 
 November 28, 2012

Preparing meals is more complicated than just adding water. Food is a luxury for some, a scarcity for others, and political no matter who is eating at the table. Join Team Kenan for an afternoon of experiential learning to explore the factors that influence people’s food decisions. For this challenge, we will be getting out of the lecture hall, into the grocery store and the kitchen. Whether you are sent to Dollar General, Whole Foods, given a car or set off by foot, you and the rest of your family of five for the afternoon will be expected to have dinner on table that evening. Each family’s financial situation will be different, so you will have to budget your time, energy and funds wisely. Over dinner, Kenan Graduate Fellow and Nicholas School Ph.D candidate Shana Starobin will help us better understand what food politics and food insecurities look like in our neighborhoods and neighborhoods that look very different from ours.

No cost to participate. Challenge by food choice. Are you up for it?

When: Sunday, February 17th, starting at 3pm
Where: Meet at the Kenan Institute for Ethics
RSVP: Here

Nov 272012
 
 November 27, 2012

Duke Amnesty International and Vision for North Korea present a talk with two student refugees from North Korea Friday, February 15 at 6:30 pm in the Fitzpatrick Center’s Schiciano Auditorium.

The people of North Korea face great difficulties in human rights, food attainment, and basic freedoms. Two students, ages 19 and 21, will be speaking about their experiences living in and escaping North Korea.

This event is a recipient of a KIE Campus Grant, and has additional sponsorship from the Duke Korea Forum, the Department of Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Sanford School for Public Policy, the Student Organization Finance Committee, the Asian and Pacific Studies Institute, International Comparitive Studies, and the Duke Human Rights Center at the FHI.