KIE Senior Fellow and professor in law Barak Richman was quoted in a recent article on the Reuters network regarding the increasing antritrust litigation against the multi-state Blue Cross Blue Shield healthcare provider.
On Thursday, February 21, Team Kenan held a public discussion led by panelists Donna Lisker (Office of Undergraduate Education), and Gary Glass (Counseling and Psychological Services). Duke’s student newspaper The Chronicle provided coverage for the event.
Twelve undergraduates working with the Duke Human Rights Center at the Kenan Institute for Ethics are currently en route to Egypt and Nepal for a month of research with refugees. The students are participants in DukeImmerse: Uprooted/Rerouted, a program sponsored by the Office of Undergraduate Education that allows students to spend an entire semester engaged in team based research on the effects of displacement on refugee populations. The students have spent the first third of the semester skilling up on field research methods and beginning to understand the dynamics of migration as well as the social, health, and legal challenges faced by refugee communities across the globe.
Beginning this week, the students form two research groups, one engaging with Iraqi refugees in Egypt and the other Bhutanese refugees in Nepal. They will work closely with refugee families to collect photos and personal narratives. The information collected will allow for comparison between the two communities and become a resource for human rights practitioners and advocates. In the final third of the semester, the refugees’ stories collected abroad will be transformed into monologues to be performed by the students on April 21 at the Nasher Museum.
Both the Bhutanese and Iraqi refugee communities are priority U.S. State Department groups for resettlement to the United States, and many are settling here in Durham. This allows for continued engagement between students and refugee families on the local level, such as the current ESL and mentoring project begun by former DukeImmerse students.
Once a week, observations and photos by the students will be posted to the DukeImmerse: Uprooted/Rerouted page.
The “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on LGBT Human Rights Advocacy” conference held on Friday, February 8 brought together an international group of scholars and practitioners in law, activism, and social science to address key issues regarding the global challenges and opportunities for LGBT rights. Hosted by the Duke Human Rights Center at the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Center for International Comparative Law at the Law School, the day consisted of five panels of presentations followed by engagement with the audience. Issues discussed included whether or not the push for legislative change is overly emphasized in the activist community, how to establish avenues of activism in countries where there are no predecessors in civil or women’s rights movements, the stigma of “Westernization” associated with LGBT advocacy in certain countries, the complex relationship between religious faith, public views, and government policies regarding LGBT communities, and ways to connect academics and advocates in a way that allows for shared resources to affect social justice.
The conference participants brought international legal knowledge, experiences from the field, and scholarly research and statistics on LGBT populations from various parts of the world in order to exchange insights about strategies for achieving legal and policy reforms and establish new networks of expertise. Already the conference has inspired one of the participants, Paul Johnson of the University of York, to create a blog regarding the European Court of Human Rights cases addressing LGBT rights issues.
Francis Cardinal George, OMI, the Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, was the first speaker of the new Religions and Public Life speaker series, “Paradoxical Politics: Religions, Poverty and Citizenship.” The six speakers chosen for the series are leading scholars and practitioners from the U.S. and abroad. This program is co-sponsored by KIE, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, and the Divinity School.
The Cardinal’s talk focused on Catholic social teaching in the age of economic globalization, and was delivered to a packed room in the Westbrook Building. He discussed the Church’s focus on strengthening communities and the ways in which global capitalism is creating increasingly stratified societies.
To watch the entire talk, visit the Religion and Public Life resources page, where all of the videos for the speaker series will be posted throughout the spring.
The next talk will be on Tuesday night. All remaining talks will be on Tuesdays, beginning at 5:30 pm in room 0014 of the Westbrook Building, next to Duke Chapel.
Jose Casanova | February 19
“Post-secularization, Globalization, and Poverty”
Ruth Marshall | February 26
“Pentecostalism, Poverty & Power”
Katherine Marshall | March 5
“Religion and Development”
Peter van der Veer | March 26
“The Spiritual, the Secular and the Poor in India and China”
Susan Holman | April 9
“Public Health, Poverty & Patristics”
Tune in today for “The State of Things” with Frank Stasio, in which Religions and Public Life at KIE faculty Luke Bretherton and Ebrahim Moosa, future guest speaker Jose Casanova, and local clergy Nancy Petty discuss the complex intersections between faith and the public sphere. Streaming audio for the episode is now available.
Grants of up to $500 are available to all Duke students, faculty and staff for projects that support initiatives that promote ethical or moral reflection, deliberation, and dialogue at Duke and beyond. We welcome diverse perspectives and submissions from organizations and individuals in all areas of the University and the Medical Center. Campus Grant funding provides support for speakers, workshops, meetings, curriculum development, publications, organizational collaborations, and other activities. Travel grants for attending conferences or other individual activities will not be awarded.
For more information and to download the application, visit our Campus Grants site.
KIE Faculty Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is part of an interdisciplinary team of Duke researchers looking at data linking DNA to psychiatric, cognitive, and criminal information in an attempt to better define what physiological factors contribute to the ability for empathy. The Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy blog GenomeLife details the project and data set.
Recently, the Brooklyn College Political Science Department has come under pressure for its co-sponsorship of a roundtable on the BDS movement against Israel. KIE faculty Kieran Healy points out in his recent blog post that invitation to conversations on academic campuses does not equal approval of speakers’ viewpoints or politics.
As reported at DukeToday, there are many opportunities to see award-winning films of all types at Duke this spring. The theme for the 2013 Ethics Film Series is “Love and Justice,” and explores how individuals – both alone and in context of their communities – engage the tension between the demands of justice and the grace of love. Each film is open to the public and is followed by discussion led by faculty in various fields. The next screening is Monday, February 11th at 7:00 pm.