Take A): a lot of what’s talked about regarding the American South is a function of what’s not talked about.

There’s an unspoken tension that carries throughout the 2005 film Junebug, directed by North Carolina native Phil Morrison. Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz), a Chicago-based art dealer specializing in “outsider art,” has journeyed south with her husband George (Alessandro Nivola) to the area around Pinnacle, North Carolina, where he grew up. The trip’s purpose is ostensibly to woo a particular self-taught “outsider” artist for Madeleine’s gallery. On the other hand, and as the film gradually leads us to believe, George and Madeleine’s complicated homecoming and reunion with George’s sprawling Southern family are precisely the point of the trip.

Frank Hoyt Taylor and Embeth Davidtz in ‘Junebug.’

This is the first time I’ve been able to say, with pleasurably full seriousness, that I’m “curating a film series.” Indeed—one of the many hats Nathan and I wear as Bear Fellows is film series curator, responsible for planning the annual Ethics Film Series, which will span four films over four months in the spring of 2014. Nathan and I have tossed around thematic ideas for the festival that reflect our shared humanities background and that run the gamut from “family” to “the ethics of artistic revision.” But we kept returning to another background we share, and one that continues to compel us: the American South. Nathan and I both grew up in North Carolina, and obviously have chosen to continue living here. My decision to stay in the Triangle after graduation was intentional and long-coming, motivated by my love of this community, which I’d defend any day for its accessibility, diversity, and engagement—whether it be political, cultural and artistic, or intellectual. Living here also means being familiar with the term “the New South.” More often than not, it’s attached to entrepreneurial or artistic ventures—a hip new tapas bar or an alt-country band—that celebrate the American South as politically progressive and economically vibrant. The “New South” is almost aspirational, staked in Antebellum roots, but without the baggage of racism and segregation.

Ironically, the “New South” isn’t a new term. It’s been used in multiple iterations since the Reconstruction Era, in opposition to the idea of the “Old South”—one defined by a plantation and slave-based economy—and, on a more micro-level, a social standard of reticence, genteel civility, and defense of the status quo. These cultural mores are traditional insofar as they reinforce tradition. The basic premise of Junebug throws the contemporary and traditional together in a way that’s impossible to tidy up—especially in the film’s 106 minutes, and especially through the framing device of Madeleine’s relationship with the fictional outsider artist David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor). The genre of “outsider art” was conceptualized by 20^th century French artist Jean Dubuffet to refer to artwork produced outside of official culture and/or institutions as well as the traditional artistic canon. While Dubuffet used the term largely to describe art produced by children and by mental asylum patients (the opening scenes of Junebug depict an auction of an autistic artist’s work), “outsider art” has expanded to refer to the work of self-taught artists, people who carve creative space outside of the mainstream. The American South has long been considered a regional hotbed for these artists who exist and work apart from a creative economy largely dictated by the ‘art world’ (based in Durham, Outsiders Art and Collectibles is devoted to this type of work). The self-sustaining ‘art world,’ that is, represented in Junebug by the NYC gallerist to whom Madeleine fears losing David Wark’s muralesque paintings.

Thornton Dial’s 2003 work ‘Don’t Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together’

A recent New Yorker article profiles the unique relationship between Alabama-born outsider artist Thornton Dial and collector/art historian Bill Arnett. Arnett fervently defends work by the likes of Dial, calling it art that “wasn’t created to entertain people or to sell to rich people…it was created to commemorate the culture itself, so that it could last, so that grandmamma could tell grandson, ‘This is what we’re about, child.’” Detractors consider Arnett’s patronage ethically problematic, even a form of “colonialism,” similar to midcentury white male music producers who became rich “by exploiting black songwriters.” Likewise, Madeleine’s worldliness—she is the daughter of diplomats, having lived and been educated around the globe—and stature in the art world stands in direct contrast to George’s sprawling Southern family, and to Wark’s creative context. As the film unfolds over several days of George and Madeleine’s visit, we watch the global and the local rub up against each other in unexpected ways, at times traumatic and other times connective, even reparative. In the space of the film’s narrative, all become outsiders in some dimension. All assumptions, all relationships are destabilized—and all of this happens, crucially, in a rural North Carolina town.

As professor, historian, and activist Tim Tyson warned my South in Black and White class this past spring, there is a danger in fetishizing the South’s—and especially the “New South’s”— complexity. There’s a danger in thinking about it as an “imagined space” onto which our collective desires and prejudices can be projected. This is part of the reason why Nathan and I are interested in showing films like this one as a way to open up discussion about the seductiveness and tensions of terminology like the “New South.” We want to disrupt the canon before it forms, to claim a space informed by, but outside of, mainstream discourse. Our collective intention, even our moral obligation, is to be intentional—about the art we consume and make, about the cities we live in, about the standard of culture we create and promote (this past spring, I wrote an editor’s note for the Duke Chronicle that treats similar themes). Your voice is an instrumental part of this process, and we invite your feedback as we move toward a film festival this spring centered in a contemporary American South that’s very much still under revision.

The post Disrupting the Canon, (Re)-Claiming the South appeared first on The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.

Helfer says, “These courts are similar in many ways: They are located in Africa, they exercise jurisdiction over countries in various stages of transition to democracy, and they were initially created to advance economic integration and trade in their respective sub-regions. Perhaps most remarkably, the dockets of all three courts expanded to include human rights cases at around the same time.” Further information may be found at Duke Law.

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KIE Prof Walter Sinnot Armstrong sits on a panel discussing the PBS series, Brains on Trial

When I told my friends that I was watching a PBS documentary called Brains on Trial, the reaction I consistently got was, “What does that mean?”

“Are the brains on trial?”

“So it’s a courtroom full of brains?”

These were of course jokes, but they reveal an interesting truth—ironically, most of us don’t think about our brains very often.

As a disclaimer, I am not a scientist. My understanding of neurology is as vast as my knowledge of astrophysics, which is to say, infinitesimal. However, it’s impossible not to absorb a few basic facts if you’ve been in the education system for 17 years and have access to the Internet­—the brain is the unit of the body that creates both function, and the idea of self (this is as far as my knowledge goes). However, we only rarely consciously consider this intersection of anatomy, neurology, and chemistry when creating our idea of our own and other’s personhood.

Which brings me back to Brains on Trial, a two part series, which began last night on PBS. I was excited to watch not only because it’s hosted by Alan Alda (Arnie Vinick is the only Republican I’ve considered voting for), but because KIE professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong had a significant hand in helping shape the content of the program. The basic idea is that each part will explore ways in which MRI technology could be used to determine guilt or innocence in a courtroom.

What struck me watching Alan Alda exploring the ways in which MRI could be used in the criminal justice system was the cautious approach all of the researchers took. No one posited this technology was always accurate or appropriate for court proceedings. Why? Because as one expert said early on, when we lend scientific weight to something, juries can accept it as the only version of the truth, when the process behind the science is often more complicated. Which got me thinking: How do we think about guilt, science, and our brains?

Scientific evidence isn’t always available or reliable. Since the dawn of forensic evidence (accelerated by the ever-popular police procedural TV drama), we’ve considered those admissions to be hard and fast, when really; there is room for error as proven by many stories and documentaries. We’re more comfortable with what is generally considered to be objective evidence than eyewitness accounts and police reports.

However, this kind of thinking is the same thing that keeps researchers from introducing MRI into the courtroom. They’re afraid that people will cling to this evidence when, as the documentary shows, it’s nowhere near 100% accurate. The entire documentary is fascinating and led me to the conclusion that justice is often more art than science, but that doesn’t mean science shouldn’t have a role in the system.

Check your local listings to find out when Brains on Trial is on and sit down for a stimulating ride.

The post This Is Your Brain on Science…and Justice appeared first on The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.

“There was a dip before the laughter, a second before it sank in among the watchers, a reverence for the man’s irreverence, because secretly that’s what so many of them felt–Do it, for chrissake! Do it!–and then a torrent of chatter was released, a call and response, and it seemed to ripple all the way from the windowsill down to the sidewalk and along the cracked pavement to the corner of Fulton, down the block along Broadway, where it zigzagged down John, hooked around to Nassau, and went on, a domino of laughter, but with an edge to it, a longing, an awe, and many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone arc downward all that distance, to disappear from the sight line, flail, smash to the ground, and give the Wednesday an electricity, a meaning, that all they needed to become a family was one millisecond of slippage, while the others–those who wanted him to stay, to hold the line, to become the brink, but no farther–felt viable now with disgust for the shouters: they wanted the man to save himself, step backward into the arms of the cops instead of the sky. 

The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before. 

Out he went.”

(Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin, 5-7)

Two weeks ago, the writer Colum McCann perched at a podium in the renovated Baldwin Auditorium and invoked an audience of about 200. The bulk of the crowd were members of Duke’s Class of 2017, for whom McCann’s 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin was chosen as their summer reading book. The other contingent was a hodgepodge: community members, older students, interlopers like me who either read the book and liked it or wanted to hear a good speaker or both.

McCann’s 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin.

McCann commanded the room with an essence that slowly unfurled itself in the same way his writing does. His arrangement of words—as in the excerpt above, which preludes Let the Great World Spin—has a movement unlike any other I know. This quality makes it difficult to adequately excerpt sections of his text: each word, phrase, and sentence is both syntactically and semantically reliant on every other one. Descriptions and sentiments don’t end; they tumble together in the spin of his great [literary] world, in a way that feels at once magical and so natural as to be obvious, even mundane.

It makes sense, then, that McCann would incorporate a word game— Hangman—into his talk (“it’s four letters, it begins with an ‘F,’ and it’s not what you’re thinking,” he said as the students snickered). The word was “fail,” an especially uncomfortable term for Duke students. And especially for incoming Duke students, who barely know what life looks like, or could look like, at this university, but who are already attuned to the ways in which their efforts toward that end could “fail.”

Ironically, every aspect of this event felt successful. McCann established just the right rapport with his audience. The students had faithfully read and dog-eared the novel. They dialogued thoughtfully both with McCann and with each other, asking questions that often reflected complex considerations of his characters: What if so-and-so hadn’t died? Would he have taken his interest in social justice to South America, to advocate for others there? Why write the novel through multiple protagonists in the first place?

Irrespective of the specific text, the summer reading book is an institutional practice. It’s designed as a “shared intellectual experience” outside of, and in fact preceding, curricular learning. It’s strategically placed alongside other Orientation Week events like Southern-style dinners, wellness advice, and pre-X-future-career open houses. The hoopla surrounding a summer reading book is emblematic of what a Duke education could—even, perhaps, should—look like, before students slide into normative behaviors and patterned ways of engaging in university culture both in and outside the classroom.

McCann precautioned that he wasn’t there “to make grand pronouncements,” but went on to enumerate the three components of what, for him, make a “good” education: vision, justice, and charity. And…failure? I’ve noticed that Duke students often conceptualize failure in terms of performance outcomes: a poor grade on a test, a rejection from a summer internship, an unextended party invitation. In the opening lines of Let the Great World Spin, McCann posits failure in a similar way: the crowd gathered below the man on wire wants to witness a “great fall,” an action they’ve already determined to be “wrong.” When reading, we feel as though we’re there, on the streets, in the sweaty human hodgepodge of late-summer New York City circa 1974. We’re trapped, along with everyone else, within the immense tension between desire and action: we want the walker to fail, to fall, because that’s a very concrete and easily imaginable physical possibility. Little do they (we) realize, McCann implies, that the crowd’s collective imagination of failure—of the walker falling—has already bonded them (us). There’s still the imagined action of the walker, but now there’s also the action of us, together, breathing, watching, on the precipice of continuing the rest of our lives. “Out he went”; out we went, out we go.

McCann. Image courtesy of Irish Writing Blog.

There’s a lot of discussion (emphasis on “discussion”) right now about the humanities existing on a similar precipice. The humanities are in “crisis,” life-or-death mode. Does literature make us better people? Does teaching the humanities make us better people? Does assigning a summer reading book—Let the Great World Spin, to be specific—make us better people?

These are enormous ethical questions, steeped in abstracted assumptions of what is “good” and “bad,” what is “better” or “worse,” what is “success” and what is “failure.” To begin to answer them requires a complex moral imagination, the same one we begin to reach when we read a book like McCann’s, feel the characters as real people and empathize with them, and sit with each other on the edge of plush seats in a swanky college auditorium as an Irish writer tells us we all need to fail more. When we are able to “inhabit new geographies,” as McCann said in his talk, we expand our notion of what’s possible. Expansion is action, and, as in all matters of life, we have to act—perhaps with the intention, or assumption, of failure—in order to survive. Similarly, today more than ever, the humanities must act, and must be treated as actionable—in order for them to survive. Treating literature as “equipment for living,” as a great English professor at this university once said. This fall, as Kenan embarks on Duke-wide initiatives explicitly targeting ethics and the humanities, I’m excited to put this approach into play. The university campus is our space to experiment, act, and, yes, fail—and keep going. Besides, there’s a reason McCann’s book isn’t called “Let the Great World Rest in Perfect Order.” Life doesn’t look like that—whether within or outside the university—and I’ll dare to make the ethical leap and demand that it should not.

The post Spinning the Great World: On Failure, Empathy, and the Life of the Humanities appeared first on The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.

Sinnott-Armstrong, the Chauncey Stillman Professor in Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics, is a faculty leader in the program for Moral Attitudes and Decision-Making at KIE. This program area explores why people think and do what they do through the lenses of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and sociology.

The panel airs on WUNC-TV Thursday, September 12 at 10:00 pm. For additional photos of the panel, visit Duke Today.

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Call for Work

The Icon Industry:
The Visual Economy of Human Rights

Deadline for Submissions:  October 16, 2013
Opening: November 4, 2013

The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University is seeking works of art—in all visual mediums—for a fall exhibit: The Icon Industry: The Visual Economy of Human Rights. The call for work is open to all graduate and undergraduate students.

The term “visual economy” in art is commonly defined as a minimalist approach. But, what happens when this search for simplicity becomes a standard for representation of human rights? Often one iconic image comes to define events, groups or issues, boiling down the complexity into a singular representation that we grab onto as the “right” image. For example, how has the 1984 National Geographic cover image photographed by Steve McCurry of then-refugee Sharbat Gula, known as “the Afghan girl” come to represent—even today in Western culture—a population of Afghan women? It is arguably one of the iconic images of the 20^th century, forever referential.

This exhibit asks artists to explore, critique, and/or celebrate the notion of the iconic image in human rights issues as seen in our news media. Artists are encouraged to approach the work through a sense of awareness, examining the role of the image, creation of icons, the role of the image subject as a human rights agent and as a symbol, the use of simplicity in visual communication and/or our image obsession. Repurposing iconic and other images depicting human rights subjects/issues is allowed and encouraged in the debate, but respect must be given to the subject of the image. Further, artists are asked to consider how their work contributes to the continued dialog overall. This exhibit aims to call awareness, and in doing so create a space for reflection on our current state of visual rhetoric, but also look forward to a more engaged public in the ethics of representation.

Submissions and questions should be emailed to:
caitlin.kelly@duke.edu
Caitlin Margaret Kelly
2013-2014 Kenan Graduate Arts Fellow

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• Watch students perform monologues based on life stories of the Bhutanese and Iraqi interviewed.
• Read student essays based on field research and community engagement.

The post New KIE web resource shares DukeImmerse: Uprooted/Rerouted student experiences appeared first on The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.

Hanagan earned her B.A. from Wesleyan College and her Ph.D. from Duke University. Her research focuses on questions of democratic citizenship and responsibility in the history of American political thought.

The post Monday Seminar: Nora Hanagan, Dec. 2 appeared first on The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.

Jessica Collett

Jessica Collett joined the Notre Dame faculty in fall 2006. Her current work focuses on how exchange contexts – that is the conditions under which social exchanges occur – affect the relational outcomes of exchange including perceptions of fairness, affective reactions, and levels of commitment, cohesion, and trust. Recent research appears in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Psychology Quarterly, and Social Forces.

The post Monday Seminar: Jessica Collett, Nov. 4 appeared first on The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.

Julian Savulescu

Julian Savulescu is a Romanian–Australian philosopher and bioethicist. He is Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Sir Louis Matheson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Monash University, and Head of the Melbourne–Oxford Stem Cell Collaboration, which is devoted to examining the ethical implications of cloning and embryonic stem cell research. He is the editor of the prestigious Journal of Medical Ethics, which was until 2005 the highest impact journal in medical and applied ethics (as ranked by Thomson-ISI Journal Citation Indices). In addition to his background in applied ethics and philosophy, he also has a background in medicine and completed his MBBS (Hons) at Monash University.

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