The Institute’s What is Ethics? seminar series encourages participants to think beyond narrow definitions of ethics to consider the unexpected places where ethical discussions may arise.

2010-2011
Sport as organized play, from Little League to the Olympics, is an ancient and enduring feature of social life. We look to sport to teach values of cooperation and hard work; we call on sport metaphors in business, war, and politics; and we experience the communal elation (or despair) of a sporting event.

Elevating the Game: A Series on Sport provided an informal setting for students, faculty, and sports enthusiasts to talk about some of the most pressing and interesting issues in sport today.

September 22, 2010
The Global Production and Marketing of Athletes
with Laurent Dubois, Kim Krawiec, Michael Gillespie, Achille Mbembe, and Wayne Norman (moderator)

October 21, 2010
Bending the Rules: Gamesmanship in Sports
with Greg Dale, Joe Heath, Jan Boxill, and Wayne Norman (moderator)

February 28, 2011
Coaches as Moral Leaders?
with Pam Bustin, Jan Boxill, Greg Dale, Mark Thomas, and Wayne Norman (moderator)

March 21, 2011
Playing to the Crowd: Sport, Media, and the Spectator
with King Kaufman, Wayne Norman, and the Franklin Humanities Institute Working Group on Sport

2008-2009
Convened by Peter Euben and Suzanne Shanahan, the Institute hosted gatherings of faculty across the university to create conversation and community among faculty with an interest in ethics, to inform and strengthen the ethical dimensions of participants’ work, and to serve as an incubator for potential projects that the Institute might undertake in conjunction with its core faculty and other interested faculty at Duke.

September 26, 2008
The Use and Abuse of Ethics
with Srinivas Aravamudan, Geoffrey Harpham, and Sam Wells

December 5, 2008
Thinking about Morality and Politics by Thinking about Race
with George Shulman

March 27, 2009
The Themitical in the Ethical
with James Faubion

The Institute’s Occasional Paper series features a selection of papers related to the above events. Read them here.