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

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

One of these components must be a research project, and the other must be a community engagement experience. For the independent research project, the student and faculty advisor will choose a topic related to one of KIE’s core program areas: Human Rights, Global Migration, Rethinking Regulation, Moral Attitudes and Decision-Making, or Religions and Public Life. These projects could take many forms, such as an art exhibition, performance, or traditional academic paper. For the community engagement project, students will use an area of interest as a springboard to explore what living an ethical life means to them personally. Students could spend a summer examining the ethics of international adoption and attend a conference for adoptees, spend time in Greenland evaluating the effects of global warming and globalization on the local population, or intern at a pharmaceutical company or banking firm, all while keeping written reflections of the ethical questions they are exploring.

Proposals for the experiential pathway must be worked on in consultation with faculty, and faculty-student mentoring will continue throughout the experiential process. While other certificate programs are looking to add experiential components, the Ethics Certificate is the first do so. Students from all fields of study are encouraged to participate in this program, which students must declare by the end of the drop/add period of their junior year. Anyone interested may visit the ECP page or contact Mekisha Mebane, mekisha.mebane@duke.edu, for more information.

Check out the new hub for student engagement journals for easy access to current and past journals kept by students in various KIE programs, and stay tuned for incoming updates from our far-flung correspondents!

Together with a faculty mentor, the two undergraduates formulated projects that incorporate research and personal reflection. Cece is a Korean adoptee exploring the culture of adoption, both through interviewing other adoptees in the U.S. and through traveling to Korea to understand how the adoption process is viewed from the other side. Christine will be in Greenland, exploring the ways in which changing environmental and economic climates are affecting the lives of indigenous Inuit communities.

The fellowship will allow freedom to pursue the student’s interests and deepen his/her own work in addition to broadening KIE’s relationship with the visual arts.  The chosen fellow will receive a $5,000 yearly stipend and access to additional resources. For further information and application instructions, visit the Graduate Awards page.

All applications must be received by 5pm on June 30th, 2013. 

The winning Duke student is Joy Liu, a Trinity junior majoring in public policy and biology (pictured at right). Her essay “Ambition” discusses a pivotal trip to Africa, in which a friendship with a local youth transformed her motivations. The Carolina student chosen, Elizabeth Henderson, is a senior majoring in journalism and mass communication. In “On Open-Mindedness,” she discusses the ways in which her liberal arts education has taken her out of her comfort zone and instilled in her an intellectual curiosity.

One of the greatest personal ethical dilemmas that has arisen in my time at Duke is: when do the ends justify the means?

I work in a pharmacology laboratory at Duke, and many of the reagents (or “”ingredients”") in my experiments come from animals. As a result, I think about the justification for the use of animals in medical research often. Every day, I see tubes labeled with phrases such as Goat anti Rabbit, which means that the antibody was obtained from goats and rabbits grown specifically for this purpose. At first glance, it’s easy to forget the pain and suffering the animal endured in an invasive bleeding procedure to produce this clear, almost invisible liquid. But upon further reflection I’m left with a nagging feeling.

The purpose of biomedical research is to improve human health through science, which is often an open-ended process of discovery. We cannot know which attempts will lead to success and which will lead to failure. To combat the nagging feeling, I remind myself of the broader goals of the project and whether each experiment is key in meeting those goals. I remember that experiments can be expensive not just in terms of ever-elusive grant money, but also in terms of the life of an animal that produced the fetal bovine serum I use to grow cells.

Because I agree that the end of goal of improving human health is important, I am able to ethically justify many of the experiments that I do. Still, at the end of the day when a technical failure happens and my western blot comes out looking like several inconclusive smudged lines, I feel less certain about how the use of these animals is pervasive in biological research.

This question of when do the ends justify the means stretches beyond the use of animals for medical research into other realms of Duke students lives. We think about the morality of our career choices. Last semester, I joined a conversation with several of my friends debating whether it is ethical to spend a few years doing work that you believe is not in the interest of society to make a large paycheck and set up for a career serving others later down the line. While we agreed that the question was important, we did not come to a consensus. The practical option may not be the one that “feels right.”

These questions don’t have easy, cut and dry answers. I’ll never be a strict consequentialist, believing that only results matter. And that persistent feeling that something is wrong is something to be taken seriously, even if only to attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance. In the rest of my time at Duke, I hope to develop a more thorough ethical framework to answer these questions – and sleep better at night.

Essays of between 500-800 words should address either or both of the following questions:

• In what ways have your core beliefs and larger aims been tested, transformed, or confirmed during your time in college?
• How have you had to defend or challenge prevailing ideas, social norms or institutions and what lessons have you learned from doing so?

The deadline for the 2013 competition is April 26, 2013.

Contact Rachel Revelle (rachel.revelle@duke.edu) for more information.