On September 6th, the second annual Human Rights Lecture@Duke – a new partnership between the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and the Duke Law School – welcomed Samuel Moyn, professor of law and history at Yale University, to Duke. Moyn’s most recent book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard University Press, 2018), questions why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside enduring and increasing inequality, and why activists seek remedies for need without challenging growing wealth.
Speaking to a full room, Moyn stated that “human rights on paper and human rights movements — until very recently — have said nothing about material inequality. They’ve been a language and they’ve provided a kind of mobilization, belatedly, that takes on sufficient provision. But when it comes to material equality, human rights falls silent.”
“Professor Moyn’s lecture left me pondering a number of issues relating to the relationship between human rights and economic inequality, says Juliette Duara, a Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke Law School and Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. “In particular, I have been mulling whether it is justifiable for a small group to become fabulously wealthy so long as the lives of those at the bottom rung are marginally improved in the process. I think not – but the ‘why not’ is interesting to contemplate.”
Click here to see a video of the talk.
The talk was co-sponsored by The Duke Human Rights Center at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, The Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute, The Center for International and Comparative Law at Duke Law School, the History Department, Sanford School of Public Policy, The Human Rights Archive at the Rubenstein Library, and International Comparative Studies.
Now on view at the Keohane-Kenan Gallery at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Workers Dreaming is a series of 22 large-scale, color photographs (1999-2006) by Chapel Hill-based artist elin o’Hara slavick. Each photo is a portrait of a worker in their place of work – a street cleaner, a deli worker, a taxi driver – with their eyes closed, as if in a state of dreaming. Are they thinking about a faraway place that they would rather be? Are they taking a quiet break from their responsibilities? Each subject is an island of temporary calm in a busy, blue-collar workday.
While eyes of the workers in slavick’s photographs are closed, we are aware that each of her subjects sees, feels, smells, and knows their situation intimately. And for all the workers slavick has documented, there are hundreds of thousands more: working assembly lines, sewing seams, pouring hot beverages, mopping a floor, collecting tickets, and all, at one time or another, probably daydreaming. “These workers — remembered and actual — inspire the photographs. They are mortal, majestic, tired, heroic, beautiful, and deeply human.” 
“I like to think of the What Now? seminar series as an effort to accomplish the principle aim of a liberal arts education, as Judith Shapiro described it when she was president of Barnard College,” says David Toole, a KIE Senior Fellow and associate professor of the practice of theology, ethics, and global health at Duke Divinity School. “She used to tell students that her job was to make the inside of their heads an interesting place to spend the rest of their lives. ‘A liberal-arts education does lots of other things,’ she would say, ‘but if it hasn’t made the inside of your head an interesting place, it has failed.’”
Based on a 2014 conference co-hosted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Michaeline A. Crichlow, professor of African and African American Studies and Sociology at Duke and a Senior Fellow at the KIE, has co-edited a volume of essays examining globalization’s effects on the interplay of race and rurality as it occurs across diverse geographies and peoples.
Effectively responding to the sexual abuse of children is, of course, beyond an American problem — it is a worldwide problem. For this reason, Americans would do well to consider the approaches of other countries to combat it, especially those of Australia, says Meredith Edelman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. In an op-ed published in The Inquirer (Philadelphia), she advocates in particular for Australia’s approaches to be used as guide, as that country has made “recent progress in addressing abuse in institutional settings across society.”
At the end of the summer, the Kenan Institute for Ethics, in collaboration with