CONTACT: Sarah Rogers
(919) 660-3035
sarah.rogers@duke.edu
DURHAM, N.C. – For seven weeks this summer, an experimental collective of artists and thinkers from Duke University’s Laboratory for Social Choreography will bring together hundreds of people in the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece, in an exhibit unlike any other.
Its goal? To reimagine how we live.
“Parliament”is a pioneering work of social choreography — an emerging art form in which normal modes of human interaction are temporarily suspended, heightening our awareness of the political and social structures that shape our everyday lives. By creating a space in which people think and move differently, “Parliament” seeks to generate new, radically imaginative possibilities for society.
He knows that it sounds strange at first, but Laboratory for Social Choreography director, Duke professor and artist Michael Kliën says that imagining alternatives is the only sane response to our current moment, in which the seemingly inexorable systems that have produced climate change and extreme wealth disparities have many citizens feeling hopeless and stuck.
An internationally recognized artist and choreographer, Michael Kliën directs the Laboratory for Social Choreography at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Drawing on choreography, philosophy, political theory, and participatory art, the Lab develops embodied, experiential frameworks for confronting the social and ecological dead-ends of our time. Photo credit: Justin Cook.
“We’re stuck in a system that we’ve collectively built, but not many people seem to like very much,” says Kliën. “There’s this notion of ‘Well, there’s nothing else, so let’s just settle’ — as if we humans haven’t always invented and created our ways of living together.
“If the system is destroying our environment, destroying our attention, destroying our pleasure in life, then of course you would want to reform or change that system,” he continues. “It’s a symptom of insanity to just accept it because you can’t think of the alternative.”
For this task, he says, you need a broad collective. So the Laboratory for Social Choreography is working with community organizations across Athens to invite all kinds of people — refugees, cancer survivors, politicians, people with learning disabilities, and many others — to join “Parliament.” Anyone can sign up to participate.
Each day, new participants will come into the exhibit space to enact “Parliament.” After a fifteen-minute briefing, they will be left to roam around for three hours or more, all of them bound by the same conditions: they will not speak, or lean on the walls, or play with their shoes. And they will definitely not look at their phones.
What unfolds over the next few hours is anyone’s guess, but “Parliament” often leads participants to a new awareness of themselves and their relation to others — but without the identity markers that typically divide us. Kliën says as much as it’s possible to do so, it strips people down to a state of “pre-identity.”
Even if participants lie down on the floor and go to sleep — which they sometimes do — Kliën says that “Parliament” forces them to confront their own agency.
“What really shows up is the potential that we stand in simply by being in the world,” he says. “It makes you aware of how it’s been reduced in scope by the social system that we’re in. That might not make you happy. But it might open up space for you to say ‘What am I going to do about it?’”
Kliën first conceptualized “Parliament” in 2011, against the backdrop of mass anti-austerity demonstrations in Athens that followed Greece’s debt crisis. It was first exhibited at the Benaki Museum in 2014. Since then, it has evolved in design and scope through new iterations across Europe and the United States, and it has seeded new social choreographic works “Amendment,” “Constitution,” and “Inauguration” as part of the Laboratory for Social Choreography’s ongoing research.
Kliën says it’s apt that “Parliament” is returning to Benaki — and to Athens, the birthplace of democracy — during a time when many are sounding fears about the deteriorating state of democracy worldwide.
“When it’s under threat, rather than saying, ‘Let’s hunker down in our institutions,’ ‘Parliament’ is saying, ‘No, let’s push the boat out and see what’s out there,’” Kliën says.
From June 11–July 27, 2025, “Parliament” runs at the Benaki Museum in Athens from 11:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m. on Thursdays and Sundays and 11:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Guides — including Duke students in the community engagement program DukeEngage — will serve as a first point of contact for museum visitors, and will help them enter and navigate the exhibit space.
“Pretty bleak” is how Kendra Rentz T’25 described forecasting the global effects of extreme heat on human mortality.
“It was depressing to look at the results every single day, and seeing how many people would die from climate change,” said Rentz, an environmental sciences major.
But she soon discovered another approach to climate research. Through a course on ethics and environmental policy, Rentz learned how to connect with community members who were most likely to be impacted by climate change — and how to conduct research that could directly benefit them.
“I discovered my passion for working with communities directly, and how much more you can get done when you’re working at the grassroots level,” she said.
Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.
After taking a climate course with Professor Alexander Glass her first year at Duke, Rentz was inspired to major in environmental sciences. Seeking summer experiences in the field, she joined DukeEngage Brazil, a program directed by Luana Lima, a professor in Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
That summer, DukeEngage Brazil offered students the opportunity to work at Itaipu Binacional Dam — the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world, which straddles the border of Brazil and Paraguay.
“Technically, we were living on the Brazil side, but every day when I went into work, I would work on the Paraguayan side, and my clock would change by an hour,” Rentz said.
She worked in the hydrology department with a group of Brazilian and Paraguayan engineers — forecasting how much water would enter the dam and how much energy it would generate.
“I was working on correlating various climate indices to natural inflow,” Rentz said.
“You can’t just correlate. You need to take into account various things — like the topography of the region and other local conditions that will affect the inflow.”
Though she gained a lot of coding experience, her time in Brazil wasn’t all work. She made lifelong friends with other DukeEngage students and Brazilians from Itaipu.
“It was one of the highlights of my Duke experience,” she said.
Back on campus, Rentz became one of the Nicholas School’s inaugural Climate Scholars. She started working with Professor Drew Shindell on emission reductions and extreme heat, which soon became her core research area.
In spring 2024, Rentz took “Ethical Dimensions of Environmental Policy,” a course taught by Kenan Institute for Ethics Faculty Fellow Kay Jowers. During a time when Rentz was feeling the emotional impact of projecting deaths from climate change, she was drawn to the course’s different approach. “And I heard great things about Dr. Jowers, so I really wanted to take it,” she said.
Each year, Jowers selects a different policy to study in a class-wide qualitative research project. This time, it was President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative, which directed 40% of climate investments toward disadvantaged communities.
“Using Duke as a case study, we were looking at how universities were engaging with Justice40 and how communities were responding to it,” Rentz said. She was part of a team that led focus groups with community organizations and analyzed the findings.
Rentz heard from community members about negative past experiences with researchers, who treated them more like objects of study than partners in a knowledge exchange.
Jowers modeled a different approach. “Instead of coming in with a research question already in mind, she goes in saying, ‘What do you guys need from us?’ Rentz said. “‘We have the tools and resources — how can we best do this?’
“It was really interesting to see that you can very easily do this ethically,” she added. “It got me thinking more about community-engaged research.”
“Why am I doing this? Why am I studying climate? At the end of the day, it’s to help solve the problem of climate change, which I think is the biggest problem of our generation and the most solvable problem of our generation.”
— Kendra Rentz T’25
Rentz began to look for ways to combine her research on extreme heat with ethical community engagement.
“You have your research question, which is something you develop in collaboration with local people,” she said. “You’re also making sure you fairly compensate them and you’re giving them something that personally benefits them.”
That summer, Rentz joined a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates at Arizona State University. Working with Professor Jennifer Vanos and graduate student Gisel Guzman, she spent three months going out into the community, testing participants’ personal heat exposure.
“Phoenix is extremely hot,” she said. “There are around 600 to 700 deaths every summer from extreme heat. It mainly affects the unhoused population and elderly people who are lower income.”
Rentz provided participants with information about cooling centers and hotlines, and later returned with deliverables showing them how their personal metrics compared to an average person’s susceptibility to heat exhaustion or stroke. Participants were compensated for the study.
“It was a great example of community-engaged research,” Rentz said. “And it was so fun. I loved talking to community members and hearing about their lives.”
For her senior thesis, Rentz decided to focus on heat exposure in Durham. Using the model developed by her collaborators at ASU, she calculated how people’s various physiological profiles affected their risk levels.
“My research is looking at maximum safe levels of activity for younger and older people,” she said. “I might be fine in the heat, but my grandmother definitely would not.”
Rentz also looked at how heat exposure differs across Durham. Disparities are apparent, especially in neighborhoods affected by redlining — a discriminatory practice of the Federal Housing Administration, which denied mortgages in Black communities in the early to mid-20th century.
“Those historical injustices are still present today,” Rentz said. “You can see a difference in heat exposure in those communities when you just take into account air temperature and humidity.”
She also hopes to integrate mean radiant temperature (MRT), using a data set created by UNC-Chapel Hill collaborators.
“Let’s say you’re standing on a giant asphalt parking lot at Walmart, and 200 meters over, there’s a green park,” Rentz said. “If you’re standing in the green park, it’s going to feel much cooler. But if you measured that with two thermometers, it could be the same exact air temperature.”
MRT helps create high-resolution estimates that can account for these differences, providing more accurate measures of communities’ heat stress.
When her study is finished, Rentz plans to share a plain language summary of her results with community members.
“I know that community organizations will continue to push for additional resources from the local government for extreme heat exposure, because it’s getting worse and worse in Durham,” she said.
As graduation approached, Rentz said she was thinking back on her first-year self and the moment she decided to major in environmental sciences — and how she’s developed her sense of purpose since.
“Why am I doing this?” she asked. “Why am I studying climate? At the end of the day, it’s to help solve the problem of climate change, which I think is the biggest problem of our generation and the most solvable problem of our generation.”
After receiving a National Science Foundation fellowship, Rentz chose to enroll in the Ph.D. program in Earth Systems and Climate Science at Arizona State University, where she plans to research the local impacts of extreme heat on vulnerable populations — and help communities adapt to the “new normal” of extreme heat.
Seniors on the cusp of graduation often have advice for other Duke students. Get to know your professors. Study abroad. Explore Durham — it’s a great place to spend a few years.
But this take-away from Will Lieber T’25 is unique: Take classes with as many non-Duke students as possible.
While he was half-joking, there’s a kernel of truth to it.
“We come to college to encounter diverse perspectives, but in some ways, college is not diverse,” Lieber said. “We’re very homogenous in terms of age, and the life experience that comes with age.”
“It can honestly limit class discussions,” Jenna Smith T’25 agreed. “Even though we all come from different backgrounds, there is this common centralizing force that really informs our experiences and perspectives.”
For Lieber and Smith, a class taught by Kenan Institute for Ethics Associate Director Ada Gregory, “Just Work: Restorative Justice Models and Applications,” was a notable exception — one that ended up shaping their paths at Duke in unexpected but perhaps unsurprising ways.
That’s because restorative justice challenges what people think they know — or have unconsciously internalized — about the way the criminal justice system works.
Typically, when a perpetrator is convicted of a crime, the state determines their punishment. Punishments vary according to the type and severity of the crime, as determined by the state. This legal process is largely abstracted from the harm caused by the crime; that is, its impact on individual victims and communities.
In contrast, restorative justice is an alternative, voluntary process that’s centered on those harmed by the crime. Through facilitated dialogues, or “circles,” it provides a structure for victims, perpetrators, and communities to decide collectively how to address the harm and try to repair it. Therefore, solutions vary according to the community and its needs.
“The questions that you get to ask in restorative justice are ones that will carry through to how you engage in your personal life, in your professional life, and how you engage in conflict in any capacity.”
— Jenna Smith T’25
When Lieber and Smith took Gregory’s course on restorative justice in spring 2023, it solidified interests in criminal justice and incarceration that they’d been developing for years.
Jenna Smith came to Duke as a Robertson Scholar with an ambitious “30-year-plan”: she was “dead-set on becoming a federal judge.” Along the way, she said, she realized that she would be in college only a short time, and “you don’t want to wake up in 20 to 30 years and realize that you hadn’t thought about any other options.”
She explored other disciplines, including international comparative studies, in which she eventually majored, focusing on Latin America. Her interest in journalism took her to Chicago, where she spent a summer interning at the Tribune. But she just kept coming back to criminal justice.
“That’s what I wanted to report on,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to talk to folks about. That’s just what I cared most about.”
During his first year of college at Illinois Wesleyan University, Will Lieber worked night shifts as an ER tech in a hospital in central Illinois. His encounters with incarcerated people coming in for emergency care caused him to reflect on how easily anyone could end up in the same situation.
“Dropping out of school, or dating the wrong person…lots of things can increase one’s potential opportunities to collide with the justice system,” he said.
Will Lieber. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.
Lieber had chosen to attend a local university because he “wasn’t really bought into the idea that the price tag of expensive elite higher education was worth it.” But then, “I didn’t feel like I was being pushed as much as I should have been.”
He decided he wanted to meet people who matched the energy he was bringing to his studies and transferred to Duke during his sophomore year. A pre-health student, he was initially interested in exploring how learning disabilities affect health outcomes. But over time, his focus gravitated towards the justice system, and he eventually built a Program II major focusing on Health and Incarceration.
“I think it can only be described as a process where I was doing things that I found meaningful over a long period of time,” he said.
When Lieber and Smith talk about Gregory’s restorative justice course, it’s clear that it wasn’t only the content that affected them, but also the way she taught the course.
For one thing, the class was far more diverse than usual. It included several volunteers from the local organization Restorative Justice Durham, whom Smith jokingly called “real adults.”
“Getting to engage in those conversations not just with our peers in the classroom but our community members in Durham was part of why I found the class so engaging,” Smith said. “It was the catalyst for me trying to engage more with opportunities outside of Duke for the rest of my time here.”
Both Smith and Lieber praised the way that Ada Gregory, a former police officer, led the course discussion. Much of it was structured in restorative justice “circles” — facilitated dialogues in which everyone has the chance to speak, and listening to understand, rather than debate, is a shared value.
People still disagreed with each other, of course. But Gregory used restorative justice practices to explore rather than shut down disagreements.
“She actively encouraged dissent,” Lieber said. “It seemed like she was really curious when people disagreed.”
“Ada set a really strong example from the beginning,” said Smith. “She presented herself and her experiences as inherently flawed and inherently human. She talked about ‘These are the ways that restorative justice has worked in my life. This is the way that justice and accountability has worked in my life, and these are the ways in which it’s failed.’
“Really, the class wouldn’t have been the same with anybody else teaching it,” she added.
While restorative justice touches on complex and difficult topics, including shame, forgiveness, and accountability, the course topic is, at its core, a philosophical one.
“The central question is, ‘What is it that we owe each other?’” Lieber said. “And it’s really difficult to figure that out. And that’s a very personal and unique question. That’s why restorative justice is so powerful — because it is personalizable and a unique form of adjudicating justice.”
Both students found that restorative justice practices were applicable to many contexts, including personal relationships.
“It is so transferable to how you think about your own emotions and your relationships with other people,” Lieber said. “It’s definitely influenced how I’ve conducted discussions with my friends and family when we’re in conflict.’”
Jenna Smith. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.
“The questions that you get to ask in restorative justice are ones that will carry through to how you engage in your personal life, in your professional life, and how you engage in conflict in any capacity,” said Smith.
For Smith, these questions also led to her senior thesis in international comparative studies, which explores how the JEP (Jurisdíccion Especial para la Paz, or Special Jurisdiction for Peace) in Colombia is using restorative justice practices to address crimes and atrocities committed during past conflicts.
“This class influenced the framework through which I analyze the world around me,” Smith said. “It was honestly like a life-defining thing for me, or really life-influencing. I was really interested in criminal legal reform prior to this, but I don’t think I had a particular praxis through which I was doing a lot of it.”
“This class certainly informed the trajectory of my path at Duke,” Lieber agreed, noting that he built his Program II major in Health and Incarceration after taking it.
Through courses, volunteering, and advocacy, both students continued to engage with the criminal justice system during the rest of their time at the university.
After Lieber participated in Re-Imagining Medicine, a program of The Purpose Project at Duke, ReMed director Warren Kinghorn connected him to a physician at Butner, a local federal correctional complex, where he started volunteering.
“I got so much out of that program,” Lieber said. “That was also a kind of trajectory-setting experience.”
Later, Lieber and Smith took a course at Butner that brings together Duke students and incarcerated students, “Life Stories.” Faculty working with Duke Divinity School’s Certificate in Prison Studies program have offered the course for over ten years. (Lieber said “Life Stories” and Restorative Justice were his two favorite courses at Duke — hence his tongue-in-cheek advice to take courses “with as few Duke students as possible.”)
Lieber and Smith became more involved in the local community, volunteering at organizations like Restorative Justice Durham and StepUp Durham, which offers re-entry programs for formerly incarcerated people.
They also took on leadership roles in the Duke Justice Project, a student-run organization. While serving as its co-president, Smith spearheaded its Advocacy Week, which brought a replica of a solitary confinement cell to the well-trafficked Bryan Center Plaza, among other educational initiatives.
“We had a full cell display on the plaza that people could step inside and see what that is like, and see the dehumanization involved,” she said.
Finally, along with Viktoria Wulff-Andersen, another Duke Justice Project leader, Lieber and Smith co-taught a house course focusing on re-entry programs in Durham, bringing in local guest speakers with whom they’d developed relationships through their volunteer work.
Through the house course, they were proud that they were able to reach students who might not have otherwise engaged with the criminal legal sphere.
“We really wanted to emphasize that, regardless of what space you are in, this should be in your mind,” Smith said. “This is something that impacts you as well.”
“You come to college to meet people who are different from you. And people in prison have so much to share that will fundamentally alter how students think about the world and how they think about the justice system.”
— Will Lieber T’25
While Lieber and Smith will graduate before Duke’s Trinity College of Arts & Sciences begins offering its newly approved Carceral Studies Certificate, they wrote a letter of support for it. The certificate program will be housed in the Kenan Institute for Ethics’ Prison Engagement Initiative.
“I cannot emphasize enough how important I think that education is,” Lieber said. “I really firmly believe that Duke students need proximity to prisons, and they learn so much from being inside them and being around the people in them. You come to college to meet people who are different from you. And people in prison have so much to share that will fundamentally alter how students think about the world and how they think about the justice system. I’m proud of what Kenan is doing on that front.”
As he finishes his senior year at Duke, Lieber says he plans to work for a year before applying for medical school, hopefully as a teacher in the juvenile justice system.
A 2025 Rhodes Scholar, Smith is heading to Oxford University in the fall, where she plans to complete the master of public policy program at the Blavatnik School of Government, followed by an M.Sc. in Criminology and Criminal Justice. She says she is still interested in attending law school in the future.
Do these seniors have any more advice for other students, particularly those interested in restorative justice?
“Don’t limit the scope of your engagement because of what you think fits on a resume, or what you think fits with your career,” Smith said. “Engage in opportunities that encourage you to think differently and challenge your understanding of the world around you and the institutions in which you operate. That could be restorative justice, or another course of action — but don’t hesitate to jump on those opportunities.”
“If you had told me when I was a senior in high school that in two years, I was going to get to go to Romania, I would not have believed you,” said Aaron Ng T’27.
Aaron Ng T’27 (foreground) takes a selfie at a traditional Romanian dinner. From left to right: Nic Beltran-Trejo (T’27), Yujin Kim (T’25), Amanda Hughes, Leah Torrey, Lalie Marie (N’26), Spence Herrington (D’25), and Madison Daniel (D’25).
Ng arrived at Duke intent on studying international relations. During his first semester, he was in the Kenan Institute for Ethics FOCUS cluster on ethics and global citizenship. After he started taking Russian language courses, he became more and more interested in Eastern Europe and chose it as a focal region in his International Comparative Studies major.
After hearing that Say the Thing director Leah Torrey was working on a program in Eastern Europe focused on storytelling and democracy, Ng emailed her. That was the beginning of his relationship with the program.
Say the Thing, a storytelling initiative of Duke Chapel in partnership with the Kenan Institute for Ethics, has created “meaning-making opportunities” around campus for students since its launch in 2023. These range from serendipitous encounters with Larks — pop-up events — to deeper adventures in storytelling — like the six-week Studio, in which students focus on crafting their own individual stories, reflecting on the forces that have shaped their identities.
Ng took part in the Studio as well as a second six-week program called the Civic Studio, in which students turned their gaze to “the big, broader stories we’re told about the United States,” he said, “about our culture, our society, our national mindset.”
Torrey encourages students to delve into their individual stories — and their relationship to the national story — because she believes they inform how we engage civically.
“We live in a very politically tense time, when there’s a lot of things happening at such a high level that oftentimes it feels like it can be really hard for us as individuals to make change,” Ng said. “And so that was one of the themes that we were wrestling with — this idea of individual impact, especially as it pertained to community building and community organizing.”
Finally, in preparation for their trip to Romania, the students shifted their focus to Eastern Europe — in what Ng said was a “very clear intersection” of his majors in Political Science and ICS.
“We’re looking at political structures,” he said, “but we’re also looking at social structures and how they compare to one another in an international context.” In other words, given the different histories of the United States and Romania, “how do these two democracies look the same, and how do they look different?”
A view of Bucharest shows the different architectural styles belonging to different eras of the city’s history. Photo courtesy of Aaron Ng.
The group of six students and two staff members departed for Romania the Friday before spring break. Torrey had structured the weeklong trip around the theme of storytelling, alternating between “macro-story” and “micro-story” days. On their first day in Romania, the group took a walking tour of Bucharest — exploring not only the city, but also the “macro-story” it tells about itself through its monuments and museums.
On the following “micro-story” day, students met with leaders and activists working to confront current challenges in Romania — ranging from a constitutional court justice to students who run a media group that creates accessible content to keep young people more informed about politics.
For Ng, the deep connection between storytelling and democracy is “one of the lessons that sticks out” from the trip.
“The national story informs us about what our place in the country is,” he said. In the United States, for instance, where the Civil Rights Movement is a part of our history, “we perceive ourselves as being capable of doing those things because we have a national story of this kind of civic action.”
In Romania, Ng saw these organizers as working to “shape the national story to inform fellow Romanians that ‘this is actually who we are — we are people who are able to organize and advocate and get things done for the betterment of all.’”
“It was incredible,” Ng said about the trip, which he called his “first real experience” abroad. “I learned so much. I met so many amazing people. I got to see an entirely different part of the world in a light that I feel like I was not prepared for. The first thing I thought when I got back to RDU was, ‘I can’t wait to go back.’ It’s a place that demands that you engage with it more.”
Another life lesson he would share with other students? “Just go out and see the world. Because there’s so much to offer.”
Most people agree that lying is wrong. But could you actually live your life without lying to anyone about anything?
They don’t know it yet, but the students in Ethics 101 are about to find out.
Scarlett Schwimmer (left) and Vincent Hovsepian (center) listen to a classmate during the discussion. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.
Jesse Summers sets up his classroom differently than most philosophy professors. Instead of facing the front of the classroom, students face each other, sitting in small groups around tables spaced throughout the room.
Right now, these groups are busy discussing a famous scenario about whether lying is morally permissible — Immanuel Kant’s “Murderer at the Door.”
As summarized by Summers, this scenario is: “You’re in your house. Your friend comes to the door and knocks. Your friend says, ‘Someone is looking to murder me. I’m going to hide in your house.’ You let your friend inside. Then there’s another knock on your door. The murderer is at the door and says, ‘I’m looking for your friend. Is your friend here?’”
The answer seems obvious, right? “No.”
But that conflicts with Kant’s ethical theory, which takes a strong position when it comes to lying: don’t do it. But should we really take lying off the table in all cases, even when someone’s life is at stake?
The students are still debating this when Summers calls them out of their small groups and opens the discussion to the entire class. What do they think about lying to the murderer at the door?
“If it’s life and death, all bets are off,” is the first student’s response.
“The only reason you wouldn’t lie would be a norm against lying,” another says, referring to an earlier discussion on ethical norms.
“Good!” Summers says. “If your view is, the norm is ‘Don’t lie,’ and norms should be followed, you tell the truth.”
“Murderers aren’t entitled to the same norms as others,” someone else says.
“Kant uses this case as a way to establish how committed he is to saying you should always tell the truth,” Summers explains. “I think he’s trolling a little bit. But his point is that you respect other people’s rational autonomy. You don’t assume the person is going to do bad things. You assume the person is capable of being reasoned with, and in virtue of that, you don’t deceive them. But Kant doesn’t say you have to let them in the house,” he adds.
“What’s going to stop them from trying to break open the door?” one student wonders.
“Morality, presumably,” Summers says, trolling a little bit.
“The only way a universalized principle works is if everyone subscribes to it,” another student says, seeming a little frustrated. “You can’t have some Kantians and some Utilitarians.”
“How honest should I be, then?” Summers asks. “Should I tell the truth all the time, no matter what? Or do we have norms in place to establish the limits of when I should tell the truth?”
“Honesty can be really self-serving,” a student says. “I’m not convinced it’s a norm at all in certain cases.”
Summers seems very interested in this response, but the class is out of time, and he has to prep the students for their next meeting.
“Here’s your assignment,” he says. “Not starting at the end of this class — starting in a few hours, you are going to commit — ”
“No…!” someone gasps.
“— to not deceiving and lying to other people for one week,” Summers finishes. “Don’t short-circuit them, don’t manipulate them. Be honest with them. And keep track of the times when you fail to do it.”
“I’m playing poker Wednesday,” a student says. “Can I lie in poker?”
Summers doesn’t answer yes or no. “This is the assignment,” he says.
“…I’m going to lose money,” the student says mournfully.
Jesse Summers speaks to students during a class discussion. Summers structures the class around students’ contributions. “It’s such a fun class, but it’s impossible to prepare for,” he says. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.
“They think they’re just killing time waiting for me to get to the real material,” Summers says of the students’ small group discussions. But he thinks these discussions serve an important function.
“They settle into these groups and end up with these classroom relationships because they talk to the same people in class every time,” he says.
Like every other college instructor in the world, Summers has been thinking about teaching in the age of generative AI. “When we went to Zoom during the pandemic, I thought, ‘What is truly important?’” he says. “Now with Generative AI, I’m like, ‘What are we doing in the classroom?’”
Summers isn’t opposed to incorporating AI into his teaching; in fact, he recently gave students the option to use it to teach themselves the basics of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. He said the results were so promising, he’d do so again.
But if ChatGPT can step in and teach students the basics of Aristotle, what should the role of an ethics professor be?
People used to come to universities because “that’s where the books were,” Summers says. Now, “You don’t need to be here for the books, so why do we need to be here?”
Right now, for Summers, the answer is simple: to connect with other people. “You get to have this conversation with the professor and other students about what you’re doing.”
In other words, what the students are learning isn’t just “What does Kant or Bentham or Aristotle say about ethics?” It’s “Isn’t it fun to talk about ethics with other people?”
“It’s so fun,” Summers says with complete sincerity.
Ryan Si gestures as he speaks during a class discussion. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.
“We know a good bit about each other because we talk about our lives a lot,” Ryan Si says about his Ethics 101 group.
Si is a sophomore studying political science, economics, and philosophy. In high school, he participated in Lincoln Douglas debates — competitions where teams of students use philosophy to argue for or against resolutions. But he decided to take Ethics 101 because it was about ethics in “everyday cases.”
“A lot of the readings we do aren’t really dense theory,” he says. “We can take the ideas from the text and just kind of run with it…and obviously, when you’re talking in discussion, people don’t tend to bring in super abstract ideas. They bring in their own experiences.”
In addition to readings, practical assignments, like “no lying for a week,” are topics for discussions. Some of these practical assignments aren’t practical at all, like the one to “waste time” for an hour (“I assume some version of scrolling is not how you’d like to waste time,” is Summers’ only caveat).
On the day I visited, he opened the class by asking the students to discuss whether or not superheroes are “assholes” because they regularly flout norms that the rest of us follow.
Liz Romage joined Ethics 101 as a teaching assistant after taking the course the previous year. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.
“Professor Summers does a great job of setting up the conversation, and then opening it up for people to bring up real-life examples,” says Elizabeth Romage, a junior studying public policy and psychology. She is also pursuing an Ethics certificate.
During open discussions, when Summers is talking to one student, asking follow-up questions that encourage them to dig a little further in their thinking, he intentionally moves to the opposite side of the room. This prompts the student to talk louder so that everyone else in the room can hear them, and anyone can join the discussion at any point.
“I think, honestly, Professor Summers runs the class in a way where it just works,” Romage says. “He’s very open. He’s very inclusive. He makes the students laugh…He’s outlining that it’s a safe space where we’re learning from each other.”
“I think that Professor Summers is very non-judgmental when people share ideas,” Si says. “I struggle with this a little bit because I did debate in high school, so my first reaction is, ‘Why is it wrong?’ I think his approach is the antithesis of the way that I used to approach ideas. He’s like, ‘Why do you think that?’ or ‘Does this tie to something that somebody else said?’ And I think that’s what makes it very welcoming.”
Do students have opportunities to participate in these kinds of discussions elsewhere at Duke? Romage says there are some, but “I don’t think they know where to find them a lot of the time.”
“That’s why I think the class is awesome,” she says, “having it built into your schedule and knowing that you do have that space.”
“Opening yourself up to questions, to comments, to being challenged, and then learning from it all — that is a great skill, and I think Ethics 101 is an awesome place to practice that,” she says.
Sasha Rhee raises her hand during the class discussion. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.
“I think the topic area is very interesting,” Si says of the class. “I think it’s applicable to every single person. And I think no matter who you are, if you take the class, you’re going to get something out of it.”
What has Si gotten out of Ethics 101?
Si says that he uses ethical theories from class as “thought tools” for how to approach specific situations.
“Like, I have this ethical dilemma,” he says. “What theory is calling to me? And how can I use that to reason what is moral?”
But sometimes that might mean setting a certain ethical theory aside — like Kant’s directive not to lie.
“I did my very best — like, I swear I tried,” Si says of the “no lying for a week” assignment. “But then there came an instance where one of my friends was really going through a tough time. They were feeling a little bit lost — like, ‘Why am I in college? Why am I this major?’ Like, everything.
“A lot of my words ended up sounding like, ‘Don’t worry — things will work out, even if it’s hard to see right now.’ I can’t know if that’s true — if everything’s going to be all right or not. So I guess that was a deception. In that instance, I thought that a different ethical theory other than a very, very strict ‘no lie’ theory was more important.”
Reflecting on this, Si says that some ethical theories don’t consider human relationships enough.
“They don’t shine a big light on relationships for something that’s so important for people,” he says. “A lot of studies have indicated that the relationships that you have with people are the most important indicator of how your life turns out and how happy you are.”
Si says that he started to see how relationships fit into ethics when he started reading Aristotle on friendship. And he also brings ethics into his own relationships — in discussions with friends who enjoy talking about philosophy as much as he does.
“The more I learn, the more I can bring to these conversations, and the more I can teach them, and they teach me back as well,” he says. “I think that’s a very rewarding way to pursue ethics. It’s a very nerdy way to bond, but it is a good way to bond.”
Dhruv Bindra (left) and Dylan Jeffries (center) laugh during the class’s discussion. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.
This article by Duke University science writer Robin Smith originally appeared on Duke Today.
Where do our political attitudes come from? Worldview Lab co-directors Stephen Vaisey and Christopher Johnston say that most research focuses on subjects in early to middle adulthood — by which point political views are often already solidified. Hoping to fill in the gaps, they’ve teamed up with Duke sociologist Jessi Streib and Bass Connections to conduct a study focused on 10–12-year-old children. Illustration by Yunyi Dai.
The contentious 2024 U.S. presidential election may be over, but Americans across the political spectrum remain baffled by the other side.
The percentage of U.S. adults who see the nation as divided on key values is higher than at any point in the last three decades.
Nearly half of Americans think members of the opposing political party aren’t just wrong, but bad people.
But how do we end up leaning toward one party over another in the first place? It’s a question that’s been nagging at one Duke University team.
He and Worldview Lab co-director Stephen Vaisey, along with Duke sociology professor Jessi Streib, wanted to know more about this process.
But the more they read about the origins of our political leanings, Streib said, the more they realized how little was known.
Some of the best-known studies to date tracked people from the end of high school onward, following them once or twice a decade until they reached middle age.
But when it comes to political views and orientation — one’s preferences about issues such as abortion, gender roles, whether a person identifies as liberal or conservative — studies suggest that most people’s core beliefs start to crystallize much sooner, before they reach adulthood.
That leaves researchers guessing about how the experiences we have up to that point influence our perspectives.
“We have very little data on what happens during those early periods,” Johnston said.
Furthermore, previous studies followed people during a different political era, from the 1960s to the 1990s, when Americans were less ideologically divided and the media less fractured than they are now.
In an effort to fill the gaps, the researchers have teamed up with Bass Connections to launch a new study of children and their parents, starting with 10- to 12-year-olds.
They’re following them once every two years until they reach voting age to better understand how various influences during those formative years shape our politics.
Many factors — including family and religious upbringing, peer pressure, the media, even our DNA — all have a hand in shaping a person’s political ideology.
Typically, parents are one of the earliest influences on young people’s politics, Streib said.
But family dynamics can be complicated, she added. While most U.S. teens share their parents’ political loyalties, some kids grow up in right- or left-leaning families only to cross party lines as adults.
Streib said she’s particularly interested in the values and political messages kids are exposed to at home, and how children respond when those messages conflict.
It may be that their parents talk about equality at the dinner table, while acting differently in their day-to-day lives — by living in a gated community, for example, or treating people with disdain or suspicion just because they’re poor.
“How do kids make sense of mixed messages like that?” Streib said.
As we get older, “other influences come into play too,” said Duke sophomore and Bass Connections team member Suhhyun Lee, recalling her first access to social media at age 13.
Add to that what kids pick up from their friends, at school, from elsewhere on the Internet.
“We want to know where kids are hearing about politics, what they’re interested in finding out for themselves and how that all shapes the way they ultimately develop,” Streib said.
“It is hard to pin down what causes what [in the relationship between personality and politics]. To get at this, we need to start early to capture the period before these links are formed, so we can observe the causal sequence.”
— Christopher Johnston, Worldview Lab co-director
Some researchers argue that our political beliefs may be even more deep-rooted, embedded within our very nature or psychological make-up.
For example, studies have found that people with certain personality traits tend to lean toward one party or the other, Johnston said.
Republicans and Democrats tend to differ in how they relate to novelty and uncertainty, hence the stark divisions between the two parties on immigration issues such as border security and pathways to citizenship.
But just because there is a connection between personality and politics doesn’t prove that one caused the other, Johnston said.
“It is hard to pin down what causes what,” Johnston said. “To get at this, we need to start early to capture the period before these links are formed, so we can observe the causal sequence.”
Johnston stressed that the goal isn’t to teach kids about politics or shape people’s perceptions, but rather to understand how they grow up to hold a range of political views. “We want a diversity of perspectives,” he said.
To do that, the researchers are looking at participants’ views on a variety of issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, their personality traits, and their responses to questions like, “Which is more important to you, curiosity or good manners?”
Aided by undergraduate students, the team conducted the first round of surveys with children and their parents this past fall, before the 2024 election, and will follow up with them with more in-depth interviews this spring.
And while today’s tweens won’t be eligible to vote in a presidential election until 2032, preliminary interviews suggest they already have nuanced views on politics.
“I think we were all really surprised at how much they knew,” said Duke junior and Bass Connections team member Hava Stone. “They just really wanted to talk about what they thought.”
“Kids are much more mature than you think they are,” Johnston said.
