The Kenan Institute of Ethics has awarded its 2023–2024 Graduate Arts Fellowship to Natasha Lehner, MFA Candidate in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University.
One of several Kenan programs focused on the intersections of ethics and the arts, the Graduate Arts Fellowship supports the creation and exhibition of new work at the leading edge of documentary practice. It is awarded to one second-year student in Duke’s MFA|EDA program each year.
A photographer primarily working in film, Tash Lehner blends abstract photographic compositions with carefully selected archival texts and images. Juxtaposing the public and the personal, she creates open-ended, branching narratives with multiple points of entry and multiple interpretations, which offer no easy resolutions to their provocations.
“I hope people come to my work with a general sense of curiosity,” Lehner said, “and follow a line that might not be the one I designed for the viewer.”
As a Graduate Arts Fellow, Lehner will install an exhibit of her work in the Kenan-Keohane Gallery and give an artist’s talk at a public event on Monday, February 12.
Lehner’s exhibit, “More of Everything,” incorporates materials from the personal archive of her biological grandfather, Harvey Karman, who died in 2008 and whom she never knew. Karman was a psychologist and an abortion rights advocate who sought to make the procedure as accessible as possible. In his quest to do so, he experimented with controversial abortion technologies, some of which caused harm to patients. Yet the Karman cannula, a medical instrument he invented in the early 1970s, made early abortions safe and accessible, and is still in use today.
Abortion and the Law, featuring Harvey Karman. Newsweek Magazine, April 13, 1970.
Abstraction, Harvey Karman
Daughter in the Field, David Lehner (2003)
More of Everything, Harvey Karman
Self Portrait, David Lehner (1972)
Self Portrait, Harvey Karman
Self Portrait, Natasha Lehner (2022)
The Del-Em Kit, Natasha Lehner (2023)
The Karman Cannula, Harvey Karman
A father of four, Karman helped several other families conceive children by donating sperm. One of these children was Lehner’s father, who found out about his true parentage ten years ago, instantly connecting him with an extended family that he never knew existed. For Lehner, a whirlwind reunion with her biological relatives ensued — along with the discovery that, like her and her father, Karman was an avid photographer, some of whose abstract compositions bore startling resemblances to her own.
“More of Everything” reflects both Karman’s compelling and complex life story and the surprisingly strong connection that Lehner felt emerging between Karman, her father, and herself. The resulting exhibit brings together both new work and photographs from Lehner’s archive; photographs and poems from Karman’s archive, shared by his family; and photographs and text by her father, David Lehner. Additionally, Lehner uses archival images from media contemporaneous with key periods in Karman’s life.
The exhibit serves as “an impossible union” of three generations, Lehner says — a means of “generating a conversation that can’t be had.”
“This is the version of the story I’m ready to tell right now,” she said, acknowledging that countless others remain.
“You are more of everything, including love” is a line from one of the many poems in Karman’s archive. “More of Everything” shows how a story — and life — contains an infinite expanse of meaning, as do the other stories and lives that it touches. It explores not only the tensions between the private and public life of a complicated figure, but the mystery of how intimate and strongly felt connections between human beings can be. In spite of time, distance, and never knowing each other, “More of Everything” suggests that sometimes, somehow, we can.
“More of Everything” runs February 12–March 8, 2024, in the Kenan-Keohane Gallery in the West Duke Building on Duke University’s East Campus.
This exhibit precedes a larger exhibit on the same material to be shown at Cassilhaus on March 22–April 16 as Lehner’s MFA|EDA Thesis Exhibition.
Choosing to devote your time and energy to a community organization is commendable, but good intentions don’t always lead to positive impacts. Read these nine tips from Kay Jowers to learn how you can make the best contributions while volunteering — and how to cultivate meaningful relationships while you do it.
Jowers is the director of Just Environments, a partnership between the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, which fosters equitable collaborations between scholars, students, and community members working on environmental justice issues.
Jowers credits these tips to the community partners who have generously guided and mentored her.
Jowers says that volunteers should bring their specific skill sets to support an organization as a whole. Illustration by Yunyi Dai.
1. First, build trust.
Trust is the foundation of every good relationship, but many communities have reasons not to trust outsiders, and many volunteers don’t work to establish trust before jumping in to help.
In the beginning stages of volunteering, Jowers says, focus on building trust with community members. Volunteers should ask themselves, “Am I acting in ways that align with this community’s values? Am I showing that I prioritize their interests? Am I fostering deep connections with the people around me?”
Be patient, be humble, and commit to demonstrating your own trustworthiness over time.
2. Follow their lead.
There are often disconnects between a volunteer’s priorities and a community’s actual needs. However urgent an issue may be, coming in with your number one priority doesn’t mean it will suddenly rise to the top of the community’s list.
Pushing your agenda forward is not an effective strategy. Instead, whenever possible, spend time within the community to gain a deeper understanding of their unique position and the challenges they face. This can take even longer if you are working in communities with people who have different social backgrounds than your own, or when communities have established restrictions on working with outsiders.
Follow the community’s lead and respect their boundaries. No matter how urgent your priority areas are, you can’t rush this process.
3. Get to know the community leadership.
Kay Jowers
When choosing community organizations to work with, take the time to get familiar with the local landscape. Try to figure out which organizations best represent the community’s interests.
This involves first looking at their leadership structure. Is the community represented on the board, or is it largely comprised of outsiders?
Also, take a look at organizations’ approaches to problem-solving — do they try to tackle social issues in isolation, or do they start by recognizing how multiple issues are linked together? Do they regularly engage with the community and seek their participation in the organization’s agenda-setting? How have they built in processes to make sure they stay accountable to the communities they serve?
For more insights on how “community-rooted organizations” operate, Jowers recommends this essay written with her collaborators and her Durham, N. C. community partner, Communities in Partnership.
4. Find a mentor.
Jowers suggests developing a trusted relationship with a “North Star,” a senior member of the organization or community who can — and is willing to — guide and mentor you. Be sure to acknowledge and appreciate the investment they make in your development and growth whenever you can.
5. Use the skills you already have. They don’t have to be exciting.
Nobody likes to think about taxes, but falling afoul of the IRS would spell disaster for any organization. Jowers describes how she uses her legal skillset to help organizations with attaining nonprofit status and maintaining tax exemptions.
“You are not the popular person in the room” when you ask people if they’ve filled out their forms and kept their minutes, she says. But even if your particular skillsets are not enthusiastically received, sometimes they’re the best way to move the community forward, and that may be recognized later.
“There are times when I have felt like the annoying pest in the room,” Jowers says, “but then I would show up at a potluck a couple of weeks later and be introduced by a community member as someone who was really helping them.”
6. Understand that in certain circumstances, you might be more of a hindrance than a help.
Because her program builds partnerships with communities, Jowers is often approached by enthusiastic college students, especially first-years, who want to get off campus and make a difference in the surrounding areas. But, she says, these communities are often oversaturated with volunteers and researchers, who, despite their good intentions, sometimes make community members feel like “labs for students.”
Students can also create a burden for these organizations; sometimes, simply because of their lack of expertise, they require supervision, which requires additional labor from staff who are already overstretched.
Rather than finding just any organization and deciding to work with them, Jowers urges students to be thoughtful and deliberate with their volunteer plans, taking time to identify an organization to work with and ensuring that they are truly in a position to help. Serving-learning courses or university programs can also help guide and structure community engagement for students.
7. Keep showing up.
Volunteering isn’t always convenient. Often, Jowers says, “relationship-building opportunities are not in the 9–5, Monday to Friday timeline,” but “being able to consistently show up over time is incredibly important.”
It takes a long time for people to start to see you as committed to their community. But if you stay consistently involved, you may find that the community begins to embrace you in turn.
8. Be okay with not seeing an immediate impact.
Sometimes you don’t know if you are making a positive impact. Sometimes you don’t even know if you are making any impact at all. Worse yet, your actions may have unintended consequences.
While creating positive change is the goal of every volunteer, these changes happen over such a long time frame that they are not always visible. Jowers says she tries to look for smaller indicators of progress, particularly in the relationships she’s building.
9. Build in moments of joy.
When you live or work in difficult circumstances, it’s important to find ways to experience joy. “It can be as simple as good food and breaking bread together,” Jowers says. These moments are necessary to sustain hard, emotionally taxing work.
For more from Jowers or more about volunteering best practices, watch the webinar “Lending a Better Hand: Making It Count,” hosted by the Duke Alumni Association.
Jason Kreinberg, Sarah Rogers, and Kay Jowers contributed to writing this post.
CONTACT: Sarah Rogers sarah.rogers@duke.edu (919) 660-3035
DURHAM, N.C. – The sixth season of the acclaimed podcast “Scene on Radio” will focus on the only successful coup d’état in United States history, in 1898 — when white supremacists seized political power and massacred Black citizens in Wilmington, North Carolina, then a thriving majority-Black community and the most populous city in the state.
Launching on January 10, the five-episode season, titled “Echoes of a Coup,” uses archival sources, scene-based recordings, interviews with historians, and the voices of community members to bring Wilmington to life — before, during, and after the coup. Drawing parallels between 1898 and the present day, it also examines the U.S. in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, as support for political violence rises and attacks on democratic institutions proliferate.
Since 2015, “Scene on Radio” has explored complex social and political topics like racism (“Seeing White”), patriarchy (“Men”), and democracy (“The Land That Has Never Been Yet”) through carefully researched and dynamically paced audio storytelling. Propelled largely by word of mouth to millions of downloads, it has received critical acclaim, including Peabody Award nominations in 2017 and 2020.
“Scene on Radio” host, journalist, and audio producer John Biewen joined the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University as Director of Storytelling and Public Engagement in May 2023. He and “Echoes of a Coup” co-host Michael A. Betts II, Assistant Professor of Film Studies at UNC Wilmington, produced this season of “Scene on Radio” in collaboration with America’s Hallowed Ground, a signature program of the Kenan Institute for Ethics, which works with communities using artistic expression to tell the stories of local sites where historic struggle and violence occurred.
“When it was founded in the 1990s, the Kenan Institute for Ethics was charged with educating the public about the importance of responsible citizenship in ensuring the well-being of society,” said David Toole, the institute’s director. “Currently, I can think of no greater moral challenge we face as citizens than the one to democracy. In its new season, ‘Scene on Radio’ does again what it has done so well before: it helps us see the challenges of our present by reexamining the past.”
“Wilmington 1898 is one of many pivotal episodes in U.S. history that too few Americans know about,” said Biewen. “‘Echoes of a Coup’ examines why that’s the case. White supremacy doesn’t just lead to failures of democracy; it makes it so that we can’t even imagine there was ever an alternative.”
“I knew we had to focus on what was lost,” said Betts. “Before 1898, Wilmington was a functioning multiracial democracy. Black aldermen were being elected to office and Black-owned businesses were thriving. White supremacists blew that world off the map. If we hadn’t lost that, who knows what kind of world we might be living in today?”
Running from January 10 to February 7, with a new episode released weekly, the sixth season of “Scene on Radio” will be available on all major podcast distribution platforms. The season trailer is available here.
The class is scheduled to begin at 1:25 p.m., but ten minutes later, students are still chatting and settling into their seats. Others are milling around at the front of the lecture hall, looking over pages of printed notes. Three are costumed: a Roman soldier, a robed Nazarene, and a bearded professor. The screen overhead projects a paused video of a TikTok feed.
The professor finally calls the room to order. “Sorry we’re late getting started,” he says. “The tech guy took a while to figure things out.”
The joke is that the professor, Jed Atkins, is the tech guy: the students needed some help figuring out how to turn on the projector’s sound.
The class is “The Good Life,” an exploration of philosophical, religious, and scientific thinking across the centuries on life and its meaning. For one of the students’ final assignments, they write and perform dialogues representing three of the traditions they’re learned about in the course.
If you’re visualizing white-haired philosophers in robes, issuing ponderous thoughts in turn — don’t. Instead, think “Saturday Night Live.”
The first skit focuses on a Duke student who is rejected for a coveted position at Goldman Sachs, sending him into an existential tailspin as he grapples with his life not going perfectly to plan.
“So over!” he says in frustration. “What am I going to do now?”
Scrolling through TikTok, as projected on the classroom’s screen, he watches a video with a voice-over from an inspirational quote from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. A red heart floats up the screen as he “likes” the post, drawing laughter from the lecture hall.
Soon the young man is visited by Marcus Aurelius himself — the student in the garb of a Roman soldier — along with Jesus of Nazareth and Duke philosophy professor Alex Rosenberg.
In the audience, the real Alex Rosenberg grins.
In this dialogue performance, Jesus of Nazareth (Maxwell Simbuwa T’26, far left), Marcus Aurelius (Jaden Sacks T’26, holding the microphone), and Alex Rosenberg (Hanna Elks Smith T’26, far right), offer advice to a Duke student (David Clements T’26, seated, center) who is distraught over an unsuccessful job application. Photo credit: John West/Trinity Communications.
Marcus Aurelius tells the student that a setback is an opportunity for personal growth. While we cannot control everything, he says, it’s how we react that matters.
Jesus tells the student that his worth is not determined by a job or a title. “My teachings are about finding strength in salvation, not in accumulation,” he says.
Alex Rosenberg says that billions of years of evolution have resulted in humans with uniquely adept brains, so he should use his. Rational analysis will help him find a way forward. Also, he adds, “There is no evidence for the existence of God.”
“I’m right here, bro,” Jesus says.
At the end of the dialogue, the student is filled with renewed confidence, thanks to the wisdom of his three interlocutors.
“I’m free to carve my own path, journeying towards a life that’s rich in meaning,” he says, “where success is measured in wisdom gained and relationships nurtured, and contributions made to the world.”
But, lest this get too inspirational, the students can’t resist one more quip — a dig at Duke’s finance- and status-obsessed culture.
“In the end,” he says, “there’s always Morgan Stanley.”
Students in “The Good Life” laugh during the dialogue performance. Photo credit: John West/Trinity Communications.
“One of the things we want them to do is play with ideas,” Jed Atkins said, smiling.
Atkins is E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Duke. He began teaching “The Good Life” three years ago as part of the Transformative Ideas program, which is based in Duke’s Trinity College of Arts & Sciences and supported by The Purpose Project at Duke, a collaboration between the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Office of Undergraduate Education, and Duke Divinity School. Specifically for sophomores, Transformative Ideas offers students a space to explore deep, enduring questions about the human condition.
Professor Jed Atkins introduces the students performing dialogues. Photo credit: John West/Trinity Communications.
“Where, on Duke’s campus, do you go to to ask big questions about meaning, value, and purpose, and to share different perspectives from some of the world’s great religious and philosophical traditions?” Atkins said, repeating a question he’d asked his students.
He found that, all too often, their response was “Nowhere.”
“So that’s exactly why I created the class: to provide a space for students to be able to consider a number of different possibilities for living the good life,” Atkins said. “I think that’s the part of the class that has resonated with students the most.”
Atkins said that he was inspired to team-teach “The Good Life” because of his relationships with faculty members who live according to different traditions. He also had reason to think that students would be receptive to it: he’d been struck by a comment from a colleague who’d observed that members of the clergy, like Imam Abdullah Antepli, were the most popular guest speakers in his FOCUS cluster. While these speakers respected the diversity of beliefs and backgrounds at Duke, he said, they also acknowledged “the hunger for meaning that students have.”
When it comes to meaning, “The Good Life” provides a feast. With the help of other faculty from Philosophy, Religious Studies, Divinity, and other Duke departments and schools, Atkins bring in perspectives from Confucianism to Islam, from Buddhism to scientific rationalism, from utilitarianism to Christianity — then puts them all in dialogue with each other.
“These different traditions have long histories of trying to grapple with these deeply human questions that we all share,” he said.
By exploring these questions together, Atkins finds, people get to know each other in a more profound way. “When you’re engaging in things that are deeply human, there’s a sense of connection that you begin to have with one another,” he said.
The course intentionally fosters that sense of connection between students. Early in the semester, just as classes are getting into full swing, students go on a two-day retreat to Black Mountain, where they share communal meals and participate in activities like archery, rock climbing, and water sports.
“I personally expressed hesitance about going on this trip,” said Bianca Ingram T’25, who took the course last fall. “It’s like, ‘Oh, how am I supposed to go away for a weekend? I have so much work to do.’”
Atkins said this is why he assigns a reading from Marcus Aurelius on the importance of leisure before the trip.
“I always get a couple of students who say, ‘We can’t afford to do that. Everybody else is working so hard. We have responsibilities,’” Atkins said. “And I say, ‘Well, this person was the Emperor of Rome.’ I mean, if you want to talk about responsibilities…right?”
Junior Bianca Ingram serves as a discussion group leader for “The Good Life.” Photo courtesy of Bianca Ingram.
Taking students off campus for a tech-free weekend, while logistically difficult, is one of the best ways Atkins has found to create a community culture in the class. Students seem to agree.
“You know, people ended up talking to me that weekend in ways that I don’t think people from my generation normally do,” said Ingram. “Like, I’d just be sitting around reading, and someone would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, what are you reading?’ And then we’d start talking about the book I was reading and getting to know one another.”
Ingram enjoyed the course so much that she applied to become a discussion group leader the following fall. Instead of TAs, former “Good Life” students lead the course’s discussion sections in campus residence halls, according to guidelines provided by Atkins.
For Ingram, the most important part of the job was creating a space where students are comfortable sharing their viewpoints.
‘Sometimes we might have a very contentious question, like, ‘Oh, do you think fate exists?’ that everyone might be scared to disagree about,” she said. “And then I, as the instructor, have to kind of provoke them and be like, ‘Oh, like, does everyone really agree?’ And you know, assure them that it’s okay to dissent. And by dissenting you add value to this space, because you’re widening the amount of ideas in the room.”
Atkins said that one of the key intellectual virtues he hopes students will develop through these discussion groups is “charity.” By this, he means the willingness to see another person and their argument — “especially if it’s an argument that might make you angry at first” — in the best possible light.
“This is the class where we talk about a lot of things that you’re not supposed to talk about at Thanksgiving, right?” he joked. But while politics and religion are hard to talk about, he said, “we talk about them because they’re important.”
The discussion groups are small, and meet 10 times over the course of the semester, so “you really get to know these students in your group, and you can feel safe with them,” Atkins said. “You can feel that this is a place where I can trust the people around me.”
Another dialogue performance explored a quintessential Duke ethical dilemma: whether or not to prioritize yourself over other passengers when a C1 bus approaches a crowded stop. From left to right, Nico Garavito T’26, Dawson Andrew T’26, Jeremiah Hasley T’26, Rohan Daftary T’26, and Sophia Monaco T’26 (far right). Garavito is playing Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Photo credit: John West/Trinity Communications.
This trust creates the conditions for risk-adverse Duke students to be a bit more brave. Maybe they’ll feel more comfortable sharing their beliefs, even if others might disagree with them. Or maybe’ll they open up to a new perspective that they’d have otherwise shut down.
And maybe the dialogues, which they write and perform with their discussion groups, becomes a place to forget about achievement, however temporarily, and just play with ideas.
Duke students sometimes “take themselves a little too seriously, and are afraid to get silly,” Ingram said. “But I think one part of education is that it can be fun.”
Creating something new with the tools of the old does not work. Our current systems are failing us — that is easy to see. But what might a new, better system look like?
Applications are now open for the 2024 Regenerative Futures Lab (rLab) sponsored by Kenan Institute for Ethics, Trinity College, and the Transformative Systems Project. Each semester, rLab will provide funding for several teams of students to search for paradigm shifting, regenerative answers to specific topical areas that will differ each year. The topical focus for the academic year 2023/24 is Debt – What We Owe to Each Other.
The Regenerative Futures Lab is a student-led research and action lab leveraging Duke’s resources to shift towards a regenerative economy. Students will work in teams of 4–5 to produce original results in the field of regenerative economics, policy, and activism. Both product and process of the students’ work will involve traditional and nontraditional pathways and final product components. The purpose of both product and process is to advance a regenerative future. In addition to the projects themselves, we will reflect upon concepts such as ecological economics, community-based research, and personal leadership growth in our weekly cohort meetings.
All teams will receive support from the director of rLab, and will actively seek collaborations and input from experts in the field, faculty, and outside organizations. This process aims to generate non-extractive relationships between cohort members and the world around them as an essential part of breaking down exploitative constructs of work and community.
This lab is for students who sense that something is fundamentally wrong with the system in which we live — and that we study to become part of. We are looking for people who are willing to question everything, even themselves. While having more questions than answers may feel hopeless, it is from this starting point that the lab begins. Our aim is to empower such students to think beyond mainstream/dominant paradigms and towards a future that centers wellbeing, reciprocity, safety, and justice.
Our spring ’24 cohort has the option to continue working on the projects developed in the fall ’23 cohort, or to develop new projects of their own. See current team project descriptions here.
Application Deadline: December 31, 2023, 11:59pm
Program Dates: January 19 – April 24, 2024
Eligibility: Duke Undergraduate Student
Commitment/Expectation
All students will take part in a weekend workshop on regenerative economy hosted by the lab and explore possible subtopics before the lab meetings start. Students are expected to devote 6–8 hours a week to rLab. This time is split between lab/cohort meetings, independent research, and related events tied to the lab. Finally, the students are expected to present their research findings in a symposium at the end of the semester (tentatively April 26, 2024).
Award: Stipend of $1,200 per semester
Application Requirements
100-200 words on (a) background (if applicable) in regenerative/transformative thinking and work; (b) specific interest/focus on a post-capitalist or post-growth or post-colonial or post-extractivist future
100-200 words in response to: “If I could wave a magic wand, what 2 or 3 major changes in the world would I propose?”
100-200 words on why you would like to join the lab
A short essay on a topic that perplexes you and what you’ve done to make sense of it
Indicate whether you have (1) taken a transformative course (such as wellbeing/care/feminist economics; post-colonial realities; indigenous narratives, etc); (2) been a member of Transformative Systems Project; (3) engaged in organizing or research efforts with a transformative systems groups and/or scholar (such as wellbeing or care econ, post-growth, BLM/Extinction Rebellion/Fridays for Future etc) – none of the above in any way represent requirements
Dhruv Rungta rides on horseback while helping to herd cattle in the DukeEngage Costa Rica program. The students integrated themselves into the farm’s daily operations in order to gain insight into its challenges.
Herding cattle on horseback was just one of several new experiences for Dhruv Rungta in DukeEngage Costa Rica, where he worked on a sustainable farm. He knew he had to be strategic when choosing problems to address during the short eight-week program. Ultimately, he chose the community’s priority areas — instead of his own.
“DukeEngage is truly a program like no other. It isn’t another study abroad or internship. It’s a gateway to forging deep bonds with a diverse community and gaining perspectives unattainable through any other means.” – Dhruv Rungta
