Shifting Foundations: Values and Cultural Changes During and After a Pandemic

The Ethics of Now with Adriane Lentz-Smith continues from home with a series of brief, thoughtful and timely conversations about the ethical dilemmas of this historic moment.  This week, join Professor Lentz-Smith and Professor of Sociology Stephen Vaisey for the conversation “Shifting Foundations: Values and Cultural Changes During and After a Pandemic.”   After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

Thursday, May 14, 2020, 7pm

Register Now on Zoom

Stephen Vaisey’s research focuses on where people get their ideas about what a “good life” looks like and what it means to be a “good person,” and to determine how this shapes the choices they make. Most generally, he examines why people do the things they do, and figures out the role of culture and cognition in explaining human behavior. He has also conducted research on 1970s communes, religion, and marijuana use, educational overqualification, gene-environment interactions, and the relationship between poverty and educational aspirations, among other topics.

He is director of the Worldview Lab at the Kenan Institute, an interdisciplinary collaborative research group that brings together faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate students to work on shared empirical projects. Worldview Lab’s main goal is to better understand diversity in values, goals, and worldviews both internationally and within contemporary American society.

Adriane Lentz-Smith is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Duke University. Her interests lie in African American history, twentieth-century United States history, and the history of the U.S. and the world. Her 2009 book Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I looks at the black freedom struggle in the World War I years, with a particular focus on manhood, citizenship, and global encounters. More recently, she has been at work on a book tentatively entitled Afterlives: Sagon Penn, State Violence, and the Twilight of Civil Rights. The book looks at dramatic moments of violent encounters between African Americans and the police to explore the role of violence in sustaining and opposing white supremacy in the two decades following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. She is also interested in how African Americans engaged the world in the age of Cold War civil rights, and how their participation in the project of U.S. state and empire set the horizons of their freedom struggles.

The Ethics of Now is a series of conversations between Duke historian Adriane Lentz Smith and a range of artists, advocates, and authors that explore the ethical challenges facing the Durham and Duke communities.”