Institute funds new faculty collaborations in ethics
Five projects have been chosen for the Kenan Institute for Ethics’s collaborative scholarly projects in ethics grants, exploring issues ranging across developing economies, disaster recovery, moral decision-making, ecosystems in the Global South, and environmental justice. This new funding mechanism aims to ignite new inquiries in ethics broadly conceived and provide support for new faculty partnerships and collaborations across campus. The selected projects will build new constituencies and research communities, both internally at Duke and in the broader community, beginning with identified networks of Duke faculty and post-docs as well as graduate and undergraduate students.
“We are delighted by the range of participants – from five schools, four institutes, and fifteen departments – and how the projects further extend attention to ethics across the university and beyond its walls,” says Noah Pickus, Nannerl O. Keohane Director of KIE. “Some projects add new dimensions to areas we’ve been working in, others launch entirely new trajectories and still others bring together emerging areas of interest at Kenan and across the university.”
The selected projects and their faculty leadership are:
- The Role of Markets in Ethical Global Development
This project will initiate and develop a debate about the current iterations of market-based, capitalist, and growth-centered models for development in both the Global North and Global South.- Michaeline Crichlow (African and African American Studies and Sociology)
- Dirk Philipsen (Kenan Institute for Ethics)
- Aarthi Vadde (English)
- Dimensions of Disaster: Decisions, Representations, Ethics
This multi-site project will examine the ethical dimensions of mitigating the hazards and structuring the recovery of natural disasters across time, such as the Great Kantō earthquake in 1923 Tokyo, as well as more recent events like Hurricane Katrina and the 2011 earthquake in New Zealand.- Henri Gavin (Pratt School of Engineering)
- Gennifer Weisenfeld (Art, Art History and Visual Studies, Asian/Pacific Studies Institute)
- David Schaad (Pratt School of Engineering)
- Cross-Cultural Approaches to Moral Attitudes and Decision-Making
This project will draw from Euro-American and Asian philosophical and religious traditions as well as cognitive psychology to address questions at the heart of human nature and its moral foundations, bridging not only philosophy and religion but also social and hard sciences.- Owen Flanagan (Philosophy and Neurobiology)
- Hwansoo Kim (Religious Studies)
- Mark Leary (Psychology and Neuroscience)
- Leela Prasad (Religious Studies and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies)
- Instituting the Ethics of Payments for Ecosystems Services: Alternative Discourses from the Global South
This project will create dialogue around critiques of the existing economic model for Payments for ecosystem services (PES), which provide financial incentives to land owners to adapt more environmentally beneficial practices. Particular attention will be paid to who is privileged in this system and how the poor are disenfranchised.- Christine Folch (Cultural Anthropology)
- Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza (Nicholas School of the Environment)
- Dean Urban (Nicholas School of the Environment)
- Environmental Justice Community Building
This project will inquire into the causes, consequences, and potential solutions for the inequitable distribution of environmental resources, burdens, externalities, and benefits amongs social groups.- Suzanne Katzenstein (Duke Human Rights Center at the Kenan Institute for Ethics)
- Kay Jowers (Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions)
- Christopher Timmins (Economics and Nicholas School of the Environment)
