The Fairfield University Philosophy Department, in partnership with the Humanities Institute in the College of Arts and Sciences, is bringing a panel of more than a dozen national scholars, community activists, and Fairfield faculty members to campus on Friday, October 4, 2019, to participate in a rich and timely conversation addressing some of the most pressing ethics issues in today’s global landscape. Registration for the event is free and available online at fairfield.edu/justice.

The daylong symposium, titled “Ethics Here and Now: Racial Justice, Reproductive Justice, Climate Justice,” will set out to identify and amplify the calls to justice embedded within scholarly and activist approaches to climate change, reproductive politics, and racial injustice. Each of the event’s featured panels will highlight both global and local expressions of the three issues and will include participation from faculty, students, and members of the community, as well as a collection of invited scholars engaged in groundbreaking work on the intersection of the issues.

“You cannot spend more than 10 minutes in the company of others, whether on social media or in real life, without confronting something having to do with climate change, racial injustice, and/or reproductive politics,” said Sara Brill, PhD, symposium co-coordinator and chair of the University’s Philosophy Department. “While these are matters that can divide people, they are also the sources for profound and deep shared experiences, worries, and hopes. Collective problem-solving and intellectual exchange — the kind of problem-solving that can occur when a diverse collection of experts, from a variety of different fields and life experiences, are given the opportunity to think together — deepens our moral imagination, inspires solidarity, and spurs effective collective action.”

Among the ethics symposium’s list of expert panelists is “Unmute” podcast host, author, and University of California, Riverside philosophy professor Mysiha Cherry, PhD, who will be joined by Ashwini Tambe, PhD, associate professor of women’s studies at the University of Maryland, and Kyle White, PhD, professor of philosophy and Timnick Chair in the Humanities at Michigan State, as the event’s keynote speakers. The keynote panel is free and open to the public and will be held from 4:30 until 6:30 p.m. in the Dolan School of Business Event Hall. The event’s supporting panels will be held earlier in the day from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Barone Campus Center Dogwood Room.

A complete schedule of the day’s events and a full list of panel participants is available online at fairfield.edu/justice.

The hope of Dr. Brill and fellow symposium coordinators Kris Sealey, PhD, and Toby Svoboda, PhD, is that students and participants leave the symposium with a keener sense of the connections between the most pressing ethical problems of our day, and a deeper understanding of the conceptual and practical cooperation needed to address them.

“We hope that everyone present will come away from the event with sharper ears for the calls for justice embedded within scholarly and activist approaches to climate change, reproductive politics, and racial injustice, and clearer eyes for the connection between scholarship and life — between theory and practice — necessary for effective ethical leadership.”