Ethics Table Brown Bag Lunches, 2014-2015

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The lunches this year began with police violence in Ferguson and ended with Michael Rakowitz’s utopian project for the right to safety in Cleveland following the Tamir Rice shooting. The issue of police violence and militarization ran throughout the year but was transferred by participants into a critique of authoritarianism in the university; it often resurfaced in discussions even when the official topic of the table wasn’t the right to safety.

Schedule and Dates Location:
The Cleveland Room, Thwing Center

September 10th: Being a decent citizen in the wake of Ferguson

September 24th: Ferguson, continued (the militarization of the police)

October 8th: An Intellectual adventure -the academy as a place of stupification (Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster)

October 22nd: Cleveland labor history, with Craig Bourne, Cleveland Heights community member and independent scholar

November 5th: Let it be stated – the university is intrinsically unethical (Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life)

November 19th: Can the university promote ethical decision making? (John Frye’s Ethical Decision Making: A Primer)

December 3rd: Future generations, the Keystone Pipeline, and colonialism (this session was changed and became a discussion of police violence, again, through the reality of Tamir Rice’s burial; a family member of the Rice family was present)

January 21st: Open discussion

February 4th: Democratization in the “corporate” university

February 18th: Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed a photograph you happen to have taken that, on reflection, shows everyday oppression

February 25th: Meeting with Cynthia Willott, ISSA lecturer with the Baker Nord Center for the Humanities

March 4th: Anne van Leeuwen, “The Ethics of Debt”

March 18th: The ethics of debt, II

April 1st: Hierarchy as an ethical landscape, led by William Greenberg

April 8th: Michael Rakowitz on A Color Removed

April 22nd: Open discussion