Gary Matthews Memorial Lecture: Michele Moody-Adams (Columbia): “Transforming Political Conflict: The Power of Participatory Listening“

Content

This lecture will introduce and defend “Participatory Listening,” a communicative practice based on the value of “listening for” unheard stories.  Participatory listening, as opposed to attempts to simply “reverse perspectives,” encourages the kind of curiosity and wonder needed to take others, and their humanity seriously. It helps to create conceptual space in which others come to see themselves as complex human beings, opening up the possibility for creative transformation of even the most persistent and violent political conflicts.  

Free and open to the public.

Michele Moody-Adams is Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University. She is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences a lifetime Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.

She has published on equality and social justice, moral psychology and virtues, and the philosophical implications of gender and race. She is the author of Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination and Political Hope (2022). She is also the author of a widely cited book on moral relativism, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy (1997) and a co-author on the multi-author work Against Happiness ( 2023).