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

Michelle Moody-Adams
Please note this event occurred in the past.
October 09, 2025 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm ET
Campus Center, Amherst Room, 10th Floor
Abstract: This paper defends a notion of “participatory listening” that builds upon concepts articulated by the writer Eudora Welty (on the value of “listening for” unheard stories) and by Quaker sociologist Elise Boulding (on the importance of “prophetic listening”). I show that participatory listening encourages the kind of curiosity and wonder needed to take others, and their humanity, seriously. Indeed, I argue that participatory listening is morally superior to the “reversibility of perspectives” doctrine associated with Kantian conceptions. Finally, I show that participatory listening helps to create conceptual space in which others can come to see themselves as complex human beings whose identities could never be exhausted by narratives that prioritize grievance, dehumanize political others, and create intractable political division. It thereby opens up the possibility for creative transformation of even the most persistent and violent political conflicts.

 

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.   

Thursday, October 9, 2025 

4:00-6:00 PM 

Amherst Room, 10th Floor Campus Center 

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).