Thursday, July 28, 2022
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, will deliver the 2023 Matthews Memorial Lecture on Friday, November 3, 2023, 4PM-6PM, South College W245.
Táíwò is the author, most recently, of Elite Capture (Haymarket Books), Reconsidering Reparations (Oxford), as well as more than a dozen academic articles and an ever growing number of essays in venues like New York Magazine, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Boston Review.
Title: "The Point is to Change It"
Abstract: Many of the practical norms we use to put our conceptions of justice into practice focus on how to manage the interactions we have, and give us portable concepts to use for this purpose (e.g. “epistemic injustice”, “gaslighting”). But the political effects of this focus interact with the aspects of our social structure that determine which interactions we have - and, perhaps even more importantly, which we don’t. Moreover, the power dynamics that sustain global systems of oppression might be different in kind and scale than those that explain local systems of oppression (e.g. the interpersonal dynamics of this room). Changing these might involve a vision of education concerned with changing our practical realities - a focus that goes beyond what is required to understand them, which in turn goes beyond what is required to criticize them. Such a vision is alive in Paulo Freire’s intellectual and political work. Applying this focus to our present day will help illuminate the tasks of our present moment for both educators and students.