CCI Theme, 2008-2009:

"Identity, Race, and Human Rights:

Social Authority and the Legacies of Lincoln and Darwin "

During the 2008-2009 academic year, the Center for Critical Inquiry will sponsor a group of interdisciplinary dialogues on how categories of identity delimit and justify human rights. We frame these issues as part of the cultural legacies of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

As we commemorate the bicentennial of each man’s birth on February 12, 2009, the occasion offers an opportunity to explore how traditions generated by their lives, their thinking and their values directly or indirectly have shaped dilemmas of human identity in American society for two hundred years. Both men contributed to reframing representations of identity, race and equality in America, and their legacies continue to inform America’s interchange with and assimilation of a global society today. Their ideas influence how we see other groups of people and ourselves, and as a result, how others sometimes must seem themselves.

Planned Events and Discussions
related to the CCI theme:

“The Social Reconstruction of Inequality”

“The Role of the Expert in Technologically
Driven Public Moral Discourse”

“Portraying Race: Personal History and Public History”

“Music, Language, and the Minds of Animals”

“Problems and Paradoxes in Spectatorship: Race, and Rights”

“Mythologics: Cultural Myths of the ‘Natural’ in Global-Age America”“

“Ethics, Power, and Privilege in Contemporary Views of Nature and Nurture”

“Changing The ‘Subject’:
Buddhist, Feminist, and Poststructuralist Critiques of the Enlightenment Self”

By re-imagining identity can we extend the scope of human rights? What makes us human, and what animals share those qualities? Should they be extended human rights? Are human inequality and human diversity distinct? What are the ethical implications of social, biological, and economic inequality for cultural diversity? How do biology and the social environment structure and re-structure our identities and the ways we perceive others? Why is it so difficult, publicly and personally, for Americans to explore race and racism? When identities change, what ethical issues are raised that entail responsibility to current and to future generations? How are transformations in identity—either ‘constructed’ or ‘natural’—related to our willingness to extend inalienable rights and ethical treatment to disparate groups?

In coordination with the Harriet Elliott Lectures, the Human Rights Film Series and the Ashby Dialogues, we explore the dynamics of individual and group identity at levels both personal and social, in ways informed by media, by expertise, by music and the arts, and by science and politics in a culture deeply influenced by two iconic figures of the nineteenth century.

If you are interested in learning more about these groups or in forming others related to the CCI’s 2008-2009 theme, please contact Cheryl Logan (calogan@uncg.edu) , Ali Schultheis (tanagerlodge@yahoo.com ), or Greg Grieve (gpgrieve@gmail.com).