The Economics of Liberal Arts Education: Notes from the Frontlines
Sponsored by the Weissbourd Fund for
the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts
at the University of Chicago

Location: Stuart Hall 101, 5835 South Greenwood Avenue
Date: Saturday April 22

Keynote speakers and respondents
Sheila Slaughter, Louise McBee Professor of Higher Education, University of Georgia
Response: Richard Epstein, James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago

Craig Calhoun, Professor of Sociology, New York University and President of the Social Science Research Council
Response: Moishe Postone, Professor of History, University of Chicago


Click here to download the full program (PDF)

Trading Faces: A Case Study in the Science of Identity, Aesthetics, Ethics

This month's Web Forum at the Martin Marty Center, University of Chicago, is adapted from a roundtable discussion that took place at the Divinity School on February 17, 2006. The discussion was made possible through the Weissbourd Fund for the Society of Fellows in Liberal Arts, and was organized and moderated by Geoffrey Rees. In the three essays presented here, an ethicist, a historian of science, and a philosopher address the ethical issues at stake in the transplantation of human tissue, and of faces in particular. As Rees posed the basic question to the discussants: how much of one's body is replaceable, renewable, or expendable before one ceases to be one's "self?" What are the potential implications for conceptions of personal identity and social responsibility? Moreover, how do we even determine which are the relevant questions to ask?

Link to Web Forum

Plato Versus Simpsons?
Debates and Strategies in Teaching Classic Texts
Saturday, January 21, 2006

Morning session
Participants: Carolyn Johnson, Preston Edwards, David Bevington

1. Screening of "Bart's Inner Child" from Season Five of the The Simpsons.
2. Presentation by Preston Edwards on how to use this episode to teach a classic humanities text.
3. Presentation by Carolyn Johnson on how to use this episode to teach a classic social sciences text.
4. Remarks, questions, and reflections by David Bevington on the proposed uses of the episode, leading us into
5. A general discussion on using multimedia to enrich our teaching.

Trading Faces
Friday, February 17, 2006, 4 — 5:30 PM

Participants:

Naomi Beck, Harper Fellow in Social Sciences, History of Science

Brian Soucek, Harper Fellow in Humanities, Aesthetics

Daniel Brudney, Philosophy

William Schweiker, Theological Ethics

Richard Shweder, Psychology and Human Development

In 1967, when Christian Baarnard performed the first heart transplant, it appeared the medical equivalent of manned space flight; a heroic harbinger of unlimited future possibility. It also provoked a host of unprecedented questions about the stability of personal identity relative to the plasticity of physical embodiment. Since then organ and tissue transplantation has become routine; but the questions raised by these practices endure. The recently celebrated prospect of face transplantation provides a compelling occasion to reflect anew on the questions of personal identity posed by organ and tissue transplantation, and also by the emerging prospect of the personalized manufacture of body parts through technologies such as somatic cell nuclear transfer. In the light of these developments, how much of one's body is replaceable, renewable, or expendable before one cease's to be one's "self" exactly? Is one's face more one's "own" than one's liver? Why? Or does the very phrasing of these questions unduly privilege contemporary norms of biophysical particularity as a ground of "self" identity? How do various disciplinary perspectives contribute to an understanding of the relevant questions to ask, never mind their resolution?

A sherry hour with hearty hors d'oeuvres will follow the discussion.

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FAMILY VALUES
http://societyoffellows.uchicago.edu/conferences/familyvalues/

Thanks to the Weissbourd Fund, the University of Chicago's Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts presents its annual, interdisciplinary conference. As in previous years, this conference draws the various disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences together into a common discussion on issues of contemporary political and cultural concern. This year's subject: family values. What is really at stake in the fierce disputes that attend our discourses on the family's forms and functions? Why is this institution the subject of such great moral and cultural anxiety? What forces have shaped the boundaries and relationships between private and public life in modern societies, and how are these forces developing in the present? What light can a comparative and critical treatment cast on the ways we argue about the past, present and future of the family in American society and in societies throughout the world?

New Conference Organized by the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts:

DEPRESSION: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
http://societyoffellows.uchicago.edu/conferences/depression/
March 12-13, 2004 at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Depressed? Anxious? Confused?

This conference starts with the premise that these questions are not merely the province of talk shows and late-night TV commercials. It asks, instead, how we might use the experience of depression as the very index of our current political climate and as a key to future political thinking. We see depression as including such related “bad” feelings as hopelessness, apathy, anxiety, helplessness, fear, numbness, despair, ambivalence, insecurity, confusion, indifference, resignation, paralysis, and powerlessness. We suspect that depression in its many forms has come to suffuse the daily lives and endeavors of a wide range of people, generating important social and political effects that we want to examine.

Possible topics include the medicalization of depression, its privatization, the epidemic of clinical depression among student populations, the relation between economic and psychological
depression, and more locally, the specificities of depression, and responses to it, in Chicago. Have individuals' feelings of hope and possibility been diminished by the “triumph" of capitalism, economic downturns (no longer referred to as “depressions”), corporate and political scandals, the rise of the security state and increasing threats to civil liberties, the apparent inevitability of certain social problems, the limited successes (failures?) of the Left and progressives? How might focusing on depression help us to understand phenomena like political nonparticipation, the rise of fundamentalisms, growing consumerism, and the retreat to the private sphere? More hopefully, we wonder: might depression have a future in politics?

Ultimately, the conference will work to dispel the notion that disempowerment is the only prognosis for the depressed or that the goal ought to lie in “getting happy.” Instead, we will ask how depression might be used politically. In particular, a guiding question will concern the historical specificity of our own moment: in a time when certain narratives no longer inspire optimism and when a culture-wide sense of a totalizing despair has started to seem natural, how might we see the political horizon opening up in new ways?

For more information, see the archived website at http://societyoffellows.uchicago.edu/conferences/depression/

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