Dr. Aaron Wendland, KCL Vision Fellow in Public Philosophy
Abstract: “A virtuous circle: Academic expertise and public philosophy”
This essay examines the relationship between academic and public philosophy through the lens of Heidegger studies. Specifically, this essay: shows how Heidegger uses technical terminology within the context of the academy to break new philosophical ground; explains how suitably clarified technical terminology can be used to introduce people to Heidegger’s philosophy and to apply Heidegger’s ideas to current affairs; and illustrates how the application of Heidegger’s ideas to contemporary issues results in new forms of academic research. Ultimately, this essay argues that there is a dialectical relationship between academic and public philosophy: i.e., public philosophy translates esoteric ideas developed in the academy into publicly accessible prose and then applies those ideas to daily life; but in doing so, public philosophy inspires new lines of academic inquiry.
From Sivan: Over the last two years I have been collaborating with Dr. Sarah Fine in the development of a new dance work, Dance No 2°. This is the culmination of my research exploring migration, our relationship to our environment, and the climate crisis. I have worked with dance and student communities across the world, and with cultural and academic partners including King’s College London.
I am hugely grateful for your support and participation in the early development of this work when I was Artist in Residence at King’s, and I would love to see you at the première on Tuesday 2nd or Wednesday 3 November.
To book a ticket and for more information follow this link. Alternatively, discounted educational group tickets can be booked here.
Venue:The Place (17 Duke’s Road, London WC1H 9PY UK)
About Dance No 2°
Led by its cinematic soundtrack, a minimal setting, and danced with raw and sustainable fashion, Dance No 2° refers to the 2° tipping point in the rise of global temperatures and examines how the land we live on and the planet we inhabit shapes us.
Rediscover how human existence is influenced by the water, land, and elements we live with, Dance No 2° is set in an infinite landscape of waves and rolling hills, hypnotic oceans and vivid deserts.
Dance No 2° will premiere at The Place during the time the UK will host the COP26 UN Conference on Climate Change, offering a danced response to some of the issues the world will be discussing in a very important year for the planet.
Free Post-Show Talk, Tue 2 Nov:Join choreographer Sivan Rubinstein after the show for a discussion about the work, chaired by Christina Elliott, Senior Producer at The Place (approx. 20 mins)
Click HERE to read our interview with Sivan Rubinstein to find out more about the inspiration behind the creation of Dance No 2°.
About Sivan Rubinstein
Sivan Rubinstein is a London-based choreographer whose art uncovers contemporary cultural issues which facilitate creative public conversations. Her work is deeply rooted in collaboration with academics, artists, communities and methods of alternative learning. Sivan is a Work Place artist (2021-26), Artist in Residence at King’s College London (2019-20) and a Co-founder of OH Creative Space. Sivan was chosen as the UK artist for Pivot Dance commissioned by Creative Europe, selected by The Place for Exit Visa, right after she graduated from Trinity Laban with a First-Class Honours in 2013. Her work has been presented at Bloomsbury Festival (Wellcome Collection, London), Being Human Festival (London), Sotheby’s, Sadler’s Wells, Migration Museum, The Place, JW3 (London), Turner Contemporary (Margate), Dance4 & The Attenborough Arts Centre (Midlands), European Dancehouse Network, B.Motion Festival, (Italy), The Dutch Dance Festival (Netherlands) and the 2019 YAP Residency Program in Beijing, China. Sivan also shares her practice in academic conferences, teaches in university settings across the UK and creates new ways of collaborating with multimedia, fashion artists and researchers. Sivan Rubinstein is currently a Work Place artist at The Place.
will this year be given by Professor Neil Ferguson (Imperial)
Professor Ferguson is a leading epidemiologist and scientific adviser whose modelling and advice significantly influenced the U.K.’s Covid-19 response. He is the director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analysics (J-IDEA) and the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis.
Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, New Hunt’s House, Guy’s Campus, King’s College London. There will also be an option to attend this event online.
The Annual Sowerby Lecture will conclude the3rd Sowerby Interdisciplinary Workshopon “Policy and intervention in crises, disasters and emergencies: Covid-19 and beyond.”
Date and time: Monday 1st – Tuesday 2nd November, 09:30-17:00.
Venue: Nash Lecture Theatre (K2.31), King’s Building, Strand Campus, King’s College London. This event will take place both in-person and online, with the talks live-streamed. A link for the online event will be shared with registered attendees in advance.
You can register for the Sowerby Interdisciplinary WorkshopHERE.
Schedule:
Monday 1st November:
9:30-10:00 Breakfast and coffee
10:00-10:15 Welcome and introduction by Sowerby Chair Professor Elselijn Kingma (KCL)
Abstract The state frequently uses medical discourse to impose unequal burdens on socially vulnerable groups. Recent examples that scholars exhaustively have documented include the targeting of Asian-Americans in the early days of COVID-19, the relative disregard of the pandemic’s harm on black and Latino communities, the active discrimination towards the reproductive health needs of women, the continued ban on blood donation by men who have sex with men, and the tendency to pressure people living with disabilities into treatment. While focusing on specific groups and incidents, however, the scholarship does not explore the deeper structural links of law and medicine that link the narratives of these groups together.
This Article builds towards such a framework, by first situating law’s relationship with medical power. Actors seeking to produce legal change frequently invoke medical concepts, symbols, and language in multiple areas of law. Medical frameworks help exert epistemological power, that is, the ability to know when and whether an individual is “really” sick, and what that sickness entails. From epistemological power springs social power—the ability to distribute resources, engage in surveillance and control, and to excise abnormal groups or practices. Legal actors and institutions use these features of medical discourse to ignore evidence regarding minority medical experience—black people’s experience with pain, for example, create diagnostic categories that undermine and denormalize minority identity, deny access to resources that turn on medical diagnoses, and subject minorities to control and exclusion. Such practices map on to widely theorized frameworks of oppression.
A structural understanding of how law uses medicine to oppress invites structural solutions. Scholarship in this space often offer one-off solutions that do not always address the structural roots of the harm involved. A program that builds on the framework I offer above would give greater voice to minorities, not just to voice the reality of their experience, but also to shape the diagnostic categories that affect them. It would shift resources towards reshaping social reality rather than physiology, as the disability rights movement has long recommended. And it would ally with medical justice movement to transform medicine into a space that can recognize, support, and protect our common vulnerability.
About the Speaker Professor Craig Konnoth writes in health and civil rights, as well as on health data regulation. He is also active in LGBT rights litigation, and has filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court and the Tenth Circuit on LGBT rights issues. His publications have appeared or will appear in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the Hastings Law Journal, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Iowa Law Review, the online companions to the Penn law review and the Washington & Lee Law Review, and as chapters in edited volumes
Konnoth formerly was an associate professor at the University of Colorado, where he ran the Health Law Certificate Program. Prior to Colorado, he was a Sharswood and Rudin Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and New York University Medical School, where he taught health information law, health law, and LGBT health law and bioethics.
Konnoth has also served as a deputy solicitor general with the California Department of Justice, where his docket primarily involved cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and also before the California Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. His cases involved the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act, sexual orientation change efforts, Facebook privacy policies and cellphone searches. Before moving into government, Konnoth was the R. Scott Hitt Fellow in Law and Policy at the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School, where he focused on issues affecting same-sex partners, long-term care and Medicaid coverage issues, and drafted HIV rights legislation. He clerked for Judge Margaret McKeown of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
We in the King’s Philosophy Department are so very pleased to be joined byDr. Aaron James Wendland (@aj_wendland), Vision Fellow in Public Philosophy at King’s, as well as Senior Research Fellow at Massey College, Toronto! Dr. Wendland launched and runs a philosophy column in TheNew Statesman called Agora, a space for academics to address contemporary social, political and cultural issues from a philosophical point of view.
“Love and care are at the heart of our moral commitments, but they do not fit neatly into the social contract model of political community” –@AlisonGopnik on the ethics and politics of caregiving in my Agora series @NewStatesman
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