This paper reads Frederick Douglass as a theorist of recognition and examines one of the counterintuitive ways that he navigates what I call the “motivational problem.” Struggles for recognition encounter the motivational problem when there is no clear desire or need on the part of powerful individuals or dominant groups to confer affirmative recognition to those struggling for recognition. While most studies of the political and moral salience of recognition focus exclusively on the misrecognition of the oppressed, Douglass confronts the motivational problem by orienting the attention of his readers and audiences to a form of misrecognition experienced by white slaveholders: a recognition of a humanity that is falsely assumed to remain intact and undistorted as a result of slaveholding. Douglass rhetorically leverages this discrepancy for an abolitionist politics of shame. By demonstrating how slaveholders alienate their humanity, Douglass seeks to not only shame slaveholders but erode their external sources of recognition and persuade his white northern audiences to dis-identify with the slaveholders and thereby implicitly recognize their own misrecognition of the master’s humanity. Douglass sought to make slaveholding appear to white Americans (among others) as unappealing as it is in reality and thereby persuade his white audiences to adopt abolitionist principles.

View a recording of the event here!

The public sphere is currently dominated by a handful of social media platforms—for example, X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit—all built on centralized networks. Centralized networks concentrate decision-making and infrastructure in a single entity that manages user identity, data storage, policy enforcement, and content curation. This concentration of control grants platforms enormous power over online communication and public discourse. Yet these platforms are operated by unelected actors accountable primarily to shareholders rather than the public. I argue that operators of platforms built on centralized networks can’t legitimately exercise power over the public sphere. By contrast, platforms built on decentralized networks—which distribute control over identity, data, and policy across independent nodes interoperating through open protocols—can in principle exercise their power legitimately. The upshot is that legitimate platform governance requires migrating to decentralized architectures.

Polarization remains an unresolved, existential threat in the AI Age. However, history shows us that new, relatively unregulated technologies have a history of being used to accelerate strategic divisions. In the 1930s and early 40s, Nazi Germany quietly blanketed North America with subtle, pro-German propaganda. A wealth of scholarship shows us that Axis forces used media formats that could fly under the radar in North America, including musicals, romantic comedies, and “cultural” programming in radio and film. Their goal was to sew division and prevent Canadians and Americans from entering into a war against Hitler.

History also shows us that our forebearers established innovative new ways of dealing with the social media crisis of their own day. Could some of the answers to the modern crisis around polarization and bias acceleration be found in the past? This talk shows how a small group of North American officials developed an innovative system to fight back. By embracing new media, they built groundbreaking, early anti-racist and anti-polarization campaigns that targeted the existing biases and divisions in North American populations that were being exploited by Third Reich. More than contributing to the end of the war, evidence suggests that these often overlooked campaigns also helped pave the way for major anti-racist and human rights legal victories in the following decade. 

Could we retool the strategies of historical anti-polarization campaigns for our own age? Drawing from the anonymous open history classroom for social media built with this model (55m views), L.K. Bertram discusses how algorithmic tools and critical, humanities-engaged algorithmic literacy can help us build and scale more engaging, public facing academic knowledge mobilization campaigns.

AI companions have become increasingly popular. A recent study estimates that around 70% of teens in the US has tried an AI companions in the past year. But is their impact on our lives overall positive? Can they provide true friendship or fulfill any of social our needs? With their popularity on the rise, what are the social and political implications they carry? 

Come discuss these and other questions with us at the Centre for Ethics, in partnership with the Algorithm Bias in Canada project.

View a recording of the event here.

View a recording of the event here.

Recent work in the metaphysics of pregnancy tells us that foetuses are best conceived as body parts which will transform into independent organisms after birth. This picture raises several philosophical questions. One question is whether birth is as morally or politically relevant as it is biologically relevant. Another relevant question is: what, exactly, is the status of foetuses before birth? Are they moral persons with rights? Are they citizens? Or are they merely morally considerable—that is, appropriate subjects of moral concern? In this presentation, I will attempt to make progress on these difficult yet pressing questions. 

View a recording of the event here.

There has recently been a burst of human rights-based climate advocacy, i.e., advocacy appealing to the idea that climate change threatens human rights. 

I argue that this recent advocacy is fruitfully understood as an effort to accommodate the fact that climate change is a structural threat to human rights. I give a working account of the relevant features of structural threats to human rights, drawing on neighbouring literatures on structural injustice to illuminate the distinctive features of the human rights case. 

I engage the philosophy of human rights literature to argue that there are plausible reasons of human rights theory to evolve international human rights law better to recognize and respond to structural threats to human rights.

View a recording of the event here.

View a recording of the event here.

View a recording of the event here

There is perhaps no piece by Martin Luther King, Jr. that is more widely read or more beloved than the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Countless articles and books have been written about its generation and meaning. Despite this, its broader philosophical significance has for the large part been missed.

The Emotions of Nonviolence offers a novel interpretation of the Letter: it is not merely a discussion of civil disobedience – as is usually thought – but is also and perhaps even primarily an essay on political motivation. On this reading, the Letter seeks to answer a central question in democratic theory: namely, how can and ought we motivate the racially oppressed to engage in civil disobedience – in what King called nonviolent direct action? King’s answer is that we must appeal to and encourage the political emotions, both positive and negative. Fear, courage, faith, dignity, indignation, and love can together motivate nonviolent action and nonviolent action can reciprocally motivate, channel, and sustain these same emotions. It is through this continuous loop that nonviolence has the potential to transform society and its structures.