Events

We host regular online meetings. If you would like to find out about upcoming network meetings, you can join our JISCmail mailing list, or contact Owen Abbott abbotto1@cardiff.ac.uk or Anna Strhan anna.strhan@york.ac.uk

The group aims to connect researchers working in this area and foster interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations. If the times of the meetings don't work for you, please contact us so we can try and find a time that does. We are keen to be inclusive of the different time zones and are happy to vary meeting times.

Researchers at all stages of their careers with an interest in ethics, morality, and values are very welcome.

Our meetings take place around every 8 weeks and are an opportunity to discuss work-in-progress, share and discuss published work, discuss challenges or methodological issues related to research in this field, and informal online meet-ups to get to know others working in this field.

Upcoming Events

Talk/workshop session with Dr Kathryn Telling and Dr Greg Wurm

We are excited to announce our next event is on 17th September, 4.30 - 5.30pm (UK time), via Teams. Register via Eventbrite to receive a link to attend.

This event aims to provide a “workshop” session for works-in-progress. Two wonderful academics, Dr Kathryn Telling and Dr Greg Wurm, have volunteered to spend 20 minutes discussing projects that they are currently working on, followed by 10 minutes of questions/feedback for each talk. Kathryn will discuss her research into how ‘evaluative fairness’ and moral reasoning can be studied across different sites of activity. Greg will discuss his timely project into political depolarization and what makes this possible.

As well as listening to two fascinating talks (abstracts below), we invite you to give feedback and suggestions on research quandaries that Kathryn and Greg are thinking through with their respective projects. Sharing expertise and supporting works-in-progress is a key aim for the SSEMV network and we hope to see many of you there.

Talk 1: How affirmative action is, and is not, like the judging of cat shows

Dr Kathryn Telling, Lecturer in Education, University of Manchester

Abstract

The outcome of Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard (2023) has proven a watershed moment for affirmative action. The US Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious higher education admissions are unconstitutional, potentially affecting practice at thousands of institutions. Critical academic responses to the ruling have drawn attention to its political motivations (Bender, 2024), and to its likely consequences for institutions and individuals (Oh, Tilbrook and Shifrer, 2024; Rubin et al., 2024). In my current research, however, I take a different route. I seek to move beyond the idea of affirmative action as something peculiar to educational decision-making, and to ask how policies that share characteristics with affirmative action operate in very different sites: that is, the sites of ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins, 1982, Stebbins & Sachsman, 2017).

The research investigates empirically how evaluative fairness is understood at three serious leisure sites: all-breed cat shows, crown green bowling tournaments, and brass band competitions. Each site has developed complex judging protocols to do the work that educational evaluations must also do: mitigate for irrelevant impediments to achievement whilst upholding the principle that some individuals are more deserving than others. Yet qualitative researchers (and ethnographers in particular) have long cautioned against blithe attempts to compare radically different sites, as encouraging a superficial quest for similarities or differences, leading to unwarranted generalisations about larger social processes (for discussion, see Hannerz, 2003). Thus, in this paper, I will explore what can be gained, and what can be missed, when we seek to compare moral reasoning across very different types of activity.

Talk 2: Putting People over Politics: Explaining the Possibility of Political Depolarization

Dr Greg Wurm, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Brigham Young University

Abstract

In response to increasing political polarization, many studies and initiatives have arisen to try and find ways to reduce it. Yet while we are becoming increasingly aware of the whats, hows, whens, wheres, and whos of political depolarization, less attention has been paid to understanding the whys, or of what makes depolarization possible. In this paper, I draw on the social theory of George H. Mead, moral philosophy of Martin Buber, and ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas to argue that political depolarization is only possible inasmuch as: 1) there is a dimension of human personhood that exists beyond ideology and identity, and 2) the experience of personhood makes distinct moral claims on us that challenge us to rethink where we stand on particular issues (ideological depolarization), who we feel most ethically responsible for (identity depolarization), and our way of being toward those who think or feel differently from us (affective depolarization). In the conclusion, I discuss what implications this understanding of personhood has for our understanding of democracy and social theory generally.

Values at the End of Life: The Logic of Palliative Care

Please join us on 19 November 2025, 4.30 - 5.30 pm (UK time), via zoom. Register via Eventbrite to receive a link to attend.

Roi Livne will be talking about his book, Values at the End of Life: The Logic of Palliative Care.

About the book: Over the past fifty years, “the end of life” has become the center of extensive economic, policy, ethical, and medical discussions in the U.S. Health economists measure and evaluate its cost; ethicists debate the morality of various approaches to “end-of-life care”; policymakers ponder alternative “end of life”-related policies; and clinicians apply a specialized approach (hospice and palliative care) to treat patients whom they diagnose as being at “the end of life.” This talk summarizes much of the argument of “Values at the End of Life” (Harvard University Press, 2019). It analyzes the proliferation of conversations on “the end of life” as emblematic of a peculiar moment in human history. Ours is a period where modern growth stagnates and the main challenge developed societies face becomes delineating the limits of human agency and governing populations within these limits. Drawing on a combination of historical and ethnographic analysis of the work of palliative care clinicians in three California hospitals, I follow how the limits of what can be done, medically and financially, to prolong life are communicated to severely ill patients and families. I use this empirical case to flesh out different dimensions in the concept of economization, which has recently attracted much theoretical attention in economic sociology.

About the speaker: Roi Livne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. An economic sociologist at heart, he studies everyday economic life and its intersections with morality. His has written about death and capitalism, the techno-politics of sovereign debts, and the first months of COVID-19. Presently, he is writing about the moral economy of pricing hospital care in the U.S., the notion of finitude in social theory, and the concept of economization.

Previous Events

Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination

PLEASE NOTE - This event will be on the 2nd July rather than the originally advertise 3rd July.

Join us on 2nd July 2025 4:30 - 5:30pm (UK time), via Microsoft Teams. Register via Eventbrite to receive a link to attend.

Professor Webb Keane will be discussing his newly published book, Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination

About the book: We have always lived with ethically significant others, whether they are the pets we keep, the gods we believe in or the machines we are endowing with life. How should we treat them as our world changes?

In Animals, Robots, Gods, acclaimed anthropologist Webb Keane provides a new vision of ethics, defined less by our minds, religion or society, and more by our interactions with those around us. Drawing on ground-breaking research by fieldworkers around the world, he explores the underpinnings of our moral universe. Along the way we investigate the ethical dilemmas of South Asian animal rights activists, Balinese cockfighters, Japanese robot fanciers -- even macho cowboys. We meet a hunter in the Yukon who explains his prey generously gives itself up to him; a cancer sufferer in Thailand who sees his tumour as a reincarnated ox; a computer that gets you to confess your anxieties as if you were on the psychiatrist's couch.

With charm, wit and insight, Keane offers us a better understanding of our doubts and certainties, showing how centuries of conversations between us and non-humans inform our conceptions of morality, and will continue to guide us in the age of AI and beyond.

About the speaker: Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and the author of multiple pioneering works on the philosophy of social thought, including the renowned book Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories.

This event will take place via Teams. Please register to receive a link to join the meeting.

Fetal Positions: Understanding Cross-National Public Opinion about Abortion

Our next meeting is on 1st May, 4.30 - 5.30pm (UK time), via zoom. Register via Eventbrite to receive a link to attend.

Prof. Amy Adamczyk will be giving a talk about her new book, Fetal Positions: Understanding Cross-National Public Opinion about Abortion, recently published by Oxford University Press.

Book description: The book is based on 40 interviews with experts in the US and China, a cross-national newspaper analysis, and survey data from over 200,000 people in 88 nations, representing the majority of the world's population. The findings show that a handful of factors—overall levels of religious importance, Catholic proportion, economic and educational development, government history, and gender inequality—can explain differences in support. Dozens of interviews conducted in China and the United States offer insight into the processes shaping attitudes. Along with investigating why abortion disapproval varies so considerably across the world, Fetal Positions also examines the forces shaping cross-national abortion rates and personal abortion decisions, analyzes the links between attitudes and laws, and unpacks the pathways through which personal and country-characteristics shape views. By offering important insights that can only be gleaned through cross-national analysis, Fetal Positions provides an international focus and fresh perspective on the abortion debate.

About the speaker: Amy Adamczyk is Professor of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Programs of Doctoral Study in Sociology and Criminal Justice at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).

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