Who is a global citizen?

Seminar for doctoral students with Randall Curren and Elsa Lee

Wednesday, April 6th, at 16:00 to 18:00

We are so fortunate to have two distinguished scholar, Elsa Lee and Randall Curren, both of whom have worked extensively on global citizenship and sustainability – and various other issues – visiting us. They will host a seminar in the after noon on Wednesday, April 6th, where you are invited to a dialogue on global citizenship. Curren and Lee will each briefly present their own research but then turn to discussion. Questions that we might explored with them include:

Is being a global citizen something we should aspire to?

Who is a global citizen?

What is the relevance of the local in a global world?

Can pluriversal politics solve the culture wars?

Where does nature fit into global citizenship? Or is nature simply a different matter?

How can we nurture civic friendship?

How do we learn to relate to each other and the world around us?

How do we see the world?

Are anthropo-memes a useful educational devices?

Other questions are welcome – and encouraged. We should take the opportunity of having access to these bright people to lit up a world that might be a bit brighter.

Ólafur Páll Jónsson will chair the event

Elsa Lee is an educationalist with an interdisciplinary approach centered on environmental sustainability education and place-based learning. She spent ten years teaching science at secondary schools in the UK and Mexico before returning to university for further study. Since completing her doctorate at the University of Bath in 2013 she has worked alongside anthropologists and sociologists on a number of United Kingdom research council funded research projects seeking to understand human relationships with/in the natural world and their behaviour towards the environment and how this intersects with education and society. Elsa has used ethnographic research techniques widely in her work in Global North and South contexts, including walking interviews and arts-based research methods. (https://www.homerton.cam.ac.uk/people/elsa-lee)

Randall Curren is an ethicist who works across the boundaries of moral, political, legal, environmental, and educational philosophy, often in ways grounded in scholarship in ancient Greek philosophy and often collaboratively with colleagues in other disciplines, including law, history, sociology, psychology, psychometrics, and geology. Moral psychological constructs that are important to the fabric of society have long been at or near the center of his interests: well-being, responsibility, negligence (as a legal construct and basis of liability), virtues, rational self-determination, and forms of impaired agency such as weakness of will and states of denial. His 2000 book, Aristotle on the Necessity of Public Education, was a unitary interpretation of Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, but substantively very much about responsibility and the relationships between education and law. His 2017 book (co-written with Ellen Metzger), Living Well Now and in the Future: Why Sustainability Matters, advances a conception of human flourishing or living well that can ground a eudaimonic theory of justice and support a conceptualization of what it would mean to preserve opportunities to live well across generations. (https://www.sas.rochester.edu/phl/people/faculty/curren_randall/index.html)