CRCV Presents
Summer Seminar Day 2
The AUM Civil Rights & Civic Virtue Society will host our second Summer Seminar, a special week-long seminar for selected students, faculty, and staff. This workshop is connected to the themes of a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation titled “From Civil Rights to Civic Virtue: Forming Character through Community.” Student participants in this event receive $500 for their participation, which will be paid as a scholarship on their student account. Faculty and staff participants will receive a stipend for their participation.
The Summer Seminar will include visits to important historic sites and museums associated with the Civil Rights movement in Montgomery and Birmingham, structured reflection about these visits, and facilitated conversations on readings about the Civil Rights movement and the civic virtues of Civil Rights participants.
Our seminar speakers will be experts on civil rights, civic virtues, and character education. Our keynote speakers include Dr. Julie Armstrong, known for her work on civil rights literature; Dr. Meena Krishnamurthy, known for her work on civil rights activists; and Dr. Michael Lamb, known for his character education and the role of virtues in public life.
We will select up to 30 student participants for this exciting opportunity. We will fund up to 7 faculty participants and up to 3 staff participants. We hope that faculty and staff will consider applying for this opportunity themselves and in sharing this information with students who might be interested, particularly students who have been at AUM for at least one semester and who have at least two more semesters before graduation.
Bio: Meena Krishnamurthy is an Associate Professor at Queen’s University in Canada. She is a political philosopher who works on race, democracy, social movements, and political psychology. Her work is largely about the role of political emotions in self and structural transformation. Her work explores how civil rights activists – especially Martin Luther King, Jr. – used protest, images, letters, and oratory to engage these emotions and to motivate transformative political action. Her book, The Emotions of Nonviolence: Revisiting Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Her scholarly work has appeared in Political Theory, the Monist, the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and Social Theory and Practice, among other places.
Title: “From Shattered Dreams to Dreams in the Making: Martin Luther King Jr. on the Transformative Power of Democratic Disappointment”
Date/Time: Wednesday, June 26, 9 – 10:15 A.M.
Place: Goodwyn 109
Abstract: In this paper, I elucidate King’s views on the value and function of democratic disappointment. On the one hand, disappointment is intrinsically valuable as a morally appropriate emotional response to frustrated desires. On the other hand, it is instrumentally valuable as a necessary precondition for political action. I close by exploring King’s account of how to constructively channel disappointment into collective political action through song.
Bio: Michael Lamb is the F. M. Kirby Foundation Chair of Leadership and Character, Executive Director of the Program for Leadership and Character, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Wake Forest University. He is also an Associate Fellow with the Oxford Character Project. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, a B.A. from Rhodes College, and a second B.A. from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His research focuses on character education and the role of virtues in public life. A recipient of teaching awards from Oxford, Princeton, and Wake Forest, he is the author of A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought and co-editor of Cultivating Virtue in the University and Everyday Ethics: Moral Theology and the Practices of Ordinary Life. He is currently the principal investigator of a $30 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to educate leaders of character at Wake Forest and support the Educating Character Initiative, which provides grants and resources to U.S. colleges and universities to develop character.
Title: “How to Educate Character: Seven Strategies to Develop Civic Virtue”
Date/Time: Wednesday, June 26, 10:30 – 11:45 A.M.
Place: Goodwyn 109
Abstract: If we are committed to developing civic virtues to promote and protect civil rights, how might we develop such virtues? This talk will draw on research from education, history, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to explore seven strategies for character development: 1) habituation through practice, 2) reflection on personal experience, 3) engagement with exemplars, 4) dialogue to increase virtue literacy, 5) awareness of situational variables and biases, 6) moral reminders, and 7) friendships of mutual support and accountability. In addition to sharing the research grounding each strategy, the talk will provide practical examples of how to apply these strategies to develop our character and the character of our students.
