IAP Seminar Series: Innovation and Social Justice
Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/12/2022 - 01/26/2022
11:00 am - 12:30 am
Categories
(Participants can attend any or all sessions)
Whether you are seeking inspiration or already committed to making the world better and just, this series will give you indispensable insights and the tools you need. It draws from the speaker’s experience at the frontline, and from philosophy, history and sociology to address the nature of justice, injustice and paths to justice.
Session 1: Moral Clarity
January 12, 2022
What gives you the authority to undertake the work of justice? What conceptions of a just world can guide the real-world work of idealists? Why is moral clarity and language crucial to this work, and how can we cultivate it?
Justice is hard because it is not win-win: people must reckon with the moral cost of their advantage and then cede it. Only those with moral clarity and authority can make demands of the advantaged. The talk will draw from Kant’s moral philosophy seen through the lens of the speaker’s work at the frontlines of justice. We will clarify morality, moral obligation, and the permissible means and ends of the work of social justice.
Session 2: The Nature of Injustice
January 19, 2022
How is injustice constituted? How do the justificatory, maintenance and enforcement branches of injustice operate? Why does injustice spread across institutions? What are its timeless tropes? How does it transmute?
Dismantling injustice requires understanding its structure, dynamics and history. This seminar will discuss the marginalizations of race, class and gender. We will examine the particularities of these injustices, and also what unifies them. We will discuss the Iron Law of Injustice: every advance or calamity increases injustice unless it is managed via universal legislation (everyone at the table with an equal voice). (Think of the pandemic and vaccines.)
Session 3: Accompaniment as a Path to Justice
January 26, 2022
This seminar will illustrate how accompaniment – journeying with the marginalized, literally and figuratively, until justice is achieved – is a morally and tactically powerful tool in our quest for justice. We will examine successful interventions in healthcare, higher ed., poverty alleviation and pretrial justice.
About
Manish Bhardwaj is a Fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values. He is the James Wei Visiting Professor at the Keller Center at Princeton where he teaches idealism, and entrepreneurship in the service of justice. He is the co-founder of Innovators In Health (IIH) which delivers healthcare to the rural poor in India. IIH works through accompaniment, addressing the particular barriers of a particular person in a particular place. Over the past 11 years, IIH has served more than 100,000 patients. Partnering with more than 800 female community healthcare workers, the organization has doubled access to TB treatment, and cut neonatal mortality by more than a third. Manish has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
