A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Category: Beyond the Ivory Tower

Beyond the Ivory Tower / International / Reflections on Ukraine / War

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Thinking in Dark Times: Life, Death, and Social Solidarity

A black-and-white photograph of a train waiting at a train station in Chełm, Poland.
Warsaw-Kyiv train, Chełm, July 2023. Photograph by Aaron James Wendland.

This lecture was delivered by Dr Volodymyr Yermolenko as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic initiatives at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and thereby counteract the destabilizing impact that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had on Ukrainian higher education and civilian life. The lecture has been lightly edited for the purpose of publication in Studia Philosophica Estonica and the original presentation can be found on the Munk School’s YouTube channel.

Contributors to the conference have published their work in an edited volume of Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

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Beyond the Ivory Tower / International / Liberty / Reflections on Ukraine / War

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Thinking About Freedom in Wartime Ukraine

This lecture was delivered by Professor Timothy Snyder (Yale University) as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic initiatives at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and thereby counteract the destabilizing impact that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had on Ukrainian higher education and civilian life. The lecture has been lightly edited for the purpose of publication in Studia Philosophica Estonica and the original presentation can be found on the Munk School’s YouTube channel. Several themes from this lecture have been developed and expanded upon in Professor Snyder’s forthcoming book: On Freedom.

Contributors to the conference have published their work in an edited volume of Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

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Beyond the Ivory Tower / Public Philosophy / Reflections on Ukraine / War

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Aaron James Wendland

Soldier with Javelin, Odesa, July 2022. Photograph by Aaron James Wendland

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series and the first post of a new series dedicated to the war in Ukraine. For this interview, Diana Popescu-Sarry spoke to Professor Aaron James Wendland. Aaron is currently a Vision Fellow in Public Philosophy at King’s College London and Vice President of International Affairs and Professor of Public Philosophy at the Kyiv School of Economics. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Aaron has spent considerable time in Kyiv and has published in Ukraine World and The Kyiv Independent, where he is currently the Head of Ideas. In March 2023 Aaron organised a benefit conference for the Ukraine academy, the proceedings of which were published in a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica last month – featuring an interview by Aaron with Margaret Atwood as well as essays by Timothy Snyder, Volodymyr Yermolenko, Orysya Bila, Joshua Duclos, Jeff McMahan, and Jo Wolff to name but a few. Over the course of the next few weeks, Justice Everywhere will feature these contributions, as well as an interview with Orysya Bila about the value of teaching philosophy in wartime Ukraine.  

Besides his work in Ukraine, Aaron has also published numerous pieces of public philosophy in The New York Times, The Toronto Star, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Moscow Times and The New Statesman, where he edited the popular philosophy column Agora from 2018-2022. Aaron is currently working on editing The Cambridge Critical Guide to Being and Time for Cambridge University Press as well as being an Associate Producer at Ideas on CBC Radio, and the Co-director of the Centre for Philosophy and Art at King’s College, London.

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Beyond the Ivory Tower

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Jennifer Mather Saul

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series. For this edition, Davide Pala spoke to Professor Jennifer Saul, Waterloo Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language at the University of Waterloo, and Honorary Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Jennifer’s interests are in Philosophy of Language, Feminism, Philosophy of Race, and Philosophy of Psychology. From 2009-2019, she was Director of the Society for Women UK. With Helen Beebee, she published two reports, ten years apart, on the state of women in philosophy in the UK. Also with Helen Beebee, she authored guidelines for good practice on gender issues in philosophy. Jennifer also runs What is Like to be a Woman in Philosophy and founded the Feminist Philosophers blog. Jennifer is interested in helping institutions find methods to combat implicit biases, and she often advises on this topic. She completed an 18 month project with the UK Cabinet Office, helping them to improve the diversity of the UK government’s security workforce. She is currently advising the UK Statistics Authority, to develop a framework for understanding and classifying misleading uses of statistics.  

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / Democracy / Distribution / Economics / General / Public Philosophy / Work

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Beyond the Ivory Tower interview with Martin O’Neill

Not only are there more democratic and egalitarian alternatives theoretically, but also policies being pursued successfully at the city and the regional level, in many places, that do give people a sense of control in the economic sphere. It’s not just wishful and abstract thinking; there is abundant proof of concept. We have to remain hopeful; we have to shine a light on those examples and talk about why they represent elements of a different kind of settlement, a more justifiable and more human political and economic system, that we ought to strive to see realized more widely and more deeply.  

(This interview took place at Alma Café, a beautiful family-owned café in York, England) 

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / General

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Dana Mills

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, an interview between Dana Mills and Zsuzsanna Chappell about Mills’s activist work in Israel-Palestine. Dana Mills is a writer, dancer, and peace and human rights advocate. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2014. As an academic, she has held posts, among other institutions, at the University of Oxford, NYU, Northwestern University, American Dance Festival, Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, University of Amsterdam and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Since 2021 she has been working in Israeli-Palestinian civil society on a variety of issues. Mills has written many articles and three books: Dance and Politics: Moving beyond Boundaries (MUP, 2016); a biography of Rosa Luxemburg (Reaktion, 2020) and Dance and Activism: a century of radical dance across the world (Bloomsbury, 2021).

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / Liberty / Public Philosophy

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An Interview with Dorothea Gädeke (Beyond the Ivory Tower Series)

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Davide Pala and Dorothea Gädeke, revolving around Gädeke’s research project “Theorising Freedom From Below”. Dr. Dorothea Gädeke is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Ethics Institute, Utrecht University. She joined Utrecht University in 2018. Before that, she taught at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany, and at TU Darmstadt, Germany and spent time as a visiting scholar at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa and at Princeton University, USA. Her research is motivated by the urge to understand and address current social and political challenges. It is situated at the intersection of political philosophy, social philosophy and legal and constitutional theory. She specialises in domination and structural injustices and analyse how they are connected to practices of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. She is particularly interested in transnational relations between the global north and the global south. Currently, she is setting up a new project on agency and resistance against unfreedom. 

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Beyond the Ivory Tower

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An Interview with Lisa Guenther (Beyond the Ivory Tower Series)

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Leonie Smith and Lisa Guenther. Lisa Guenther teaches at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. Her position is cross-appointed in Philosophy and Cultural Studies and her official title is ‘Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies’, reflecting her current areas of scholarship, teaching, and activism. From 2012-17, she volunteered at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville, Tennessee, where she facilitated a discussion group with men on death row called REACH Coalition. She currently teaches a Walls to Bridges class at Collins Bay Institution in Kingston, Ontario, which brings together undergraduate students from Queen’s with incarcerated students from Collins Bay for credit-bearing courses in Philosophy and Sociology. She is also a member of the Advisory Board for the P4W Memorial Collective, a group of former prisoners who are creating a memorial garden for women who died at the Kingston Prison for Women (P4W).

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Beyond the Ivory Tower

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An Interview with Thomas Shakespeare (Beyond the Ivory Tower Series)

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Diana Popescu and Tom Shakespeare. Tom Shakespeare (CBE, FBA) is a Professor of Disability Research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He was trained in social and political sciences at Cambridge University but his work combines disability studies with sociology, social policy, and sexuality studies. His books include The Sexual Politics of Disability (1996); Disability Rights and Wrongs (2006; 2014); Disability – the Basics (2017). He was a member of Arts Council, England (2003-2008), a technical officer at the World Health Organisation where he co-edited the World Report on Disability (2008-2013), and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (2013-2019).  He is currently chair of Light for the World – UK, and vice-chair of Light for the World International.

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Academia / Beyond the Ivory Tower / General / Public Philosophy

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An interview with Joseph Chan (Beyond the Ivory Tower series)

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series (you can read previous interviews here).

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Joseph Chan worked for three decades as Professor in the Department of Politics of Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. After Beijing’s crackdown on the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and the imposition of the National Security Law on Hong Kong in July 2020, he left Hong Kong for Taiwan. He now lives and works in Taipei as a distinguished research fellow at the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica. Throughout his career, Joseph was a public intellectual well-known to politicians, activists and ordinary citizens in Hong Kong, and played some roles in Hong Kong politics, including as a mediator between the government and student protestors in 2014. We talked about how he got into political theory, his work in integrating Confucian political philosophy with Western liberalism, the tensions and limits of being a public intellectual, and his recent interest in the ethics of violence and protest.

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