| Emma Ebowe and Christopher Hopson will discuss their work in an event moderated by ELSCE Director Eric Beerbohm. A light lunch will be served. Registration is required for both in-person and online attendance.
In recent years, universities across the United States have undertaken an effort to study, publicize, and respond to their historical ties to American slavery. This effort has resulted in various initiatives, including some to identify, contact, and design programs for living descendants of those who were enslaved by university affiliates. Universities that choose to identify and contact descendants might have various goals, but must all address the question of what, if anything, is owed to direct descendants.
During this Ethics Monday, Emma Ebowe and Christoper Hopson will discuss their paper, which proposes an ethical framework for universities to adopt when they choose to identify and contact descendants, one they call "reparative engagement." This framework argues that universities owe direct descendants redress for the moral harms caused by their involvement in slavery. It also defines ethical principles to guide both the creation and implementation of reparations options for direct descendants. The authors hope this framework is useful for advancing widely-shared university goals of intellectual and moral integrity, as well as the broader demands of reparative justice for the history of racial domination in the United States.
About the Presenters: Emma Ebowe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University, with a secondary field in African and African American Studies. She is a James M. and Cathleen D. Stone PhD Scholar in Inequality and Wealth Concentration and a former Graduate Fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics. Emma is a political theorist whose research focusses on the social, political, and relational injustice produced by the welfare state. Her recent work proposes ethical and policy correctives for institutional injustice in the foster system and suggests new normative ideals to govern state intervention into intimate family life. Emma is an affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology (ALARM) Project.
Christopher Hopson is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Government, specializing in political theory and American politics. His research interests include African American political thought and its engagement with topics at the intersection of law and political theory, as well as "racial policy" issues like integration and reparations. Christopher was an Undergraduate Fellow at the Safra Center and has worked as a research fellow at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, and as a political consultant at The Raben Group in Washington, D.C. Next year he will start as a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School. |
