果冻传媒

The (ISEE) is pleased to announce publicly the winner and finalists for the 2020 Andrew Light Award for Public Philosophy. ISEE established the award to promote work in public philosophy and honor contributions to the field by Dr. Andrew Light, who was recognized for his distinctive work in public environmental philosophy at ISEE鈥檚 2017 annual summer meeting.

With this award, ISEE strives to recognize public philosophers working in environmental ethics and philosophy, broadly construed, and who bring unique insights or methods that broaden the reach, interaction, and engagement of philosophy with the wider public. This may be exemplified in published work or engagement in environmental issues of public importance.

This year鈥檚 honorees have made important contributions and provide distinctive examples of the work in public environmental philosophy that is happening today. The winner and finalists will be honored at an International Society for Environmental Ethics group session at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association on Thursday, January 14, 2021.

This year鈥檚 Light Award winner is Dr. Keith Hyams, Reader in Political Theory and Interdisciplinary Ethics in the Department of Politics and International Studies at 果冻传媒 (United Kingdom). Dr. Hyams, who earned his DPhil at University of Oxford in 2006, has published academic research in areas that include climate ethics, climate justice, urban resilience, and the governance of global catastrophic risk. However, what distinguishes him as a public environmental philosopher is his work across disciplines, sustained collaboration with non-governmental organizations, and public engagement on issues that include urban adaptation in low income countries, environmental and human rights for Indigenous peoples, and health and environmental injustice in informal settlements in six African cities (Johannesburg, Lusaka, Kampala, Nairobi, Lagos, and Freetown). Dr. Hyams鈥檚 collaborators describe his approach as 鈥渁lways one of developing a constructive partnership,鈥� and note that he brings to this work methodologies that help various publics and policymakers to integrate and constructively discuss ethical issues at stake in environmental decisions. Dr. Hyams鈥檚 work on climate adaptation is especially notable. In this area, he has served as an ethics advisor to the Indigenous Health Adaptation to Climate Change network, co-authored a report on 鈥楻emedying Injustice in Indigenous Climate Adaptation Planning: Climate Ethics, Inequality, and Indigenous Knowledge鈥� (available at: warwick.basilico-staging.it/ethics/research/), served as an advisor to the city of Cape Town climate adaptation department, and worked with international NGOs such as Oxfam and Practical Action on the ethics of climate adaptation. Additionally, Dr. Hyams has mentored six postdoctoral researchers and multiple doctoral students, helping them to develop their own skills in publicly engaged environmental philosophy. This year鈥檚 Andrew Light Award recognizes the collaborative, publicly engaged, and ethically grounded work of Dr. Keith Hyams as distinctive contributions to public environmental philosophy.

This year鈥檚 finalists are Dr. Kian Mintz-Woo of University College Cork (Ireland) and Dr. Jeremy Moss of University of New South Wales (Australia).

Dr. Mintz-Woo, a lecturer at University College Cork, is an early career scholar who has already demonstrated a sustained commitment to publicly engaged philosophy. As a graduate student at University of Graz, Kian Mintz-Woo helped to develop a public art exhibition, Exhibition CliMatters, which was shown in multiple venues in Austria and drew over 1700 visitors, and he founded, organized, and contributed to the Climate Footnotes blog (). As a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, Dr. Mintz-Woo collaborated with Professor Peter Singer on an article, 鈥溾�� published in Project Syndicate on May 7, 2020. Dr. Mintz-Woo鈥檚 academic writing focuses on climate ethics, particularly carbon pricing, discounting, and the social cost of carbon.

Dr. Jeremy Moss is a Professor of Political Philosophy at University of New South Wales (Australia) whose work focuses on climate justice, the ethics of renewable energy, and ethical issues associated with climate transitions. He is Director of the Practical Justice Initiative and leads the Climate Justice Research program at UNSW as part of this initiative. Professor Moss鈥檚 work has been featured in The Guardian, and Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), National Aboriginal Radio, Al Jezeera, and LeMonde, and he has developed a Climate Justice website (climatejustice.co) 鈥渢o provide accessible discussions of the justice-related issues that underpin an effective response to climate change.鈥� In addition, he has published op-eds on climate ethics in The Conversation, including 鈥溾��).

艩谩d铆 Shana谩h has given a presentation followed by a Q&A to the government鈥檚 Commission for Countering Extremism. He presented the results of his doctoral research entitled 鈥淯nder Pressure: Muslims鈥� Engagement in Counter-Extremism鈥� and engaged in a discussion about the lack of robust empirical evidence regarding the perception of counter-extremism and counter-terrorism policies by UK Muslim communities and the lack of research into the attitudes, motivations and work of Muslims who are active in addressing Islamist extremism.

The Commission鈥檚 tweet about the event is available here:

The first annual report for the 果冻传媒 Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development (WICID) has been published.

The main take away points from the report are:

• Research grants - internally and externally funded grants, leading to publications
• WICID Methods Lab - our flagship Toolkit series to be published by
• Webinars - Global Insights and South Asia and Covid-19 series
• - relaunch and increasing readership
• Everyday in Lockdown international project of photographic accounts of Covid-19

The full report can be read here.

Last Sunday, Channel 4 showed the latest documentary in a series on 鈥楻oyals and Spies鈥�, researched by Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac (Nottingham).

Filmed in 果冻传媒鈥檚 Modern Records Centre, the programme showed how The Queen was dragged, unwittingly, into a notorious CIA-MI6 coup that overthrew the government of Iran in 1953. The wider programme of research has involved two PAIS students working at the National Archives in Kew. The latest programme attracted extensive press coverage including stories by and .

.

The next Q-Step research seminar will take place on Zoom next Monday, 15th June, 2pm–3pm.

Robin Harding, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford,

"Terrorism, Trust, and Ethnic Identification: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Nigeria"

Abstract: Terrorism is increasingly a problem across Africa, but as yet little work has sought to investigate its political effects. Studies in Europe and the US suggest that terrorist attacks can increase political trust, but it is unclear whether we should expect these findings to hold in a context where political institutions are often fragile, and where political violence is frequent. We investigate this question in Nigeria, where terrorism has been widespread and increasing over the past decade. Making use of unexpected attacks by the extremist group Boko Haram, which occurred during the fieldwork of a public opinion survey, we show that even in a context of weak state institutions and frequent terrorist activities terrorist attacks significantly increase political trust. Previous studies in other contexts have attributed such effects to a "rally round the flag" mechanism, whereby people look to national state institutions as the legitimate source of security in the face of terrorist threat. A further implication of this argument is that terrorism should result in a stronger sense of collective national identity. Counter to this, we find that terror attacks in this context actually reduce the salience of respondents' national identity, instead significantly increasing ethnic identification. This fits with arguments from social psychology which suggest that fear and insecurity can lead people to identify more strongly with their in-group. These findings have important implications for understanding the political effects of terrorism in contexts where society is divided along ethnic lines and where ethnic divisions are politically salient.

Zoom link:

Meeting ID: 274 739 0271

Password: 1234