2023 Morris Lecture: Michael D. Kennedy, "Anticipating Epoch End while in Search of Solidarity"
Schedule
Thu, 23 Mar, 2023 at 04:30 pm
Location
Boston University, Leventhal Center Auditorium, 233 Bay State Rd, Boston, MA 02215 | Cambridge, MA
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Each spring semester, BU Sociology hosts the Albert Morris Lecture in Sociology. Named in honor of the first Department Chair, this lectureship was established in 2009 after a generous gift to the Department from an anonymous alumnus.Michael D. Kennedy, Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University
"Anticipating Epoch End while in Search of Solidarity: A Method for Comparing Catastrophes and Networking Affinities"
In these times, discourses of epoch ends are plentiful, leading with climate catastrophe and more recently invoked with the war on Ukraine and the effects of pandemic. Following a brief review of the variety of narratives defining epoch ends, in past, present, and future tenses, I present a schematic allowing for more systematic comparisons, apparent in the diagram below. To illustrate, I contrast qualities of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With this graphic, one might in particular consider the magnitudes and concentrations of loss, on the one hand, and on the other, the variable ways in which claims to expertise and truthfulness are mobilized in order to address uncertain futures. I organize this comparison to facilitate efforts to connect catastrophes beyond their most proximate damages, so that we might develop a different discourse of global solidarity, one that emerges from within catastrophes and their networks of engagement rather than superimposed on top of them by schema generated in other conjunctures and for different purposes.
Michael D. Kennedy is Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Throughout his career, Kennedy has addressed East European social movements and systemic change with recent engagements around both Ukraine and Kosova. For the last 20 years, he also has worked in the sociology of public knowledge, global transformations, and cultural politics, with particular focus on social movements and universities. He continues to work in global and transnational sociology, focusing now on how various articulations of difference and solidarity travel.
Recent political transformations within the USA and across the world have moved him toward a more knowledge cultural and public sociology, focusing especially on how communities of discourse use various kinds of questions, styles of reasoning, and forms of evidence to identify the qualities of justice defining various forms of social organization and modes of transformation.
Kennedy was the University of Michigan's first vice provost for international affairs in addition to being director of an institute and five centers and programs at UM; he also served as the Howard R. Swearer Director of Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. Kennedy concluded 9 years of service on the Executive Committee, as chair, and the Board of Directors at the Social Science Research Council in 2015, a two year term on the International Academic Advisors' Board of Singapore Management University's School of Social Sciences in 2017, a 3 year term on the Governing Board of European Humanities University in 2019, and 5 years as chair and co-chair of two education programs for the Open Society Foundations in 2021. Within sociology, he was the chair of the Global and Transnational Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association in 2019-20.
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Where is it happening?
Boston University, Leventhal Center Auditorium, 233 Bay State Rd, Boston, MA 02215, Cambridge, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
