A public lecture by Mary Kate McGowan and a 2-day workshop seeking to establish the necessary ingredients for a logic of transformative social change. This event is kindly funded by Royal Institute of Philosophy, SoSS Networking Grant (UOM), Centre for Digital Trust and Society (CDTS at UOM) and The University of Manchester Philosophy Department.
EVENT THEMES
Oppressive social structures have powerful inertia that goes beyond individual agents with bad attitudes. They shape incentives, roles, power, hierarchies, norms, ideologies, resources, institutions. Speech is used to maintain and expand oppression, harming vulnerable groups and normalizing hatred and violence against them. How to disrupt this cycle?
We seek to establish necessary ingredients for a logic of transformative social change. A body of work proposes that social-norm change can be explained through decision-making theories, complexity theories, game-theoretic models. We aim to establish fruitful links across these models to answer these problems:
· why do individuals follow bad norms;
· how does language provide such incentives;
· how to mitigate conditions leading to unfair distribution of resources;
· what forms of resistance and social movements enable social change.
SCHEDULE
4TH OF JULY: DAY 1
12:30-12:45 REGISTRATION
12:45 -14:00 Mary Kate McGowan (Wellesley College) - "Objecting Against the Current: On In Situ Counterspeech, Social Norms, and Silencing"
14:00 -14:15 BREAK
14:15 - 15:05 Mihaela Popa-Wyatt (University of Manchester) - "Speech, Norms and Games"
15:05 - 15:35 BREAK
15:35 - 16:25 Chris Cousens (University of Stirling) - "Fat-calling: Ascriptions of fatness that subordinate"
16:30 - 17:20 Miriam Ronzoni (University of Manchester) - "Intersectionality: Epistemological Not Metaphysical"
5TH OF JULY: DAY 2
9:30 - 09:45 REGISTRATION
9:45 - 10:35 Andrea Sangiovanni (King's College London) - "Solidarity, Social Kinds, and Social Change"
10:40 - 11:30 Sarah Fisher (UCL) - "Moderating synthetic content"
11:35 - 12:25 Emily McTernan (UCL) - "Reputations, cancellations, and private selves"
12:25 -13:15 BREAK
13:15 - 14:05 Lilian von Bressensdor (LMU Munich) - "Do Social Structures Bias Communication?"
14:10-15:00 Ajinkya Deshmukh (University of Manchester) - "The Case for Regulating Attention-Mining Services"
REGISTRATION, VENUE & ACCESSIBILITY
Whilst the event is in person, online attendance is possible.
To register please email justina.berskyte@manchester.ac.uk with the subject line 'Social Norms Workshop'. Please indicate whether you will be attending in person or online. For online registrations, a Zoom link will be distributed closer to the time.
The event will take place in Humanities Bridgeford Street Building, Oxford Road, M13 9PL. The venue is wheelchair accessible, for more information see:
https://www.accessable.co.uk/the-university-of-manchester/access-guides/humanities-bridgeford-street#ba990ef0-c059-a94e-a814-423ac47836c5.
Please email the organisers if you have any other accessibility requirements or questions.
ORGANISERS:
Mihaela Popa-Wyatt (mihaela.popa-wyatt@manchester.ac.uk) & Justina Berskyte (justina.berskyte@manchester.ac.uk) & Lucija Duda
