Columbia’s Michele Moody-Adams to Present Gary Matthews Memorial Lecture on ‘Transforming Political Conflict: The Power of Participatory Listening’

Michele Moody-Adams, Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University, will present the Gary Matthews Memorial Lecture, "Transforming Political Conflict: The Power of Participatory Listening," Thursday, Oct. 9, from 4-6 p.m. in the Amherst Room on the 10^th Floor of the Campus Center.

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, the lecture will introduce and defend "participatory listening," a communicative practice based on the value of "listening for" unheard stories. Participatory listening, as opposed to attempts to simply "reverse perspectives," encourages the kind of curiosity and wonder needed to take others, and their humanity seriously. It helps to create conceptual space in which others come to see themselves as complex human beings, opening up the possibility for creative transformation of even the most persistent and violent political conflicts.

Moody-Adams is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences a lifetime Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. She has published on equality and social justice, moral psychology and virtues, and the philosophical implications of gender and race. She is the author of "Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination and Political Hope" (2022) and "Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy" (1997), and is a co-author on the multi-author work "Against Happiness" (2023).

More information about the Matthews Lecture, which is free and open to the public, can be found on the Department of Philosophy website.