"Letting Go of Heroes and Villains"
Start Date/Time:
October 21, 2022 at
4:00 PM
End Date/Time:
October 21, 2022 at
6:00 PM
Location: Abbott Auditorium, Lovejoy Library
Brief Description: UPC Keynote Lecture by Visiting Scholar Barrett Emerick
Dr. Barrett Emerick
"Letting Go of Heroes and Villains: Agency and the Possibility of Moral Redemption"
Friday, October 21, 2022 | 4-6 p.m.
Abbott Auditorium, Lovejoy Library 0044
Although it’s tempting to think of people as either heroes or villains we should try not to do so. Hero/villain thinking fails to take seriously the relational nature of agency and undermines our ability to hold people responsible for their actions. It also misdirects attention away from oppressive social systems and encourages us to focus on the actions of individual actors, thereby leaving those systems intact. Instead of thinking of people as heroes or villains, we should do the hard work of really holding people accountable for their actions, which means recognizing that they are more complicated than such thinking encourages.
