IASH Fellows Coleen Watson, philosophy, and Liyang Dong, English, will speak beginning at noon Wednesday, Nov. 30, in the IASH Conference Room, LN-1106.
Watson will speak on "The Wisdom of the People Public Humanities Project"
My project is a podcast series that will explore specific issues in political philosophy, with special emphasis on democratic theory. Mainstream political rhetoric rarely considers questions about what democratic freedom and equality are and why democratic institutions and processes are valuable, despite so much lip service paid to the social goods of democracies. This project hopes to fill this gap in public conversation by creating a podcast aimed at engaging general audiences with the philosophical concepts behind democratic governance. In addition, the podcast will explore how political philosophy’s ideas impact listeners’ everyday lives in hopes of promoting more rigorous civic discourse about normative issues in democratic life while demonstrating shared conceptual common ground many citizens haven’t recognized.
Among the questions explored in that topic is whether democracy is valuable merely instrumentally because it is good at satisfying individual preferences, or because democracy also has intrinsic value in that they are better than all other forms of government at promoting freedom and equality among citizens. Other topics to explore will include appropriate remedies to social and structural injustices, political knowledge and disinformation, and the limits of free speech.
