Cosmopolitan Thinking/Dialogical Ethics will be devoted to thinking in and from the cracks and the conflicts between the triumphal claims than the world is flat and the consequences of imperial actions taken to flattening the world; to explore the possibilities of thinking otherwise in the areas of political economy, political theory, epistemology, ethics, subjectivity, etc; and to explore the relations between technological innovations and the reproduction of exploitation and marginalization.
Romand Coles and Walter Mignolo initiated this three-year project as an outcome of the seminar, “Race, Religion, and Globalization.” The project involves a core group of Duke and UNC faculty and graduate students interested in exploring the links between knowledge, morality, and social transformation. Walter Mignolo (Duke) and Mark Driscoll (UNC) are the current co-convenors of this seminar.
The first year was devoted to discussion based on the current research of its own members plus three guest scholars: Irish Young, a political scientist from the University of Chicago; Paula Moya, a professor of English and Latino/as Studies at Stanford University; and Tariq Ali, an intellectual and activist who writes for the New Left Review in London.
The year 2002-2003 was devoted to “Human Rights, Ethics, and Critical Cosmopolitanism.” Visitors included: Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Coimbra, Portugal; Catherine Walsh, a professor and activist from the Universidad Andina, Quito, Ecuador; and Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, a Nigerian philosopher who teaches at De Paul University in Chicago.
At the end of the third year (2004), the group will launch a full-scale conference on the moral, political, and intellectual concerns they have raised in the workshop.