PI: Anton Ford, Department of Philosophy
Partnering with: Jean-Philippe Narboux, Université de Strasbourg and Thomas Khurana, University of Potsdam
With support from this faculty grant, we will convene a series of three interlinked workshops about the philosophical notion of material intentionality as it relates to our ability to interpret the world, on the one hand, and to change it, on the other. The modifier, ‘material,’ marks that the relevant ‘intentionality’ is precisely that of an embodied subject, who is embedded in a community other such subjects, whose lives are conducted socially in a constant metabolic interaction with the surrounding natural world. Our proposal builds on groundwork laid by an earlier workshop at the Paris Center, in April 2022. One theme that emerged in the first workshop is that, although it is conventional in American Universities to contrast “analytic philosophy” and “continental philosophy,” the latter term is a portmanteau, which refers to several distinct traditions of thought, including Marxism and Phenomenology. In the last hundred years, these two strands of the “continental” tradition have often been as hostile to each other as either has been to Analytic Philosophy. Moreover, while Marxism and Phenomenology are both significant movements in the French philosophical tradition, they are no less rooted in Germany. This requires us to expand and deepen our collaboration.
PI: Alan Zarychta, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
Partnering with: Burcu Pinar Alakoc, University of Chicago, Associate Instructional Professor and Emel Özdora Akşak, Bilkent University, Associate Professor & Associate Dean
Recent research on refugee integration has highlighted the importance of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) like frontline health workers in supporting healthcare access for refugees, as well as shaping public attitudes and behaviors toward refugees. Focusing on the case of Syrian refugees in Turkey, our research investigates the ways in which frontline health workers can support or undermine efforts to provide responsive health services for refugee populations, the factors that shape these different behaviors, and their connections to broader public attitudes and prospects for social integration and inclusion. Our workshop—built on the success of an initial event two years ago—will reconvene a team of scholars from the University of Chicago and Bilkent University at the Center in Paris to develop the next phase of this joint research project, namely a large-N survey of health workers across multiple regions in Turkey. In terms of broader impacts, this research centers the attitudes and behaviors of SLBs within efforts to support equitable health service delivery, and aims to address fundamental questions about the role of public bureaucracies in responding to and supporting the health and social needs of refugee populations in Turkey and other refugee hosting countries.
PI: Peggy Mason, Department of Neurobiology
Partnering with: Pedro Lopes, University of Chicago, expert on the readiness potential and Wim Pouw, Radboud University, expert on gesture and motor control
Why do we get physically tired from mental effort? Why are we mentally spent after a day of physical exertion? We will work with scientists from Chicago, UK, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands to investigate the neurobiological basis of fatigue. Our first step is to host a meeting on Neural Mechanisms of Fatigue to be held at the John W. Boyer Center in Paris. The goals of this meeting are to identify the core questions to answer, methodologies to use, and populations to study in forthcoming experiments. We will fix upon a common protocol to be run at the Paris Center (for roughly one quarter’s time, by PM), in Chicago, and in the Netherlands. Experiments are designed to test whether both physical and cognitive fatigue arise from cognitive effort. To determine if physical fatigue scales with cognitive supervision, we will compare fatigue after gestures (cognitively undemanding movements) and after reaches to differently sized targets, actions that can be highly demanding. We will then compare the fatigue produced by mental rotation tests of hands, feet and 3-D puzzle pieces. Finally, we will examine a potential brain mechanism underlying both cognitive and physical fatigue. After completing our experiments, the results will be submitted for publication.
PI: Lisa Wedeen, Department of Political Science
Partnering with: Jennifer Pitts, University of Chicago, Political Science & Social Thought
We will present a three-year series of events at the Boyer Center | IIRP and the American University Beirut as part of Revolutionary Disappointment, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory’s new collaborative initiative. Revolutionary Disappointment is a theoretical, historical, and multi-sited ethnographic project that engages the writings of revolutionaries, artists, and scholars who think about questions of revolution, despair, political retrenchment, nostalgia, the politics of waiting, and temporality more generally. It intends to consider the work of revolutionaries in exile and those who have stayed in their countries of origin, to reflect on themes of generational change and of evolving priorities, and to investigate the multifarious efforts to navigate everyday life when dreams have been dashed and loved ones lost. Centered on debates in the Middle East, the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and Europe, project activity will include both closed workshops and public conferences featuring a working group of interdisciplinary, international scholars working primarily in the humanistic social sciences. The Paris- and Lebanon-based activity will be complemented by events here in Chicago and result in a special issue of Critical Historical Studies as well as a monograph by PI Lisa Wedeen.
PI: Maliha Chishti, Harris School of Public Policy
The MENA region is currently marred with wars and violent conflicts unlike any other part of the world. In collaboration with Dr. Amal Hamada from the Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences at Cairo University, we will conduct an exploratory investigation into the network of women’s organizations in the MENA region organizing for peace and the protection of women’s rights in conflict. We plan to identify and establish relations with the leading regional women’s peace organizations based out of Cairo and Amman to gain a sense of the frameworks, approaches and strategies currently employed to mobilize and lobby for peace at national, regional and international levels. We plan to examine whether women are engaging the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda, considered the most significant and wide-reaching international framework for the protection and rights of war-affected women. The WPS Agenda has been formally adopted by most states in the MENA region, however, it is generally acknowledged that among women's organizations it is either underutilized or entirely bypassed. This project aims to first identify and map out current women-led peace efforts and assess the degree of engagement with the global WPS Agenda.