CAPE Events for SPRING, 2009

   

Over the past two decades, there has been an explosion of the slave trade. Indeed, research suggests that there are more slaves per capita today than at any other point in human history. The U.S. State Department and the United Nations estimate that somewhere between 800,000 and 4 million people are trafficked into slavery each year.  Of these, the overwhelming majority are hapless women and children who have been sold into forced prostitution. The U.S. State Department 2008 Trafficking in Persons Report notes that trafficking of human beings is the third highest money making operation for organized crime behind the sale of illegal drugs and guns. It nets more than $12 billion dollars a year.

Sex slavery is uniformly violent and harmful to the victims who endure rape, gang rape, torture, coercion, and murder. They join the nearly 10 million women and children ensnared into sex markets around the globe.

Dr. Kate Transchel has been researching the trade in flesh from the former Soviet Union for the last eight years. Having returned in January from a four-month research trip to Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Latvia, Transchel explores the nature of the sex trade—the women and children trapped in it, the traffickers profiting from it, and the johns creating the demand for it. In economic parlance, women are the commodity—the supply side of the equation. Embedded on the supply side are “push” factors: extreme poverty, lack of education, lack of opportunities, a desire to improve one’s desperate life. On the demand side are men who use and abuse prostituted women and children. It is the demand the fuels the trade in flesh. In a consumer society, do we have the right—or even the obligation—to control demand?

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"Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms "
Wednesday, April 8, PAC 134 at 7:30 p.m.

Nicolette Hahn Niman Environmental activist, attorney, and cattle rancher (Niman Ranch) Author of Righteous Porkchop Nicolette Hahn Niman takes time to visit Chico on her national book tour to discuss the practices of hog factory farms and the devastating contributions these practices make to air and water pollution. By contrast, Niman advocates supporting the innovative and cost-effective methods of traditional ranching whose practitioners make profits through ethical and sustainable means. "[L]ays out why industrial [meat] production is a threat to our most treasured traditions and values, even our democracy…[and] demonstrates convincingly that factory meat production, with all its attendant pollution, cruelty, and economic and social disruptions, is unnecessary." -Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. "[A] searing, and utterly convincing, indictment of modern meat production." -Michael Pollan, author, Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food "The best piece of writing on animal agriculture I have encountered in 25 years of work in animal welfare and agriculture." -Dr. Bernard E. Rollin, Colorado State University, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Biomedical Sciences, and Animal Sciences Sponsored by CAPE and the Institute for Sustainable Development

 

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"Language as an Ethic of Justice"
Wednesday, March 25th, PAC 134 at 7:30 p.m.

Previous work in sociology, critical criminology and the broader study of justice argues for the powerful presence of social control in the U.S. Professor Coyle will demonstrate how social control is built, maintained, and changed by the labor of moral entrepreneurs in everyday social and criminal justice discourse and by the habits of language they produce. By performing a variety of justice language studies and building a “Language of Justice” critical language theory, Coyle traces the processes that give rise to social meanings around issues of social and criminal justice and track how these meanings become symbolic in the entire discourse about crime and justice in our social life. Professor Coyle will also discuss how moral entrepreneurs define justice situations and social and criminal justice meanings in everyday life through their work of framing the language used to discuss, interpret, and shift practices and policies in social and criminal justice.  Through studies of common justice-language phrasing, such as “innocent victim” or “tough on crime,” Professor Coyle argues that modern discourse reflects a denial of the radical constructed character of social and criminal justice ideas and practices. Public justice discourse is found to operate in and out of a field of social control concerns whose categories – “crime,” “criminals” and the like – are perceived as definitions handed down from an authoritative source (from ontological definitions about human nature to epistemological definitions given by theological language, etc.), and not constructed by the everyday maintenance of language work.  Because language defines reality, inherently attends to ideological functions, and in time becomes structurally hegemonic, suppressive and colonizing of other subjugated experiences, ideologies, and languages, “Language of Justice” research works to denaturalize justice language to interpret whether or not we are achieving our claimed justice principles.

 

	Michael J. Coyle, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Political Science, CSU, Chico

 

 

Social and biological scientists have long debated in what ways, and to what degree, humans are conditioned by their environment and social world.  For some, for example, the content of the human mind derives primarily from such circumstances, and its evolved architecture consists of general-purpose mechanisms referred to as "learning," "intelligence," "rationality," and "culture."  Others emphasize how linguistic and social dimensions of human capacities critically shape comprehension of the world and action in it, producing diverse experiences, perspectives, values, and institutions.

A new kind of evolutionary psychology provides another framework, based on developments in cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience. According to this Evolutionary Psychology model, the modern mind is the product of natural selection which evolved to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago. On this view, human minds consist of a number of functionally specialized, domain-specific, reasoning circuits, or modules, that organize the way we interpret our experiences and provide universal frames of meaning that allow us to understand the actions and intentions of others. Thus, according to the Evolutionary Psychology model, human beings share certain views and assumptions about human action and the nature of the world in virtue of these human universal modules.

What might all this mean for ethics? What does the Evolutionary Psychology model have to say about those human behaviors we see as moral? What might Evolutionary Psychology tell us about behaviors as such altruism, deception, kindness, love, competitiveness, and punishment?  About historical conditions, social institutions, and cultural interpretations that shape how ethics are conceived and managed in different societies?  In celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species, we will look at these and other questions to weigh the contributions and potential limits of contemporary evolutionary psychology.

Edward Vela Psychology, CSU, Chico

David Eaton Anthropology, CSU, Chico