Classroom Enhancement Grant

These grants are open to all faculty.  Faculty may apply for grants throughout the academic year for research-based activities or invited classroom guests that support efforts to enrich the teaching experience with a focus on ethics, broadly construed.  These grants may be used to invite a guest lecturer from outside Dartmouth to a class, go on a research-related field trip, or engage in other activities that support the curriculum or classroom experience.  For more information about Dartmouth's current travel guidelines, visit:  https://news.dartmouth.edu/covid-19/travel-and-visitors. 

Classroom Enhancement Grants should not be used to supplement travel or other expenses related to academic conferences on campus. If a visiting faculty member is on campus for such a conference, Classroom Enhancement Grants may be used for an additional night's stay in Hanover in order to meet with students in classes. Honorarium limit up to $500 per person and any additional funds used for travel or other costs. Honorariums for Zoom classroom visits are permissible. Faculty may submit applications totaling up to $3,000 per fiscal year.  The Institute reviews these grant requests on a rolling basis and the award (which may be less than the amount requested) depends on the impact of the speaker in advancing ethics instruction in the class as well as the availability of funds.

Submit an application.

Once you have received a grant and used the funds for your class, please fill out the form to verify and confirm the use of the funds. Confirmation of fund usage form (here).

Having studied bird intelligence in earlier classes, the Raptors Up Close program will give PHIL 50.18 students the chance to interact directly with real "animal minds." 

Raptors Up Close Animal Outreach Program (60 min), Vermont Institute of Natural Science (VINS), with three live birds and a VINS educator. https://vinsweb.org/animal-outreach/raptors-up-close/

This experience will deepen their understanding of raptor cognitive abilities, provide opportunities to ask questions, and introduce them to the conservation and educational initiatives at VINS. It will also encourage students to reflect on how these efforts relate to the ethical issues discussed in class, such as whether animals with complex cognitive abilities warrant special consideration in conservation, how our understanding of animal minds should shape our interactions with them, and how the capacity for pain, pleasure, or emotion influences the moral status of non-human animals.

Paul Perkins, JD, Plante & Hanley - Engineering Ethics Workshop

Paul Perkins will join us for a workshop with each of the two sections of the engineering capstone course (ENGS 89) to help students understand ethics as an engineer, project manager, and citizen. He will also help students build a framework to evaluate engineering decision-making from multiple standpoints through the lens of ethics.

Request for 3 guest speakers for my class (over Zoom). Each speaker will come for two consecutive class sessions. For each session, the students will read an essay by the speaker. 

1. Dr. Serawit Debele. Universität Bayreuth. "The ethics of recovering Queer African Pasts."

2. Dr.Miriam Kilimo '14. Emory University. "The Limits of Electoral Gender Quotas in Kenya."

3. Dr. Kwame Otu. Georgetown. " LGBTQ rights and Foreign intervention in Africa."

The course explores the constructions of gender and sexual identities in different African socio-cultural contexts and offers a framework to talk about gender and sexuality in African contexts. The question of ethics is a running thread throughout the course, as we cover the ethics of researching LGBTQ issues in African contexts, the ethics of foreign intervention and sanctions in the fight against homophobia in African contexts, and the ethical dimension of gender parity legislation. All 3 speakers are experts in their fields and will speak directly to these ethics related questions.

Requesting funds to take students in my Food History course on a field trip to a local farm (Taste 4 Good Farm) in East Thetford, VT which is run by fellow Dartmouth professors Matt & Desiree Garcia. This field trip will entail a lecture on agroforestry and regenerative grazing practices given by myself and a fellow professor, Theresa Ong, in the Environmental Studies department. These talks will be accompanied by a visit to farm fields to see these practices in action. The field trip will then culminate with an agroforestry-themed meal where students will have the opportunity to engage with the farmer as well as myself and Theresa to discuss our applied work in the local agricultural and farming community.

Speakers:

Dr. Theresa Ong, Agroforestry and climate change
Dr. Mario Machado, Regenerative grazing systems and climate change
Dr. Matt Garcia, Regenerative grazing systems in practice

This class is cross listed with Geography, AAAS, and WGSS. I will seek budgetary support from each department and am asking the Ethics Institute for support in purchasing 18 copies of my guest speakers book for my students. Professor Emeritus Celes Tisdale is the author of "When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal". Professor Tisdale is a literary scholar and poet who taught poetry to incarcerated men in Attica Correctional Facility in Western New York State following the infamous Attica Prison Uprising of 1971. His work relates to the ethics of including art and education in prison. It highlights the humanity of criminalized individuals and calls attention to the fact that although incarcerated individuals are in prison, they still have basic human rights.

Professor Maurizio Ferraris (Full Professor of Philosophy, University of Turin / Director of the Scienza Nuova Institute / President of the LabOnt Center) https://maurizioferraris.eu/

Title of the talk: 'Webfare' and Artificial Intelligence

Professor Ferraris is one of the leading European philosophers and has published over fifty books that present his widely influential theories about realism, moral philosophy, social ontology, aesthetics and the philosophy of technology. Professor Ferraris' talk will introduce his proposal for a new moral economy suited for our data-centred world, which he calls 'webfare', as a form of cross-national welfare based on the taxation of data-processing. Ferraris will also present his orginal articulation of the distinction between human and artificial intelligence and its ethical implications. Ferraris' talk connects with the Ethics Institute because it has the ambition of advancing public ethics in various ways.
 

I am requesting funding for guest speakers Susi Maresca and Camila Parodi. Susi is working with a student group over the course of the term. She is a photographer with a long-term project and collaboration on the impacts of lithium mining in northern argentina. Camila is a journalist who co-wrote a book with Susi titled: "La ruta del Litio: Voces del agua." The ethics component is about reframing the global energy transition in terms of ethical relationships between the global north and global south. Inviting these speakers who have this ethnographic experience researching and telling stories about the costs of lithium mining brings these issues alive to students.  This class visit will expose the whole class to these issues, and be complemented by academic readings.

Nelson De Witt, Independent Filmmaker and Author, "Identifying Nelson/Buscando A Roberto"

The invited speaker is filmmaker and writer Nelson De Witt, who will be sharing a preview of his upcoming documentary titled "Identifying Nelson/Buscando A Roberto" an exploration to the complex story of transnational adoption that took place during the 1980s Salvadoran Civil War. Nelson De Witt is an adoptee himself, and the film is about rediscovering his Salvadoran roots, family, the ethics around his identity formation as part of this tumultuous political moment in Central American history.

The topic of transnational adoption is a rarely discussed subject on campus, in universities, and in debates around the ethics of family formation and politics. The Central American experience about this is recent, and is linked to the knotted history of U.S. presence in the region that has operated as both a hindrance to self-determination but also its savior. The questions around Nelson De Witt's personal experience brings these thorny issues around ethics, redress, and family to the fore.

I'm requesting funds for two visitors to our class.

1. José Medina, Walter Hill Scott Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University

2. Lidal Dror, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University

Both speakers will address issues of epistemic injustice, at the intersection of ethics, political theory, and epistemology. Both will give public lectures from 3:30-5:00pm, which all students in PHIL 50.38 (3A) will attend. José Medina will also be meeting with the students in our class from 5:20-6:20pm, to discuss chapters of his they will have read.

I am requesting support of a experiential, design-learning focused seminar that I am teaching in conjunction with Book Arts Workshop at Dartmouth Spring 2024. Dan Nott, non-fiction illustrator and teacher at the Center for Cartoon Studies, White River Junction, VT.  Cities are places of intense inequality while also frequently incubating social movements and fomenting radical change. Urban density, diversity, intensity all feed into these dynamics. In this class we grapple with questions including: Who is the city for? How do structural elements (such as buildings and freeways, property taxes, school districts) support or erode justice? How do urban social movements build solidarity across difference? How can we (as people concerned with social justice and the city) avoid the twin perils of gentrification/disinvestment?  Why do social movements congeal in certain moments and places and not in others? We will consider these questions in cities of the Global North and South.  This course will be taught collaboratively, with Dartmouth's Book Arts Workshop. Each Tuesday we will study core concepts, theories, and processes relevant to urban social justice and injustice. On Thursdays, students will illustrate these phenomena in their empirical diversity in a particular city of their choosing. I say illustrate quite literally—as we will be making books will serve as the culminating project for the course.  No prior experience with book arts necessary, but an openness to experiential learning and creative experimentation is essential.  

Andrew McFarland (CUNY), Associate Professor of Philosophy
Topic: "Love as a Public Good"

Professor McFarland's areas of specialisation are metaphysics and the philosophy of science. His current research focuses on the nature of social and biological categories particularly as they relate to the nature of human dispositions. His talk would enhance my students' understandings of the nature of love as a social category. In particular, his talk will focus on human dispositions to love, how love functions as not merely a personal but also a public good, and the social mechanisms needed to support loving relationships for ethical flourishing.

In the spring term of 2024 the LATS 37 students and our community partners will be collaborating on short video projects about the farm workers' lives, their work on the dairy farms, and also about their dreams and other possible topics that the students and farm workers will explore in the "digital stories" that the LATS 37 students will co-create. In LATS 37 we always invite our community partners to Dartmouth for at least one social event at the end of the term, and this spring 2024 we expect to host two public screenings to share the students' video projects with a wider audience. After the class concludes, I expect to develop a website that we will archive the LATS 37 students' video projects, and potentially these short documentaries and creative digital stories will also be shown at conferences and film festivals.

Dr. Gonzalez Mendoza and Dr. Noroña are both transhemispheric mestiza scholars of Indigenous descent, working with racialized and Indigenous communities in the US and Latin America. Each takes a feminist approach to knowledge production, framing women's testimonios and storytelling as an alternative way of not only knowing the world, but of making it through a politics of care and relationality, in contexts of deep structural inequality and violence. I have invited them to speak to my class because I want students to hear firsthand from researchers working through this epistemological approach, which is itself an ethical position on how we know the world, and through whom. As students in the seminar are all completing research projects on land struggles, many of which will be part of their thesis projects, I also want them to have the opportunity to discuss research ethics, reflexivity, and accountability with these speakers, and expand how they think about doing research.