The Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research (CEPR) of the University of Salzburg is happy to announce the call for papers for a workshop on "Recognition and Poverty". The workshop will be held at the University of Salzburg on 15 and 16 November 2018.

The invited speaker for this workshop is David Ingram (Loyola University Chicago), who will give a talk on "Misrecognition and Divided Agency: Does Micro-Finance Empower Women?".

The overall aim of this workshop is to bring together papers that explore the relation of recognition and poverty, and how (critical) theories of recognition can be utilized to enhance our understanding, evaluation and critique of poverty and social inequalities. This also includes issues of recognition in the production of poverty knowledge and in poverty research. Another possible topic is the relation of recognition to other critical normative concepts such as reification, alienation or invisibility in respect to issues of poverty. Furthermore, papers can explore anti-poverty policies, development aid and duties towards the (global) poor. Critical examinations of reflections on poverty and related issues in the work of past and present thinkers of recognition (e.g. Fichte, Hegel, Kojeve, Fanon, Taylor, Fraser, Honneth) are welcomed.

This workshop hopes to contribute to the ongoing and expanding debate about recognition in ethics, political and social philosophy by focusing on poverty, which is one highly important social and global challenge. Contributions from social and political theory are also welcomed as are papers that combine conceptual and empirical work.​

The workshop will run over two days and each speaker will have 75 minutes (about 25 minutes for presentation and 50 minutes for discussion). Draft papers are shared in advance and speakers can focus on the key points of their paper in the oral presentation. A peer-reviewed publication of selected papers is envisaged in an edited volume on the workshop topic in the Springer Book Series Philosophy and Poverty. We expect that participants consider this option to publish their paper presented at the Workshop.

There is no conference fee. Coffee breaks and two lunches will be covered by the CEPR. Unfortunately we cannot offer any subsidy for travel and accommodation costs.

If you are interested in participating please submit an extended abstract of 750 words ready for blind review (in a .doc or .odt file) to gottfried.schweiger@sbg.ac.at. Deadline for submissions is 1 May 2018, and decisions will be communicated within two weeks after this deadline. It is expected that draft versions of the papers are shared two weeks before the workshop.

If you have any question about the workshop please contact Gottfried Schweiger at gottfried.schweiger@sbg.ac.at 

The Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research (CEPR) of the University of Salzburg organizes an annual Salzburg Workshop in Philosophy and Poverty. In 2018 the workshop will focus on the topic of "Poverty and the Family". The invited speaker for this workshop is Jonathan Wolff (Oxford), who will give a talk on "Poverty, Social Expectations, and the Family". The workshop will run over two days and the program will include nine papers. The abstracts of all talks will be published soon on this site. Draft papers will be shared among all registered participants two weeks in advance.

​Guests are welcomed but need to register via e-mail until 1 May 2018 at gottfried.schweiger[a]sbg.ac.at

For more information please visit the workshop's website: www.workshop-poverty-philosophy.org/

Thursday 17 May 2018

10:00 Jonathan Wolff (Oxford): Poverty, Social Expectations, and the Family​

11:15​ BreakBreak

11:30 Anke Snoek and Dorothee Horstkotter (Maastricht): How poverty compromises agency: the case of substance dependent parents

12:45 Lunch

13:30​ Mar Cabezas (Complutense de Madrid): Children raising children: Parental responsibilities and paradoxes in the intergenerational transmission of poverty​

14:45 Break

15:00 Erik Magnusson (Pompeu Fabra)​: Enhancement, Equality, and Parental Partiality​

16:15 Break

16:30 Karin Kuhlemann (University College London): Poverty and the moral limits to the right to procreate

17:45 End of Day 1

Friday 18 May 2018

9:30 Alicia-Dorothy Mornington and Alexandrine Guyard-Nedelec (Panthéon Sorbonne): The case of British forced adoption – is poverty eroding parental rights?

10:45 BreakBreak

11:00 Douglas MacKay (North Carolina): Parenting the Parents: The Ethics of Parent-Targeted Paternalism  in the Context of Anti-Poverty Policies​

12:15 Lunch

13:00 Anders Herlitz and Adel Daoud (Gothenburg and Rutgers): Economic stability, poverty and fairness​

14:15 Break

14:30 Jordan Thomson (Toronto): Having it Good without Being Bad​

15:45 End of Day 2

Venue​

​The workshop will take place at the Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research. The Centre is located in the city centre of Salzburg. The address of the Centre is Mönchsberg 2a, 5020 Salzburg, Austria.

Workshop: Spatial In/justice: Linking Perspectives from Geography and Philosophy

organized by Andreas Koch (Social Geography, Salzburg) and Gottfried Schweiger (Political Philosophy, Salzburg)

13. & 14 September 2018, University of Salzburg
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This workshop is part of the 2018 Salzburg Conference in Interdisciplinary Poverty Research on Space and Poverty

The aim of this workshop is to facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion and exchange of ideas and knowledge between geography and philosophy on issues of spatial in/justice. Spatial in/justice is certainly of high interest to both disciplines, whether it be in the form of poverty, inequality, exclusion, marginalization or oppression or issues of rights, morality, agency or knowledge production regarding spaces. Both disciplines have produced valuable insights on these issues over the last decades and yet it seems as if they are rather separated from each other. This workshop is dedicated to explore how geographical and philosophical concepts, theories, insights and methods can learn, enrich or even criticize each other to help us to better understand spatial in/justice but also to construct better practices and policies to overcome them. This workshop is open to several different conceptual and methodological approaches and theoretical backgrounds within geography and philosophy (e.g. Structuralism, Marxism, Critical Theory, Liberalism...).

• Questions and topics that might be explored are, among others,
• Concepts, (critical) theories, knowledge, and constructions of spatial in/justice
• Spatial in/justice and spatial inequalities (e.g. poverty, exclusion, exploitation)
• Rights and spaces, e.g. the right to the city Issues of normativity in geography and geographical knowledge
• Space(s) in theories of global and social in/justice Intersections of spatial in/justice with race, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship or class
• Politics and policies of spatial in/justice Subjectivity, agency and spatial in/justice

Interested colleagues are invited to submit an abstract of 500 words as a .doc or .odt file to gottfried.schweiger@sbg.ac.at before March 31st 2018. Decisions will be communicated within two weeks. It is expected that draft papers are shared two weeks in advance of the workshop. A publication of the papers presented in this workshop is envisaged.

Please be aware: This workshop is part of the 2018 Salzburg Conference in Interdisciplinary Poverty Research on Space and Poverty. The organizers can offer a waiver of the conference fee (100€) for paper givers in this workshop. Coffee breaks, two lunches and the conference dinner are provided but participants need to cover their travel expenses and accommodation.

More information about the conference can be found on this website: www.poverty-conference.org

As part of its research program "Enacting "Catholic Social Tradition" the Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research together with the University of Notre Dame and Trinity College Dublin organzied a workshop on "Catholic Social Teaching and the Capabilities Approach". The workshop took place on 15 and 16 December 2017 at Trinity College Dublin. Among the speakers were Catriona Russell (Trinity College), Severine Deneulin (Bath) and Tina Beattie (Roehampton). This workshop is part of a book project on the topic of Integral Human Development, which will be published in the book series of the Kellogg Institute with University of Notre Dame Press.

In mid October, CEPR Senior Scientist Helmut P. Gaisbauer spent his first field research week in Dumbrăveni/Romania. There he aims to shed light on the obstacles and possibilities as well as effectiveness of a social project that supports children of poverty-stricken families in their regular access to education. This project called A.C.E.S. offers after-school care to a small number of about 20 children mostly with a Roma background living in a slum-like neighborhood at the outskirts of Dumbrăveni. The most important feature of A.C.E.S. is the long-term commitment of funds for at least 8 years to really make a difference.

The VALUE-DUMBRAVENI research project supports this initiative by providing insights into the obstacles and chances of reducing poverty amongst the target population, i.e. mainly in strengthening children through support and enhancing their educational efforts.

In recent years, CEPR contributed extensively to the discourse on child poverty and severe, absolute forms of poverty in affluent societies which are intersecting in this case. This way, CEPR generated insights in particular forms of poverty that can be framed with the concept of fundamental poverty. Fundamental poverty is a form of poverty that coins the whole of a human existence. Child poverty shapes the very identity of and the manner how the children interact with the world in a long-lasting way. Absolute poverty is severe poverty that denies basic human needs. These forms of poverty are “fundamental” because they shape the basic code of a life in a long-lasting manner, influencing daily routines, basic opportunities and fundamental decisions.
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In his recent fieldwork, Helmut did a series of interviews with supported children, with the project’s staff and with representatives of the local schools in order to understand what factors influence school attendance, how the educational systems’ efforts to support children with special needs and marginalized children work, to learn about the children’s backgrounds and performance and how the children experience A.C.E.S. The next field trip is planned for end of March 2018.

​CEPR Senior Scientist Helmut P. Gaisbauer has been appointed president of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Ethics ifz Salzburg by September 1 2017. He follows Prof Clemens Sedmak who has led the ifz from 2009 to 2017 and is now full professor of Social Ethics at the University of Notre Dame/Indiana.

As an international research centre for social ethics, the ifz researches into questions of how to improve people’s lives. It is a place for interdisciplinary approaches on socially relevant issues based on the values of human dignity, common good, solidarity and sustainability. The ifz is a platform for ideas and solutions that serve our society, the church and the economy; it wants to achieve that goal through its academic work and by providing a meeting place, where academics and non-academics have the opportunity to meet (www.ifz-salzburg.at).
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The ifz is closely cooperating with the CEPR – e.g. in a consultancy assignment by the state Salzburg concerning the realization of European Social Funds projects in the period 2017-2021, by hosting a common research seminar series or common public events aiming at public debate and knowledge transfer.

The Centre for Ethics and Poverty Reserach (CEPR) is happy to welcome Constanze Binder as a Visiting Fellow in 2018. She will stay at the CEPR from April to June 2018 and work on a project on the relation of freedom, inequality and democracy.
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Dr. Constanze Binder is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, a Co-Director at the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics and Director of the research master programme in Philosophy and Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Constanze Binder studied Economics and Environmental System Science at Graz University and obtained a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Groningen on the value of freedom for a person’s identity and agency. Constanze has previously taught in the Philosophy Departments of Groningen and Leiden University, worked at the Economics Department of the University of Osnabrück, and contributed to projects on climate change for the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Environment and the Austrian Human Dimensions Program. Constanze’s research focuses on the value of freedom in human development. She worked on the conceptualization and measurement of freedom and responsibility in welfare economics and political philosophy.

Freedom, Inequality and Democracy

The objective of this research project is to explore the relationship between (material) inequality and freedom. More specifically, the goal is to question the suggested conflict between freedom and equality and investigate under which conditions (material) inequality can undermine freedom in general and democratic freedom in particular. For this purpose, the project is divided into three parts.
In the first part, the literature on (in-) equality is explored and the literature on the relationship between inequality and other concepts, such as poverty, human well-being, social cohesion and human development are surveyed. In the second part, the question is raised whether/under which conditions inequality can undermine human freedom. In this part the specific focus will be on the capability approach and under which conditions material inequality in society can undermine human well-being understood as the freedom/capabilities to pursue the life paths a person has reason to value. In part three of the project, the focus will be on specific variant of such freedoms that are at risk to be undermined by increasing (material) inequality, namely democratic freedoms. Part four of the project explores different policy proposals, such as an unconditional basic income or inheritance taxation to constrain material inequality and its negative impact on human well-being and democratic freedom.

The Centre for Ethics and Poverty Reserach (CEPR) is happy to welcome Małgorzata Dereniowska as our first Visiting Fellow in 2018. She will stay at the CEPR from January to April 2018 and work on a project on the relation of environmental sustainability and poverty alleviation.

Małgorzata holds a PhD in Philosophy, MA in Social Communication, and BSc in Ecology from Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland). She is co-editor of special issues for Ethics in Progress and International Journal of Sustainable Development, and of the World Economics Association Pedagogy Blog “Perspectives on Economics & Society.” She is co-author of Positional Analysis for Sustainable Development: Reconsidering Economics, Policy and Accounting with Judy Brown and Peter Söderbaum (Routledge 2017). She serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education and Environment, Space, Place. She has written on a variety of topics in ethics, environmental thought, normative aspects of economics, and sustainable development.

Environmental sustainability for poverty alleviation: Ethical and philosophical aspects

The idea of sustainable development, or sustainability, was developed to address the mutual causality between socio-economic inequalities and environmental degradation. In essence, sustainability is a concept of intergenerational justice aimed at poverty alleviation and at minimizing environmental burdens in a way that allows meeting the essential needs of people now and in the future. It emphasizes the need to integrate social, environmental, and economic dimensions of development and well-being, implying collective responsibility.
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Attention to the environmental aspect of poverty broadens the scope of normative approaches towards poverty and social exclusion. It also strengthens the case for ethically-founded approaches to alleviation strategies. But sustainability has a wide variety of meanings and interpretations, and necessitates trade-offs in balancing the well-being of contemporaries and future people. As a result, different views of sustainability render different metrics and indicators for public policy, and leave open the question about what type of relationship between well-being and poverty alleviation is implied by the concept of sustainability.
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In this project I seek to answer this question, and examine the importance of an environmental dimension of poverty broadly construed. To this end, I analyze major economic and philosophical approaches to sustainability, arranged within the needs-satisfaction, freedom-oriented, and preference-based approaches. In the course of investigation, I will address the following questions: Is focusing on human needs enough for defining sustainability? Can sustainability be a functioning among others, or should we rather think of it as a meta-capability? Is introducing the idea of collective capability and collective moral responsibility enough to provide a satisfying framework for concrete decision making in terms of sustainability? My main objective is to lay out the elements of multidisciplinary approach to poverty alleviation that addresses sustainability justice, and individual and collective aspects of responsibility in a multicultural world under environmental uncertainties.