Symposium 'When life comes between us. Ethics and social relations in everyday life’

23-24 January 2023
Kromme Nieuwegracht 29, Utrecht

Conference program

We take our starting point in what Zigon takes to be the most fundamental of all ethical questions, ‘How is it between us’? As ethics begins with a demand that emerges from a situation within which one finds oneself with others, this points at the relationality of existence, but moreover draws our attention to what actually happens between people in everyday life. This deepens our scope of the everyday from the tacit and routine to the unpredictable and dynamics of learning and change.

During two days, we explore lived experiences of social relations in everyday life, ranging from the ambivalent and struggle, to recognition, transformation and the opening up of new or unexpected possibilities. We consider what these experiences expose on the existential, ethical or political plane, as well as what can or needs to be transformed for being together otherwise.

Program

Plenary Speakers

Jarrett Zigon

Porterfield Chair in Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia, VS.

He is wellknown for his writings on moral breakdown, attunement and relational ethics. His research interests include the anthropology of ethics, problematics of being human, the political, ontological relationality, and thinking anthropology with philosophy. These interests are explored in his most recent books 'Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding' and 'A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community'.

Lone Grøn

Professor with special responsibilities in Anthropology, VIVE, Danish Centre for Social Science Research.

Drawing on phenomenological anthropology and anthropology of ethics and morality, her work considers how we can study and meaningfully speak about the good old age amidst situations of suffering and decline. Research projects include family life with cognitive difference and disability, end of life care provided by volunteer death doulas, and everyday life in dementia care wards.

Carlo Leget

Professor of Care Ethics and chair of the department of Care Ethics, University of Humanistic Studies.

Drawing on care ethics and phenomenology, he works on the normative and existential dimension of care as a political, social and personal phenomenon. Research projects include spiritual care as interdisciplinary work in palliative care, existential conversations for people with early dementia and palliative care patients and families with a migrant background, and meaningful nursing home care.

Rasmus Dyring

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Aarhus University, Denmark.

As philosophical phenomenologist engaging with anthropology, and one of the main contributors to the emerging field of critical phenomenology, he works on conceptions of ethics and community that do justice to the singularity of human existence, and methodological questions pertaining to making "freedom", "the possible" or "the otherwise" the object of study. Research projects include phenomenology of aging and everyday creativity in dementia care.