Measuring Respect: can children’s social equality be expressed in policy?

Posted on

The next meeting of the research group will take place Wednesday, 18th of January, 2017, 1-2 pm in Conference Room 2.15, CMB

Philip Cook, lecturer in Political Theory, will discuss the development of a new research proprosal.

 

Philip Cook: Measuring Respect: can children’s social equality be expressed in policy?

Stigma, discrimination, and marginalisation stain our social relations. These stains may persist even if our societies become more equal materially. Social equality requires that individuals, groups, and social institutions treat all with respect, in addition to ensuring all receive equal shares of society’s goods. But our understanding of social equality is limited: our conception of respect is vague; our devices for promoting it crude; and our sense of who should be treated as social equals hazy. This project interrogates a pressing social problem that embodies these complexities: ‘can we measure the respect children experience in schools?’ The project aims to clarify our normative and empirical understanding of respect; to develop a feasible metric for respect that is philosophically and administratively robust; to probe the boundaries of social equality by challenging the current omission of children. The presentation will set out the rationale for the project and invite feedback on how it may be developed for future grant applications.


Comments are closed.