NEH Enduring Questions Course on Ethics and Community

FAIN: AQ-248198-16

University of Kansas Center for Research, Inc. (Lawrence, KS 66045-3101)
Ani Kokobobo (Project Director: September 2015 to June 2019)

The development and teaching of a new undergraduate course on the ethical boundaries of community.

In the proposed course, Ani Kokobobo, assistant professor of Slavic Literatures at the University of Kansas, uses canonical works of nineteenth Russian literature and philosophical works to consider the boundaries of communities through the enduring question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" In Russian culture, as reflected in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, community is understood in capacious and almost universalist terms. We focus on the significant moral responsibility these writers believe community members have toward one another and the challenges of upholding these moral responsibilities. Kokobobo pairs the Russian texts with six distinct ethical philosophies-ethical relativism, egoism, consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, and feminist ethics. Having honed their ethical vocabularies, students spend the last month of this class applying these skills to thinking about the boundaries of our contemporary American communities, with a special focus on racial divisions.