2023 Course Highlights

• Katie MacDonald (School of Architecture) — Buildings Must Grow: Seeding, Maintaining, and Decommissioning Buildings with Renewable Building Materials
• Amy Ogden (French) — The Good Life?
• Dee Payton (Philosophy) — Philosophy of Abortion and Reproductive Healthcare
• Jess Reia (School of Data Science) — Data Ethics
• Douglas Taylor (Biology) — The DNA Revolution in Science and Society

Ethics, Business, and Leadership

Gabrielle Adams (Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy)—Values-Based Leadership

If you had an opportunity to cheat in this class, and you knew no one would ever find out, would you do it?
Is it OK to use the American flag as toilet paper?

Your Batten tuition is funded by your previous employer; you promise you will return after you graduate. At the beginning of your second year, you receive an amazing job offer from another organization. They are willing to back-pay 50% of your tuition. What would you do?

These questions are similar to the discussions and debates we will have in class. Although perhaps extreme, they nevertheless illustrate the ways in which psychological processes, personal values, and laws and rules can influence our decisions.

Values-Based Leadership is a course designed to familiarize you with some of the dilemmas that you, as a leader, will confront, and to equip you with some of the leadership skills and tools that may be useful to you in your post-MPP career.
Let me be very clear: I do not have the right answer to these questions. My personal answer may differ from yours. This class is not meant to teach you to be more ethical, and I do not claim to be more ethical than anyone else in the class. This class is meant to equip you with skills and tools that you as a leader can use to approach ethical dilemmas and to understand how people in general, on average make decisions about moral issues.

In this course, we will discuss research from philosophy, social psychology, organizational behavior and leadership, and behavioral economics. By the end of this course, you will be able to answer questions such as:

• What is a moral decision?
• What various frameworks can I use to make moral decisions? What are the limits of each?
• How are moral stances or positions developed? Why are moral issues psychologically entrenched?
• Why do moral issues divide people? How might those divides be overcome?
• What roles do organizational cultures, norms, and rules and standards play in fostering or deterring unethical behavior?
• How do structures, institutions, and policies encourage/discourage moral behavior or perpetuate inequality?
• Eileen Chao (Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy)—Behavioral Sciences for Civic Leadership

Roger Martin (McIntire School of Commerce)— Ethics in Business, Accounting &
Auditing

People seldom intentionally choose to act unethically; more frequently, they make choices or behave without accurately recognizing the ethical implications of situations they encounter. Accountants are no different, except that in addition to the “typical” ethical situations faced by others, they also face a unique set of client, regulatory and social pressures that demand well-reasoned ethical responses. We will study ethical considerations in a wide range of business contexts to recognize and consider ethical situations faced by individuals, organizations and their leaders, and especially accountants; we will focus on mechanisms designed to improve ethical decision making. In our study we will focus on (1) improving our critical thinking skills, (2) applying our critical thinking skills within ethical frameworks and professional rules and (3) applying analyses to real-life and fictitious cases to practice our ethical decision making.

Charles Mathewes (Religious Studies)—Business, Ethics & Society

This course aims to “Familiarize students with philosophical and theological frameworks for interpreting and evaluating human activity in the marketplace.” It will engage philosophical sources to explore the ethical contours of capitalism, paying particular attention to questions about private property, just distribution of goods, and the relationship between self-interest and the common good. In addition to classical theorists such as John Locke, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx, this course also will take up Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theological and moral perspectives. It will use all these philosophical and theological perspectives to reflect upon questions about the relationship between culture, moral values, and the market, including questions about corporate responsibility, finance, marketing, and consumption.

Ethics, Culture, and History

Katia Dianina (Slavic)—Good and Evil in Russian Culture

Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Lisa Dobrin (Anthropology)—Language Shift, Death, and Revitalization

In the early 1990s, a dramatic shift took place in the discipline of     linguistics. After decades of scientific detachment in the interest of discovering the abstract universal principles underlying language structure, dire predictions about the future of linguistic diversity suddenly captured linguists’ attention and galvanized a disciplinary commitment to document and preserve endangered languages before they die out. Where did this movement “to save what can yet be saved” of dying native life ways come from? What makes it so compelling to the diverse participants and stakeholders involved (linguists, members of heritage communities, funding agencies, international organizations, the general public)? What kind of obstacles do language preservation projects repeatedly encounter, and why do they do so? This seminar explores the endangered languages movement as an instance of the western “will to preserve”. In particular, we will treat it as a historically situated cultural phenomenon in which issues of ethics come to the fore.

Ethics and Literature

Marva Barnett (Teaching Resource Center/French)—Les Miserables: Ethics Dilemmas
of Today

In our fast-paced digital world, thinking people still dedicate hours to reading novels, seeing plays, watching movies. Why? In this seminar, we’ll explore the multifaceted appeal of literature, theater, and film by plunging into one great novel: Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. What is it about this story that speaks to people across decades and cultural divides? Why, worldwide, have over 60 million made les Mis the longest-running musical, and what has prompted directors to make 50 film versions of the novel, including the 2012 award-winning musical with live on-set singing?

Les Misérables, moreover, leads us readers to consider a remarkable variety of ethical dilemmas, from the personal to the international. Should Jean Valjean reveal his criminal past to save a stranger, or keep his secret and protect his workers’ financial future? In what ways do his battles with his conscience parallel our own? How just was the criminal justice system for Valjean, and how just is America’s system today? When, if ever, is war defensible? Is revolution necessary for social progress? How glorious and moral is it to fight (and die?) for a cause one believes in? How moral is it to sacrifice oneself for a beloved person?

Tamika Carey (English/Writing Program)—Writing Regret and Repair

Tamika Carey is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in Rhetoric and Composition Studies and specializing in Cultural Rhetorics, African American and feminist rhetorics, Black women’s intellectual histories and writing traditions, and the memoir. My first book, Rhetorical Healing: The Reeducation of Contemporary Black Womanhood (SUNY 2016), is a feminist critique of the discourses and strategies within Black women’s wellness culture throughout the last thirty years.

Mark Edelson (History)—Ethics and Empire in Colonia America

Max Edelson studies the history of British America and the Atlantic world. His research examines space, place, and culture in colonial North America and the Caribbean. 

Mark Edmundson (English)—Literary Ideals

Mark Edmundson is University Professor at the University of Virginia. He teaches courses in Romantic and Modern Poetry, Shakespeare, and Nineteenth Century Philosophy.

Charlotte Matthews (Interdisciplinary Studies)—The Notion and Heft of Home

This course will be an exploration of the connections and disconnects, the fact and fiction, the comfort and anguish of home. In his writings of 1950 Thomas Mann noted,“One of the most important characteristics distinguishing {humans} from all other forms of nature is his knowledge of transitoriness, of beginning and end, and therefore of the gift of time.” Do we invest so much in home as a stay against this knowledge? Why is leaving home so monumental? Why are the homeless often outcasts? Why are there so many clichés about home? Through novels and films, we will explore these questions and more.

Stephanie Moore (Education and Human Development)—Technology, Learning, Systems, and Culture

Stephanie L. Moore, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Instructional Design & Technology in the School of Education and Human Development.

Jeffrey Olick (Sociology and History)—Ethics and Memory

Jeffrey Olick is a cultural and historical sociologist whose work has focused on collective memory and commemoration, critical theory, transitional justice, postwar Germany, and sociological theory more generally.

Sabrina Pendergrass (Sociology)—Race and Ethics in Society

Sabrina Pendergrass is an Associate Professor of African American and African Studies.  Her research and teaching interests include race, inequality, internal migration, cultural sociology, and the U.S. South.

Alison Pugh (Sociology)—Work and Care in an Age of Insecurity: The Ethics of What We Owe Each Other

How has work changed in the last century, and how do these changes affect our selves and, ultimately, our relationships? Scholars have documented massive transformations from mass-production and rewards for loyalty to an emphasis on adaptability and flexibility. Yet these changes have implications for more than how we think about work. This class considers how the organization of work interacts with the way we connect to others and will examine the challenges to ethics mounted by the new “age of insecurity,” in which increasingly temporary relationships at work and in intimacy destabilize conventional ideas about what we owe each other on the job and at home.

The class will start with the latest research on how work has changed, from the rising importance of flexibility, networks and service work to the impact of technological innovation. We will consider how each of these changes bears implications for the self. The latter third of the course will focus on how these changes affect relationships at work and at home and how these changes shape what we might call an ethics of insecurity.

Ethics and Medicine

Mete Civelek (Biomedical Engineering; Medicine)—Biomedical Data Science

Introduces genomics and bioinformatics theory and tools to analyze large scale biological data. Specific topics covered are Introduction to Linux and R statistical programming language, computations on the high-performance computational cluster, analysis of sequencing data with applications in gene expression and protein/DNA interactions, differential expression analysis, pathway and co-expression network analysis.

Claire Cronmiller (Biology)—Human Genetics

What comes to mind, when you think about "human genetics"? Blue eyes? Red hair? Colorblindness? Other heritable disorders? What about cancer? Or, genetic testing? Gene therapy? Forensic analysis? Human migration patterns? Throughout the semester, we'll see how the molecular analysis of the human genome provides not only transformative information about our genome's function, but also increasing opportunities for developing medical applications and for revealing secrets about our historical and evolutionary past. We'll build on the basic genetics principles you mastered in BIOL3010, expanding and adapting them for studying human heredity and gene function. Wherever possible, we'll broaden our discussions to reflect on the ethical dilemmas that continue to arise as our rapidly growing genetic knowledge impacts both individuals and society.

Elizabeth Epstein (Nursing)—Ethics in Nursing Practice

This doctoral-level seminar course is designed to enhance the student’s ability to describe and analyze ethical concepts foundational to nursing practice and utilize a variety of ethical decision-making frameworks to address ethical dilemmas arising from increasingly complex care, use of technology, consequences of policy interventions, and global health issues. Students will be challenged to examine individual and professional values, as well as critically analyze diverse perspectives on various ethical issues. The course emphasizes the DNP’s leadership role in promoting ethical care delivery at all levels of care, from individual to system.

Craig Konnoth (Law)—Medicalization and the Law

Craig Konnoth writes in health and civil rights, as well as on health data regulation. He is also active in LGBT rights litigation, and has filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court and the Tenth Circuit on LGBT rights issues.

Rebecca Stangl (Philosophy)—Theory and Methods for Bioethics

This course aims to provide a theoretical background and a set of methodological tools with which to contextualize and address ethical issues as they arise in bioethical contexts. The first half of the course will be a systematic overview of such theories and tools. The second half of the course will be more hands-on. Using these tools, we will address several live issues in bioethics, such as the distribution of scarce resources such as human organs, commercial and international surrogacy, research ethics and consent, and health disparities as revealed in the recent Covid-19 pandemic. One thing we will pay attention to here are the various context in which these issues arise: personal, institutional, and political.

Ethics and Religion

Elizabeth Alexander (Religious Studies)—Ethics and Theology of the Rabbis

How do I know what to do? None of us learn the difference between right and wrong without a certain amount of trial and error, but a course in ethics supplements (and perhaps eases) some of life’s hard lessons. Ethics is the discipline that teaches people how to deliberate and decide to act in certain ways and to become certain kinds of actors in the world. In this course, students will learn to think about ideal behavior, why one may fail short of realizing it, the values that can guide one when making tough decisions, and the challenge of negotiating between conflicting values. Students will develop their skills as ethical reasoners by engaging resources from classical Judaism.

Ahmed H. Al-Rahim (Religious Studies)—Islamic Ethics

Ahmed H. al-Rahim joined the Department of Religious Studies in 2009. Before coming to the University of Virginia, he served in the Office of Analysis for Near East and South Asia (INR), U.S. Department of State. His research and teaching focus mainly on Arabic and Islamic religious, intellectual, and philosophical history in the Middle Ages.

Matt Hedstrom (Religious Studies)—Religious Diversity and the Common Good

Matt Hedsgtrom is a historian of the United States specializing in religion and culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My central questions probe the intersections of American modernity and Protestant and post-Protestant religious modernity in the United States.

Paul Jones (Religious Studies)—Christianity, Gender, and Sexuality

This class engages debates about Christianity, gender, and sexuality in the past and present. Topics addressed include: biblical treatments of sex, gender, and sexuality; theological views of the human in patristic, medieval, and modern theology; Christianity, feminism, feminist theology and womanist theology; sexuality and sexual ethics; and queer theology.

Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering

Elizabeth Alexander (Religious Studies)—Ethics and Theology of the Rabbis

How do I know what to do? None of us learn the difference between right and wrong without a certain amount of trial and error, but a course in ethics supplements (and perhaps eases) some of life’s hard lessons. Ethics is the discipline that teaches people how to deliberate and decide to act in certain ways and to become certain kinds of actors in the world. In this course, students will learn to think about ideal behavior, why one may fail short of realizing it, the values that can guide one when making tough decisions, and the challenge of negotiating between conflicting values. Students will develop their skills as ethical reasoners by engaging resources from classical Judaism.

Phoebe Crisman (Architecture)—Educating Agents of Change: Integrating Ethics in the Foundation of a New University-Wide Sustainability Major

architectural theory, urbanism and sustainability. Crisman is Director of the Environments + Sustainability track of the Interdisciplinary Major in Global Studies. She also directs the Global Sustainability Minor, which in conjunction with the Major form the UVA Global Sustainability Initiative.

Sanda Iliescu (Architecture)—Creativity and Community: Design Lessons for Young Artists and Architects

Sanda Iliescu’s practice spans the media of painting, drawing, and collage. Outside the studio, she makes murals and installations, some with students at the University of Virginia, where she is Professor of Architecture.

Sarah Kucenas (Biology)—When Good Cells Go Bad

Accordion content 7.

Garrick Louis (Engineering Systems and Environment, Engineering and Society)—Ethics Education for Scientists and Engineers

 

Your former advisor publishes a paper based on your work but does not include you as a co-author because you changed advisors or moved to a new university.

• You notice an error in your data after your paper has been accepted for publication and it is too late to stop it from being published – what should you do?
• After you present your preliminary results at a conference a colleague from another university asks you to share your database with her. You know she is doing research similar to your own, and fear that she might publish her results from the data before you do – what should you say to her?
• You work in a lab that requires you to handle hazardous or potentially infectious materials but you never received any hazardous or infectious materials training. What should you do?
• Your research is on satellite navigation systems for drone aircraft. You believe they would be used only for surveillance activities. You find out that the technology is being used in drones that conduct bombing missions in which civilians are killed. You feel uncomfortable about this but are not sure how to approach your advisor.
• You are concerned about climate change and wonder what role you can play in addressing the problem as an engineer and private citizen. What can you do?
• You notice significant overcharging by your supervisors on the project you are assigned to. You think it is wrong and may even be illegal but you don’t know how to voice your concerns. What should you do?
• You hear about DEI, Sustainability, and Sustainable Development but you don’t know how they are relevant to your work as a scientist or engineer. How can you inform yourself and get involved while contributing positively to your job?
  The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) requires undergraduate Engineering programs to show that their graduates “demonstrate an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility,” and have, “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of Engineering solutions in a global and societal context.” [1]. There is no comparable standard for graduate Engineering education. Furthermore, though Engineering graduate students are routinely engaged in research on subjects like water and sanitation infrastructure for developing communities, nanotechnology and other emerging materials, Bio-Engineering, electronic surveillance, human factors, and proprietary technologies for military applications, they generally receive no formal training in Ethics - either in the ethical conduct of their research and publication, or on the broader societal implications of their work. Indeed, engineers are intimately engaged in the development and integration of engineered systems into society and even into the human body itself, yet they receive no formal training in the ethical implications of this work.
  There are few graduate Engineering courses that address Research Ethics or the broader impacts of Engineering research and development on society and the environment. There are also few Engineering courses that prepare graduate students for the ethical aspects of their careers as Engineers. This course is intended to fill this gap in Graduate Engineering Education.

 

Paxton Marshall (Electrical and Computer Engineering)—Introduction to Engineering and Sustainable Housing Design, Construction, Evaluation

Paxton Marshall received the B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1966, an M.A. in History from the University of Maryland in 1972, the Ph.D. in Education from the University of Chicago in 1979, and the M.E. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia in 1990. Dr. Marshall joined the faculty in 1987 and retired in 2013. He taught courses in electric circuit analysis, electromechanical energy conversion, and electric power, and was responsible for the administration of the undergraduate instructional programs.

Susanne Moomaw (Urban & Environmental Planning, School of Architecture)— Environment and the Economy

Suzanne Morse Moomaw has spent the last three decades observing communities through social, design, and political lens at local, regional, national, and international scales. Her teaching in community economic development challenges students to consider possibilities and create transdisciplinary solutions to the “wicked” problems facing civilization

Tianhao Wang (Computer Science)—Data Privacy

Tianhao Wang research interests include Differential Privacy, Machine Learning Privacy.

Caitlin Wylie (Science, Technology, and Society) and Gianluca Guadagni (Science, Technology and Society) —Ethical Analytics

Experts rely on data analytics to inform decision-making about crucial social issues, such as education, employment, access to loans, healthcare, public safety, and reliable research. However, decision-makers tend to trust the outcomes of data analytics without understanding the complex, black-boxed methods that produced these outcomes, such as statistical models and machine-learning algorithms. This course uses case studies of the social implications of datasets to prepare you to 1) investigate techniques of data analytics to open the techniques’ black boxes and understand how they work in order to decide whether they are trustworthy and 2) ask questions about the ethical implications of these techniques and how we use them to shape each other’s lives in order to judge how to best perform ethical analytics.

You will apply the statistical and ethical analyses that you learn from the case studies discussed in class to interpret case studies that you identify from your own discipline or areas of interest. You will learn through experience that ethics is an integral part of all stages of data analytics, including posing research questions, organizing data, calculating results, and sharing interpretations with relevant audiences, such as through valid and comprehensible visualizations.

Global Ethics and Human Rights

Sahar Akhtar (Philosophy)—Democracy and Membership

Sahar Akhtar is a philosopher and economist, often working at the intersection of these fields.

Kristen Gelsdorf (Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy)—Ethics & Policy in International Humanitarian Assistance

Kirsten Gelsdorf is a professor of practice of public policy and leadership and the Director of Global Humanitarian Policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Gelsdorf brings over 20 years of experience working in the humanitarian sector.

Jeffrey Rossman (History)—Genocide and Ethics

Jeffrey Rossman is an Associate Professor Director, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Jennifer Rubenstein (Politics)—Global Ethics

Jennifer Rubestein is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia specializing in political theory. Her interests include the political role and ethical responsibilities of non-governmental organizations; global justice; non-ideal theory; democratic theory (especially theories of non-electoral representation and advocacy that attend to global inequalities); theories of office, and the role of imagination and experience in politics.

Dariusz Tolczyk (Slavic)—Humanity in Extremis: Facing Evil in the Twentieth Century

Twentieth century will most likely remain one of the most puzzling periods in human history, in which amazing humanitarian progress was coupled with unprecedented barbarity of modern totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and others. The course helps students untangle this paradox by exploring a series of memoirs by survivors as well as essays, films, and other cultural statements. These materials are analyzed in interdisciplinary contexts involving the humanities and social sciences. The students tackle and discuss issues such as: Why and how have modern ideologies motivated and justified crimes against humanity? What kinds of ethical manipulations were performed by Nazism and Communism? Are we no longer vulnerable to these manipulations? Does knowledge of the past evil protect us against repeating history? How are "cultural memories" of extreme atrocities constructed? What priorities are reflected in emphasizing some crimes while deemphasizing others? What ethical, political, and aesthetic criteria have been employed thus far in creating various public narratives of twentieth-century atrocities?.

Tessa Farmer (Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures)—The Global in Situ: Perspectives from the Middle East and South Asia

Tessa Farmer is Associate Professor in the Global Studies Program and Anthropology Department at the University of Virginia. She serves as the Track Director for the Global Studies-Middle East South Asia (GSMS) program. Tessa received her MA (2007) and PhD (2014) in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. She conducted fieldwork in Cairo, Egypt between 2009 and 2018.

Chad Wellmon (German)—Human Dignity: On the Sources and Uses of a Concept

Chad Wellmon is a Professor of German Studies, with appointments in History and Media Studies, at the University of Virginia, where I teach and write about the history of knowledge and information, the history of technology and universities, and media and social theory.

The Institute for Practical Ethics (IPE) announces another round of fellowships.

More info about Teaching Fellowships