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Jeffrey Dill Releases New Book on Global Citizenship Education

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Institute Alumni Fellow and Research Director of the Culture of American Families Project Jeffrey Dill released a new book titled, The Longings and Limits of Global Citizenship Education: The Moral Pedagogy of Schooling in a Cosmopolitan Age.

The book offers an empirical account on global citizenship education from the perspective of teachers and classrooms, based on a qualitative study of ten secondary schools in the United States and Asia that explicitly focus on making global citizens.

Dill is Research Assistant Professor of Social Thought in the Templeton Honors College and Co-Director of the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good at Eastern University.

Order the book here, and find out more about the Institute’s scholars here.

 

Culture of American Families Findings Released

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A three-year study of the Culture of American Families by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture identifies four types of family cultures – the Faithful, Engaged Progressives, the Detached, and American Dreamers – that are molding the next generation of Americans.

Each type represents a complex configuration of moral beliefs, values and dispositions – often implicit and rarely articulated in daily life – largely independent of basic demographic factors, such as race, ethnicity, and social class.

Most parenting research of the past 30 years, which undergirds notions of “tiger mothers” and “helicopter parents,” has been based in psychology and focused on parenting styles, said project co-director James Davison Hunter, executive director of the Institute. This study, funded by an $850,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation, goes beyond parenting styles “to tell the complex story of parents’ habits, dispositions, hopes, fears, assumptions and expectations for their children,” Hunter said.

The project findings are being released November 15 in conjunction with a Washington, D.C. conference convening practitioners working with families. The 36-page executive report is available here. Learn more about the project.

Meet Dissertation Fellow Benjamin Snyder

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Benjamin Snyder is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Virginia. He specializes in cultural sociology with interests in time, memory, and emotions. His dissertation focuses on time pressure and the culture of busyness in America. Snyder was recently awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.

Ben says, “The Institute is one of the few places where a young academic can develop professionally without sacrificing wonder, imagination, and the courage to transcend the nearsightedness of today’s academic disciplines.”

Read more about the Institute’s current fellows here.

Meet Graduate Fellow Matthew Puffer

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Matthew Puffer is a doctoral student in Theology, Ethics, and Culture at the University of Virginia. His current research interests include moral anthropology, comparative religious ethics, and religion and public life. Matt recently published “Election in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics: Discerning a Late Revision” in the International Journal of Systematic Theology as well as “Taking Exception to the Grenzfall’s Reception: Revisiting Karl Barth’s Ethics of War” in Modern Theology.

Matt says of the Institute, “The rich exchanges that take place on a regular basis through the Friday seminars at Watson Manor have been invaluable to my own intellectual development. On any given week and regardless of the topic—whether culture, pluralism, religion, or otherwise—these discussions have been invaluable to my own research in religious ethics.”

Read more about the Institute’s current fellows here.

Meet Associate Fellow Anna Kim

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Anna Kim is a PhD candidate in the history of art and architecture at the University of Virginia. She was selected as the sole U.S. graduate student member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, United Kingdom. Kim is also the program coordinator for the National Endowment for the Humanities’s Summer Institute on Leonardo da Vinci, a program coordinated with the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence–Max Planck Institute, Florence, Italy.

Read more about the Institute’s current fellows here.

 

Congratulations to Dissertation Fellow William Hasselberger

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The Institute congratulates Dissertation Fellow William Hasselberger on the successful defense of his dissertation in philosophy, “The Ideals of Agency: Autonomy, Sociality, and Individuality.” Faculty Fellow Tal Brewer was chair of the committee, and Faculty Fellow Chad Wellmon was a committee member. Hasselberger will join the Institute as a 2012-2013 postdoctoral fellow.

Hasselberger says of the Institute, “The space in which one reads, thinks, converses, and writes can have a pronounced impact on one’s work. Having the quiet, patient, and thinking-friendly environment of the Institute has already greatly benefited my dissertation.”

Read more about the Institute’s current fellows here.

Fellows Honored by the American Sociological Association

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The Suzanne Langer Prize for Best Student Paper in the Sociology of Culture section of the American Sociological Association was recently awarded to Dissertation Fellow Christina Simko for “Rhetorics of Suffering: September 11 Commemorations as Theodicy,” which is forthcoming in the American Sociological Review. Dissertation Fellow 
Benjamin Snyder was recognized with an honorable mention for “Culture of Vigilance: Rethinking Clock Time and the Self.”