Moving Up Without Losing Your Way

In this talk and Q&A, Jennifer Morton will discuss the ethical costs upwardly mobile students must bear to transform their life circumstances dramatically.

These costs affect their relationships with family and friends, their sense of cultural identity and their place in their community. She argues that these are ethical in so far as they concern those aspects of life that give it value and meaning. Using social science evidence, she will show how these costs result from a complex tangle of economic, cultural and structural factors that unjustly and disproportionately affect disadvantaged students and their communities.

She suggests that we need to offer students a new ethical narrative of upward mobility that recognizes and acknowledges these moral costs. The talk will conclude with some thoughts on how COVID-19 has further impacted this situation.

About the speaker

Jennifer Morton is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Her areas of research focus on philosophy of action, moral philosophy, philosophy of education and political philosophy. She received her PhD from Stanford University and her AB from Princeton University.

Presented as part of the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Learning Speaker Series by Concordia University's Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP)