The goal of this discussion is to examine shame as a social mechanism. When, why, and how do we shame each other? Who profits from shame? Who maintains power or gains power through shame? When is shame valid, and when is it simply mean and cruel? Or utterly pointless? How is shame delivered in the age of big data?
The urgency of this conversation is multifaceted. The proliferation of shame-based strategies in politics, the rise of billion dollar social media companies that profit from vicious online interactions, and the spread of automated scoring systems that hire or deny jobs, assess public school teachers, or decide on sentencing lengths of criminal defendants with no explanation of systems of appeal are three among many.
Shame is a growing force that effects our interpersonal and institutional interactions. What are its long term individual and cultural consequences?
All Helix Center events are free and open to the public, including this one!
Roundtables are streamed live our website and the recording remains available after the event events.
This is a past event that happened on 2:30pm on Saturday, May 18th, 2019.
Participants
Joseph Adamson
Joseph Adamson is Professor Emeritus of English at McMaster University. His current area of research focuses on the relevance of Silvan Tomkins’ affect and script theory to literature, in particular how affective and shame dynamics inform and shape a writer’s life and work. He has written on the role of shame in a variety of... read more! »
Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis is University Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry, and Director of the Institute for the Study of Child Development at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He is also Professor of Psychology, Education, Biomedical Engineering, and Social Work at Rutgers University. In addition he serves on the Executive Committee of the Center for... read more! »
Cathy O’Neil
Cathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was a postdoc at the MIT math department, and a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then switched over to the private sector, working as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the... read more! »
Richard A. Shweder
Richard A. Shweder is a cultural anthropologist and the Harold Higgins Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. degree in social anthropology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University in 1972, taught a year at the University... read more! »