The Program for Public Discourse has partnered with the Kidzu Children's Museum for a new event series. “Let’s Talk About It” is a series of sessions designed to explore difficult topics and provide tools to families and children in grades 2-5 to practice and promote civil discourse in the next generation. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.

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Hard conversations about difficult topics can lead to hard and difficult feelings. Kidzu is teaming up with Breaking Taboo to arm your family with the tools needed to work through challenging emotions, and to ‘smooth out’ situations where a conversation has already digressed into troubling territory. Get hands-on and proactive as we work though tricky topics around feelings and mental health. Breaking Taboo is a non-profit with a mission of bolstering education and eradicating taboos around mental health and suicide prevention.

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Participants have free access to play at Kidzu during the program.

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Participants will receive a free return visit to Kidzu and coupons for Alfredo’s Pizza Villa. Those who attend all five sessions will receive a badge and special gift!

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Register Here

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Presented in coordination with the East Chapel Hill High School Civil Discourse project and made possible with support from NC Humanities.

Date: May 3, 2023

Times: 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM

Audience: Public

Venue: Kidzu's Children Museum

The Debate Balloon is an engaging role-playing group activity where participants assume the persona of historical figures from the distant past to recent times. The premise of the story is that the world below has ended and the players find themselves on a balloon ascending to a new world. However, the balloon starts going down instead of up. The main solution open to the participants is to decide who gets to stay on the balloon. Each player introduces their character and gives a case for why they should stay. At the end of each round, one person leaves the balloon while still being able to vote in subsequent rounds. The game continues until the final individual has been determined!

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This event is hosted by PPD's Agora Fellows.

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This is a CLE event and includes free food!

Date: April 3, 2023

Times: 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Audience: Students

Venue: Room 2518 A in the Carolina Union

The Agora Fellows present “Political Speed Dating” an event to discuss big ideas, meet new people, and engage in discourse surrounding the issues of the day. This will be your chance to fire off an uninterrupted hot take to your fellow UNC students! Come meet your political soulmate on Friday March 31st at 5 PM in Room 3411 in the Carolina Union. The event will consist of rotating 90 second pairings where one person has the opportunity to give any opinion on any issue. This is your opportunity to meet people who share your viewpoints or have the chance to be persuaded on an issue you may disagree with! Agree or disagree, this event will be a fun way to engage with contemporary issues outside of online echo chambers! We hope to see you there!

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This is a CLE event and includes free food!

Date: March 31, 2023

Times: 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Audience: Students

Venue: Room 3411 in the Carolina Union

Register Here

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On March 22nd at 5:30 p.m., the UNC Program for Public Discourse hosts a hybrid Abbey Speaker Series event on the relationship between abortion and faith.

Date: March 22, 2023

Times: 05:30pm – 07:00pm

Audience: Public

Venue: FedEx Global Education Center, Nelson Mandela Auditorium; Online

Maharat Ruth Friedman is a member of the inaugural class of Yeshivat Maharat, which is the first institution to ordain Orthodox women as spiritual leaders and halakhic (legal) authorities. She serves as Maharat (clergy) at Ohev Sholom - The National Synagogue in Washington, DC, where she performs all traditional rabbinic functions. She is also a proud member of the Washington Boards of Rabbis and sits on the Executive Committee of the board of the International Rabbinic Fellowship, of which she is also a member. Maharat Friedman is also a founding member of the Beltway VAAD. She and her husband Yoni are the proud parents of Ezra, Jobe and Evie, and their four-legged princess, Cocoa.

Lauren W. Reliford, MSW is a passionate and mission-oriented public and population health professional focused on bridging the gap between social theory, spirituality, research, and practice and bringing them to the forefront of our major policy decisions. She currently serves as Political Director for Sojourners, an ecumenical Christian organization that seeks to discover the intersection of faith, politics, and culture through their magazine and putting that faith into action for social justice through our mobilizing work.

Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of Arriving at Amen and Building the Benedict Option. She is a convert from atheism to Catholicism who has worked as a policy analyst, a data journalist, and a curriculum developer at an organization teaching “defensive driving for your brain.” Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Plough, Comment, First Things, America, and other outlets. She runs Other Feminisms, a substack community focused on the dignity of dependence.

Mara Buchbinder is a professor and vice chair of the department of social medicine at the UNC School of Medicine. She is also an adjunct professor of anthropology. She is a medical anthropologist whose work focuses on how patients, families, and healthcare providers navigate social and ethical challenges resulting from changes in medical technology, law, and health policy. Dr. Buchbinder is the author of Scripting Death: Stories of Assisted Dying in America and All in Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain, as well as the co-author of Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Join Professor Ifeoma Ajunwa for a fireside chat with Professor Nita Farahany as they discuss Professor Farahany’s new book, “The Battle for Your Brain: Defending Your Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology.” The Program for Public Discourse is co-sponsoring this event with the Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program.

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March 21, 2023 from 12 – 1 pm in Room 5042 at UNC School of Law (Van Hecke-Wettach Hall)

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Lunch will be served so please RSVP to ensure an accurate head count.

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For those who can’t attend in person, a Zoom webinar link will be sent at the time of registration.

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Register here

Date: March 21, 2023

Times: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

Audience: Public

Venue: Room 5042 in Van Hecke-Wettach Hall

Nita Farahany, author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending Your Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology(St. Martin’s Press 2023), is the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law & PhilosophyandFounding Director of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society. She is a widely published scholar on the ethics of emerging technologiesand frequent commentator for nationalmedia and radioand keynote speaker at eventsincluding TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the World Economic Forum, and judicial conferencesworldwide.From 2010-2017, she served as a Commissioner on the U.S. Presidential Commission for the Study ofBioethical Issues. She currently serves on the National Advisory Councilfor the National Institute for Neurological Disease and Stroke, as an elected member of the American Law Institute, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, immediate past President of the International Neuroethics Society, ELSI advisor to the NIH Brain Initiativeand to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, member of the Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disordersand the Standing Committee on Biotechnology Capabilities and NationalSecurity Needsfor the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the Global Future Council on Frontier Risksfor the World Economic Forum. She is the Reporter for the Drafting Committee on updating the Uniform Determination of Death Committeefor the Uniform Law Commission(ULC), as well as a ULC Commissioner. Farahany is a co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Law and the Biosciencesand on theBoard of AdvisorsforScientific American. She also serves on scientific and ethics advisory boards for corporations. Farahany holds an AB (Genetics) from Dartmouth College, an ALM (Biology) from HarvardUniversity, and a JD, MA, and Ph.D. (Philosophy) fromDuke University.

Dr. Ifeoma Ajunwa, J.D., Ph.D., is an award-winning tenured law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law where she is the Founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program at UNC Law. She is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University since 2017 and a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School (2022-2023). She was a 2019 recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and a 2018 recipient of the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). Professor Ajunwa's book, The Quantified Worker, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in April 2023.

On March 21, the Program for Public Discourse Agora Fellows will host a public student forum on the topic of abortion. The event will be facilitated by Braver Angels ambassador Leah Sargeant who will also serve as a panelist for the Abbey Speaker Series event on Faith and Abortion on March 22.

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This debate will utilize the Braver Angels format. As described on their website: "A Braver Angels Debate is a highly structured conversation in which a group of people think together, listen carefully to one another, and allow themselves to be touched and perhaps changed by each other’s ideas. When done well, everyone walks out a little closer to the truth, more aware of the validity in opposing views, and with tighter community relationships."

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Students can register to participate at go.unc.edu/PPDBA. Space is limited.

Date: March 21, 2023

Times: 6:00pm – 8:00pm

Audience: Students Only

Venue: Room 3408 in the Carolina Union

Register Here for Zoom!

On February 24 at 3:00pm, the Program for Public Discourse kicks off the spring semester with an Abbey Speaker Series hybrid event on the future of affirmative action. A panel of educators and scholars will discuss what is next for affirmative action in higher education after the Supreme Court’s ruling. This event is co-sponsored by the UNC General Alumni Association.

Date: February 24, 2023

Times: 03:00 pm – 04:30 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Frank Porter Graham Student Union, The Auditorium;

Glenn C. Loury is Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University. He holds the B.A. in Mathematics (Northwestern) and the Ph.D. in Economics (M.I.T). As an economic theorist he has published widely and lectured throughout the world on his research. He is also among America’s leading critics writing on racial inequality. He has been elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association, as a Member of the American Philosophical Society and of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, and as a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

John McWhorter, teaches linguistics at Columbia University, as well as Western Civilization and music history. He specializes in language change and language contact, and is the author of The Missing Spanish Creoles, Language Simplicity and Complexity, and The Creole Debate. He has written extensively on issues related to linguistics, race, and other topics for Time, The New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and elsewhere, and has been a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. For the general public he is the author of The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Language Hoax, Words on the Move, Talking Back, Talking Black,and other books, including Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He hosts the Lexicon Valley language podcast, has authored six audiovisual sets on language for the Great Courses company, and has written a twice-weekly newsletter for the New York Times since August 2021.

Rachel F. Moran is Distinguished and Chancellor’s Professor of Law at UC Irvine. Previously, she was the Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law and Dean Emerita at UCLA and the Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law at UC Berkeley. Moran is past President of the Association of American Law Schools, and in 2012, President Obama appointed her to the Permanent Committee of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise. As the American Bar Foundation’s inaugural Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law, Moran launched “The Future of Latinos in the United States: Law, Opportunity, and Mobility” with Robert L. Nelson in 2015. Moran has published extensively on issues of educational equity, racial equality, and Latinx law and policy, including three recent articles on affirmative action in higher education.

Theodore M. Shaw (Ted) is the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil Rights. Shaw teaches Civil Procedure and Advanced Constitutional Law. His research areas include the Fourteenth Amendment, affirmative action, housing policies regarding fair housing. Shaw attended Columbia University Law School, practiced as a Trial Attorney in the Honors Program of the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. He joined the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) where he worked for over 26 years. Shaw directed LDF’s education docket and in 2004, became its fifth Director-Counsel. Shaw previously taught at the University of Michigan Law School, where he played a key role in initiating a review of its admissions policy that was later upheld in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003 by the Supreme Court.

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Date: February 10, 2023

Times: 1:00pm – 2:00 PM

Audience: Public

Venue: The Carolina Club

Register Here

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How can the United States try to make amends for its original sin? What is owed to the ancestors of slaves and the inheritors of structural inequality? Which policies might best serve those endeavors? The Program for Public Discourse’s Debating Public Policy Series invites Duke public policy professor, William Darity, and Harvard law professor, Randall Kennedy, to deliberate these and other questions related to the theme of reparations, moderated by UNC law professor, Osamudia James.

Date: December 8, 2022

Times: 03:00 pm – 04:30 pm

Audience: Public

Venue: Zoom

William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. He has served as chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and was the founding director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke. Previously he served as director of the Institute of African American Research, director of the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, director of the Undergraduate Honors Program in economics, and director of Graduate Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Randall Kennedy is Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. He was born in Columbia, South Carolina. For his education he attended St. Albans School, Princeton University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia and the Supreme Court of the United States.

Osamudia James joined the UNC School of Law faculty in 2021. Her writing and teaching interests include education law, race and the law, administrative law, and torts. James is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and popular press commentary exploring the interaction of law and identity in the context of public education. Her work has appeared in the NYU Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, and the Minnesota Law Review, among others, as well as in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post.

The Center for Faculty Excellence and the Program for Public Discourse are excited to present a new workshop series aimed at engaging with “Wicked Issues” in the classroom. Wicked issues, or wicked problems, are characterized by their complexity, their lack of clear solutions, and their tendency to place our highest values in competition with each other.

Join us on December 7 for the last session of the three part workshop series. In this interactive session for instructors titled "Working on Wicked Issues in Your Classroom", participants will work individually and with colleagues to troubleshoot the wicked issues that arise in their own classrooms. We will also begin to develop classroom activities that will push students to engage in more nuanced, complex thinking around divisive topics in their disciplines. Participants should come with a wicked issue in mind to discuss with the group.

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Register for this event here.

Date: December 7, 2022

Times: 03:00 pm – 04:15 pm

Audience: Educators

Venue: Zoom