“The Audacity of Listening”
Presentation Abstract:
The audacity of listening is a reflection on how by listening I came to recognize aspects of the world in which I was living that had previously been hidden, and to write about the different voice that I identified as an ethic of care. I will speak of hearing and then breaking the silence of women in conversations about morality. And I will recall the moment when I realized that listening becomes an audacious act when we rely on not knowing what we can learn when we listen for not just what people think but what they really think, and when they say what they actually feel and know rather than what they assume others want them to feel and think and know. It was listening to women and to girls that first brought this home to me. And now, with one foot in the arts and one in philosophy, I have written Solstice, a novel where I explore across three generations and several continents the questions: how do you know what’s true and how do you know what you can trust.
Dr. Carol Gilligan will be introduced by Prof. Jonathan Cohen of UC San Diego.
Carol Gilligan is the 2025 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Arts and Philosophy. She has critiqued conventional psychological theories for narrowing the model of personality development and relegating the “care” perspective—which emphasizes human relationships—to a subordinate, gendered status as a feminine moral perspective. By envisioning an enmeshment of the “ethic of justice” and “ethic of care,” Gilligan has established a new academic foundation to address global issues related to care.