Dates
5 & 6 July 2024
Location
Universität Hamburg
Von-Melle-Park 8, room 20
in-person only
Registration
All welcome.
Please register by emailing takingsocialnormsseriously@gmail.com
Programme
Note a change to the schedule: the original first talk has been cancelled. We will start at 10:20 instead.
Friday 5 July
9:15 – 10:05
Camilo Martinez (Princeton) – Junk Norms
10:20 – 11:10
Lel Jones (UC Davis) – Micropleasures: Resistance via Affective Social Norms
11:25 – 12:15
Jon Bebb (Liverpool) – Why Be Normal?
12:15 – 13:35
Lunch
13:35 – 14:25
Temi Ogunye (Princeton) – Social Norms, Informal Activism, and the Efficacy of ‘Cancel Culture’
14:40 – 15:30
Setareh Ezzatabadi (Calgary) – Norms, Motivations and Structures: Towards a Motivational Account of Social Practices
15:45 – 17:15
Laura Valentini (LMU Munich) – Personal Sovereignty, Institutional Norms, and Social Critique (keynote)
19:00
Conference dinner
Saturday 6 July
9:30 – 10:20
Giovanni Mariotti (Parma) – Social Norms and Habitual Practices: Rethinking the Artisanal Model
10:35 – 11:25
Jonathan Seglow (Royal Holloway) – Self-Respect as Normative Accountability
11:40 – 12:30
Alex Horne (Sydney) – Quasi-Authoritative Normativity
12:30 – 14:00
Lunch
14:00 – 14:50
Lizzy Ventham (Salzburg) – Social Norms and Private Matters
15:05 – 16:35
Katharina Berndt Rasmussen (Stockholm & IFFS) – Modelling with Social Norms (keynote)
Theme
Social norms have a major impact on our everyday lives – for better or worse. On the one hand, they seem indispensable as tools for cooperation, social stability and/or accountability. On the other hand, the unwritten rules of our society can function to perpetuate inequality and form an obstacle to positive change. We underestimate social norms when we primarily conceive of them as arbitrary and inconsequential norms we happen to accept, such as table setting rules. Instead, this broad category of norms reaches far beyond dinner parties and affects us in much larger ways, from filling in ideas of fairness to determining who gets to speak up.
To take social norms seriously as an important subject of philosophical inquiry, we must start from an accurate and comprehensive picture of what they are and what they mean to us. This requires combining explanations, justifications and criticisms developed from different perspectives. The aim of this conference is to bring together people from different subdisciplines in philosophy with a shared interest in social norms, in order to inspire a joint understanding of these norms and their effects.
This conference is part of the project The Normativity of Conventional Norms, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg under the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder.
Eline Gerritsen 