Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, will come together with Michael Murphy, Founding Principal and Executive Director of MASS Design Group, and Dean Sarah Whiting for a conversation about the 2020 American Academy of Arts & Sciences report, Our Common Purpose. They will discuss voting as both a civic issue and a design issue.
Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at ... view more »
Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, will come together with Michael Murphy, Founding Principal and Executive Director of MASS Design Group, and Dean Sarah Whiting for a conversation about the 2020 American Academy of Arts & Sciences report, Our Common Purpose. They will discuss voting as both a civic issue and a design issue.
Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, is a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. Widely known for her work on justice and citizenship in both ancient Athens and modern America, Allen is the author of The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (2000), Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown vs. the Board of Education (2004), Why Plato Wrote (2010), Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (2014), Education and Equality (2016), and Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. (2017). She is the co-editor of the award-winning Education, Justice, and Democracy (2013, with Rob Reich) and From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in the Digital Age (2015, with Jennifer Light). She is a former Chair of the Mellon Foundation Board, past Chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Michael Murphy is the Founding Principal and Executive Director of MASS Design Group, an architecture and design collective with offices in Boston, Kigali, Poughkeepsie, Santa Fe, Cape Town, and London. As a designer, writer, and teacher, his work investigates the social and political consequences of the built world. Michael’s research and writing advocates for a new empowerment that calls on architects to consider the power relationships of their design decisions, while simultaneously searching for beauty and meaning. Since MASS’s beginnings with the Butaro District Hospital in Rwanda, their portfolio of work has expanded to over a dozen countries and span the areas of healthcare, education, housing, urban development, and more recently, food systems, indigenous sovereignty, and the public monument.
Michael’s 2016 TED Talk, entitled “Architecture that’s built to heal,” invites viewers to question how architecture can be a tool for healing and the construction of dignity. To this end, MASS seeks partnerships and projects that examine our structural systems and how to reconstruct them through our built environment. Michael has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, University of Michigan, and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. Michael is from Poughkeepsie, NY, and holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago.
Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, joined the GSD as Dean in July 2019. She is a design principal and co-founder of WW Architecture, and served as the Dean of Rice University’s School of Architecture from 2010 to 2019.
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