Lauren Bialystok, Authenticity and Social Justice (Ethics@Noon)

Ethics at Noon

Event poster with cancelled over the text

Per University of Toronto COVID-19 instructions, this event is cancelled until further notice.

Authenticity and Social Justice

When discussions of social justice hinge on the politics of identity, as they currently seem to, we rely on unreflective assessments of authenticity to verify people’s identities. But these determinations can be arbitrary and yield contradictory intuitions.  I use two case studies to illustrate this problem: Joseph Boyden, whose indigeneity was more or less revoked, and the CAMH Gender Identity Clinic for children that was recently closed down.  In the first case, social justice advocates sided against Boyden, arguing that he was not authentically indigenous and therefore should not have the authority to continue representing indigenous Canadians.  In the second case, the clinic was censured for supposedly failing to recognize the authenticity of transgender children, which social justice advocates are loath to question.  Yet both cases involve an elusive internal identity that resists empirical or political confirmation.  The demands of progressiveness, or allyship to vulnerable communities (such as indigenous peoples and trans people), appear to pull in opposing directions on these hot-button issues, with potentially far-reaching consequences.  I use theories of authenticity to analyze the assumptions that give rise to these political intuitions, and argue for an ethics of difference that is less tethered to judgments of identity.

☛ please register here

Lauren BialystokLauren Bialystok
University of Toronto
Social Justice Education

Wed, Apr 1, 2020
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin