Join us for this Institute of Asian Research event on the state of ethics in Mongolia\, with special guest Jade Richards\, a PhD student fr om the School of Anthropology at the University of Kent\, UK. With welcome remarks by SPPGA Professor Julian Dierkes.
In Mongolia\, a fundamenta l breakdown of trust between politicians and electorates has recently given rise to a widespread sense of disaffection among ordinary citizens. Many p eople feel that the political landscape proposed by democratization has beg un to run counter to their sense of moral order in particularly stark ways. As a result\, they reject certain dimensions of democracy\, such as freedo m\, that fail to live up to their material and ethical expectations. For te achers of moral and civic education\, this has presented a unique challenge .
Anchored in insights from Jane Richards' evolving research on Lifel ong Education in Ulaanbaatar\, this talk explores the question of why democ ratic freedom has become the object of so much contention\, and the attempt s of moral and civic education teachers to rethink the meaning of freedom a nd the practice of civic virtue in their classrooms. She pays particular at tention to the ethical factors that structure their view of how best to rel ate to themselves and others\, as well as to values\, objects and instituti ons. This involves thinking about people’s own criteria for evaluating demo cracy on a more ethical scale than is usual in political analysis. Cruciall y\, she uses civic education as the grounds from which to better understand how larger shifts are understood by ordinary citizens and subsequently ref ashioned into critiques and new political forms on the ground. This not onl y reflects emerging political sensibilities as they are locally constructed through what is considered ethically correct\, but also as a product of an d reaction to the current unethical perception of politicians.
Bio: J ade is a final year PhD student from the School of Anthropology at the Univ ersity of Kent\, UK. This talk is part of her larger thesis project titled ‘Creative Citizenship: Ethics\, Expectation and Lifelong Education in Ulaan baatar’. Based on 18 months of fieldwork at Mongolia’s largest Non-formal a nd Lifelong Education Centre\, her research explores the diverse array of c lasses designed to equip unemployed adults with the ‘traditional’ knowledge \, practical skills and ethical dispositions considered necessary to meet t he rapidly changing demands of everyday urban life. Jade is currently at UB C as a visiting international research student working along Dr. Julian Die rkes to write about the relationship between ethical self-cultivation and d emocracy in contemporary Ulaanbaatar.
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