Book Talk: Rebels with a Cause

Wednesday, May 7th, 2025 | 5:30pm EST
Hosted at 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, New York, NY

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge, the Center on Modernity in Transition, and the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity on Wednesday, May 7th at 5:30 PM for a book talk with Niobe Way. She will discuss her new book Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture with Carol Gilligan and Shahrzad Sabet. The conversation will focus on what the book teaches us about our oneness as human beings and how we can create a culture that better aligns with human needs. This event builds on the Seminar on Human Oneness which took place on February 6-7, 2025.


Speakers

NIOBE WAY

Dr. Way is Professor of Developmental Psychology at NYU, the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH; pach.org), creative advisor of agapi, and the Principal Investigator on the Listening Project. She is the author of Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture. She was the President of the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA), received her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, her doctorate from the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, and was a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at Yale University in the psychology department.

CAROL GILLIGAN

Psychologist and writer, and her groundbreaking book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development has been translated into 18 languages. With her students, she coauthored and coedited four books on women’s psychology and girls’ development: Meeting at the Crossroads, Between Voice and Silence, Making Connections, and Women, Girls, and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance. At Harvard University, where she was the first Graham Professor of Gender Studies, her award-winning research led to the founding of the university’s Center on Gender and Education. She is now University Professor at New York University and lives with her husband in New York City and the Berkshires.

SHAHRZAD SABET

Dr. Sabet is Co-Director of the Center on Modernity in Transition (COMIT) and a Fellow at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge. Her research and training span a variety of disciplines, including political science, philosophy, economics, and psychology. She has held positions at Princeton University, the University of Maryland, and Harvard University, where she received her PhD, and her work has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times and the Washington Post. She is currently working on a book entitled The Crisis of Identity: The Case for Human Oneness, which argues that only a universal human identity can fundamentally resolve the tensions around group identities, and reconcile the oneness and diversity of humankind.


 
 

The concepts that express our shared humanity are proving inadequate to the challenges we face. Terms such as cosmopolitanism, humanism, and universalism can trigger unease in academic and public discourse, revealing that how we understand our oneness as human beings requires reconsideration. This transdisciplinary seminar gathered an international group of leading thinkers to engage this task. Over the course of the two-day seminar, we addressed a set of dilemmas that surround the concept of human oneness, including the tensions between unity and diversity, universalism and justice, essentialism and constructivism, the secular and the sacred, and human beings and their natural environment. We hope to cultivate a sustained and dynamic community of inquiry on this essential theme.


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