Jennifer Lackey, professor of philosophy at Northwestern College, was awarded the 2023 Horace Mann Medal by Brown College’s Graduate Faculty.
The medal “is given yearly to a Brown Graduate Faculty alumnus or alumna who has made vital contributions in his or her subject, inside or outdoors of academia.” Professor Lackey earned her Ph.D. from Brown in 2000.
In a press release concerning the award, David Christensen, professor of philosophy at Brown College, says:
Lackey is, by any measure, one of many prime mental leaders in her subject. However she can also be a kind of students who has taken extraordinarily significantly her mission to use her scholarly experience outdoors the academy in a manner that contributes to society at giant.
Professor Lackey is the writer of the forthcoming Criminal Testimonial Injustice (Oxford, 2023), The Epistemology of Groups (Oxford, 2021), and Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge (Oxford 2008), together with many articles and other writings. She can also be editor-in-chief of Episteme and co-editor-in-chief of Philosophical Studies.
Along with her tutorial analysis, Professor Lackey has labored extensively with the Northwestern Prison Education Program (previously). From Brown College:
Lackey’s work with the Northwestern Jail Training Program (NPEP) has been transformative, each for these incarcerated and for her personal work in philosophy. NPEP has grown since its launch in 2018 to incorporate 100 incarcerated college students from throughout the state of Illinois and its first cohort of scholars will make historical past this fall once they graduate with bachelor’s levels from Northwestern College.
Pierre James, one among her college students at Stateville Correctional Middle says, “Jennifer Lackey, via her selflessness, has made the unimaginable doable. She entered a spot of distress and created an atmosphere of hope thriving in academia. She breathes life and love into all of us. Due to her constructive power in my life, on a regular basis I’m a greater man than I used to be the day earlier than.” His classmate, Lynn Inexperienced, concurs, saying that “On this tumultuous journey, trying to find data, striving for excellence, we discovered ourselves.”
The influence of this system has been monumental, not just for the scholars enrolled in it, but in addition for his or her households and communities. As Stateville pupil Brandon Perkins says, “My father and my cousin (who was extra just like the older brother I by no means had) went to jail earlier than me, plus a handful of different relations. For me, NPEP is the hammer that may break the generational chain of incarceration that has plagued my household.”
Professor Lackey just lately gained a $300,000 grant from Northwestern to launch a brand new “international venture on epistemic reparations”:
In collaboration with a extremely interdisciplinary group of colleagues, together with historians, journalists, legal professionals, artists, social scientists, and different philosohers, Lackey goals to develop the UN’s framework of human rights in order that it explicitly acknowledges our proper to epistemic reparations, together with the “proper to be recognized”—to have our tales of gross violations of our human rights acknowledged by others. With work located in South Africa, Canada, and Ukraine, in addition to in Chicago and Evanston, the venture will deliver tutorial concept into direct contact with actual world issues.
As a part of the award, Professor Lackey will current her concepts about epistemic reparations in a commencement forum at Brown later this month.
