MARS Dialogues – AY 2023-24

Macroethics—Addressing our Responsibility to Society

MARS Dialogues are a space where students, faculty, and staff can collaboratively learn, discuss, and understand how engineering technology can enable social justice. They are a collaboration between the SHUTTLE Lab and Mackenzie Warwick & Prof. Aditi Verma in Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences. We are funded by a College of Engineering DEI Faculty Grant. To ensure that you are kept up-to-date about our dialogues, please join our e-mail list by clicking here.

Over the course of the semester we will have three different types of events:  Workshops, Case Studies, and Journal Clubs. In a Workshop, we will have an interactive session intended to give participants the tools you need to implement social justice in their research, education, and life. In a Case Study, a faculty member or graduate student will lead a dialogue about the social, economic, legal, and technical aspects about a specific aerospace or nuclear engineering system. And in a Journal Club, we’ll have separate disciplinary discussions on aerospace and nuclear engineering topics.

During the Winter 2024 semester, MARS Dialogues will be held on Fridays from 12:00 – 1:30 pm. We’ll keep the main discussion to 12-1 pm, so if you need to leave early you’re welcome to do so.  This semester, our plan is to dig deeply into the challenging, but critical, topics of the military-industrial complexmoral disengagement, and organizing.  The specific dates are:

  • January 19 – Introduction
  • February 2 – Military-industrial complex
  • February 16 – Military-industrial complex
  • March 15 – Moral disengagement
  • March 29 – Organizing (building collective power)
  • April 12 – Social

You can see and subscribe to the MARS Dialogue calendar here.

For our collected aerospace macroethics resources, please see this page on the SHUTTLE Lab website.