Dignity Talks

There is a lot of talk these days about gender -- and how we express our gender identity. It's an issue that goes to the core of who we are, so it goes to the heart of human dignity. But how, exactly, do gender stereotypes -- expectations about who we are and how we should act -- affect our sense of our dignity and how we relate to others through dignity? In this episode, Dhriti talks to some of her classmates about how they experience gender stereotypes, then Mika interviews Sydney Rendell, a lawyer who has spent many years litigating cases on behalf of children and young people and who has a lot of insights into how gender stereotypes can affect a child's dignity. Then we hear from Erin and her own reflections about how gender stereotypes and gender based violence and aggression affect the dignity of all of us.

In this episode, Dignity Talks with David Shipler, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and author of many books looking at social justice in a wide range of contexts. Our guest host, Pablo Mezquita-Mendina, wanted to explore how poverty affects a person's dignity, so he reached out to David, whose book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America, had had a big impact on him. In this conversation, David and Pablo explore what dignity means in the context of people struggling to get by, how poverty and homelessness affect a person's sense of self and how they're seen in the world. And what we can all do to protect the dignity of people who are experiencing economic hardship.

AI is everywhere -- especially in our classrooms. But we wanted to know how AI is affecting the dignity of students -- is it helping them to learn more, to grow, to have access to more information and a bigger world? Or is making them dumber -- doing work for them, while allowing them to hide what they haven't learned? Is it destroying the very things education is designed to do -- make us curious about the world and develop our ability to critically manage information? Or is it helping us be more rigorous consumers of information? We wanted to know how students -- and teachers -- think about how AI is affecting the dignity of students. So we asked our former high school teachers -- each of whom has very different views on the subject. And we also asked two experts: one, a high school student and the other, Dr. Josh Gellers, a recognized expert in machine learning and robotics who has written books on the subject.

This is a trailer for our Podcast, Dignity Talks. Zora, one of our young hosts, asks what it would look like if we really took seriously the idea that every person has inherent dignity and worth? If we looked at the issues that come up in our day-to-day lives -- AI, religious diversity, gender stereotypes and more -- through the lens of human dignity. She explains that in this podcast, we ask hard questions about our values and the world we want to live in. And she invites everyone to join the youth-led conversations!