Projects
Below are some of the projects the Center has organized or sponsored. If you have questions or would like to propose a project, please contact us.
Thought About Food Podcast
Thought About Food is a podcast on food and food studies, sponsored by the Center and hosted by Ian Werkheiser. Each episode looks at important issues around food, and interviews academics, activists, policymakers, chefs, or anyone who works on these issues.
Digital Worlds Workshop
The Digital Worlds Workshop is a research coordination network, sponsored by the Center. It is focused on emerging digital technologies and their effects on the world we live in, and seeks to interrogate the way modern digital technology enhances, hampers, entangles, or alters our experience of our lives. The workshop has led to several projects, including a special issue of the journal Techné, as well as an annual conference.
Ethics Bowl
Each year, the Center sponsors an Ethics Bowl team from UTRGV to travel and compete in regional, state, and national competitions. Ethics Bowl is a debate-style competition sponsored by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. Every November, 10-12 students represent UTRGV at the Texas Regional Competition, hosted by St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. The top teams advance to the National Competition in the Spring. At the competition, participants discuss six case studies that address current dilemmas in social and professional ethics. Each case presents students with unique challenges as they attempt to ascertain which response to the case is ethically correct. UTRGV’s teams form in the early Fall, after the September release of the case studies for the Texas Regional Competition.
International Conference on Border Studies
For several years, the Center has sponsored a conference on Border Studies. The proximity to the border of the host universities' locations in Mexico and the US is a special opportunity for scholars and researchers from around the globe to collaborate in a unique geographic region and present multidisciplinary research on the important and timely issues related to borders. The conference aims to encourage working together across borders and developing lasting collaborative relationships to find solutions to some of the most important international economic, social, and ecological problems we face today.
Texas Ethics Workshop
From 2017-2020, the Center sponsored a workshop bringing together philosophers from around Texas and the world to collaborate, connect, and develop works in progress. Many collaborative and individual projects came out of the workshop, which was unfortunately suspended due to the pandemic.
Philosophy Across the Americas: Thinking La Frontera
In 2017, the Center sponsored a conference called the Philosophy Across the Americas: Thinking La Frontera which brought together artists, philosophers, students, and activists from across the Americas to share perspectives and projects, and to celebrate the Rio Grande Valley as a Borderlands/Frontera.