EthicsLab 5th Anniversary Conference

This conference is organized to celebrate the 5 Year Anniversary Conference at the Ethics and Public Policy Laboratory (EthicsLab) at the Catholic University of Central Africa in Yaoundé, Cameroon. EthicsLab is the first ethics center in sub-Saharan Africa and launched in March of 2019 with an international conference featuring scholars from across the African continent and the global academic community. The 5-Year Anniversary Conference will take place in June of 2024, and the aim is to bring together once again a large group of scholars from Africa and the rest of the world to discuss issues related to epistemic justice, but also to ethics and political theory more broadly.

The central goals of EthicsLab include supporting African scholars working on ethical and public policy challenges facing the Central African region and the continent more broadly, thereby increasing the voice and influence of African perspectives in moral and political theory at a global level.

The conference aims to provide an opportunity for academics worldwide to engage with many talented scholars from across the African continent and vice versa. There is far too little interaction of this kind, and the conference represents one way EthicsLab aims to facilitate more of it. The launch conference in 2019 began this effort and was a major success in this regard.

The ambitious plan for the conference is to hold 4-5 keynote talks, including at least two by prominent African scholars, as well as a variety of panels organized by participants who have taken the initiative to construct them (rather than directly by us). The aim is for each panel to include an equal number of African and non-African scholars, and to be organized by at least one African and one non-African scholar working together. The hope is that this dispersed organization model will ensure inclusive representation of scholars from many geographical locations, with a range of perspectives, and working on a wide variety of topics.