The Team
Speakers
Felipe De Brigard
Associate Professor, Duke University
Program Chair
Dr. De Brigard is the Fuchsberg-Levine Family Associate Professor of Philosophy, Associate Professor in Psychology & Neuroscience, and Core Faculty in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, where he also leads the Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab. He earned a bachelor's degree from the Universidad Nacional of Colombia, a masters degree from Tufts University, and a doctoral degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He also trained as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University prior to joining Duke in 2013. He has published several articles in philosophy, psychology and neuroscientific venues, and has received a number of awards, including being named Rising Star by the American Psychological Association, and the Stanton Prize by the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He works primarily in philosophy of mind with an emphasis in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. His research focuses on the nature of memory and its relations to other cognitive faculties, such as perception, imagination, attention and consciousness, and he is also interested in the philosophy of neuroscience and moral psychology.
Santiago Amaya
Associate Professor, Universidad de los Andes
Program Chair
Santiago Amaya is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, where he co-directs the Moral Judgment and Emotion lab. He works mostly at the intersection of action theory and moral psychology, trying to understand the mechanisms subserve distinctively moral behavior and the social dynamics shape that its evaluation. His articles have appeared in Noûs, Philosophical Studies, Social Philosophy and Policy, Synthese, among other venues. He is currently co-director of two projects: “LATAM Free Will, Agency, and Responsibility” funded by the John Templeton Foundation and “Off The Rails, Moral Psychology Beyond Traditional Borders” funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation. Santiago got his PhD from the Philosophy Neuroscience Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis and was a Volkswagen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain.
Deliberative Collective Memory: Theory and Practice of the Regional Historical Memory Group
Pablo Abitol
Professor, Universidad Tecnologica de Bolivar
Pablo Abitol is a professor of New Political Economy, Big History, and Theories of Democracy and Development in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Technological University of Bolívar (UTB), where he also teaches graduate courses on institutions, democracy, human development and peace-building, and coordinates the Regional Historical Memory Group, the Peace Lectures, and the Cultural Evolution Workshop. He holds a BA in Political Science, MA in Philosophy, and PhD in economics. He develops basic and applied research projects (with emphasis on participative action research - PAR) about collective memory, social learning, behavioral transformation, cultural change, polycentric governance, market design (especially local & regional food systems), deliberative democracy, reconciliation and peacebuilding. He is a member of the Regional Peacebuilding Space of Montes de María and columnist in El Universal, La Silla Vacía, and formerly in Las 2 Orillas.
Researching forgiveness in the Colombian conflict
Wilson Lopez
Professor, Universidad Javeriana
Wilson López López is a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Editor of the journal Universitas Psychologica, and Leader of the research group "Social Ties and Cultures of Peace." He is a senior researcher in MInciencias, and among his lines of research are forgiveness and reconciliation, mediated discourses around conflict and peace, and scientific communication and scientometrics. He received his PhD in Basic and Social Psychology from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. His research has earned him a number of prestigious awards, including the Inter-American Prize for Psychology, two Javeriano Research Awards, and the National Psychology Award. He has published more than 150 articles in journals included in Web of Science and SCOPUS, and serves as President-elect of the Division of Political Psychology of the International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP)
Forgiveness in the path to peace: Implications for 'post-accord' generations
Laura Taylor
Assistiant Professor, University College, Dublin
Dr. Laura K. Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology, University College Dublin, and an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast. She promotes science with a clear social purpose and embodies the interdisciplinary research. Dr. Taylor researches peacebuilding in children and young people, trying to counteract the origins and persistence of conflict around the world and over time. Her research innovatively investigates the impact of political violence on young people and their communities. Challenging the narrative that youth are either victims or perpetrators of political violence, she studies how conflict-affected young people may make positive contributions to society. This creative approach integrating developmental psychology and peace studies, summarized by the Developmental Peacebuilding Model (Taylor, 2020), has the potential to make a significant impact not only to this area of research, but also to program interventions and public policy globally. For example, Dr. Taylor has published with collaborators in Colombia, Croatia, Israel, Ireland, Kosovo, Republic of North Macedonia, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, and South Korea. As a leader in the field of peace psychology, with a focus on promoting positive intergroup relations in childhood, Dr Taylor’s research, teaching and mentoring, and global service exemplify the international, diversity and excellence.
Bringing to Mind the Best and Worst: The Role of Emotion in Memory
Daniela Palombo
Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia
As an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Palombo investigates cognitive and neural factors associated with how we form and retain autobiographical memories. She is especially interested in understanding how emotions (especially negative emotions) shape what we remember and for how long. She also examines how autobiographical memory influences other cognitive functions, with a primary focus on future imagination and decision making. Her research approach is multi-faceted; she explores these topics in healthy individuals as well as in neuropsychological (e.g., amnesia) and psychiatric (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder) populations. She uses a combination of behavioural and neuroimaging methods, with a special focus on quantifying the structure and richness of memory narratives (i.e., written memories provided by individuals).
Changing the Normative Landscape: Forgiveness and Letting Go
Dana Nelkin
Professor, University of California at San Diego
Dana Kay Nelkin (Ph.D. UCLA) is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. Her areas of research include moral psychology, ethics, bioethics, and philosophy of law. She is the author of Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility (Oxford University Press), and a number of articles on a variety of topics, including self-deception, friendship, forgiveness, praise and blame, psychopathy, and the lottery paradox. She is also a co-editor of Forgiveness: New Essays and the Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility. Her work in moral psychology includes participation in an interdisciplinary research collaboration of philosophers and psychologists, The Moral Judgements Project, which brings together normative and descriptive enquiries about the use of moral principles. Other roles include membership of the advisory board of the UC San Diego Institute for Practical Ethics.
To forgive & Forget? Investigating the relationship between intentional forgetting and forgiveness
Saima Noreen
Senior Lecturer, De Monfort University
Dr. Noreen trained as an experimental psychologist whose primary research is concerned with the executive control of memory and how this relates to one’s identity and the social world we live in.
Her work has focused on exploring the extent to which we have executive control over how particular memories come to mind and whether the ability to forget particular details associated with events may facilitate changes in affect and represent one of the means by which forgiveness and reconciliation may occur. She is also interested in looking at other cognitive processes, such as social problem solving and future thinking in clinical conditions, including depression. Dr. Noreen completed her doctoral training at Aston University, Birmingham UK under the supervision of Dr. Nathan Ridout. She was first appointed as a post-doctoral research fellow in 2010 and then lecturer at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. In 2014 she took up a lecturing post in Goldsmiths, University of London before taking up her current post as senior lecturer at De Montfort University in 2016.
¿Qué permite perdonar?
(What allows us to forgive?)*
Lucia Gonzalez
Architect, Comision de la Verdad
Lucía González Duque is an architect and was Comisioner for the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición (Comission for the Clarification of Truth, Convivence and Non-repetition) from January 2018 to August 2022. She has worked on social, artistic, and cultural issues in public and private entities. She has been director of cultural entities such as Museo de Antioquia, Orquesta filarmonica de Medellín, Theatro Pablo Colón Uribe, and the Pequeño Teatro, as well as being advisor for Ideartes. She also served as advisor for the office of the Alto Comisionado para la Paz (High Commissioner for Peace), for the Reconciliation, Peace, and Convivence for the Mayor Office, Director of the Planning Department, and Director for the Museo Casa de la Memoria de Medellín. She worked at social entities such as Presencia Colombo Suiza, Viva la Ciudadanía, Centro Internacional para la Justicia Transicional, and Centro de Fe y Culturas, among others. Finally, she has worked on national projects for the reconstruction of Eje Cafetero after a devastating earthquake in the FOREC, as well as on the attention project for natural disasters in Colombia Humanitaria.
* Session will be presented in Spanish
TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON
Maria Emma Wills
Independent Investigator
Dr. Wills is a Colombian political scientist with an in-depth interdisciplinary work. Her contributions span different disciplines (political science, feminism, Latin American history and memory studies). Her research and applied work have developed at the intersection of State institutions, civil society groups, and universities, around difficult topics such as gender and peace building, the role of the military in post conflict settings and sexual violence in armed conflict settings. From August 2012 to August 2018, she served as Advisor to the Director of the National Center for Historical Memory where she was in charge of developing pedagogical tools for school teachers, promoting regional university research groups on historical memory, and building bridges with the military and the Police, as well as the business sector. Upon resigning from office in August 2018, she became a Visiting Scholar at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l´Homme in Paris and during the winter term of 2019, she was invited as an International Visiting Research Scholar by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (PWIAS) at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver. In August 2019, Dr. Wills became a Visiting Professor at the Universidad de Los Andes, where she had been Associate Professor and Head of the Political Science Department from 2004-2007. During her career, she has received financial support from USIP, USAID, the Swiss Government, and COLCIENCIAS.
Reflexiones sobre la interacción entre la memoria autobiográfica y la construcción participativa de memoria histórica
(Reflections on the interaction between episodic memory and the participative construction of historical memory)*
Yessica Blanco
Master's Student, Grupo Regional de Memoria Historica
Jessica is a master’s student in Social Research Methods and a researcher in the Grupo Regional de Memoria Histórica (Historic Memory Regional Group) at Universidad Tecnológica del Bolívar. She earned her undergraduate double degree in Social Communication, and Political Science and International Relations from the same university. She was awarded a scholarship from Fundación Carolina to carry out studies in Public Policy Design at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Additionally, she earned a certificate in Management and Innovation at Universidad del Norte. She is a social leader and member of the regional space for peace building at Montes de María.
*Session will be presented in Spanish