In the second part of the conversation with Professor Teresa Bejan of Oxford University we discuss civility on the left and right of U.S politics.  Professor Bejan agues for a bipartisan thickening of skins - that both sides should be more willing to continue the conversation and 'tolerate the disagreeableness of disagreement." Toby gives some objections from a social justice perspective and we end with a lighthearted look at how we , personally, deal with difficult conversations.

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Before coming to Oxford, Dr Bejan taught at the University of Toronto and as a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University.  She received her Ph.D. with distinction from Yale University in 2013.  She is the recipient of the American Political Science Association's 2015 Leo Strauss Award for the best doctoral dissertation in political philosophy. In 2016, she was elected as the final Balzan-Skinner Fellow in Modern Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge.

Her research brings perspectives from early modern English and American political thought to bear on questions in contemporary political theory and practice.  She has published peer-reviewed articles in The Journal of Politics, History of Political Thought, Review of Politics, History of European Ideas, and the Oxford Review of Education, and in several edited volumes.  Her book, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration examines contemporary calls for civility in light of seventeenth-century debates about religious toleration.

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You can follow her on Twitter:

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https://twitter.com/tmbejan

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And buy her book here:

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Mere Civility

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