In his spare time, philosophy professor Madison Powers made a website at the end of last year to supplement his teaching on environmental justice. While many such sites might include an assortment of external links and excerpts, Powers’ product offers more than 200,000 original words – the equivalent of about four 200-page books.
Powers, a senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, created fewresources.org to approach environmental issues from a social justice perspective.
A few months after creating the site for his students in “Global Justice/The Environment,” Powers expanded it to serve as a resource for a population beyond the Georgetown student body, and it now has an international audience clamoring to study this hot topic. He created the acronym FEW, which stands for “food, energy and water.”
While Powers receives no revenue from the site and does little to market it, it regularly receives 6,000 unique visitors a month, with hits coming from 120 different countries. India represents the second-largest group behind the U.S.
“I don’t want anybody’s money,” Powers said. “I want it completely intellectually independent so that no one can raise any suggestion that the point of view in there is a function of someone other’s agenda.”
Powers’ research centers on global justice and public health issues.
“As a philosopher, I’m interested in not just the policy, but I’m interested in every place in that policy discussion where there’s an ethical inflection, where some issue of justice gets raised,” Powers said.
Students in Powers’ class use the site as a resource to supplement their experience in the classroom.
“The website isn’t a textbook, but it kind of takes the place of a textbook because it’s better than a textbook,” Kafele Kossally (COL ’14) said. “It’s basically a repository for basic information about the topic.”
Powers does not, however, see the website as a replacement for the more traditional symposium model traditionally favored by philosophers.
“I would say that it is no substitute for writing books and articles or teaching classes,” Powers said. “It is a way of putting in one place a lot of information that’s of an interdisciplinary nature.”
Although Powers said the website has been successful for spreading his research on the environment and social justice, he does not see the online model as applicable to all fields of philosophy.
“Practical ethics, bioethics and the stuff I do, there’s a good case for this kind of online format that’s different, with the aim of really helping to shape the rising of a certain disciplinary niche within applied ethics,” Powers said. “I don’t think there’d be much need for that in metaphysics or most of the areas of philosophy that are fairly self-contained.”
Students have also found that the website has improved in-class discussion.
“It’s definitely more interactive because the links you choose reflect your interests so even though we pretty much read the same thing every day, everyone brings different information to class, so it makes it more refreshing,” Kossally said.
Powers said he receives 15 to 20 emails a month from visitors to fewresources.org, allowing him to interact with his audience and learn about the environmental issues that are significant in other parts of the globe.
Fifty entries in and with online content double the length of his last book, Powers plans to maintain and grow the site for the foreseeable future.
“I’ve got the copyright and the ownership of the electronic stuff,” Powers said. “I don’t see any reason [to stop]. I’m just getting going.”