Agency, Responsibility and Critical Literacy - Social Demands and Challenges #KRIK

The only session from the KRIK conference in Zagreb that I didn't liveblog was entitled Agency, Responsibility and Critical Literacy - Social Demands and Challenges: the Academy and Beyond from Michael George (St. Thomas University, Canada).
This was because it was more of a discussion session. George started by reading a short paper aiming to provoke discussion, in particular about the statement he started with: "all academic [meaning intellectual] workers are part of a moral community". A community is a group of people who share values and purpose. He proposed that if the group cannot agree on values, there is no community. George also talked about the behaviour, traits and places that groups may share.
So what is a moral community and does such a thing exist? Is there a connection between academic workers and a moral community, and what might that connection be? The values may relate to intellectual projects. George reflected back to the origins of academic communities i.e. theologically-based communities, which intrinsically were moral communities. He then briefly traced the evolution of different disciplinary strands, through the enlightenment, with the growing marginalisation of religeon. He also traced the rise of capitalism, through mercantile to state capitalism to multinational corporate capitalism.This reduced values to financial interest.
Seeing "all academic workers are part of a moral community" as hypothetical, you can also consider the statement "all academic workers are not part of a moral community" as perhaps more factually accurate. You can go on to reflect on what benefits might arrive if "all academic workers are part of a moral community" were actually true. What if people made this statement before starting any new project, and considered whether it applied to the new venture? Might this prompt more critical awareness? Might it stimulate more agency (what should I/we do?)? One other thought I will pass on from his introduction was seeing information as a way of finding what is going on (which also requires knowing history and context) - so then, once we know what is going on, we can decide what to do.

I didn't attempt to capture the discussion that followed this, but perhaps you can follow this up by pondering for yourself - is the statement "all intellectual/ academic workers are part of a moral community" true where you are? How can you tell? Is the opposite true? (etc.)
Photo by Sheila Webber: hydrant, Zagreb, September 2026