"Sustainability Unbound": 2011-2012 Saul O Sidore Memorial Lecture Series
Videos of the lectures are available below and on the "Video and Podcasts" page of our website (Scroll right to the Sustainability Unbound tab).
Sustainability is more than a buzzword, but what does it really mean? Break free from the limits of “green.” Join an international group of humanists to discuss the big idea of sustainability — and what the humanities have got to do with it.
All lectures were held in the Huddleston Ballroom.
Lectures were free and open to the public.
March 21, 2012
Melissa Lane
Professor, Department of Politics, Princeton University
12:10 PM, Huddleston Ballroom
Dr. Lane is a political theorist specializing in ancient Greek thought, with longstanding experience of thinking with public and private leaders about the ethics and politics of sustainability through work with the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership and the Prince of Wales's Business and Sustainability Programme. Her book, Eco-Republic, is forthcoming this fall, using Plato's Republic as a model for thinking about a stable, sustainable, and healthy state of mutual shaping between persons and polity. In her talk, Dr. Lane will extend that argument about the nature of the virtues and the reconceptualization of the common good in light of sustainability, and build on a new interdisciplinary project on communicating scientific uncertainty in connection with sustainability in which she is involved at Princeton.
See Melissa Lane's "Sustainability Unbound" lecture below.
Lewis Hyde
Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing, Kenyon College and Faculty Associate, Berkman Center, Harvard University
7:00 PM, Huddleston Ballroom
Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Trickster Makes This World (1998) uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. Hyde's most recent book, Common as Air, is a spirited defense of our "cultural commons," that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich in the present. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a Faculty Associate at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Lecture unavailable.
March 22, 2012
Jeff Todd Titon
Professor of Music, Brown University, enthomusicologist
12:40 PM, Huddleston Ballroom
Dr. Titon, author of the blog, "Sustainable Music: A Research Blog on the Subject of Sustainability and Music," focuses on musical cultures as ecosystems and an ecological approach to musical and cultural sustainability. His work in acoustic ecology and ecological economics theorizes nature’s economy to show how sound transforms place and how ecological principles may inform cultural policy. He is the author or editor of seven books, numerous articles, recordings, and documentary films. Co–founder of the American Studies program at Tufts University, since 1986 he has directed Brown University's doctoral program in ethnomusicology and is a past editor of the Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is the first person trained in ethnomusicology to focus on American vernacular music and is regarded as a pioneer in the area of applied ethnomusicology and cultural conservation. He is currently writing the Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology (co-edited with Svanibor Pettan) and a book theorizing an ecological approach to music and cultural policy. Dr. Titon holds an MA in English and a PhD in American Studies from the U. of Minnesota, with a dissertation in ethnomusicology on blues.
See Jeff Titon's "Sustainability Unbound" lecture below.
Enrique Leff
Mexican philosopher, economist, and environmentalist
4:00 PM, Huddleston Ballroom
Enrique Leff is a Mexican environmentalist who works in the fields of political ecology, environmental epistemology, and ecological economics. He is a Level III Researcher with the Mexican National Researchers’ System and a Professor of UNAM’s post-graduate division of Political and Social Studies. Coordinator of the Latin American Environment Training Network of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) since 1986 and former UNEP Coordinator for Mexico, he is the author of more than 150 books and articles published in Europe and Latin America, including Green Production: Toward an Environmental Rationality, and is a member of numerous academic and consultative bodies: UNAM Advisory Board, Mexico City; Mexican Academy of Sciences; National Council of Environmental Education for Sustainability; Advisory Board to UNAM Environemntal Education; Scientists with Social Commitment Board of Directors (UCCS), Mexico; Mexican Academy of Science; Mexico ‘s Environmental Education Communication Foundation; Advisory Board Center for the Plata Basin Socio-Environmental Knowledge; International Advisory Council for the Latin American Forum of Environment Sciences, Argentina; Latin-American and Caribbean Society of Environmental History; CLACSO Political Ecology Group; International Network of Socio-Environmental Practices, Brasil; Réseau Francophone International dResearch in Environmental Education, Canada; Skepsis, Academia Semiologia e Direito, Portugal; and the International Association of Cultural Researchers Pirámide, Perú (EQUIDIA). Enrique is the editor of the Collection Environmental Latin American Thinking of the United Nations Environment Programme, a member of the Editorial and/or Scientific Councils of the journals Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (U.S.A.); Political Ecology (Spain); Éducation Relative á l´Environnement: Regards-Recherches-Réflexions, Canada; Theomani (Argentina); Ambiente & Sociedade, Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente, y Sociedade em Debate (Brazil); Environment Ideas and Initiative & Environment (Colombia); Environmental Sciences (Costa Rica); Polis and Leader Magazine (Chile); Latin American Journal of Ecologic Economics (Ecuador); and Social Studies, Ecologic Gazette and Quivera (Mexico). He holds a Ph. D in Development Economics from Paris and an earlier degree in Chemical Engineering. See Enrique's August 2011 TED Talk.
See Enrique Leff's "Sustainability Unbound" lecture below.
Rafique Keshavjee
6:00 PM, Huddleston Ballroom
After obtaining his doctorate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, Dr. Keshavjee was Post–Doctoral Fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT and Research Associate in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. In the early 1990s he became Associate Dean of The Institute of Ismaili Studies and subsequently was with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, as Director of the Aga Khan Humanities Project for Central Asia. After working for Christensen Fund as its Program Officer for Turkey, Iran and Central Asia, Dr. Keshavjee returned to his native Kenya to become the Head of Academic Planning of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of the Aga Khan University in Arusha, Tanzania, an entirely new university and campus for which planning is nearing completion. His talk will be about Muslim and other humanists from over a thousand years ago who were deeply concerned about our obligations to other creatures in the environment, and the environment as a source for metaphysical reflection on our place in the universe.
See Rafique Keshavjee's "Sustainability Unbound" lecture below.
Carol Mansour had to cancel her visit with us. While Carol's unique voice will be missed, we are fortunate to have another unique voice in Dr. Keshavjee to contribute to the symposium.
The Saul O Sidore Memorial Lecture Series was established in 1965 in memory of Saul O Sidore of Manchester, New Hampshire. The purpose of the series is to offer the University community and the state of New Hampshire programs that raise critical and sometimes controversial issues facing our society. The University of New Hampshire Center for the Humanities sponsors the programs.
