ASTRA Speakers Series, Fall 2011 & Winter 2012
The Arts, Science and Technology Research Alliance (ASTRA) aims to bring together researchers across the University of Guelph whose interests lie within an intersection of the sciences, the humanities and the fine arts.
Tuesday March 6, 2012 - Associate Professor Madhur Anand
Human-Environment Systems and Sustainability: Collective Intentions vs. the Invisible Hand
MacKinnon 318 at 12 noon - Bring your lunch
We all know that humans are part of the so-called 'environment'. But the collapse of human-dominated ecosystems in not so distant and recent times suggests that we don't have a good understanding of human-environment systems. What are some of the belief and values that humans introduce into their interactions with ecosystems? Can this kind of knowledge help us to move away from 'invisible hand' metaphors of production systems and more towards managing collective intentions towards greater sustainability? I will address these questions and give an example of an approach to coupling human-environment systems from our recent work on mathematical modeling of human influence on forest-grassland mosaic dynamics. By 'coupling', I mean a two-way feedback: from human behaviour to 'environmental' dynamics and back to human behaviour. In my talk I may also refer, albeit obliquely, to poetry.
Click HERE for poster.
Tuesday April 10, 2012 - Stefan Linquist
Title To Be Announced
MacKinnon 318 at 12 noon - Bring your lunch
Description Coming...
Tuesday February 7, 2012 - Jennifer Bonnell
An Environmental History of an Urban Borderland: Toronto's Don River Valley, 1860-1930
MacKinnon 318 at 12 noon - Bring your lunch
This presentation explores the social and environmental history of Toronto's Don River Valley, and the circumstances that transformed an area central to the development of the early town of York to a polluted and vilified urban periphery by the mid-nineteenth century. Cast as a "space apart" for the assimilation of municipal and industrial wastes, the river valley also functioned through this period as a place of refuge and reform for people at the margins of society-for gangsters, Roma travellers, depression-era hoboes. This presentation examines the connections between these functions, and the ramifications they had for perceptions and material uses of this space at the city's edge.
Click HERE for poster.
Tuesday February 28, 2012 - Dr. William Noel
Lost and Found: The Archimedes Palimpsest
Science Complex Atrium, University of Guelph at 7pm
For more information about this talk, please visit www.uoguelph.ca/arts/noel-astra
This talk is brought to you by ASTRA, the Art History Speaker Series, the School of Fine Art and Music, and the College of Arts.
Thursday September 15, 2011 - Shelagh Grant
Polar Imperative and Beyond
Science Complex Atrium at 7pm
Shelagh Grant is Canada's Leading Arctic historian.
Click on the following link for more information about this talk: www.uoguelph.ca/arts/emwf
Thursday September 22, 2011 - Professor Gard Otis
The Benefits of Honey Bees: Honey, Pollination, and Rural Livelihoods
MacKinnon Building Room 132 at 12 noon - Bring your lunch
Bees are important as pollinators of both crops and native plants. Honey bees, in particular, can be delivered when needed in huge numbers, and in addition to their pollination services they produce products (honey and beeswax) that are valued by humans. Gard will draw on his personal experience to explore the relative value of honey bees in both North America and developing countries.
Click HERE for poster.
Tuesday November 1, 2011 -- Professor Tom Nudds
The Art of Science for Environmental Policymakers
Mackinnon Building Room 229 at 12 noon -- Bring your lunch
Governments and stakeholders alike turn to scientific authority to advocate and defend policy choices. However, scientific knowledge is in a constant state of flux; uncertainty is pervasive. New tools for aiding policy makers to manage in the face of uncertainty require a fundamental re-shaping of what agencies and advocates typically mean by “science-based”. Tom will build on his recent presentation to policy directors from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources to illustrate the case for scientific policy analysis.
Monday November 14, 2011 - Lawrence Weschler
Art and Science as Parallel and Divergent Ways of Knowing
War Memorial Hall at 7pm
LAWRENCE WESCHLER, for twenty years (1981-2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies, is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992) and was also a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award (1998).
Weschler’s books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland (1984); A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990); and Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998). His “Passions and Wonders” series of books currently comprises Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982); David Hockney’s Cameraworks (1984); Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995) which was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces (1998) Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999); Robert Irwin: Getty Garden (2002); Vermeer in Bosnia (2004); Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (2006), which received the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticsm; True To Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney (2008); Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin (Expanded Edition, 2008); and just released this fall, Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative.
Weschler has contributed to recent museum and gallery catalogues focused on the work of Tara Donovan, Deborah Butterfield, Liza Lou, The Art Guys, Michael Light and Mark Dion, among others. He is a contributing editor to McSweeney’s The Threepenny Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review; curator at large of the DVD quarterly Wholphin; former chair of the Sundance Documentary Film Fund; and director of the Ernst Toch Society, dedicated to the promulgation of the music of his grandfather, the noted Weimar emigre composer.
Lawrence Weschler has taught, variously, at Princeton, Columbia, UCSC, Bard, Vassar, New York University, and Sarah Lawrence. He currently serves as the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and artistic director emeritus of the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Tuesday November 29, 2011 - Professor Alice Hovorka
The Lives of Women and Chickens in Botswana: Intersections, Hierarchies, and Everyday Lives
MacKinnon Building Room 132 at 12 noon - Bring your lunch
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| ASTRA_Feb072012.pdf | 120.81 KB |
| ASTRA_Mar062012.pdf | 183.44 KB |
