Crossings+Boundaries

Religion and philosophy have always been present in human space exploration, in the form of religious rituals practiced during space missions, placement of sacred objects in space, and astronauts’ descriptions of transcendental changes in perspective when looking back on Earth. Space exploration also poses ethical, religious, and philosophical challenges. How, for example, do we protect other celestial bodies from contamination by human space exploration? How do we protect the Earth from contamination by extraterrestrial samples brought back on spaceships? How will human society be represented to extraterrestrial beings? What are the wide-ranging implications of finding life in the universe?

In his talk, Waltemathe will discuss these issues, exploring questions that seem to belong to the realm of science fiction while focusing on scientifically plausible exploration scenarios.

Michael Waltemathe is senior lecturer in the Department of Protestant Theology at Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. He also serves as an officer of the Astrosociology Research Institute, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to the development of astrosociology as a multidisciplinary academic field. Dr. Waltemathe is also a founding member of IASGAR, the International Academy for the Study of Gaming and Religion.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series.

CROSSINGS+BOUNDARIES

Michael Waltemathe: Religious and Philosophical Implications of Space Exploration

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Susan Collins

From In Conversation (1997) which provided a live link between the street and the internet and Transporting Skies (2002) which relayed sky live, in real-time, between Penzance and Sheffield, to more recent pixel-by-pixel transmissions from remote locations including Fenlandia (2004), Seascape (2009) and London 2013; the lecture will present a number of works which each in different ways rely on an ‘open system’ or structure for their realisation. The lecture will also explore issues raised by the works including the role of belief in their construction and interpretation; the relationship between time, landscape and technology, and reflect on what it means materially to record a digital image and transport it across space and time.

Susan Collins is Professor of Fine Art and Director of the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, where she founded the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in 1995. She works across public, gallery and online spaces often employing networking and time as primary materials. The work is exhibited widely nationally and internationally with key works including the BAFTA nominated Tate in Space for Tate Online, Fenlandia, and Seascape. Public commissions include Underglow, a network of illuminated drains for the Corporation of London.

Transporting Skies - Professor Susan Collins (Slade School of Fine Art)

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Dorian Fuller

Full title - Growing Societies: the Archaeobotany of Food Production and Globalization of Agriculture

The origins of agriculture irrevocably changed the relationship of humans and the earth, literally transforming earth at local scales of cultivation, and over the long-term, promoting population growth and economic specialization globally.While archaeologists have long investigated this “Neolithic revolution”, the ways in which humans changed plants through domestication and reordered their use of the vegetative world has come to be appreciated more recently through advances in the archaeobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains. This lecture considers recent insights on the transition from wild plant gathering to farming, drawing on examples from India, Southwest Asia, China, and Africa.

Dorian Q Fuller grew up in San Francisco, California, received a BA from Yale University in Anthropology and Biology, and a PhD from Cambridge. After his PhD on the origins of agriculture in South India, he began teaching archaeobotany at UCL in 2000. His archaeological fieldwork has included India, Sri Lanka, China, Thailand, Sudan, Ethiopia, Morocco, Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. He has authored more than 170 papers and is a founding editor of the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

Growing Societies - Professor Dorian Fuller (UCL Institute of Archaeology)

Last week, biographer and journalist Walter Isaacson delivered the 43rd annual Jefferson Lecture—the government’s highest honor for people working in the humanities. But Isaacson’s message wasn’t just for humanists. He argued that the future belongs to those who can appreciate both the arts and the sciences. Isaacson joins Ira to explain how thinkers from Einstein to Steve Jobs drew on both spheres to make their breakthroughs, and why mixing the two is more important than ever in the digital age.

Find out more at http://scifri.me/S0d88c.

Why Science and the Humanities Are Better Together

Juan Cobo Betancourt | The Coming of the Kingdom: The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada

In this inaugural event for the IHC's Crossings + Boundaries public events series, four UCSB faculty members will discuss their varied experiences as interdisciplinary scholars.

Beth DePalma Digeser, Laila Shereen Sakr, Jeremy White, Brandon Whited

INAUGURAL PANEL: Interdisciplinary Crossings + Boundaries

When seven rocky planets were discovered around the
star TRAPPIST-1, claims of potentially habitable worlds
animated the scientific discourse and press coverage.
Beautiful animations of the surfaces of these planets and
imaginative tales of planet hopping suggested that this
discovery was not just about discovering more planets,
but that it was also about discovering worlds. In this talk,
Messeri will recount ethnographic findings from her work
with exoplanet astronomers. She will explore how planets
become worlds and what resources scientists draw on to
execute this conceptual crossing and imaginatively leave
the boundary of our world to extend human presence
beyond the solar system.
Before joining the Anthropology department at Yale earlier
this year, Lisa Messeri taught at the University of Virginia
and the University of Pennsylvania. Her published work
includes Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of
Other Worlds (2016), which traces how the place-making
practices of planetary scientists transform the void of
space into a cosmos filled with worlds that can be known
and explored.

Sponsored by the Idee Levitan IHC Endowment and the IHC’s
Crossings + Boundaries series.
Image Courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Lisa Messeri: Interstellar Crossings

Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella are the co-editors of Translation and Creativity (Continuum 2006) and One Poem in Search of a Translator (Peter Lang 2008).  

They met in 1998 at the University of East Anglia, UK, while studying for postgraduate degrees in literary translation, Eugenia specialising in experimental translation, Manuela in theatre translation, and have since collaborated in several translation projects. 

They are both interested in developing the idea of translation as a creative form of text making, and have set up The Creative Literary Studio (http://thecreativeliterarystudio.wordpress.com/) in November 2012, a blog and a virtual space encouraging experimentation, performance and the creation of texts through translation.

For further podcasts in the Between the Lines series visit: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cics/between-the-lines 

Between The Lines: Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella

The world is witnessing the greatest mass migration since 1945. More than sixty-five million people, about one in every hundred on Earth, have fled their homes. Some are internally displaced; others are refugees who have moved to multiple countries. This talk will discuss the three main causes of this giant human tide: the implosion of the Middle East following the Arab Spring; climate change, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where drought and advancing deserts are pushing people to abandon their homes; and famine, because of which at least twenty million people are currently at risk of starvation, most of them in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia. In his talk, Filkins will take the audience on a tour of these places and discuss ways to address the complex causes of mass migration.

Filkins has been a staff writer with The New Yorker since 2011. From 2000 to 2010, he was a reporter for the New York Times, reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. He has also worked for the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times, where he was chief of the paper’s New Delhi bureau. In 2009, he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of Times journalists covering Pakistan and Afghanistan. His book, The Forever War, won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series; the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life; and the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment.

Dexter Filkins: Exodus: The Largest Movement of People Since the Second World War

Ronald Rael’s talk reexamines what the 650 miles of physical barrier dividing the US and Mexico is and could be, suggesting that the wall is an opportunity for economic and social development along the border that encourages its conceptual and physical dismantling. Rael will illuminate the transformative effects of the wall on people, animals, and the natural and built landscape through the story of people on both sides of the border who transform and creatively challenge the wall’s existence. He will also discuss his architectural studio’s counterproposals that reimagine, hyperbolize, or question the wall and its construction, cost, performance, and meaning. Rael proposes that despite the intended use of the wall, which is to keep people out and away, the wall is instead an attractor, engaging both sides in a common dialogue.

Ronald Rael is the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture and Associate Professor in Architecture, the College of Environmental Design, and the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a partner in the award-winning architectural firm Rael San Fratello and CEO of Emerging Objects, a 3D Printing MAKE-tank. He is the author of Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (2017), Earth Architecture (2008), and Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing (2018).

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment.

Ronald Rael: Borderwall as Architecture

This talk approaches the controversy over the killing of the gorilla Harambe in the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016 as a unique window onto the making of animalness and blackness in the contemporary U.S.  It will explore the notion of a racial-zoological order in which the “human” is constructed simultaneously in relation to both the “black” and the “animal.”

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine.  She is the author of Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (2000) and Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (2015), both of which won book awards from the American Political Science Association.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment.

Claire Jean Kim: Murder and Mattering in Harambe's House

A conversation reflecting on thirty years of Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center with Peter Brooks, Founding Director, and Founding Fellows Kai Erikson, Geoffrey Hartman, and Robert Shulman is held as part of the Whitney’s 30th Anniversary celebration. In 1981, the Whitney Humanities Center began at Yale University under the new university presidency of A. Bartlett Giamatti. For this celebration of thirty year’s growth and activity at Yale, the WHC’s founding director and three of its founding fellows return to discuss and offer reflections on their experience both in the University at large and their place at the WHC within it, especially with regard to the role of the humanities in relation to the sciences in the undergraduate experience at Yale. Peter Brooks, Founding Director, is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University and Andrew W. Mellon Scholar in the department of Comparative Literature and the Center for Human Values at Princeton. Kai Erikson is the William R. Kenen Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology and American Studies at Yale. Geoffrey Hartman is Sterling Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar of English and Comparative Literature at Yale, and Robert Shulman is Professor Emeritus of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Senior Research Scientist in Diagnostic Radiology. Jul 23, 2012

For the Record: A Conversation Reflecting on Thirty Years of the Whitney Humanities Center

Adonis (born Ali Ahmad Said Esber) is a Syrian poet and essayist who led the modernist movement in Arabic poetry in the second half of the 20th century. He has written more than 20 books in his native Arabic, including the pioneering work An Introduction to Arab Poetics. He is visiting the US to celebrate his 80th birthday, and in this netcast, he and Khaled Mattawa read from Adonis: A Selection, published by Yale University Press in 2010 in the Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letters Series. Jan 06, 2011

Adonis visits the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University

Between the Lines - Adam Freudenheim

Artist Grayson Perry joined a panel discussion on the Future of the Arts, as part of UCL's Festival of the Arts.
The panel also included: 
• Professor Lisa Jardine (UCL Historian and Broadcaster) 
• Professor Malcolm Grant (UCL President and Provost) 
• The Rt Hon David Willetts MP (Minister for Universities and Science) 

Chaired by the Dean of Arts and Humanities, Professor Jonathan Wolff.

The panel discussion examined the broad definition of what we mean by the 'arts', from fine art and performing arts to its more general use in academia, 
incorporating also the humanities, including literature, philosophy and history. The panel also questioned whether the arts are threatened by recent cuts in funding.

More info on the Festival of the Arts: 
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/festival-of-the-arts

Future of the Arts - panel discussion

The IHC’s mission is to advance knowledge about human experience in cultural, historical, and social contexts and to do so through programs that foster human agency, social connectivity, and civic empowerment.

IHC events include lectures, seminars and conferences organized by IHC research focus groups and sub-units as well as events co-sponsored with campus departments. In addition, the IHC mounts year-long public programs on themes suggested by UCSB faculty and graduate students.

Michael Waltemathe: Religious and Philosophical Implications of Space Exploration

IHC UCSB

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