Public Goods will be a year-long program at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center that will explore the past history and present condition of the civic commons. In the context of the digital era such new formations as Google Books, Wikipedia, and the Creative Commons have emerged as institutions claiming to promote the public sphere. At the same time, however, government-sponsored programs intended to serve the public good by supporting education and the advancement of knowledge and culture are being challenged on both fiscal and ideological grounds. These developments have occurred in the context of expansive intellectual property doctrines and a movement toward cultural privatization that some scholars have likened to the privatization of the agricultural commons in early modern England. The IHC’s program will consider both the long tradition of the civic commons – an idea reaching back to historical notions of the polis and the commonweal – and the present political, commercial, and legal challenges that threaten a diminished and constricted future.

Public Goods | 2011-12

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Fireside podcasts on ethics in neurodevelopmental disorders

www.neuroethics.ubc.ca

Audio Podcast On Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Meet Dr. Adam Kirton, a Pediatric Neurologist at Alberta Children’s Hospital and University of Calgary. Here, in a conversation with Dr. Judy Illes, he discusses the visibility of alternative therapies for cerebral palsy and the ethical issues around where families 'place hope’.

This 'Conversations in Neuroethics for Neurodevelopmental disorders' series was created by NeuroDevNet, the Knowledge Translation Core and National Core for Neuroethics. Please visit neuroethicscanada.ca and neurodevnet.ca to find short videos, reference lists and more.

Adam Kirton-CP and Alternative Therapies

Pharmacy historian Briony Hudson discusses the importance of women in pharmacy dating back centuries for breaking down doors for the female pharmacists of today in the latest episode of A Coffee With…podcast series.
Listen to the podcast to learn about: 
•	The beginnings of women in pharmacy
•	What the significant step changes were to women’s official role in pharmacy
•	What women working in pharmacy today can learn from their predecessors

'A coffee with...Briony Hudson'

Dominic Severs examines forms of housing that challenge British norms of spatial understanding and behaviour.

Fear of Non - Street Housing.WMA

Pre and Post-war development in Northern Italy

Judy Loach Italian Rationalists.WMA

INAUGURAL LECTURE: Public Goods and Those Who Create Them: From Respect to Disdain in Modern America
Nelson Lichtenstein (History, UCSB)
Thursday, October 20, 2011 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In this talk, the inaugural lecture for the IHC’s Public Goods series, Nelson Lichtenstein argues that the recent attacks upon public employee unions in Wisconsin and other states have been just as much an assault upon the idea that government is essential to provide key goods and services as it has been an effort to curb the power of organized labor and reduce spending in fiscally austere times. Lichtenstein, the MacArthur Foundation Chair in History at UCSB, is director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Public Goods Series.

INAUGURAL LECTURE: Nelson Lichtenstein: Public Goods and Those Who Create Them

TALK: Articulating The Public Good: Protocols of Liberty and the American Revolution
William Warner (English, UCSB)
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

At a time when so many are eager to appropriate the political mantle of the American Revolution, it is worth investigating the techniques and values that enabled the Massachusetts Whigs to gather the power to challenge to the British Empire in 1772-1776. At the origin of their movement were three new modes of political mediation: an associational practice, the public committee of correspondence; a genre, the popular declaration; and a set of communication protocols. These innovations enabled the emergence of a distributed network of the Massachusetts towns with the coherence and purpose to act together.

William Warner is Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. In addition to books on the novel as a form of eighteenth-century media culture, he is co-editor with Clifford Siskin of This is Enlightenment (Chicago: 2010). This talk is drawn from his recently completed monograph, Protocols of Liberty: Communication and the American Revolution.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Public Goods series.

William Warner: Articulating The Public Good: Protocols of Liberty and the American Revolution

TALK: The Fog of Freedom: Liberation and Lock-in in the Age of the Internet
Christopher Kelty
(Center for Society and Genetics and Information Studies, UCLA)
Thursday, October 27, 2011 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Why are new information technologies so frequently associated with freedom? Which cultural and philosophical concepts of freedom are central to technology design, use and critique? Why freedom instead of justice, equality or well-being? How was the link forged and why? This presentation will explore the fog of freedom in episodes from the last forty years of the development of information technology: the development of UNIX; the rise of free software; the appearance of “social media,” cloud computing, and crowdsourcing; and the eternal return of the monopoly tech company. 

Christopher Kelty is a member of the Information Studies Department, the Anthropology Department, and the Center for Society and Genetics at UCLA.  He is the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008), as well as articles on the nanotechnology and responsibility, new forms of mediated civic participation in science and culture, and the history of software.
 
Sponsored by the UCSB Library in recognition of Open Access Week (October 24-30) and the IHC’s Public Goods series.

Christopher Kelty: The Fog of Freedom: Liberation and Lock-in in the Age of the Internet

TALK: Reclaiming Fair Use: The Best Practices Approach
Peter Jaszi (Law, American University)
Thursday, November 3, 2011 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

“Fair use” is the safety-valve of the U.S. copyright law; it authorizes activities that would otherwise be considered infringement when they add significant value to collective culture. Today, more than ever, a robust understanding of fair use doctrine is essential to the health of  the intellectual property system.  Professor Jaszi will discuss the history of  the doctrine , the ways contemporary courts apply it, and how communities of practitioners are joining forces to claim – and assert – their fair use rights.  He will also discuss some current fair use controversies concerning education and libraries.  He is the co-author, with Patricia Aufderheide, of a new book from the University of Chicago Press:  Reclaiming Fair Use:  How to Put the Balance Back in Copyright.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Public Goods series.

Peter Jaszi: Reclaiming Fair Use: The Best Practices Approach

TALK: Maps as a Public Good: Crowdsourcing in Fire Emergencies
Michael F. Goodchild (Geography, UCSB)
Thursday, November 10, 2011 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Developments in web technology have made it easy for the average citizen to provide information about events on the Earth’s surface. This information is especially valuable in time-critical situations, such as wildfires. After examples of the power of crowd-sourced geographic information, the presentation focuses on the role of the community in gathering and maintaining current information during fire emergencies in Santa Barbara. Volunteers have played key roles both in creating information, and in synthesizing it in the form of online maps and situation reports. The key issue of data quality will be discussed.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Public Goods series.

Michael Goodchild: Maps as a Public Good: Crowdsourcing in Fire Emergencies

TALK: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Rob Nixon (English, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Friday, November 18, 2011 / 2:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of “slow violence” to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode.
Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Rob Nixon: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Part of our Forgotten Masters series, and in association with Docomomo, this talk addresses the life of architect Jean Tschumi. Together with academic and writer Jacques Gubler, architect Bernard Tschumi discusses the work of his father, the first president of the UIA and the founding head of Switzerland’s French-speaking School of Architecture at Lausanne.

Image caption: Aula des Cèdres, Lausanne, Switzerland, 1962 by Jean Tschumi Photo © Jean Tschumi Archives

Jean Tschumi: forgotten master of architecture

Named by some as one of the greatest omissions of design history, Aino Marsio-Aalto belongs to a line of women architects whose work has become overshadowed by that of their better-known male partners. Our panel discuss her often overlooked contribution to Nordic Modernist architecture.

On the panel:
Summer Islam – architect working for 6a architects; graduated from the Architectural Association; teaches a design studio for the MA in Architecture at the London Metropolitan University
Aino Niskanen – Professor of History of Architecture, Aalto University, Finland
Judi Loach – architectural and cultural historian, Professor in Early Modern and Modern European Cultural History, Cardiff University; Chair of Docomomo UK

Aino Aalto: forgotten master of architecture

Opioids have become increasingly used for pain treatment because of its effectiveness but like all drugs it has its consequences?

Pain management : Opioid

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.

Rob Nixon: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

IHC UCSB