Lansdowne Lectures
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Item Feminism and prostitution: The uneasy debate(1992) Overall, ChristineItem Hawar - a cry for help: The ongoing genocide of the Yazidis by ISIS(2017-05-09) Tekkal, DüzenThe event begins with a screening of the documentary film, Hawar: My Journey into the Genocide, followed by a presentation and a Question & Answer session.Item Emotion recognition: Is it universal?(2017-05-09) Russell, James A.Does human nature include an emotion signaling system? Two lines of research suggest (1) Recent studies in two remote societies (Papua New Guinea, Mozambique) found that most people do not match the emotion and face in the predicted way. (2) Various studies have documented the role of context (expresser’s body and situation, and experimental context) in what emotion is seen in a face. Rather than recognizing a pre-specified emotion from a facial expression, people interpret facial expressions in light of other information.Item Dream a world cultural therapy model: Building children's resilience in the context of collective trauma(2017-05-09) Guzder, JaswantDr. Guzder shared the results of her research on a school-based project that was designed to respond to the collective trauma of a post-slavery society that struggles with high rates of violence. This project started in 2005 in inner city Kingston, Jamaica as a collaboration between the Universities of West Indies and McGill. Dr. Guzder first implemented the Dream a World (DAW) intervention with 30 high-risk children aged 8 to 12. The DAW resilience-promoting intervention addresses academic failure and disruptive behaviors with arts-based and remedial working groups. The success of the pilot project led to three years of Grand Challenges funding to implement the intervention in four additional schools with 100 children. In this presentation, Dr. Guzder also discusses challenges to implementing mental health prevention initiatives.Item Twelfth-century transformations(2016-09-25) Ashe, LauraBetween the mid-eleventh and the late twelfth centuries, the ways in which people perceived, understood, and explored their places in the world were drastically and irreversibly changed. These changes have long been recognized, and scholars in various fields have described their effects on society and culture. The transformations of this period include the appearance and rise of what is now known as affective piety, religious experience characterized by extreme emotional engagement; the corresponding change in theological focus from God the Father to the suffering, loving Christ; the theological and psychological turn to interiority, and a newly confessional sense of selfhood; the appearance of new secular ideologies of chivalry, of love, of individuality, and cultural and social elitism; finally, the development of literary fiction. It is my argument that these are all parts of a whole, and that their origins can be traced and explained in terms of one another.Item Christian human rights(2017-05-09) Moyn, SamuelMost people today associate human rights with the secular progressive cause. This talk looks at how, in European history in the middle of the twentieth century, the Christian right made a critical contribution. Based on a new book of the same name, the talk argues that human rights were valuable as the European right moved beyond authoritarian reaction as World War II was won by the Allies, and the threat of a secular socialist left arose in postwar party politics. Human rights rhetoric emerged from the top of ecclesiastical hierarchies, and new kinds of center right Christian political parties rose championing ideas like human dignity and human rights.Item Language and the institutional diversity canon(2017-05-09) Wolfram, WaltMost institutions in North America now acknowledge the importance of diversity in the workplace and in education, and have established dedicated, organizational programs dedicated to promoting and implementing diversity. Institutional programs on diversity typically support a range of cultural and individual lifestyles and behaviors—from race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, nationality, gender, etc.—but they rarely address language variation which can index all of those characteristics. In fact, institutions of higher learning continue to reproduce linguistic subordination while supporting other kinds of diversity. As recently observed, “Academics tend to the centre-left nearly everywhere, and talk endlessly about class and Multiculturalism. (...) And yet accent and dialect are still barely on many people’s minds as deserving respect” (The Economist January 29, 2015). This presentation considers the rationale for incorporating language into university diversity programs, and illustrates practically how a current program can be implemented on a university-wide level.Item Medieval English rabbis: Image and self-image(2016) Roth, PinchasFrom at least the mid twelfth century until the Expulsion in 1290, England hosted a community of active rabbinic scholars. Although much of their literary heritage has been lost, several treatises and dozens of responsa still survive. This lecture will survey the state of research into the surviving rabbinic texts from medieval England and the life and times of those rabbis whose names are known. In traditional and critical scholarship alike, the rabbis of medieval England are perceived as minor figures, piquant but unimportant. To a large degree, this perception stems from the assumption that medieval Anglo-Jewry as a whole was nothing more than an offshoot of the larger and more vital Jewish community in France. This talk will consider the factual basis of that perception, examining the ways in which medieval English rabbis were seen by their continental Jewish contemporaries and how they saw themselves.Item El memorial del 68: Representations of recent memory in Latin America(2017-05-10) Vázquez Mantecón, AlvaroThe lecture reflects on the history, context and purpose of El Memorial del 68 (The Memorial of 68), an architectural space and gallery that commemorates the massacre of students and workers at the hands of the Mexican government in Tlatelolco, an historic neighborhood in Mexico City, on October 2, 1968. Dr. Vázquez Mantecón collaborated in this project as a curator in charge of the script and the museographic design.Item Imagination, memory, and engagement: Expressing indigenous and non-Indigenous geographies(2017-03-09) Pearce, Margaret W.In this talk, Dr. Margaret Pearce, a U.S. based academic, cartographer and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, will introduce cartography as a form of language, explore some of the structural details of that language, and demonstrate the way that altering those structural details opens up new possibilities for engagement with the reader and other collaborators. Dr. Pearce will share her struggle to achieve those possibilities in her work, for the expression of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous geographies. Each map brings new lessons to the surface regarding imagination, memory, and community. Her hope is that this talk will in turn expand the audience’s imagination for what the map can do and be.Item Emergence of HIV in Africa and beyond(2017-05-11) Hogg, Robert S.Dr. Hogg talked about the origins of HIV-1 in Central and West Africa. Several theories were examined and he also explained how social change, migration, and population growth helped to spread the epidemic throughout Africa and beyond.Item Chernobyl and the contemporary nuclear imagination(2017-05-11) Hundorova, T. I."Chernobyl" today is not only an actual event, but also a symbolic one. As such, it is similar to other traumatic events in twentieth century history - the Holocaust, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima. After Chernobyl the image of the world has changed, and the history of the new era of nuclear culture has begun. How one can talk about the trauma of Chernobyl? Who are the witnesses of Chernobyl? How the nuclear imagination is connected with the experience of Chernobyl?Item Freedom sings: Land/bodies/resurgence(2017-05-12) Simpson, LeanneThis talk will explore Indigenous resurgence and nationhood through story, song and video. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson will discuss resurgence as an ongoing ntervention into the colonial project by sharing works from her recent album f(l)ight (RPM Records), her new book of short stories This Accident of Being Lost (House of Anansi) and her forthcoming academic work on the The Radical Resurgence Project (UMP Press). https://www.leannesimpson.caItem Beyond conservation: Facing the reality of biodiversity in a human-dominated world(2017-05-15) Thompson, RossThe majority of the world’s ecosystems have been profoundly altered by human activities in ways that are essentially irreversible. Global population growth will place ever greater demands on ecosystems and the services that they provide. Using examples from waterway management in Australia, Dr. Thompson will discuss the issue of how we manage ecosystems within the bounds of what society demands from them, and in the context of regional factors such as climate change, habitat fragmentation and species invasions. He will argue that restoration is most often an unrealistic goal, and that rebuilding and managing ecosystems for a range of values is the challenge that ecologists truly face. Using data from major environmental management interventions including landscape-scale revegetation, invasive animal control and environmental flow provision he will describe the challenges in restoring, remediating and re-engineering natural ecosystems.Item Resilient and sustainable structural forms(2017-05-15) Adriaenssens, SigridDr. Sigrid Adriaenssens is a structural engineer specializing in the form finding and optimization of structures. This lecture is based on her long-term research with the goal to transform the engineering design framework for a future-oriented built urban environment.Item Real options for endangered species (or What does a theory from finance and economics have to do with wildlife conservation?)(2017-05-15) Conrad, Jon M.In this lecture, Dr. Conrad explores when to trigger conservation programs to save endangered species. The concepts, applicable to many BC species, are brought to life with an example drawn from a captive breeding program for the California condor.Item Re-emergence of untreatable gonorrhea: A public health nightmare for the 21st century?(2017-05-18) Lewis, DavidIn this lecture, Dr. Lewis will give a historical overview of the evolution of antimicrobial resistance in the gonococcus and discuss current approaches to manage the public health threat of untreatable gonorrhea.Item Ringel's decomposition problem and graph labellings(2017-05-18) Rosa, AlexanderDuring the 1963 international graph theory conference in Smolenice, Czechoslovakia, Gerhard Ringel formulated the following conjecture: The complete graph with vertices can be decomposed into subgraphs, each isomorphic to a given tree with edges. Shortly thereafter, several kinds of graph labellings were introduced with the aim of attacking Ringel’s conjecture. Among these, the graceful labelling (originally called labelling) became the most prominent. Professor Alexander Rosa will attempt to present an overview of the up-to-date approaches to Ringel’s conjecture, and also to the well-known conjecture that every tree has a graceful labelling.Item Antisemitism and divisions over Israel in diaspora Jewish communities: The exploitation of Jewish difference(2017-10-04) Kahn-Harris, KeithDivisions over Israel have become an increasingly significant feature of Diaspora Jewish communities in recent years, leading at times to serious conflicts and difficulties in communal cooperation. These divisions have begun to be recognized outside Jewish communities as well, and in some cases have been appropriated by those accused of antisemitism to provide ‘alibis’ for their words and deeds. All but the most extreme antisemites can find sections of Jewish opinion that they can use to shield themselves. In this talk Keith will give some examples of this emerging phenomenon before offering some thoughts on how Jewish communities can respond to it.Item The environment of childhood poverty(2017-10-24) Evans, Gary W.One of the best predictors of physical and mental health along with cognitive development among children is poverty. But what psychosocial processes and experiences underlie these inequalities? In this talk professor Evans will summarize childhood correlates of poverty and then argue that one of the reasons for poverty’s impacts on children is exposure to cumulative physical and social risk factors.