Tag Archive for: campus theme

Civil rights theorist Ian Haney Lopez

Civil rights theorist Ian Haney Lopez to speak at SOU

(Ashland, Ore.) — Southern Oregon University’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion has partnered with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to bring celebrated law professor and civil rights theorist Ian Haney Lopez to the SOU campus for a public lecture on creating a free and equal multi-racial democracy.

Haney Lopez’s lecture, “Building a Broader ‘We’: Fusing Race and Class,” is part of the SOU Campus Theme lecture series, which is focusing this year on “identity.” The talk will be at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, May 16, in the Rogue River Room of SOU’s Stevenson Union.

The lecture centers on the question of how we can make the transition from a multi-racial population to a multi-racial democracy – and one that is “genuinely racially egalitarian.” Haney Lopez, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, will challenge audience members to examine their understanding of racism, and will discuss a model of racism that blends race and class to show the value of embracing a multi-racial society.

SOU’s Campus Theme lecture series is meant to create opportunities for students, faculty, staff and community members to engage in intellectually stimulating conversations. Each theme in the annual series – which began in the 2009-10 academic year – focuses on a specific concept and addresses big questions, enables deep understanding and broadens the intellectual horizons of participants.

The collaboration between SOU’s Office of EDI and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is the result of ongoing conversations about how the two organizations can build community and serve as partners in the work of equity. Anyania Muse – OSF’s Interim Chief Operating Officer and Managing Director of IDEA People, Culture & Operations – was familiar with Haney Lopez, and proposed the community lecture partnership.

Haney Lopez teaches in the areas of race and constitutional law. His research centers around class, race and politics, and the ways in which class and race are often leveraged for gain – dividing society in ways that benefit the whole the least. He is considered one of the nation’s leading thinkers on how racism has evolved since the civil rights era.

He authored the 2014 book, “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class,” which examines how politicians exploit racism to ultimately support rule by the rich; and the 2019 book, “Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America,about how the manipulation of coded racism evolved during the Trump era. He also wrote the books “White by Law and “Racism on Trial.

Haney Lopez holds an endowed chair as the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC-Berkeley, and has been a visiting law professor at Yale, New York University and Harvard. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Washington University, a master’s degree in public policy from Princeton and a law degree from Harvard.

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Alec Arellano lectures on democracy in Campus Theme series

Occidental College professor to lecture on identity of American democracy

Occidental College political scientist Alec Arellano will visit SOU this week as a guest speaker in the 15th anniversary edition of SOU’s “Campus Theme” lecture series. He will lecture on the identity of American democracy.

Arellano’s lecture, “Continuity and Change: John Dewey on Navigating Democratic Identity,” will be at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 4, in Room 124 of the Art Building. It is free and open to the public.

SOU’s Campus Theme lecture series aims to create opportunities for students, faculty, staff and community members to engage in intellectually stimulating conversations. Each theme in the annual series – which began in the 2009-10 academic year focuses on a specific concept and addresses big questions, enables deep understanding and broadens the intellectual horizons of participants. This year’s theme is “identity.”

Arellano says that the United States faces a myriad of challenges, many of which go to the core of American democracy’s identity, as the country enters the 21st century’s second decade. The challenges concern the balance between holding fast to custom and tradition on the one hand, and innovating in response to new circumstances on the other.

The philosophy of John Dewey, who characterized democracy as not just a system of formal political institutions but also as a way of life requiring the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, furnishes a resource for thinking through this issue, Arellano says. Though Dewey’s short 1934 book, “A Common Faith,” is on its surface a proposal for a post-Christian spirituality that he wants to inaugurate, it also can be productively read as an account of some of the habits of character he regards as necessary for life in a modern democracy.

The SOU Campus Theme presentation will examine some of Dewey’s strategies for promoting those habits of character and consider their relevance for contemporary life.

Arellano is a political theorist specializing in Ancient Greek political thought, contemporary American political thought, and liberalism and its critics. He teaches courses on constitutional law and society, American politics and political theory in the Department of Politics at Occidental College.

Arellano received his Ph.D. in 2019 from The University of Texas at Austin. His work has been published in top journals in political science, and his current research examines Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill and John Dewey’s views regarding the conditions under which critical, independent thought can be a salutary force for democratic politics. He is also the nephew of Bobby Arellano, a professor in SOU’s Department of Emerging Media and Digital Arts.

Stanley Crawford to lecture on garlic battle

SOU guest to lecture on garlic, international companies and uncertainty

(Ashland, Ore.) — Stanley Crawford – garlic farmer, author and focus of the Netflix documentary “Garlic Breath” – will speak at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 13, in SOU’s Meese Auditorium (Room 101 of the Art Building).

Crawford’s free lecture will lead off the university’s 12th annual “Campus Theme” lecture series. Each year’s lectures follow a theme, with past series including “Ignorance and Wisdom,” “Truth” and “Shapes of Curiosity.” This year’s theme is “Uncertainty.”

Crawford is an author who moved to Dixon, New Mexico in 1970, where he and his wife Rosemary started their garlic farm, El Bosque Farm. There, he wrote “A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm” along with other essays and novels.

Crawford started a legal battle in the fall of 2014, when he petitioned the US Department of Commerce to look into Chinese garlic importer Harmoni International Spice, which Crawford claimed was exploiting an anti-dumping loophole. The fight between Crawford and Harmoni continues, but his account of the case has been told both through his upcoming book “The Garlic Papers: A Small Garlic Farm in the Age of Global Vampires,” and in the episode “Garlic Breath” of Netflix’s six-part documentary series “Rotten.”

SOU faculty members are asked to encourage their students to attend Campus Theme presentations.

The themed lectures are presented by the Oregon Center for the Arts in partnership with the Office of the Provost and the Division of Humanities and Culture.

Story by Blair Selph, SOU Marketing and Communications student writer

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Zaretta Hammond-culturally responsive teaching-SOU

Author of “Culturally Responsive Teaching” to give SOU campus theme talk

Zaretta Hammond, the San Francisco-area author of “Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain,” will discuss how teachers can support underserved students in an April 10 presentation that’s part of SOU’s 2018-19 campus theme of “Ignorance and Wisdom.”

Hammond notes that student populations across the country are progressively growing more racially and linguistically diverse. She will discuss having a real impact on learning by being more responsive to students’ differences.

Her talk will touch on igniting intellectual creativity and accelerating learning by incorporating the latest findings from cognitive neuroscience and the principles of culturally responsive teaching that she lays out in her 2014 book.

The event will be from 4:30 to 630 p.m. on Wednesday, April 10, in the Rogue River Room of SOU’s Stevenson Union. It is co-sponsored by the SOU Provost’s Office, School of Education and Division of Humanities and Culture; the Ashland, Medford and Central Point school districts; and the Southern Oregon Mentor Consortium.

Hammond, now a national education consultant, is a former high school and college expository writing instructor. She is passionate about the interconnections of equity, literacy and culturally responsive teaching. She blogs at CRTandtheBrain.com and calls herself “a former writing teacher turned equity freedom fighter.”

She received her bachelor’s degree in English literature from New York University and a master’s degree in secondary English education with a concentration in writing instruction at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

The 11th year of SOU’s Campus Theme features a variety of presentations that explore the concepts of “Ignorance and Wisdom,” and the relationships between the two.

The university adopts a theme each year for a series of lectures and discussions. Last year’s was “Truth,” and the previous year was “Shapes of Curiosity.” The series, presented by SOU’s Arts and Humanities Council, creates opportunities for students, faculty, staff and community members to engage in intellectually stimulating conversations.

SOU faculty members are asked to encourage their students to attend and participate in the Campus Theme presentations.

Ignorance and Wisdom-books and flowers

Campus Theme: Ignorance and Wisdom presentations this month

The 11th year of SOU’s Campus Theme continues with a pair of presentations this month, beginning at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 20, with “To not know: Is It Ignorance or Wisdom?” by Fred Grewe, chaplain at Providence Medford Medical Center.

The talk, which is free and open to the public, will be in Room 319 of the Stevenson Union. It will be followed on Thursday, Feb. 28, by “Wisdom and Compassion: Awakening Human Capacities to Build Resilient Communities,” by Paul Condon, an assistant professor of psychology at SOU. That presentation will be at 7 p.m. in Room 323 of the Stevenson Union.

Both events are part of SOU’s campus theme for the 2018-19 academic year, “Ignorance and Wisdom.” This year’s campus theme presentations all explore those two concepts and their relationships.

The university adopts a theme each year for a series of lectures and discussions. Last year’s was “Truth,” and the previous year was “Shapes of Curiosity.” The series, presented by SOU’s Arts and Humanities Council, creates opportunities for students, faculty, staff and community members to engage in intellectually stimulating conversations.

In this week’s talk, “To Not Know,” Grewe will explore the teachings of various religious thinkers – Christian, Buddhist, Taoist and Jewish – and what each has contributed to the understanding of what constitutes both wisdom and ignorance. A promotional flyer for the event cites the words of the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, when asked in a pornography case to define the threshold for obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”

Grewe has served as chaplain for the Providence Hospice in Medford since 2012, and served previously as a hospice chaplain at Asante Ashland Community Hospital and at St. Louis University Hospital in Missouri. He has published several articles and books about dying and the clergy’s role in end-of-life preparations.

The Feb. 28 presentation, “Wisdom and Compassion,” will look at the conflict and divisiveness that increasingly characterizes today’s political world. The talk will draw on Buddhist philosophy and cognitive science, and suggest that a fundamental problem is the mind’s tendency to portray others in limited ways that deny their full humanity.

Condon will explore a potential solution: current research on addressing relational and societal challenges through meditation and the human capacities for wisdom and compassion.

Condon’s research lab at SOU examines the social and relational processes that contribute to mental and physical wellness – particularly, through compassion and meditation.

SOU faculty members are asked to encourage their students to attend and participate in the Campus Theme presentations.

SOU-Wisdom-Battistella-campus theme

Ignorance and Wisdom: Presentation kicks off SOU’s Campus Theme

The 11th year of SOU’s Campus Theme will kick off at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 30, with the presentation, “Ignorance, Wisdom and the Etymological Fallacy,” by English Professor Edwin Battistella.

The talk, which is free and open to the public, will be in Room 319 of the Stevenson Union.

This year’s Campus Theme – “Ignorance and Wisdom” – will explore those two concepts and their relationships. The university adopts at theme each year for a series of lectures and discussions. Last year’s was “Truth,” and the previous year was “Shapes of Curiosity.” The series each year creates opportunities for students, faculty, staff and community members to engage in intellectually stimulating conversations.

Tuesday’s talk will focus on what can be learned from the history of words. Battistella’s interactive presentation will look specifically at the history and development of the words “ignorance” and “wisdom,” the limits of word history and the mechanism of semantic change. He will also explore techniques to study and pin down the meanings of those and other similar words.

SOU faculty members are asked to encourage their students to attend the presentation.

Battistella, who earned his doctorate in linguistics from the City University of New York, teaches linguistics and writing at SOU. His work has appeared in the Huffington Post, Politico, Oregon Humanities and the Oregonian. He is the author most recently of “Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology,” published in 2014 by Oxford University Press.

Battistella is also on the editorial board of “The Oregon Encyclopedia” and is the co-editor-in-chief of journal “Language and Linguistics Compass.”

Exploring Happiness Series Continues with Stanford Scholar

(Ashland, Ore.) – Are human beings primarily driven by self-interest and individualism? What role does social connection play in our well-being and happiness? Dr. Emma Seppala, Associate Director at Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, will address these questions when she visits Southern Oregon University this week as the next speaker in SOU’s Campus Theme series on Exploring Happiness.
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SOU’s ‘Civility’ Theme Continues with Spring Term Presentations

(Ashland, Ore.) – Southern Oregon University continues discussing this year’s campus theme “Civility” with a fascinating series of spring term presentations. The feature presentation is May 17 when Dr. Andrew Bacevich, Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University will discuss “The Sources of American Conduct.” Dr. Bacevich is a retired career officer in the United State Army, a vocal critic of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and is the author of “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.”

All presentations are free and open to the public.

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Software Freedom Activist is Next Speaker in SOU’s Civility Series

(Ashland, Ore.) – Dr. Richard Stallman, who launched the free software movement in 1983, will speak Tuesday, April 3, and Wednesday, April 4, on the SOU campus as part of this year’s campus theme, “Civility.” Stallman’s Tuesday presentation, “Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks,” will be at 7:00 p.m. in the Meese Auditorium of the Art Building. Read more

SOU’s ‘Civility Theme Continues with Winter Term Presentations

(Ashland, Ore.) – Southern Oregon University continues discussing this year’s campus theme “Civility” with a fascinating series of winter term presentations. All presentations are free and open to the public.

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