A Feminist Utopia in Madison? Global Communities, Science Fiction, and Women
May 24, 2006 @ 7:00 pm
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Panelists: Justine Larbalestier (moderator), science fiction historian, critic and author; and science fiction writers Nalo Hopkinson, Karen Joy Fowler, Meghan McCarron, Elizabeth Bear.
This panel will discuss the global communities of feminist science fiction, WISCON, and the history of feminist science fiction, which stretches back far further than 30 years. Special attention will be paid to well-known feminist science fiction books and stories by leading women authors such as Octavia Butler, Suzy Mckee Charnas, Joanna Russ, and Ursula Le Guin. WisCon, the world's leading feminist science fiction convention, has been bringing together writers, readers, fans, and scholars from all over the globe to talk, think, argue, and laugh about feminism, science fiction, politics, media, and everything else under the sun (and beyond it!) for thirty years. This annual feminist sci-fi utopia has been created right here in Madison.
Justine Larbalestier is the author of the Hugo-shortlisted Battle Of the Sexes in Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and the editor of Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Wesleyan University Press, 2006). She has published two novels, Magic or Madness (Penguin/Razorbill, 2005), and its sequel, Magic Lessons (Penguin/Razorbill, 2006). The final book in the trilogy will be out in March 2007. She is an Honorary Associate in the School of English, Art History, Film and Media at the University of Sydney in Australia.
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She grew up in New England, and has recently returned there after some years in the Mojave Desert. She is the author of over twenty published short stories; the best-selling, critically acclaimed Jenny Casey series (Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired); and the forthcoming Carnival and Blood and Iron, and is the recipient of the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Author. She got her chin at a second-hand shop; it used to belong to the Joker.
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of the novels Canary, The Sweetheart Season, Sister Noon, and The Jane Austen Book Club as well as the short story collections Artificial Things and Black Glass (which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 1999.) Her short story, "What I Didn't See," won the 2004 Nebula Award, and Sister Noon was a Pen/Faulkner finalist. Along with writer Pat Murphy, Fowler co-founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, given annually to a work of science fiction and fantasy that explores or expands our understanding of gender, an award now in its 15th year.
Nalo Hopkinson is Jamaican-Canadian (and a bunch of other hyphens, too). She is the author of novels Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, and the Salt Roads, and of short story collection Skin Folk. She is a founding member on the board of the Carl Brandon Society, which exists to promote the visibility of people of color in science fiction community. She's currently completing a novel in which menopause is magic.
Meghan McCarron was called "Bucky" in the womb after R. Buckminster Fuller. When she was a kid, her mother introduced her to books, feminism, and science fiction, and the three have been linked in her mind ever since. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Twenty Epics, and Flytrap, and she's a graduate of Clarion West, a highly selective workshop for speculative fiction writers. She blogs about feminism, science fiction, and the beautiful stupidity of post-college life at megmccarron.livejournal.com. She lives, for the moment, in Los Angeles.
This event is presented by the Center for the Humanities in partnership with WisCon. To learn more about WisCon, visit their website at: www.wiscon.info.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Professor of English, UW-Madison
Eat Locally, Think Globally: Cosmopolitan Taste in Madison and Beyond
April 25, 2006 @ 5:00 pm
Madison Public Library, Central Branch
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
This discussion will examine the conjunction of regionalism and internationalism by focusing on matters of taste in the context of food. Professor Walkowitz will talk about how cosmopolitan culture can be both less than national (regional) and more than national (international), sometimes at the same time. We will also include a panel of respondents that will bring local restaurants, farming, and culture to the discussion.
Katherine Cramer Walsh
Professor of Political Science, UW-Madison
Engaging Conflict and Difference: Race and Dialogue in Madison
March 7, 2006 @ 5:00 pm
Madison Public Library, Central Branch
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
With Gladis Benevides, Civil Rights & Affirmative Action Expert, and Mona Adams Winston, Development Manager for Second Harvest Foodbank
Madison is a cosmopolitan city in many ways, and yet according to residents, it has a long way to go to embrace and honor the cultural diversity within its midst. Madisonites are often accused of intellectualizing problems, of talking and deliberating too much at the sake of actually taking action to confront public problems. Are attempts to organize dialogues about race guilty of this charge? Katherine Cramer Walsh's talk will consider the use of inter-group dialogue programs to improve race relations in Madison and compare these attempts with the use of race dialogues in other U.S. cities. Mona Winston and Gladis Benevides, two community leaders and activists who have played central roles in the administration of the City of Madison Study Circles on Race, will offer commentaries on Walsh's research and reflect on the place of dialogue in Madison's interracial future.
Humanities Now Panel Discussion
Blasphemy and Free Speech: the Danish Cartoons and World Reaction
February 27, 2006
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Panelists/Participants
Assistant Professor Birgit Brander Rasmussen (English, UW-Madison)
Professor Deborah Jenson (French, UW-Madison)
Ovamir Anjum (PhD student, History, UW-Madison)
Professor Tejumola Olaniyan (English, African Languages and Literature, UW-Madison)
Professor W. Flagg Miller (Anthropology, UW-Madison)
Emeritus Professor Niels Ingwersen (Scandinavian Studies, UW-Madison)
A panel discussion sponsored by the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities; co-sponsored by the International Institute's European Union Center of Excellence and the Middle East Studies Program; and the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions.
Greg Downey
Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication and School of Library & Information Studies, UW-Madison
Madison as a "Livable City" and a "Wired City": Connections and Contradictions
February 7, 2006 @ 5:00 pm
Madison Public Library, Central Branch
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
With Mike Ivey, Reporter, The Capital Times
Here in Madison, our diverse population, strong school system, and vibrant economy have long earned the city a reputation for "livability" in the national press. Recently Madison has also been held up as a model "wired" city, a site of innovation and interaction for "new media" and "knowledge economy" workers. But has the growth of global cyberspace affected the livability of our local urban space? Can a city with a strong tradition of social justice awareness and activism confront its own "digital divides"? Join us for a wide-ranging introduction to current ways of thinking through these intertwined issues of technology, economy, and society.
Andrew Wolpert
Associate Professor of Classics and History, UW-Madison
War, Democracy, and Empire in Classical Greece
November 30, 2004 @ 7:00 pm
Madison Public Library, Central Branch
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Andrew Wolpert holds a dual appointment in the departments of Classics and History, with affiliate positions in the Religious Studies and Legal Studies programs. His work centers on Greek history, historiography, rhetoric and oratory, and on Athenian Law and Society. Wolpert earned his PhD at the University of Chicago and MA at the University of Michigan. He is the author of numerous articles and essays, and the book-length study, Remembering Defeat: Civil War and Civic Memory in Ancient Athens (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). In the summer of 2005, he directed the University's summer session program in Athens, Greece.
Alfred W. McCoy
J.R.W. Smail Professor of History, UW-Madison
Hidden History of the CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib
November 9, 2004 @ 7:00 pm
Madison Public Library, Sequoya Branch
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
After earning his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history at Yale in 1977, Alfred McCoy has directed his writing and research toward two topics — the political history ofthe modern Philippines and the politics of opium in the Golden Triangle. His 1972 book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (recently revised as The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade), sparked controversy at the time of its publication, but is now regarded as the standard work on the subject and has been translated into nine languages. Three of his books on Philippine history have won that country's National Book Award. In March 2001, the Association for Asian Studies awarded him the Grant Goodman Prize for his career contributions to the historical study of the Philippines.
Victor Bascara
Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies, UW-Madison
Unburdening Empire
October 12, 2004 @ 7:00 pm
Madison Public Library, Pinney Branch
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Victor Bascara specializes in the literature of colonialism, focusing especially on the era of American expansion in the South Pacific at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. He is the author of the forthcoming book Unburdening Empire (under contract with the University of Minnesota Press) and the leader of Empires in Transition, an interdisciplinary workshop for UW-Madison faculty and students organized as a part of the Center's A.W. Mellon Foundation Interdisciplinary Workshops in the Humanities. He received his PhD at Columbia, and began his teaching career at the University of Georgia. He has been a member of the UW-Madison faculty since 2001.
Laurie Beth Clark
Professor of Art, UW-Madison
Trauma Memorials
April 27, 2004
Monona Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Searching for Meaning in Memorials to the Holocaust, the Atomic Bomb, and 9-11.
Timothy B. Tyson
Professor of Afro American Studies, UW-Madison
Miss Amy's Witness: Why the History of the Civil Rights Movement is (Mostly) All Wrong
April 20, 2004
Monona Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Author of Radio Free Dixie and Blood Done Sign My Name.
Dick Ringler
Professor of Scandinavian Studies & English, UW-Madison
What Should an Artist Do When His Country Goes Mad? The Case of the German Painter Otto Dix
April 6, 2004
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Richard N. Ringler is professor emeritus of English and Scandinavian Studies at the UW-Madison. He is a specialist in Anglo-Saxon culture and history, and is one of the world's foremost authorities on Icelandic literature. After earning his MA at the UW-Madison, he earned his PhD at Harvard, and returned to Madison to teach in 1962
The War Over Memory: Genocide and 9/11
Associate Professor of Political Science, UW-Madison
Confessing Evil
March 23, 2004
Stoughton Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Michael Bernard-Donals
Professor of English and Jewish Studies, UW-Madison
The War Over Memory: Genocide and 9/11
February 17, 2004
Stoughton Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Rebecca Walkowitz
Assistant Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Patriotism and Civility: A Literary Perspective
March 11, 2003 @ 7:00 pm
Middleton Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Patriotism is not new as a topic of literature, but in the 20th century, many writers have made literature a topic of patriotism. This trend began during World War I, when poets and novelists decided that writing about war and national allegiance meant writing about language, and the political slogans and literary aphorisms that express and encourage patriotism. It also meant thinking about the ways that patriotism distributes, transforms, controls and obstructs language in everyday life. The World War I writers argued that there is no civility without language: that civility exists only in so far as individuals can speak, feel, agree and disagree, both in public and in private. Recent writers have come to propose that literature not only serves to describe the conditions of patriotism but that it also serves to compensate for and change those conditions. Professor Walkowitz will examine these issues through two poems by Wilfred Owen, who wrote and died during World War I, as well as several more recent works in the literature of patriotism.
Rebecca Walkowitz earned her A.B. from Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges, her M.Phil from the University of Sussex, and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. Her research and teaching encompasses British and American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially contemporary narrative fiction and film; modernist theories of culture and the aesthetics of nationalism, patriotism, and cosmopolitanism; narrative theory, critical theory, and cultural studies, styles of political commitment in contemporary narrative; McCarthyism and American culture after World War II.
Jean Lee
Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Origins of American Patriotism
February 11, 2003 @ 7:00 pm
Monona Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Historian Jean Lee presents an examination of the formation of patriotism in the early United States, and the ways in which the founding generation tried to define it. Taking into account the social, cultural, and political roots of patriotism, Professor Lee will explore patriotism as a key driver in American history through its links to war, gender politics and roles, and the development of an American national identity.
Professor Jean Lee's teaching and research interests at the UW include the American Revolution, cultural memory of the Revolution, and the Chesapeake River region in the 18th century. Her publications include the book The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County (W.W. Norton, 1994), which was awarded prizes from the Maryland Historical Society and the American Association for State & Local History, and articles such as Historical Memory, Sectional Strife, and the American Mecca: Mount Vernon, 1783-1853 in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (2001).
Harry Brighouse
Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Should We Teach Patriotism?
January 14, 2003 @ 7:00 pm
DeForest Area Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, there has been a distinct increase in patriotic feeling among Americans. Among the results of this heightened sentiment is a renewed call that schools should teach children to be more patriotic. Teaching American history and literature, and requiring the pledge of allegiance (or 'moment of patriotic observance') in schools are among the most visible manifestations of this trend. This response is not limited to the political right: much of the political left also argues that children should be taught history and literature patriotically-but the two sides often disagree about the meaning of patriotism.
Professor Brighouse argued that it is entirely respectable for people to love their country, but also that they have no specific obligations to their country or fellow-countrymen, and, further, that it is wrong for schools to inculcate patriotism (whether from right or left) in students. It is wrong because it wastes valuable instructional time, interferes with learning, and violates the basic precepts of a free society.
This lecture is the fourth of six public programs in the 2002-2003 Humanities Forums on Contemporary Issues series, organized by the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities and the Dane County Public Libraries with support from The University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Continuing Studies.
Harry Brighouse has taught in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Philosophy since 1992. He works on the foundations of liberal theory and the place of education and the family in liberalism. He is currently working on the significance of positionality for egalitarian justice, on development theory and liberal egalitarianism, on the fair distribution of power, and on whether parents have rights over their children. Professor Brighouse has also written extensively about education policy, and is co-editor of the new journal Theory and Research in Education.
Rodney Stevenson
Professor of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Crisis in Business Ethics: Enron, WorldCom, and the Culture of Greed
November 12, 2002 @ 7:00 pm
Sun Prairie Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Stevenson adresses the ethical failures, criminal activities, and other factors associated with the recent round of corporate scandals at companies such as Enron and WorldCom. These scandals have resulted in some of the largest bankruptcies in history; substantial harm to the investors, employees, and customers of these corporations; and widespread economic damage reaching far beyond the companies themselves. He will discuss how the recent crisis in business ethics calls for reforming business behavior, reinforcing regulatory controls, and reconsidering the social-corporate contract.
Stevenson teaches the MBA Business Ethics Course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Business, where his research focuses on business ethics and social responsibility, social control of economic enterprise, and public utility regulation. He has written on a wide variety of issues associated with business ethics, economic power, the public utility industries, and the need for regulatory oversight of markets and business activity.
Harry Brighouse
Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ethics in Politics? A Look at the Wisconsin Elections
October 8, 2002 @ 7:00 pm
Stoughton Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Brighouse looks at the ideal of a just society, and explains what it means for Wisconsin politics today. He looks at our elections and asks which candidates have incorporated the demands of social justice into their programs.
Brighouse is a political philosopher who has written numerous articles about social justice, and has been involved in politics as an activist since he was 14. He is also an expert on education policy, and is a frequent commentator in the national media in the UK. His most recent book is called School Choice and Social Justice. He recently appeared in the Ken Loach movie Bread and Roses.
Claudia Card
Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Evil in the 21st Century: September 11 and Beyond
September 10, 2002 @ 7:00 pm
Marshall Community Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Using contemporary examples, Card explores what distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs. Is evil today worse or on the rise? What makes a person or institution evil? Is evil an inevitable aspect of the human condition? Are some evils unforgivable? Are there some we should tolerate? How can we best live with evils?
Card is the Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy at UW-Madison, where she has taught since 1966. Her recent books include the forthcoming The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil, to be released in September by Oxford University Press, as well as The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck and On Feminist Ethics and Politics. She is also engaged in a project on the responses to such atrocities as genocide and major terrorism.
