CANCELED
Featuring musician and spoken word artist m5 vibe and NU-Intel, a conscious hip-hop band with an unique vibe and deep subject matter. Program is held in conjunction with Carrie Mae Weems: The Usual Suspects.
Immerse yourself in an interactive dance exhibit directed by choreographer Darion Smith in collaboration with composer Juliet Palmer and dancers. The 45-minute interactive dance exhibit and performance is based on nonverbal communication through the lens of Carla Bengtson's work with Western fence lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis) commonly known as the blue-belly. Smith, Palmer, and dancers create a world where sound and movement challenge our senses to reexamine our surroundings and how gesture, innate or learned, reads and is read.
This exhibition is part of a collaborative creative project led by UO Professor of Art Carla Bengtson that merges art, science, dance, music, and olfaction. Inspired by the research of Dr. Emilia Martins (Arizona State University) on the group learned, gestural language of Western fence lizards, Every Word was Once an Animal explores the overlapping forces of nature and culture between humans, animals, and language. The interdisciplinary exhibition blends Bengston’s playful investigations into the lifeworlds of nonhuman animals with choreographer Darion Smith’s interest in embodied language, composer Juliet Palmer’s investigations into the material possibilities and constraints of human and nonhuman utterance, and artist Jessie Rose Vala’s evocations of the intimate relationship between sculptural form and the mythic mind.
The ACLU of Oregon and the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics are this event featuring Jeffery Robinson. Based on guidance from public health experts, we feel that it is in the best interest of everyone for the organizers to reschedule these events for a later date. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the cancellation.
Featuring Jeffery Robinson, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU and director of the ACLU's Trone Center for Justice and Equality, which houses the organization's work on criminal justice, racial justice, and reform issues.
For more than three decades, attorney Jeffery Robinson has devoted his career to racial justice. In recent years, he has traveled the country speaking hard truths about race in America. Weaving heartbreak, humor, passion, and rage, Robinson takes us through this stolen history, showing how the legacy of slavery impacts every aspect of our society.
Sponsored by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics's Program for Democratic Governance and the ACLU of Oregon. This event is being held in partnership with Community Alliance of Lane County (CALC), National Lawyers Guild, UO Chapter, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Springfield-Eugene, UO Black Women of Achievement, UO Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, UO Mixed Student Union, and UO Undergraduate Legal Studies Program.
The event is free and open to the public, but please register so we can make sure to accommodate everybody who wants to attend.
A unique approach to environmental field studies.
We offer students an immersive and personal experience with important environmental and cultural issues facing our wildlands and the cultures they support. Our small student teams travel to the heart of where today’s environmental challenges occur, and together we seek solutions for the critical concerns facing our world’s wildlands. Students have an unparalleled opportunity to work side by side with our faculty and active researchers, helping to find answers to important environmental problems. Our overarching goal is to have students leave our program with extensive knowledge about a specific region and the broader skills and understanding of ecological, geological and social sciences to effectively evaluate this information in their future careers.
APPLY TODAY! https://geo.uoregon.edu/programs/multicountry/wildlands-studies
After days of deliberation, the organizers of the Environmental Justice Pathways Summit have made the heartbreaking decision to postpone the Summit. We do not make this decision lightly. The rapidly developing situation with COVID-19 in the Pacific Northwest demanded a cautious response to protect the public welfare. With some of our speakers being elderly and others coming from Seattle and D.C., and Tribal participation put in jeopardy because of Tribal community decisions to impose their own travel restrictions, we just believe it is too important to keep everyone healthy and safe. We hope to soon announce the Autumn EJP Summit dates so you can get them on your calendars. The summit WILL happen and we are working hard to ensure that all the amazing lineup of speakers we have stays the same. We are confident we will have a meaningful event when we gather together in the fall months.
Leonard Mlodinow explores how the human mind handles change
We live in a time of great turmoil and change in personal, social, and business spheres. To thrive in such a time, we must adapt and exercise a particular kind of thinking. Elastic thinking is needed to assess new situations, and to form a framework for understanding and reacting to them. It is leads to innovation and creativity.
In his upcoming talk, “Elastic: Flexible Thinking for our Time of Change,” Leonard Mlodinow will explore the psychology and neuroscience behind elastic thinking, detail ways to evaluate our ability to think nimbly, and provide methods to help us improve our skills.
Leonard Mlodinow, theoretical physicist and best-selling literary science writer, will give the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2019–20 Kritikos Lecture.
Mlodinow’s lecture is based on his recent book Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World, an exploration of how elastic thinking works. He draws on cutting-edge neuroscience to show how, millennia ago, our brains developed an affinity for novelty, idea generation, and exploration. He discovers how flexible thinking enabled some of the greatest artists, writers, musicians, and innovators to create paradigm shifts. And he investigates the organizations that have demonstrated an elastic ability to adapt to new technologies.
Mlodinow’s parents were holocaust survivors. His father, Simon, was a leader in the Jewish underground in Czestochowa, Poland, until he was shipped to Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944. The Nazis slaughtered his wife and two young children. After he was liberated in 1945, Simon immigrated to New York City and met Mlodinow’s mother, Irene, who had also been in a labor camp in Poland. They raised Mlodinow and his two siblings in Chicago.
Mlodinow dropped out of Brandeis University in 1973 when the Yom Kippur War began and traveled to Israel to work on a kibbutz. While there he discovered physics after reading Richard Feynman’s books. He later completed his studies at Brandeis and earned his PhD in theoretical physics from UC Berkeley.
In addition to Elastic, Mlodinow has authored and co-authored many NYT bestsellers: Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra), The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, and A Briefer History of Time (with Stephen Hawking).
Mlodinow’s talk is free and open to the public. For disability accommodations (which must be requested by April 14), contact ohc@uoregon.edu or 541-346-3934.
Leonard Mlodinow explores how the human mind handles change
We live in a time of great turmoil and change in personal, social, and business spheres. To thrive in such a time, we must adapt and exercise a particular kind of thinking. Elastic thinking is needed to assess new situations, and to form a framework for understanding and reacting to them. It is leads to innovation and creativity.
In his upcoming talk, “Elastic: Flexible Thinking for our Time of Change,” Leonard Mlodinow will explore the psychology and neuroscience behind elastic thinking, detail ways to evaluate our ability to think nimbly, and provide methods to help us improve our skills.
Leonard Mlodinow, theoretical physicist and best-selling literary science writer, will give the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2019–20 Kritikos Lecture in Portland.
Mlodinow’s lecture is based on his recent book Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World, an exploration of how elastic thinking works. He draws on cutting-edge neuroscience to show how, millennia ago, our brains developed an affinity for novelty, idea generation, and exploration. He discovers how flexible thinking enabled some of the greatest artists, writers, musicians, and innovators to create paradigm shifts. And he investigates the organizations that have demonstrated an elastic ability to adapt to new technologies.
Mlodinow’s parents were holocaust survivors. His father, Simon, was a leader in the Jewish underground in Czestochowa, Poland, until he was shipped to Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944. The Nazis slaughtered his wife and two young children. After he was liberated in 1945, Simon immigrated to New York City and met Mlodinow’s mother, Irene, who had also been in a labor camp in Poland. They raised Mlodinow and his two siblings in Chicago.
Mlodinow dropped out of Brandeis University in 1973 when the Yom Kippur War began and traveled to Israel to work on a kibbutz. While there he discovered physics after reading Richard Feynman’s books. He later completed his studies at Brandeis and earned his PhD in theoretical physics from UC Berkeley.
In addition to Elastic, Mlodinow has authored and co-authored many NYT bestsellers: Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra), The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, and A Briefer History of Time (with Stephen Hawking).
Mlodinow’s talk is free and open to the public. Adult beverages will be available for purchase. For disability accommodations (which must be requested by April 14), contact ohc@uoregon.edu or 541-346-3934.
What is Information? (2020) will investigate conceptualizations and implementations of information via material, representational, and hybrid frames. The conference-experience will consider information and its transformational æffects—from documents to data; from facts and fictions to pattern recognition; from physical information to differential equations; and from volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity to collective intelligence and wisdom.
The tenth annual What is…? examines tapestries, temperaments, and topologies of information lenses and practices—including—social and technical, mathematical and semantic, physical and biological, economic and political, cultural and environmental information. Thus, information can be understood as physical, for instruction, and about epistemic systems. Next year’s gathering expands on What is Technology? (2019), which explored technology as tools, processes, and moral knowledge, as well as problem-solving and intelligent inquiry.
Plenary participants to be announced.
Quench your thirst—for knowledge and for beer—at Ideas on Tap, the Museum of Natural and Cultural History's monthly pub talk. This month, join Courtney Cox, assistant professor of race and sport at the University of Oregon, for a look at the sports industry's use of quantitative data to predict and enhance athletic performance—and explore what it all means for athletes, from the weekend warrior to the Golden State Warriors.
Between 1949 and 1966, at least 4,713 Japanese students, of whom 651 were women, studied at American graduate schools. They were supported by the best-known fellowships at the time—the GARIOA (Government Account for Relief in Occupied Areas, 1949-1951), administered by the US Army, and Fulbright (in Japan since 1952). These young scholars were among the first people to travel abroad after World War II. They arrived bearing the burdens of the past, while possessing an openness to the future. They came to study in a land that had interned around 120,000 Japanese Americans during the war, but they persevered and were among the first women in the world who earned graduate degrees. At a time when being a housewife was held up as a middle-class ideal, many became professors, university chancellors, librarians, and translators. Others became leaders in medicine, journalism, athletics, and other male-dominated professions. Alisa Freedman recovers the forgotten history of mothers of academic fields in the humanities who transformed the roles women could play in education and the workforce.
Alisa Freedman is a Professor of Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Oregon. Much of her interdisciplinary work investigates how the modern urban experience has shaped human subjectivity, cultural production, and gender roles. She is a 2019–20 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.
Paul Root Wolpe asks, How do we teach morals to a machine?
Artificial intelligence has proven that machines are good at learning facts, strategies, tactics. But can they learn values, have empathy, develop intuitions, have compassion? Machines can clearly learn, but can they undergo moral development or make ethical decisions?
Jewish ethicist Paul Root Wolpe will give the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2019–20 Tzedek Lecture, titled “Deep Ethics in the Age of the Algorithm”.
Wolpe will discuss deep machine learning, deep surveillance, deep facial recognition. Thomas Friedman called “deep” the word of 2019. The word reveals the role of complexity in our modern technological understanding of the world; complexity used to be a problem, now it is a resource. And that complexity means that often we cannot wait for an outcome before we make an ethical judgement; ethics will have to be built into the complex algorithms that will decide who will get resources, who will get arrested, and, famously, who the automated car will crash into. In an age of deep machine learning we will need a deep ethics to keep pace. It is time to ask: what will that ethics look like?
Paul Root Wolpe is the Raymond F. Schinazi Distinguished Research Chair in Jewish Bioethics and the Director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, where he is a Professor in the Departments of Medicine, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Sociology.
Wolpe’s work focuses on the social, religious, ethical, and ideological impact of medicine and technology on the human condition. His teaching and publications range across multiple fields of bioethics and sociology, including death and dying, genetics and eugenics, sexuality and gender, mental health and illness, alternative medicine, and bioethics in extreme environments such as space. He also writes and talks about the Jewish contribution to thinking about the ethical aspects of medicine and technology.
Wolpe, a member of Atlanta’s Congregation Shearith Israel, participates in Scientists in Synagogues—a program that explores interesting and pressing questions surrounding Judaism and science. He is the son of the late Rabbi Gerald I. Wolpe, one of the great figures in American Jewish life, and brother of Rabbi David Wolpe, the Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles.
Wolpe spent 15 years as Senior Bioethicist for NASA, where he still serves as a bioethical consultant. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience. He is a past President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities; the current President of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors; and served as the first National Bioethics Advisor to Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Wolpe’s talk is free and open the public. For disability accommodations (which must be requested by May 7), contact ohc@uoregon.edu or 541-346-3934.
Paul Root Wolpe asks, How do we teach morals to a machine?
Artificial intelligence has proven that machines are good at learning facts, strategies, tactics. But can they learn values, have empathy, develop intuitions, have compassion? Machines can clearly learn, but can they undergo moral development or make ethical decisions?
Jewish ethicist Paul Root Wolpe will give the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2019–20 Tzedek Lecture. His talk titled “Deep Ethics in the Age of the Algorithm” will take place in Portland.
Wolpe will discuss deep machine learning, deep surveillance, deep facial recognition. Thomas Friedman called “deep” the word of 2019. The word reveals the role of complexity in our modern technological understanding of the world; complexity used to be a problem, now it is a resource. And that complexity means that often we cannot wait for an outcome before we make an ethical judgement; ethics will have to be built into the complex algorithms that will decide who will get resources, who will get arrested, and, famously, who the automated car will crash into. In an age of deep machine learning we will need a deep ethics to keep pace. It is time to ask: what will that ethics look like?
Paul Root Wolpe is the Raymond F. Schinazi Distinguished Research Chair in Jewish Bioethics and the Director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, where he is a Professor in the Departments of Medicine, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Sociology.
Wolpe’s work focuses on the social, religious, ethical, and ideological impact of medicine and technology on the human condition. His teaching and publications range across multiple fields of bioethics and sociology, including death and dying, genetics and eugenics, sexuality and gender, mental health and illness, alternative medicine, and bioethics in extreme environments such as space. He also writes and talks about the Jewish contribution to thinking about the ethical aspects of medicine and technology.
Wolpe, a member of Atlanta’s Congregation Shearith Israel, participates in Scientists in Synagogues—a program that explores interesting and pressing questions surrounding Judaism and science. He is the son of the late Rabbi Gerald I. Wolpe, one of the great figures in American Jewish life, and brother of Rabbi David Wolpe, the Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles.
Wolpe spent 15 years as Senior Bioethicist for NASA, where he still serves as a bioethical consultant. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience. He is a past President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities; the current President of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors; and served as the first National Bioethics Advisor to Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Wolpe’s talk is free and open the public. Adult beverages will be available for purchase. For disability accommodations (which must be requested by May 7), contact ohc@uoregon.edu or 541-346-3934.