61´«Ã½

Global Media: The Shock Doctrine

Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist, will be a guest speaker at 61´«Ã½as part of the Humanities Institute’s fall lecture series “Global Media” on September 18.

(Up-and-Coming) California Authors: Andrew Foster Altschul

Andrew Foster Altschul, a lecturer in the creative writing program at Stanford University, will read from his novel “Lady Lazarus” on September 17, as part of a new speaker series, (Up-and-Coming) California Writers.

Patricia Williams to Speak on Seeing a Color Blind Future

Legal scholar Patricia J. Williams will speak on “Seeing A Color Blind Future” at 61´«Ã½ on Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 7:30 p.m. in Garrison Theater in the Performing Arts Center.

“Escape”

Author Carolyn Jessop, former member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, presents her book, Escape, at a luncheon and lecture, Saturday, May 31, 2008, in the Hampton Room, Malott Commons.

Gregory Stock: "Enhancing the Human: Genomics, Science Fiction and Ethics Collide"

Gregory Stock has explored the larger evolutionary significance of humanity’s recent technological progress for many years, and he examined the subject at length in his 1993 book, Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism (Simon & Schuster). Following its publication, he spent a year at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs looking specifically at the implications of recent breakthroughs in molecular genetics. It was as an outgrowth of that work that he teamed up with John Campbell to organize this conference, the first ever on human germline engineering. Currently Dr. Stock is directing the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at UCLA and is a visiting senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life.

John D'Agata: "About a Mountain"

John D’Agata’s book titled About a Mountain is a long essay about Las Vegas, Edvard Munch, and suicide, focusing in particular on the Yucca Mountain Project in southwest Nevada, where the Department of Energy has been developing a repository for high-level nuclear waste.

Lynne Thompson '72: "Beg No Pardon"

Poet Lynne Thompson, 61´«Ã½Alumna class of ’72, will present her 2007 Perugia Press prize-winning work Beg No Pardon. This collection of poetry is about the formation of identity from a little-known and complicated beginning, both personally and culturally. Described as “brimming with personality and attitude in the very best sense — pride, dignity, and graceful indignation — Thompson speaks about the search for legacy, love of legacy, and joy of legacy.” Beg No Pardon describes a vivid world of Afro-Caribbean heritage and late 20th century life.

Sara Laschever: "Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want"

A writer with a longstanding interest in the life and career obstacles faced by women in the workplace, Sara Laschever has been published by The New York Times, The Harvard Business Review, The New York Review of Books, Vogue, Glamour, WomensBiz, and many other publications.

Her first book, Women Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation — and Positive Strategies for Change, co-authored with Linda Babcock, explored a newly recognized phenomenon: that women are much less likely than men to use negotiation to improve their circumstances. Women Don’t Ask looks at the causes of this reluctance on the part of women and examines the high price women pay in both lost wages and delayed career advancement.

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp: "Nothing to Lose: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the 1960s"

Unlike New York, Los Angeles did not have an true art museum until 1965. The artists who chose to pursue their art here were intentionally charting a course independent of that pursued by peers on the East Coast. Ed Kienholz, Robert Irwin, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha and others were rebels with a cause, creating work that was beholden to their own sensibilities despite the lack of gallery support or critical commentary. Hunter’s talk addresses the personalities and politics of the era, incorporating anecdotes recounted by the artists and those around them.

Walter Benn Michaels: "Unequal Opportunity: The Flourishing University and the Vanishing Middle Class"

Walter Benn Michaels is just completing a project, The Shape of the Signifier, on literary and theoretical writing since 1967. His new project — its working title is “The Beauty of a Social Problem” — will be about art and inequality between WWI and WWII, and his teaching over the next few years will probably focus on this period while continuing to engage the issues raised by some more recent texts.