Events, Lectures, News
Prof. Alan Lessoff (Illinois State University)
June 28, 2018, 6–8 p.m. (c.t.), Philosophicum I, P 15
In recent years, an environmental perspective on urban history has been transforming both urban and environmental history, by emphasizing the city as an especially intense form of human interaction with nature, rather than a site distinct from or opposed to nature. This session considers the variety of new perspectives on both cities and the environment that emerge when one researches cities as features within and influences upon the environment.
For more information see the poster.
Lectures, Lunch Lectures, News
Scott P. King (Shenandoah University, USA)
June 21, 2018, 1-2.30 p.m., 02.102 (Philo II)
Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt, a 98-year-old nun and team chaplain for Loyola University Chicago, became a sensation in both social and traditional media during her school’s underdog run to the 2018 USA collegiate men’s basketball tournament semifinals. In this presentation, I examine her rise in popularity, and subsequent backlash to that popularity, through the lens of social psychological theories on aging and stereotypes, using Twitter as a basis for qualitative analysis.
Scott King is Associate Professor of Psychology at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia, USA and Visiting Lecturer in the Obama Institute at JGU Mainz.
You can download the poster for this talk here.
General, Lectures, News
Prof. Marcus Reisenleitner (York U)
June 20, 2018, 4 p.m.–6 p.m. (c.t.), Philosophicum II, 00-212
When President Trump announced a reduction of protected federal land in two of Utah’s national monuments, clothing outfitter Patagonia, protested, changing their homepage to a black-and-white motto “This Land is Your Land?” and joining a lawsuit against the president. The move continues the privately held company’s tradition of fighting for environmental causes. Its founder, Yvon Chouinard, distinguished himself as a documentary filmmaker with Mountain of Storms (1968) in a way similar to Bruce Brown’s father of surfing documentaries, The Endless Summer (1966). Both documentaries feature young male Californian drop-outs travelling to remote locations of natural beauty with little regard for the geopolitics of the time, setting the tone for a tradition of documenting the often politically naïve, individualistic and rebellious reactions to suburban America’s mainstream and pursuing a vague countercultural notion of escaping consumer culture while piggybacking on American imperialism’s opening up routes to remote locations.
The talk discusses the reverberations of these documentaries’ environmental and geopolitical imaginaries in two recent engagements with the tradition: Chouinard‘s 180º South: Conquerors of the Useless (2010) and William Finnegan‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (2015).
Events, General, Lectures, News
Peter W. Marx (Universität zu Köln)
June 18, 2018, 6-8 p.m. (c.t.), 00.212 (Philo II)
Book Launch & Talk
Please find more information on this event on the poster.
Please note: The event will be held in German.
Lectures, Lunch Lectures, News
Julia Polyck-O’Neill (Brock University, Canada)
June 19, 2018, 12-2 p.m., 02.102 (Philo II)
The idea that artistic practice, after the massive shifts initiated by conceptual art, takes into account, and is accountable to, the material reality of human relations suggests a radical reconceptualization of art’s social, cultural, economic, and political position and role. According to this reading, I consider how conceptualist photography has the capacity to contribute to such considerations to an even greater degree, by means of the visual-cognitive dynamics inherent to the photographic encounter. With its unique epistemological and ontological bearing, such an encounter has the potential to proffer a significant phenomenological intervention: one that uses both evidential and abstract-conceptual information to simultaneously promote deep reflection and propose new perceptions of the world in relation to the self. In comparatively analyzing Canadian artist Jeff Wall’s primary strategies in staging photographic images, I uncover how historic and more recent theoretical and philosophical discussions and material practices in photography emerge from and import specific but variable sets of relations that effectively participate in the construction of subjectivity according to both individual and collective scales.
Julia Polyck-O‘Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer, and is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program (Culture and Aesthetics) at Brock University (St Catharines, Ontario, Canada) and Visiting Lecturer in the Obama Institute at JGU Mainz.
You can download the poster for this talk here.
