November 2, 2010 Too Human: Law, Humanity, Limits 4 - 6 p.m. Doheny Memorial Library 240 To secure your spot please RSVP to: tcc@college.usc.edu

How does a society’s treatment of those deemed outside the pale of acceptable humanity — “the worst of the worst” — define “the human”? To ask this question is also to ask about limits: the limits of law and punishment, and the limits of what a society tolerates. To pose the question of the human and limits in a very different way, what are the limits of aesthetic codes and how do these limits change in a contemporary networked and information-saturated global environment? What happens to urban space and ideas of the human? While these questions may appear tangentially related, they are indeed central to and interwoven in the work of Vanessa Place, an L.A.-based lawyer, poet, novelist, art critic, and independent publisher. Her work, both as a lawyer and as an artist, addresses issues about the limits of human personhood.

 

November 9, 2010 HUMANS, ROBOTS AND WAR The Growing Robotics Technology and Ethics  3– 5 p.m. Doheny Memorial Library 240 To secure your spot please RSVP to: tcc@college.usc.edu

This program explores what is happening today, and what may be possible in the future, in the technological side of robotics and warfare. Join experts in a discussion about robots in disaster relief and weapons systems, and the ethics of the continued developments of both.

Speakers:
George Bekey, professor of engineering, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Maja Mataric, senior associate dean for research, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Peter Will, research professor and senior fellow of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), USC
Viterbi School of Engineering

Moderator:
Douglas Becker, international relations, USC College

 

November 15, 2010 Do You Believe in College? The Role of USC College Within a Research University 4– 6 p.m. Doheny Memorial Library 240 To secure your spot please RSVP to: tcc@college.usc.edu

What are the challenges that a college faces in the twenty-first century? What is a college within a research university? Is it a collection of disciplines and departments, or is it unified by an overarching set of values and a shared academic mission? What does a college offer to the broader community in a research university? In what sense can faculty and students be said to “belong” to a college? What does it mean for students to “go to college” in a university setting? In this time of tight budgets and pressure on many students to look on their education as pre-professional training, how can USC College most effectively promote its core values, and what roles should faculty and students take in helping to do so?

Come discuss these and related questions with our panelists and each other.  A light reception will follow this event.

Speakers:
William Deverell, history
Peggy Kamuf, French and Italian and comparative literature
Michael Waterman, computational biology

 

November 16, 2010 THE HUMAN-ANIMAL DIVIDE Thinking With/As Animals 4 – 6 p.m. Doheny Memorial Library 240 To secure your spot please RSVP to: tcc@college.usc.edu Part IV of a Series of V

When bees dance, when birds and whales sing and when bats echolocate, how close do these communicative methods come to what we call “language”? Furthermore, within evolutionary processes, how do manual gestures among humans become speech and how does a leg, in the case of the bat, become a wing? What essential changes to the nature of the human or the animal are signified by speech and flight? And how do we represent the relations between humans and animals in terms of choreographies of the gaze? Why and when do animals look at humans? What do they see when they do look? And how are human and animal gazes the same or different?

In a wide-ranging and dynamic panel discussion between Sharon Swartz (Evolutionary Biology, Brown University), Akira Lippit (Cinema, USC), and Michael Arbib (Neuroscience, USC College) we will engage these questions and more about the differences and similarities between animals and humans.

 

November 18, 2010 HUMANS AND DISASTERS Paris Under Water How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 4 – 6 p.m. Doheny Memorial Library 240 To secure your spot please RSVP to: tcc@college.usc.edu

Natural disasters and epidemics have threatened human existence ever since human beings began to form societies and to manipulate natural environments to their advantage. But the growing complexity of civilization has made it at once more subject to the spread of diseases and “natural” disasters, such as earthquakes, fires, and flooding — and more capable of prevention.

In this lecture, Jeffrey Jackson, associate professor of European history and director of the environmental studies program at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, will discuss his book Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 and discuss how in the midst of nature’s fury there is always the hope of rebuilding for the future.

 

November 29, 2010 THE HUMAN-ANIMAL DIVIDE What Is It Like To Be Kung Fu Panda? Animating Animals 4 – 6 p.m. Doheny Memorial Library 240 To secure your spot please RSVP to: tcc@college.usc.edu Part V of a Series of V

In this lecture, Judith Halberstam explores the use of animated animals for political representation. The genre of animation and particularly animation for children has been used by both the right wing and the left wing to argue about the indoctrination of youth through seductive and seemingly harmless imagery. And while the combination of text and image, the layering of mechanisms of identification through animal avatars, and the magical mixture of color and craziness definitely allows for cartoons to serve as attractive tools for the easy transmission of dense ideologies, the reduction of the animated image into pure symbol and the simplification of animated narratives into pure allegory does an injustice to the complexity of the magical surrealism that we find in animated cinema.

 

November 30, 2010 HUMANS AND DISASTERS Paradises Built in Hell Natural Disasters and Social Possibilities 4 – 6 p.m. Doheny Memorial Library 240 To secure your spot please RSVP to: tcc@college.usc.edu

Drawing from her new book A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit will talk about natural and unnatural disasters from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco to Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian calamity, about the role of beliefs and politics in shaping and limiting the outcome of disasters, and about the moments of social possibility and joy that arise in many disasters. She will also address Hollywood disaster movies, utopian experiments, and ideas about the coming long disasters of climate change.

 

Events and details subject to change. For more information, email tcc@college.usc.edu.