Swarthmore College Faculty Lectures
http://www.swarthmore.edu/alumni/faculty_lectures/index.html

This program allows you to experience Swarthmore College Faculty Lectures. The lectures that we feature are complete, self-contained lectures that were open to the campus and local community.

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Dissent From Within: How Site-Based Educators Use Protest to Create Policy Ch...
Posted: February 2010

Professor of Educational Studies Frank Grossman focuses on how an organization comprised of teachers and administrators in New York State used protest to create policy change. Grossman's work provides a framework to understand how marginalized actors within systems of schooling organize to create change. Such a framework is becoming increasingly relevant as educators attempt to create space for local practice in the current top-down policy environment.

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Between the keys: Jazz explorations
Posted: December 2009

Isn't a German Jazz pianist somehow like a Japanese Yodeler? Cornell Visiting Professor Hans Lüdemann discusses the role of a creative musician in society and examines questions of identity. The lecture includes adventurous improvisations and some brand new pieces of music created at Swarthmore College.

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Transfronterizo Talk: Conflicting Constructions of Bilingualism on the US-Mex...
Posted: October 2009

Ana Celia Zentella, Lang Visiting Professor of Social Change, is a recognized leader in building appreciation for language diversity and respect for language rights. Her research shows that fluency in Spanish and English, the most visible cultural marker of the identity of students who have spent years living and studying on both sides of the US-Mexico border (transfronterizos), is both a product and facilitator of their frequent trips between San Diego and Tijuana. Interviews in Spanish and English with eighty transfronterizo college students indicate that, despite their proficient bilingualism, their linguistic capital may not translate into expected rewards as they struggle with language and identity conflicts. In particular, intra-sentential code switching, or Spanglish, is frowned upon, because that way of speaking is identified with el hablar mocho de los pochos [‘chopped up Mexican American speech’]. Nevertheless, the obstacles transfronterizos encounter in ESL programs, criticisms of their Spanish by Mexican citizens, feelings of shame about their Spanish-accented English, and heightened English-only fervor in the state and nation may undermine their avowed commitment to Spanish. Her research has led her to argue that interrupting the reproduction of linguistic and educational inequality requires educational and governmental language policies in the USA and Mexico that build on the principles of an anthro-political linguistics.

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Microbiology: An Icebreaker for Conversations about Science Literacy
Posted: July 2009

Professor of Biology Amy Cheng Vollmer is devoted to increasing science literacy. She finds that the impact of microbes and microbiology on society is manifold: medical, environmental, as well as on the geochemical history of the earth itself. Using microbiology, Vollmer communicates the process of research and discovery - the content and application of science - to many audiences beyond her Swarthmore classroom, including those who attended her talk during this year's Alumni Weekend.

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Camp Mementos from Krystyna Zywulska: The Making of a Satirist and Songwriter...
Posted: July 2009

Krystyna Zywulska is perhaps best known as the author of Przezylam Oswiecim (I Survived Auschwitz), her candid and moving account of life and death in the extermination camp Birkenau published immediately after the war. Less known, but no less important, are Zywulska's songs and poetry created during her imprisonment. These works not only offer valuable insight into the daily experiences and cultural activities of prisoners in the Nazi camps, but also reveal the unlikely birth of a literary and satirical talent. Assistant Professor of Music Barbara Milewski examines a selection of Zywulska's camp songs and the contexts in which they were created. She also considers the stylistic qualities that lent Zywulska's post-war writings their force and the extent to which they were developed in the works she created in Birkenau.

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The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life
Posted: May 2009

For a generation, the United States, along with most of the West, was in the thrall of an ideology that asserted that the magic of market competition held the solution to every problem. But even the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, knew that this ideology is false-a lesson we are learning anew in the current financial crisis. Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action Barry Schwartz argues two things. First, markets have their place, but that place isn't every place. And second, even in their place, to work properly, markets depend on nonmarket values that market competition actively corrodes.

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The Role of Antigone in Manipur, NE India
Posted: April 2009

In the last 50 years, Antigone has often been mobilized in fights against tyranny. In Manipur, a state in India’s Northeast, demands for self-determination, labeled "insurgency" by the Indian government, have grown in number and in violence, and the Indian Army is a forceful military presence. Citizens have been shot in the street, young men have been picked up for "interrogation" and tortured, and women have been raped and killed by the Army. There have been many translations and adaptations of Antigone in Manipur — including one in which Creon wore the Indian flag as his headgear. Assistant Professor of Theater Erin Mee describes how, in these productions, Antigone is about the conflict between regional autonomy and national stability. These productions have been used to articulate and celebrate regional culture, and to establish a regional identity that is distinct from, if not in opposition to, the national identity and culture imposed on Manipur’s citizens by the Indian government. As such, they mount both a cultural and political resistance to the national government.

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Dark Twins: Faulkner and Race
Posted: March 2009

Professor of English Literature Philip Weinstein's new book, Becoming Faulkner, explores the relationship between Faulkner's troubled life and the kinds of trouble he learned to convey so powerfully in his novels. "The process of his 'becoming Faulkner' was fraught with untimely decisions and unmastered experiences," Weinstein says. "If he had led the life he wanted, he would not have written the books he wrote." Weinstein's talk draws on the third chapter of the book, "Dark Twins," and charts Faulkner's immersion, as a man and as a writer, in a sea of racially unmanageable waters. "His testimony is all the more telling," Weinstein adds, "for the fissures it reveals."

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The Legend of Mustapha Shaw: Slave, Soldier, Rebel
Posted: February 2009

The historical narrative of the American Civil War and Reconstruction has most often focused on the “promise” of the nation’s “Second Revolution” and the “splendid failure” of the federal government to secure land for and protect the civil rights of black Americans in the moment of Reconstruction. Embedded within this narrative, the story of black freedmen and women is retold as a sorrow song – a tale of hopes raised and then dashed. Historian Allison Dorsey explains how the legend of Mustapha Shaw challenges this narrative. Shaw - who escaped slavery and ran to the fight for freedom, who soldiered as one the United States Colored Troops, and who, in the face of the federal betrayal still rose to become an independent entrepreneur and landholder - encourages us to rethink the black past. Courageous, defiant, and financially savvy, Shaw represents the often overlooked first generation of black middle class land holders in the post-Civil War South.

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When Thomas Bayes Met Milton Friedman
Posted: December 2008

Reverend Thomas Bayes’ view that belief is a basis of probability has led to the development of methods for repeatedly rubbing conditional probability distributions together in such a way so that they give birth to information drawn from a corresponding joint probability distribution. This information can interact with our beliefs to form a comprehensive inference about parameters that shape our world. Professor of Economics Philip Jefferson uses these methods to examine the relationship between consumption and income as embodied in a famous hypothesis by Professor Milton Friedman.

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Post-Election Reflection: Where Do We Go From Here?
Posted: November 2008

Now that the next U.S. President is known, what are some options for people who want major change in national policies both domestic and foreign, in the direction of justice, peace, and environmental sustainability?

Visiting Lang Professor George Lakey presents a multi-dimensional strategic framework for change.  Based on research but guided by vision, the framework offers meaningful actions for the next four years for people with diverse gifts and backgrounds seeking unity of collective strength.

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Why credit markets are "frozen," and what the "bailout" will do
Posted: October 2008

Professor of Economics John Caskey provides a non-technical overview of the cause of the current financial crisis, emphasizing how a decline in housing prices can lead to a system-wide freeze in the availability of credit and a potential recession. He also discusses what the government has done to try to unfreeze credit markets (as of Oct. 10, 2008) and speculates on what the government might try to do in the future.

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Where You'd Least Expect it: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Expansion of Civ...
Posted: September 2008

Professor Tyrene White describes the regulatory framework within which China's NGO's have begun to operate and the strategies sometimes used to be allowed to register. It challenges the standard typology that divides NGO's into those that are government-organized NGO's (or GONGOs), and those that are genuinely non-governmental.  Using the case of the Amity Foundation, one of China's leading and most successful social service NGO's, she shows the difficulty of completely disentangling state and society NGO origins.

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America’s Attention Deficit: Political Ritalin in 2008?
Posted: August 2008

Assistant Professor Ben Berger examines democracy’s history and looks at its future. Too many contemporary theories of democracy are premised on a widespread yearning for more politics, more deliberation, more activism.

But those theories, while well-intentioned, fit poorly with empirical evidence of most citizens’ expressed preferences. Not only now, but since the days of ancient Greece, democracies have struggled to keep citizens’ attention and energies focused on political affairs. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, widely (but wrongly) considered to be an unqualified optimist for American “civic engagement” in the Jacksonian era, worries about the elusiveness of citizens’ attention and energy.

So while popular governance has almost always been a story of “attention deficit democracy,” Tocqueville gives us strategies for engaging citizens more effectively. Berger closes by examining the 2008 presidential election and asking whether Barack Obama’s charismatic appeal will be only a temporary stimulant or an opportunity to re-engage citizens with political institutions and each other.

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Creating a Curious Robot
Posted: July 2008

Most robots are programmed to solve a particular task, but cannot adapt to new situations. In this talk, Professor Lisa Meeden describes an ongoing project to create a more general-purpose robot that can learn about the world on its own.