Lecture Previews
Title: International Week Event Lecture: Today’s Interdependent World Order
The Basics: Alexander Lennon, editor-in-chief of the Washington Quarterly, will focus on global strategic trends and their public policy implications. He is a senior fellow in the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) International Security Program, where he focuses on the grand strategy and foreign and security policies of the contemporary major powers — the United States, China, Europe, India, Japan, and Russia — as well as nuclear proliferation prevention strategy.
Current debates on the G20, United Nations Security Council membership, League of Democracies, and other similar global assemblies are important but may only be half of the conversation defining today’s interdependent world order. Alexander Lennon proposes six principles of world order that major powers can agree upon to extend global peace and prosperity.
For more information, contact Veronica Dristas at (412) 624-2918 or dristas@pitt.edu.
When: Tuesday, Sept. 29, 4 p.m.
Where: University of Pittsburgh
Title: The School of Art Lecture Series
The Basics: Animated film maker Jim Trainor, who has made films since he was 13, uses black magic marker on typing paper to create his films. His works include The Fetishist, which took him 11 years to complete. Other famous works of his are those of animals: The Bats, The Moschops, The Magic Kingdom, and Harmony.
In 2004 in New York, The Magic Kingdom was featured in the Whitney Biennial. Trainor was named a professor of art at The School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2000 and remains there to this day. He is currently working on several projects, including Nascent Humanity.
When: Tuesday, Sept. 29, 5 p.m.
Where: McConomy Auditorium, University Center
Title: Declarations of Dependence: Labor, Personhood, and Welfare in South Africa and Beyond
The Basics James Ferguson, professor and chair of the department of anthropology at Stanford University, will discuss the changes occurring in South Africa and how the country managed to transform from a labor-scarce society to a labor-surplus one.
In recent decades, economic restructuring has radically reduced demand for low-skilled manual labor, and mass unemployment has become a durable, structural feature of South African society. Ferguson suggested that the South African experience reveals, in an extreme and clarifying form, a set of processes that are occurring in many other parts of the world and that better understanding of such processes may help us to find our way past some of the current impasses in progressive politics.
When: Monday, Oct. 5, 4:30 p.m.
Where: Gregg Hall(Porter 100)
Title: The Global, Environmental Impact of the United States, in Peacetime and Wartime
The Basics: Richard Tucker, adjunct professor of environmental history in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan, will discuss the impact that the United States, similar to other empires throughout history, has had on distant ecosystems and natural resources. He will explain how the American economy, in the 20th century, was one force behind global environmental deterioration.
When: Monday, Oct. 5, 4:30 p.m.
Where: Gregg Hall (Porter 100)