View Additional Visiting Speaker Video Collections:
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Farming While Black: African Diasporic Wisdom for Farming and Food Justice | Leah Penniman
Liberal Arts Division and Center for Social Equity & Inclusion
Lecture, April 24, 2019. 4:30 pm, 20 Washington Place Auditorium. Some of our most cherished sustainable farming practices - from organic agriculture to the farm cooperative and the CSA - have roots in African wisdom. Yet, discrimination and violence against African-American farmers has led to our decline from 14 percent of all growers in 1920 to less than 2 percent today, with a corresponding loss of over 14 million acres of land. Further, Black communities suffer disproportionately from illnesses related to lack of access to fresh food and healthy natural ecosystems. Soul Fire Farm, cofounded by author, activist, and farmer Leah Penniman, is committed to ending racism and injustice in our food system. Through programs such as the Black-Latinx Farmers Immersion, a sliding-scale farmshare CSA, and Youth Food Justice leadership training, Soul Fire Farm is part of a global network of farmers working to increase farmland stewardship by people of color, restore Afro-indigenous farming practices, and end food apartheid. And now, with the new book Farming While Black, Soul Fire Farm extends that work by offering the first comprehensive manual for African-heritage people ready to reclaim our rightful place of dignified agency in the food system. Join us to learn how you too can be part of the movement for food sovereignty and help build a food system based on justice, dignity, and abundance for all members of our community.
WEBSITE FOR BOOK: www.farmingwhileblack.org
WEBSITE FOR FARM: www.soulfirefarm.org
SOCIAL MEDIA: @soulfirefarm @farmingwhileblack
Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol educator, farmer/peyizan, author, and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY. Li co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2011 with the mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land. As co-Executive Director, Leah is part of a team that facilitates powerful food sovereignty programs – including farmer training for Black & Brown people, a subsidized farm food distribution program for communities living under food apartheid, and domestic and international organizing toward equity in the food system. Leah has been farming since 1996, holds an MA in Science Education and a BA in Environmental Science and International Development from Clark University, and is a Manye (Queen Mother) in Vodun. The work of Leah and Soul Fire Farm has been recognized by the Soros Racial Justice Fellowship, Fulbright Program, Grist 50, and the James Beard Award, among others. Her book, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Landis a love song for the land and her people.
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Decolonizing Design, Imagining Alternative Futures | A talk by Arturo Escobar
Liberal Arts Division and RISD Museum
Decolonizing Design, Imagining Alternative Futures lecture, April 18, 2019. 6:15 pm, Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum/Chace Center. Exploring Nature-Culture-Sustainability and design with author, anthropologist, and philosopher Arturo Escobar in conversation with RISD faculty, Namita Dharia, Jess Brown, Ramon Tejada, and Ijlal Muzaffar. This conversation is planned in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibition, Repair and Design Futures.Co-sponsored by RISD’s Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies and Global Arts + Culture graduate programs and the RISD Museum’s exhibition, Repair & Design Futures.
Arturo Escobar is the Kenan Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a Research Associate with the Culture, Memory, and Nation group at Universidad del Valle, Cali. His main interests are political ecology, ontological design, and the anthropology of development, social movements, and technoscience. Over the past twenty-five years, he has worked closely with several Afro-Colombian social movements, particular the Process of Black Communities (PCN). He is author of the well-known book Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995, 2011), and more recently, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (2008); Sentipensar con la Tierra. Nuevas lecturas sobre desarrollo, territorio y diferencia (2014); Otro possible es possible: Caminando hacia las transiciones desde Anya Yala/Afro/Latino-America (2017); and Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (forthcoming, 2018).
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Arjun Appadurai: Is Modernity Still At Large? Global Cultural Flows in the Digital Era
Liberal Arts Division, President's Office, and Social Equity + Inclusion Office
Thursday, April 11, 2019 at 6:30pm in the 20 Washington Place RISD Auditorium. In this lecture renowned socio-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai will revisit some of the key propositions about globalization, modernity, and contemporary cultures first offered in his groundbreaking book Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) in light of recent developments in the digital, political, and economic spheres.
Arjun Appadurai is the Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. He serves as Honorary Professor in the Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Tata Chair Professor at The Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Mumbai and as a Senior Research Partner at the Max-Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen. He was previously Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, where he also held a Distinguished Professorship as the John Dewey Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences. Arjun Appadurai was the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School from 2004-2006. He was formerly the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center on Cities and Globalization at Yale University. Appadurai is the founder and now the President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai (India).
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Sonya Kelliher-Combs | A Sense of Place
Social Equity + Inclusion Office, Painting Department, and Sonya Kelliher-Combs
The Office of Social Equity + Inclusion and the Painting department sponsored an artist talk and conversation with Alaska-based artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs as part of the ongoing RISD Indigenous Arts Series. The lecture took place on February 26th, 2019 at 5:00 pm in the Michael P. Metcalf Auditorium, Canal St., Providence, RI. Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Inupiaq/Athabaskan)was born in Bethel, Alaska, in 1969 and raised in Nome, she holds a bachelor of fine arts (1992) from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and a master of fine arts (1998) from Arizona State University, Tempe. Her artwork continually references a sense of place, history, culture, and family. Kelliher-Combs is the recipient of numerous awards including the Eiteljorg Museum Fellowship, the Anchorage, Alaska, Mayor’s Individual Artist Award, the Arctic Education Foundation Academic Excellence Award, and the Best of Show honor at the Visual Arts Center of Alaska’s Vision of New Eyes exhibition. Her work can be found in numerous private and public collections including the National Museum of the American Indian, Anchorage Museum, Eiteljorg Museum, British Royal Museum, Institute of American Indian Art Museum of Contemporary Native Art, and Alaska State Museum.
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Wartime Mobilization and Rapid Climate Change | Laurence Delina
Liberal Arts Division
Lecture, November 14, 2018. 1:15 pm Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum/Chace Center. Laurence Delina’s work explores governance and institutional arrangements in the politics and policy of sustainability, focusing on sustainable energy transitions and rapid climate mitigation. His book, Strategies for Rapid Climate Mitigation (Routledge 2016), investigates what can be learned from wartime mobilization to achieve rapid deployment of sustainable energy technologies. As a Pardee Center Post-Doc, he is leading a research project on sustainable energy transitions in developing countries. This project led to his most recent book, Accelerating Sustainable Energy Transition(s) in Developing Countries: The challenges of climate change and sustainable development (Routledge 2017), which explores how transitions away from carbon-based fuel sources to renewables occur in fourteen developing countries.
Laurence Delina, a Filipino scholar and author, is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University. He is the author of Strategies for Rapid Climate Mitigation: Wartime mobilization as policy model?, Accelerating Sustainable Energy Transition(s) in Developing Countries: The challenges of climate change and sustainable development, and Climate Actions: Strategies for social mobilization.
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Climate Futures, Design, and the Just Transition Part II
Liberal Arts Division
Symposium, Part II, Saturday | 9:00 am - 3:00 pm. RISD Auditorium.
At a time when climate politics would seem to be stuck between a state of “melancholic paralysis” (Wark, 2015) and “passive nihilism” (Connolly, 2016), mobilizations occurring around just transitions stand as one of the few bright spots on the horizon. Discussions of just transitions are at different stages of development. They come with the usual bundle of issues, problems, controversies and setbacks. But they also come with potential and promise. In a bleak intellectual context, where the converging forces of climate destabilization and authoritarian populism would seem to be shrinking the ecopolitical imaginary to the propositions that we must either prepare for the worst or embrace a technocratic ecomodernist project to decarbonize the status quo, discussions circulating around just transitions are marked by a refreshing level of pragmatic concreteness and even a degree of hope.
Building on two previous meetings held at Brown and Northeastern by the Just Transitions Research Network in 2016 and 2017, this symposium will bring together a range of scholars and activists to map some of the different ways in which the search for just and rapid post carbon transitions now animates all manner of interventions--on the part of labor and climate justice activists, designers, architects, academics and artists--and is opening up intersectional spaces across movements fighting for racial and gender justice. We will explore the political, ideological, aesthetic, cultural and socio-technological barriers that stand in the way of just transitions in both the Global North and Global South. We will consider who is visible and who is rendered invisible in different kinds of transition discourses. This symposium will explore the potential material, political and ecological impacts of a renewables roll-out. Finally, we will debate the merits of just transitions premised on frameworks such as green growth, plenitude, degrowth, design futuring, decoloniality and beyond.
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Climate Futures, Design, and the Just Transition Part I
Liberal Arts Division
Symposium, Part I, November 9-10, 2018. Friday | 1:30-6:30pm.
At a time when climate politics would seem to be stuck between a state of “melancholic paralysis” (Wark, 2015) and “passive nihilism” (Connolly, 2016), mobilizations occurring around just transitions stand as one of the few bright spots on the horizon. Discussions of just transitions are at different stages of development. They come with the usual bundle of issues, problems, controversies and setbacks. But they also come with potential and promise. In a bleak intellectual context, where the converging forces of climate destabilization and authoritarian populism would seem to be shrinking the ecopolitical imaginary to the propositions that we must either prepare for the worst or embrace a technocratic ecomodernist project to decarbonize the status quo, discussions circulating around just transitions are marked by a refreshing level of pragmatic concreteness and even a degree of hope.
Building on two previous meetings held at Brown and Northeastern by the Just Transitions Research Network in 2016 and 2017, this symposium will bring together a range of scholars and activists to map some of the different ways in which the search for just and rapid post carbon transitions now animates all manner of interventions--on the part of labor and climate justice activists, designers, architects, academics and artists--and is opening up intersectional spaces across movements fighting for racial and gender justice. We will explore the political, ideological, aesthetic, cultural and socio-technological barriers that stand in the way of just transitions in both the Global North and Global South. We will consider who is visible and who is rendered invisible in different kinds of transition discourses. This symposium will explore the potential material, political and ecological impacts of a renewables roll-out. Finally, we will debate the merits of just transitions premised on frameworks such as green growth, plenitude, degrowth, design futuring, decoloniality and beyond.
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Break Pot: Benefit St.
Liberal Arts Division, President's Office, Social Equity + Inclusion Office, and RISD Museum
Thursday, November 8, 2018 at 1 pm in the RISD Museum Upper Farago Gallery. Amy Lee Sanford, a Cambodian-American artist with an international reputation, participates in the RISD Museum’s exhibition “Repair and Design Futures” through a powerful, one-afternoon performance of a gallery installation entitled Break Pot: Benefit St., a shortened version of the six day durational performance called Full Circle.
Born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and raised in the United States, Amy Lee Sanford holds a degree from Brown University in the Visual Arts. Her work references the deep personal significance of family separation, cultural destruction and death associated with the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s, and the long, slow process of reconstruction in the decades that have followed. She investigates the intersection of trauma and healing, the healing processes of repetition, recollection and repair, and the defragmentation of history. Sanford has been in numerous exhibitions internationally, most recently Memory | Commitment | Aspiration (Arkansas, 2018), Cinerama: Art and the Moving Image (Singapore, 2017-18), Love in the Time of War (San Francisco, 2016) and Images Biennial: An Age of Our Own Making (Denmark, 2016). This piece is a particularly powerful evocation of individual, social and cultural repair. The performance takes place over three hours; visitors are welcome to drop in for part of it or stay for the duration.
Photo credit: Amy Lee Sanford, Full Circle (Day 3) Amy Lee Sanford - 2012 Durational Performance.
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An Evening with Pulitzer Prize Winning Playwright Lynn Nottage
Liberal Arts Division, President's Office, Social Equity + Inclusion Office, Experimental and Foundation Studies Division, and Fine Arts Division
Monday, November 5th, 2018 at 5pm in the RISD Auditorium. The President’s Office and Social Equity and Inclusion Initiative welcome Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, director, producer, activist and educator Lynn Nottage to RISD. Nottage engages some of our most intractable problems, both on and off the stage, and her practice is characterized by extensive research while writing and continued involvement with subject communities once the work is complete.This event is sponsored by the Office of the President, the Social Equity and Inclusion Initiative, the Division of Liberal Arts Humanities Fund and a Research Collaboration and Event Grant, the Division of Experimental and Foundation Studies and the Division of Fine Arts.
Lynn Nottage is among the most celebrated of contemporary American playwrights and the first female to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice (for Ruined in 2009 and Sweat in 2017). She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” a Guggenheim Grant, the Doris Duke Artist Award, PEN/Pels Award, National Black Theater Fest’s August Wilson Award, the Helen Hayes Award and many others. Following her studies at Brown and Yale Universities, she worked as an advocate with Amnesty International, where she found her artistic voice, and has since produced a body of work that makes “injustices too familiar to be ignored.” She is a co-founder of Market Road Films production company and a faculty member at both Columbia School of the Arts and the Yale School of Drama.
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Murray Moss | In search of Narrative
President's Office and Murray Moss
Visiting designer Murray Moss, founder and creative mind behind MOSS design gallery in NYC, presents In Search of Narrative, a lecture addressing such questions as: Is there a life story embedded in each inanimate object? Does the designer address not only formalistic aspects of an object, but also narrative? These questions provide the foundation for Moss’s exploration of object narratives and his belief that every object, whether categorized as functional, decorative or as art, contains a complicated narrative that points to the fundamental intersection of persons and things in modern life.
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Victor Papanek: Design, Ecology, and Global Activism | Alison Clarke
Liberal Arts Division, Theory & History of Art & Design Department, RISD Museum, and RISD Global
Lecture, October 4, 2018. 6:00 pm Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum/Chace Center. The division of Liberal Arts, THAD department and RISD Museum welcome author and design historian Alison Clarke to RISD to give a lecture titled “Victor Papanek: Design, Ecology and Global Activism. "In 1968, Papanek described the design profession as a mode of “do-it-yourself murder” that generates waste, wreaks ecological havoc and excludes the most socially disadvantaged. Design, he warned, had become preoccupied with “the concocting of such inane trivia as mink-covered toilet-seats, electronic fingernail polish dryers and baroque fly-swatters,” rather than solving “real world” needs.
Based on the forthcoming book Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (MIT Press) and research for a recent co-curated exhibition with the Vitra Design Museum, Germany, the lecture will explore how Papanek’s iconoclastic designs, provocative journalism and unique global pedagogic initiatives upended the complacency of the 1960s and ’70s design establishment. Clarke will examine how this shift in the perception of design as a political tool was part of a broader challenge to commodity culture that drew on feminist and counter-culture ideas of non-capitalist production, African-American civil rights and global post-colonial activism, and a burgeoning ecological movement. She will conclude by examining the legacy of Papanek’s ideas in contemporary design discourse. This event is sponsored by the Division of Liberal Arts graduate programs in Global Arts and Cultures and Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies in conjunction with the RISD Museum’s Repair and Design Futures Exhibition and RISD Global.
Alison J. Clarke is a design historian and trained social anthropologist. She is chair of Design History and Theory and Director of the Victor J. Papanek Foundation, University of Applied Arts Vienna, and taught previously at the Royal College of Art, London. Professor Clarke’s publications include Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America, which became the basis of an Emmy Award nominated PBS documentary, Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century (2017), and Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture (with Elana Shapira, 2017). She is currently completing a monograph for MIT Press titled Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World, as well as co-curating a related exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum, Germany.
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Getting to Zero: What it will take to decarbonize electricity | Jesse Jenkins
Liberal Arts Division
Lecture, September 26, 2018. 1:10 pm Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum/Chace Center.
Jesse D. Jenkins is one of the leading contemporary figures thinking about energy futures and the project of deep decarbonization. He is currently an Environmental Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on the rapidly evolving electricity sector, including the transition to zero-carbon power systems and the proliferation of distributed energy resources. Jesse earned a PhD in Engineering Systems ('18) and MS in Technology & Policy ('14) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked previously as a researcher at the MIT Energy Initiative, the Director of Energy and Climate Policy at the Breakthrough Institute, and a Policy and Research Associate at the Renewable Northwest Project.
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Virgil Abloh | Theoretically Speaking
President's Office and Virgil Abloh
Best known for his Milan-based fashion label Off-White and as Kanye West’s longtime creative director, Virgil Abloh visited RISD May 2–3, 2017, packing the Auditorium with students eager to hear him speak about his trajectory and approach to design. His brief talk quickly morphed into a conversation with President Rosanne Somerson 76 ID in which the two talked about the importance of transcending boundaries, building credibility, maintaining integrity and moving fluidly across time, space and medium as a designer.
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A Conversation with Kara Walker
RISD Museum and Kara Walker
Accomplished artist Kara Walker (RISD MFA 1994, Painting/Printmaking), winner of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures that have appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide. The RISD Auditorium was full to capacity for this much-anticipated Artist Talk. This video was produced by RISD Museum.
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Carolee Schneemann | Lecture
Graduate Studies and Carolee Schneemann
Visiting artist Carolee Schneemann gave a lecture on March 22nd, 2016 in the RISD Auditorium at 7:00pm. Carolee Schneemann’s legendary performances, installations, and video art explore and fuse a vitality of sensate experience and vivid imagination through ideas of the sacred, taboo, and erotic pleasure. With remarkable courage she disturbs conventions and trespasses boundaries, altering the conditions – and our expectations – of art. A pioneer of 1960s feminist art, her paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture, and strikingly independent writings reveal and animate a distinctive vision that continues to challenge and inspire artists today.
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Philip Glass | Lecture
Liberal Arts Division and Philip Glass
The local arts nonprofit FirstWorks brought Glass and violinist Tim Fain to Providence for a Wednesday evening concert Februrary 25th, 2015. The composer then stopped by RISD on Thursday afternoon, February 26th for an open discussion about his creative practice with Dean of Liberal Arts Dan Cavicchi, a cultural historian and author of several music-focused books. A large audience packed into the RISD Auditorium listened intently as Glass spoke about the process of producing emotionally charged soundtracks for The Truman Show, Notes on a Scandal, Hamburger Hill and many other moving films.