Sidore Series 11-12
Sustainability Unbound Moves Beyond the Buzzword
The 2012 Sidore Lecture series Sustainability Unbound, organized by the UNH Sustainability Academy, invites participants to break free from the limits of green. An international group of humanists will discuss the big idea of sustainability. They will examine how politics, creative writing, music, economics, philosophy, and filmmaking contribute to an unfettered notion of sustainability that goes beyond environmentalism to include creativity and culture.
The lecture series will take place over two days on March 21 and 22, 2012.
All lectures are free and open to the public.
They will be held in the Huddleston Hall Ballroom.
Melissa Lane
Professor, Department of Politics, Princeton University
March 21 • 12:10 p.m., Huddleston Ballroom
Melissa Lane is a political theorist specializing in ancient Greek thought. She has long experience working with public and private leaders about the ethics and politics of sustainability at the University of Cambridge and the Prince of Wales’s Business and Sustainability Programme. Lane’s specialty is Plato. Her book Eco-Republic is forthcoming this fall, using Plato’s Republic as a model for thinking about a stable, sustainable, and healthy state of mutual shaping between persons and polity. In her talk, Lane will examine the nature of the virtues and the reconceptualization of the common good in light of sustainability. She will also build her talk upon a new interdisciplinary project on communicating scientific uncertainty in which she is involved at Princeton.
Lewis Hyde
Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing, Kenyon College and Faculty Associate, Berkman
Center, Harvard University
March 21 • 7:00 p.m., Huddleston Ballroom
Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift, illuminates and defends the non- commercial portion of artistic practice. Trickster Makes This World (1998) uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. Hyde’s most recent book, Common as Air, is a spirited defense of our “cultural commons,” that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and that continue to enrich in the present. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Jeff Titon
Professor of Music, Brown
University, enthomusicologist
March 22 • 12:40 p.m., Huddleston Ballroom
Jeff Titon is the author or editor of seven books, numerous articles, recordings, and documentary films. He writes, “Sustainable Music: A Research Blog on the Subject of Sustainability and Music,” which focuses on musical cultures as ecosystems and an ecological approach to musical and cultural sustainability. His work in acoustic ecology and ecological economics theorizes nature’s economy to show how sound transforms place and how ecological principles may inform cultural policy. He is co–founder of the American Studies program at Tufts University. Since 1986, Titon has directed Brown University’s doctoral program in ethnomusicology, and he is a past editor of the Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is the first person trained in ethnomusicology to focus on American vernacular music and is regarded as a pioneer in the area of applied ethnomusicology and cultural conservation. He is currently writing the Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology (co-edited with Svanibor Pettan) and a book theorizing an ecological approach to music and cultural policy.
Enrique Leff
philosopher, economist, and environmentalist
March 22 • 4:00 p.m., Huddleston Ballroom
Enrique Leff is an environmentalist who works in the fields of political ecology, environmental epistemology, and ecological economics. He is a Level III researcher with the Mexican National Researchers’ System and a professor in Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in the post- graduate division of political and social studies. Leff is also coordinator of the Latin American Environment Training Network of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and former UNEP coordinator
for Mexico. He is the author of more than 150 books and articles published in Europe and Latin America, including Green Production: Toward an Environmental Rationality. Leff serves on numerous international academic and consultative bodies
as well as on the editorial councils of academic journals.
Carol Mansour
filmmaker
March 22 • 6:00 p.m., Huddleston Ballroom
Carol Mansour is the director of many documentary films, including Voices from Yemen, Maid in Lebanon, Invisible Children, A Summer not to Forget, 100% Asphalt, and more. Founder and owner of Forward Film Production, Mansour makes documentaries about social problems such as domestic workers abuse and child labor in Egypt, Lebanon, and Yemen. Her work has won the Jury’s Award from the Sole Luna Film Festival, best short documentary from the International Film Festival - New Zealand, best short documentary at the 2001 Documentary Festival, the Jury’s Award at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Parise, and best documentary at the Arab Film Festival of Rotterdam.