Weekly presentations
Transformation and its application in sustainability research
[ 26 September, 2008; 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm. ] This Friday the 26th of September, Val Brown and Rod Griffith will host a roundtable discussion in the Managing Change series: Transformation and its application in sustainability research. Until recently, transformation has been a taboo word, too strong for research funders, communities and organisations working on change towards sustainability. Suddenly it’s an OK word - between Al Gore and the melting ice-caps we seem to have crossed a threshold that says sustainability is not business as usual. Following Barry Newell’s challenge to the Forum to identify their metaphors, which metaphor for transformation are each of us using in our work?
Roundtable session on climate change
[ 15 August, 2008; 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm. ] Two weeks ago, Desley Speck lead us on a discussion around her early stage PhD research into climate change, public opinion, political decision-making and the media. This discussion was so exciting that Forum attendees wanted to follow up some of the key ideas that were raised. So this Friday 15th of August, we will be having a roundtable session led by Barry Newell (Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU) on ‘Climate change - interpretations of resilience, irreversibility, urgency and political will to act’.
Swimming with Whale Sharks
This Friday the 8th of August, Wendy Rainbird (Nature and Society Forum) will be leading a discussion on “Swimming with Whale Sharks: the place of direct experience in valuing and understanding the natural world”. We will explore the issues for effective on-going conservation management, human interactions with and threats to the whale sharks, and the changes these bring to oceanic ecosystems, political processes and personal values.
Savannah Cats (review)
For this Forum, Penelope Marshall led us through a work in progress on the current troubled importation of the Savannah Cat into Australia. This involved stepping back from the controversy to look at how this case depicts tangled webs of failing governance and deliberation, alongside the problematic consequences of humanities project of modernity and ethical dilemmas at the heart of how we think the world should be.
From the Music of the Spheres … and Back Again (review)
‘From the Music of the Spheres to the Clatter of the Dice and Back Again’. Well, for this Forum John Schooneveldt lead us on one very stunning trip, covering 4 billion years, into some seriously big ideas and re-conceptualisations, and to which I can not do justice in a few paragraphs, but here is a shot at a slice of it.
A sense of urgency and peril?
[ 1 August, 2008; 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm. ] This Friday the 1st of August, Desley Speck (PhD candidate, Fenner School, The ANU), will be leading a discussion on “A sense of urgency and peril? Australian perceptions of climate change and their political influences”.
The cat, the dog and the python: The proposed importation of savannah cats into Australia
[ 25 July, 2008; 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm. ] This seminar will explore several aspects of the current construction of the savannah cat controversy. Firstly, it will reveal the competing discourses evident in the savannah cat case as complex; if not irreconcilable. Secondly, it will reveal the nomenclature relied on within these discourses as equally complex. Thirdly, it will highlight suggested changes to the existing administrative powers of the national Vertebrate Pest Committee as being neither transparent nor accountable and therefore of concern.
From the Music of the Spheres to the Clatter of the Dice and Back Again
The case for applying Darwinian principles to explain social and cultural change
John Schooneveldt (Nature and Society Forum)
Traditional wisdom has long recognised that societal arrangements, beliefs, languages and cultures evolve over time but they do so rather differently to the way living organisms have evolved. In other words, while Darwinian evolution is widely accepted as explaining [...]
The Price of pre-ecological policy inertia (review)
The title of David Eastburn’s Human Ecology forum discussion was The Price of pre-ecological policy inertia: 10,000 hectares of dead Red Gums? And what we got from David was an emphatic removal of the question mark in his title and, sadly, its replacement by an exclamation mark…The kernel of David’s story is this: on the [...]
Roundtable discussion
It has been a while since we did one of our periodic collective ‘brain dumps’, so as we have reached the middle of the 2008 and you’ve all no doubt got many ideas and plans buzzing around in your heads, the aim of this Human Ecology Forum is to draw out those ideas for collective mulling over and discussion. The plan is to have a round table discussion within the broad category of social science, natural science, humanities research / practice / dilemmas / debates / dialogues or just on the conundrums of doing ‘right’ practice out there in the world… 12-2pm Friday 11 July 2008.
Recent Comments