Network Winter 2010 will be held from Monday, January 11 to Friday, January 15, 2010 at the University of the Sacred Heart in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The following seminars will be offered:
Energy and the Environment
Literature and the Environment
Society and the Environment
Applications are no longer being accepted for the Network Winter 2010 seminars.
ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT
About the Seminar
The world sits at the crossroads of a remarkable shift in terms of energy production and use, which has been brought on by a combination of technological advances, political pressures, economic changes, and a growing concern worldwide for ecological matters. However, there is a great deal of confusion as to the scope, technical potential, practicality and impact of both conventional and alternative energy sources.
This seminar will explore the technical and scientific basis for recent developments in the field of energy and their implications for the terrestrial ecosystem. General themes for the seminar include energy sources and their use in the developed and developing world; the relationship between sustainability and energy; and energy capture and storage. We will pay particular attention to three of the most promising forms of renewable energy production and utilization: solar, wind, and bioenergy. Seminar readings will be based on current articles dealing with energy and the environment.
Few topics in the public arena today are as politicized, muddled, controversial, technical, far-reaching and interesting as the issue of energy. As a consequence, there is a great opportunity to utilize this topic to stimulate student interest and teach clear thinking in a variety of subjects.
This seminar is suitable for participants with a foundation in mathematics, physical science or biological science.
About the Convener
Daniel Ciolkosz is an extension associate with the Penn State Biomass Energy Center and the Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department. His experience includes several years as an energy consultant at CDH Energy Corporation, as well as a faculty position at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Dr. Ciolkosz has received several awards for outstanding teaching and works in the areas of biomass conversion, alternative energy systems and energy efficiency. Ongoing projects include the development of solar-biomass hybrid systems and the evaluation of fuel densification processes for biomass. He also serves as the bioenergy technical lead for the US-DOE Northeast Regional Clean Energy Application Center.
Professor Ciolkosz received his Ph.D. in agricultural engineering from Cornell University, and his B.A.E. and M.S. from the Pennsylvania State University.
LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
About the Seminar
This seminar will explore the ways we have come to understand our relationship with the natural world. How we have honored, cherished, degraded, and exploited the land around us, as well as the creatures and, frequently, the native people who live there. How we have used mythology and science and religion for insight into landscapes, people, and creatures we have often only poorly understood. The course is designed to be useful for faculty from a broad array of disciplines, including literature, journalism, history, sociology, ethnic studies, political science, and environmental studies. Our readings will be taken largely from the work of novelists and nonfiction writers, but also from poets, philosophers, and scientists. Among the many topics we will consider are: how we know (and do not know) the places we inhabit; what stories we tell, and pass on, about ourselves, and about "others," be they wild animals or people from unfamiliar cultures; what religion and spirituality can tell us about nature, and vice versa; what changes we have experienced in our relationship with food; what we value - morally, aesthetically, and politically -- in the natural world, and what we perceive as worthless. Our readings will be taken largely from the anthology, Literature and the Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture, edited by Lorraine Anderson, Scott Slovic, and John P. O'Grady. Additional readings will be posted on a Blackboard site.
In addition to reading assignments, we will discuss a very useful teaching tool: the nature journal. We will talk about the writing process - specifically, how we can better train our powers of internal and external observation, skills as critical for writers as they are for field scientists. Nature journals can serve as a kind of personal meditation, allowing us to observe and document our interior lives, but also as an opportunity to reflect the world outside ourselves, just as it is.
A final session will be devoted to exploring the use of nature journals and other pedagogical strategies to enhance environmental awareness in the classroom.
About the Convener
McKay Jenkins is Cornelius Tilghman Professor of English and Director of the Program in Journalism at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness, Murder and the Collision of Cultures in the Arctic, 1913 (Random House, 2005); The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler's Europe (Random House, 2003); The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone (Random House, 2000); and The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999). He is also the editor of The Peter Matthiessen Reader (Vintage, 2000). His new book, on toxic chemicals, our health, and the environment, will be published by Random House in 2010.
A former staff writer for The Atlanta Constitution, Professor Jenkins also has written for Outside, Orion, and many other publications. He is a winner of the University of Delaware's Excellence in Teaching Award. He holds degrees from Amherst, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, and Princeton, where he received a Ph.D. in English.
SOCIETY AND THE ENVIRONMENT
About the Seminar
This seminar will explore the ways that scholars have looked at the complex relationship between society and the natural environment. The course will focus particularly on two of the main theories of the society/environment relationship that come to very different conclusions about the fate of society and the planet: Ecological Marxism and Ecological Modernization. We will review these theoretical perspectives, paying particular attention to recent contributions. The first two days of the seminar will be devoted to reviewing these two theories and contextualizing them within the broader literature on the relationship between society and the environment. During the second half of the seminar, we will use the empirical case of global climate change, which has received significant attention in the social science literature as well as in the real world in recent months, to think about the applications of these theories to empirical examples. Building off of the recent literature on global climate change that applies these theoretical perspectives, we will focus on two of the dominant themes in sociological discussions of the issue: climate policy-making in the United States and climate skepticism.
Readings will include the newly published Ecological Modernisation Reader: Environmental Reform in Theory and Practice (Routledge, June 2009), National Governance and the Global Climate Change Regime (Rowman & Littlefield 2004), a selection of readings from the ecological Marxism perspective, and a selection of recent social scientific writings about climate change.
Sessions will be broken down into discussions of the theories, empirical readings, and pedagogical tools that can be used in the classroom. To that end, arrangements will be made to screen selected films that focus on the topic of climate change, including The Age of Stupid and The Denial Machine.
About the Convener:
Dana R. Fisher is associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on environmental policy and civic participation and activism more broadly. Currently, she is working on projects that explore urban environmental stewardship in New York City and multiple aspects of climate politics in America. She has written a number of peer-reviewed articles, and is the author of National Governance and the Global Climate Change Regime (Rowman & Littlefield 2004) and Activism, Inc.: how the outsourcing of grassroots campaigns is strangling progressive politics in America (Stanford University Press 2006).
Professor Fisher received her Ph.D. and Masters of Science degrees from the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her undergraduate degree is in East Asian Studies and Environmental Studies from Princeton University.