We are animals who must eat, but should we eat animals? If we eating animals are to be sustainable, is eating animals sustainable? Do eating animals need to eat animals who eat? This roundtable assembles a diverse group of experts from the fields of philosophy, law, and meat production and butchery for a lively discussion of what is increasingly being recognized as one of the most vexing set of issues of our time.

 

Eating Animals is a roundtable conversation with Camas Davis (former Food Editor, Portland Monthly), Kathy Hessler (Center for Animal Law Studies, Lewis & Clark College), Ramona Ilea (Professor of Philosophy, Pacific University). Moderated by Alastair Hunt (Professor of English, Portland State University).

 

A conversation about modern music

Frank Black writes and plays music as a solo artist and as a member of Grand Duchy and The Pixies.

Carl Wilson is a Toronto-based music editor for The Globe and Mail and the author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.

Made possible through support from the Northwest Film Center and PSU’s Graduate Literary Organization (GLO).

Free and open to the public. 21+

A discussion of new issues and directions in environmental history with major national scholars in the field.  Participants will include:

 

William Cronon (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Author of Changes in the Land; Nature's Metropolis; Uncommon Ground

Nancy Langston (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Author of Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares; Where Land and Water Meet; Toxic Bodies

James Feldman (University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh), Author of Storied Wilderness

 

Cronon studies American environmental history and the history of the American West. His research seeks to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world: how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas of nature shape our relationships with the world around us.

 

Moderated by Professor William Lang, Department of History at Portland State University and editor of the Oregon Encyclopedia Project.

 

David Theo Goldberg is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the  University of California, Irvine and Director of the UC system’s Humanities Research Institute. Professor Goldberg's work ranges over issues of political theory, race and racism, ethics, law and society, critical theory, cultural studies and, increasingly, digital humanities. Together with Cathy Davidson of Duke University, he founded the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) to promote partnerships between the human sciences, arts, social sciences and technology and supercomputing interests for advancing research, teaching and public outreach. He and Davidson recently published The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, a summary report of the forthcoming book, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (forthcoming, MIT Press). He has authored numerous books, including The Threat of Race (2008); The Racial State (2002); Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (1997); Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning  (1993); and Ethical Theory and Social Issues: Historical Texts and Contemporary Readings (1989/1995). He has also edited or co-edited many volumes, including A Companion to Gender Studies (2005); A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies (2002); Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies (2002); Relocating Postcolonialism (2002);  Race Critical Theories: Text and Context  (2001); Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (1994); Jewish Identity (1993); and Anatomy of Racism (1990).

Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Professor of English and Womens Studies, University of Chicago.  Professor Berlant's research focuses on the legal and normative production of personhood in the U.S. nineteenth and twentieth centuries—now the twenty-first: in particular, citizenship, formal and informal. By formal she designates state, juridical, and institutional practices of zoning and more abstract boundary drawing—between public and private, or white and non-white, or citizen and foreigner. She has recently finished a trilogy of books on national sentimentality now—the first and third in the series are The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997), and The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008).  Her edited volumes include Intimacy (Chicago, 2000) and (with Lisa Duggan) Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State 2001, and Compassion: the Culture and Politics of an Emotion (2004).

This national conference follows upon the inaugural conference from last year, and will bring over sixty scholars from across diverse disciplines and backgrounds to Portland to draw out the controversies over the meaning and practice of sustainability.