Monday, 1 December, 2008

Spending More Won't Help
Our guest on December 3, Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College and co-chair of the board of directors of the Center for a New American Dream, has a brief essay on the new realities of consumption and the economy, available here.

 She also just published this op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, "Holiday Shopping--Just Don't."

Friday, 7 November, 2008

Only Connect:
Madeline Levine, Denise Pope and K-12 Education
For an excerpt from The Price of Privilege, a book by Madeline Levine, our guest on November 15 when we discuss revitalizing American public education, please go here.

Denise Pope's  book, Doing School, is described here.

And take a look at this video on Stanford's East Palo Alto Academy.

We look forward to seeing you on November 15 at 1:00pm in Kresge Auditorium.

Monday, 3 November, 2008

Vote!

Tuesday, 21 October, 2008

The Center for Advanced Study
in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford
We are pleased to join with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (CASBS) to present our October 23 conversation with Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. and Claude Steele, the director of the Center since 2005.  Among his many other honors, Skip Gates was a fellow at the Center in 2007-08.

CASBS is dedicated to advancing knowledge about human behavior and fostering contributions to society by facilitating interdisciplinary perspectives, depth of inquiry, integration of knowledge, and application to real world concerns.  The Center aims to bring the disciplines into contact with each other and broaden scholars' work beyond their specialized training.

Since the arrival of the first class in January 1955, CASBS has offered a place of sanctuary and stimulation for more than 2,000 distinguished scholars to do their best work and interact with peers from a rich variety of fields.  Each year, CASBS offers 40 to 50 residential fellowships for accomplished and promising scholars in fields that illuminate the questions of how people and societies behave.

The Center’s founders envisioned that fellows would in turn make significant contributions to human welfare. And indeed they have. Many of the most important theories in the behavioral sciences have originated here. CASBS takes pride in providing a milieu that enables scholars to do the kind of work that leads to awards that recognize significant contributions. The Center’s alumni include 20 recipients of the Nobel Prize, 10 winners of the Pulitzer Prize, 43 MacArthur Fellows, and 128 current members of the National Academy of Sciences.

For more information, visit www.casbs.org.

We look forward to seeing you at Kresge Auditorium on October 23.

Monday, 13 October, 2008
Naomi Klein and Democratic Reconstruction

When you scroll through the Aurora Forum archive, you find that we regularly present conversations with investigative journalists such as Rebecca Solnit, Lewis Lapham, Amy Goodman, Chris Hedges, and Dahr Jamail, whose writings are motivated by a passion for social justice. This coming Thursday, October 16 we welcome another such journalist, Naomi Klein, for a conversation that grows out of her latest book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007).

Naomi Klein first arrived on the scene with No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000), an international bestseller that examines the way our affluence is a by-product of globalization's devastating effects on the world's poor. In between No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, she and her husband, Avi Lewis, produced The Take (2004). This film chronicles events in the wake of Argentina's economic collapse in 2001, after which unemployed workers took over factories abandoned by the multinationals and got them running again.

Naomi and Avi wrote about the Argentine struggle for democratic reconstruction in The Nation: "The legal and political case for worker control in Argentina does not only rest on the unpaid wages, evaporated benefits, and emptied-out pension funds. The workers make a sophisticated case for their moral right to property...based not just on what they're owed personally, but what society is owed. The recovered companies propose themselves as an explicit remedy to all the corporate welfare, corruption, and other forms of public subsidy the owners enjoyed in the process of bankrupting their firms and moving their wealth to safety, abandoning whole communities to the twilight of economic exclusion."

Does the case in Argentina offer lessons for what we face now in the United States, where we've also seen a massive transfer of public wealth to private hands through crony capitalism fueled by unchecked greed? Naomi Klein thinks it does, and her books are filled with stories of similar devastation and of courageous people who wake up from the shock and find ways to work together to preserve democratic ideals.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Monday, 6 October, 2008

Invitation to Special Event on October 11
Space has been reserved for Aurora Forum guests to attend a Stanford Reunion Homecoming Weekend Classes Without Quizzes session: "The Future of Human Health: Seven Very Short Talks that Will Blow Your Mind."

This event features seven very different and inspiring stories about the frontiers of human health from seven of Stanford's most innovative faculty members.  Borrowing from a format used at the TED Conference, each speaker will deliver a highly engaging talk in just 10 minutes about his or her research.

Learn about Stanford's newest and most exciting discoveries in neuroscience, bioengineering, brain imaging, psychology, and more.  Moderated by Mark Gonnerman with presentations by Kwabena Boahen, Karl Deisseroth. Stefan Heller, Brian Knutson, Jennifer Raymond. Krishna Shenoy, and Brian Wandell.

The Future of Human Health:
Seven Very Short Talks that Will Blow Your Mind
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Dinkelspiel Auditorium. 2:30 – 4:00pm
Free and Ticketed | Tickets available at the
Stanford Ticket Office | Call 650-725-2787

Tuesday, 30 September, 2008

Vice-Presidential Debate Broadcast
in Kresge Prior to Inaugural Lecture
The Aurora Forum has arranged to broadcast the vice-presidential debate on October 2 in Kresge Auditorium starting at 6:00pm. Doors open at 5:30.

You are invited to bring your friends, watch the debate, and stay for Danielle Allen's inaugural lecture for our Education for Citizenship series with the Stanford Center for Ethics.

Monday, 22 September, 2008

The Aurora Forum Joins with National Geographic's All Roads Photographers at the Adobe Photo Systems Building in San Francisco on Monday, September 29 to present “Global Storytellers,” a program celebrating the work of four widely diverse photographers from around the globe:

Khaled Hasan (Bangladesh), Farzana Wahidy (Afghanistan), Alejandro Chaskielberg (Argentina) and Rena Effendi (Azerbaijan).

These four photographers, all 2008 National Geographic All Roads photography awardees, represent a new generation of under-represented global storytellers, each with their unique visions and ways of celebrating the story of their culture.

The program will be moderated by Mark Gonnerman along with Chris Rainier from the National Geographic Society and Andy Patrick of the Fifty Crows Foundation for Social Change Photography.

WHEN: Monday, September 29, 2008

RECEPTION: 4:30 – 5:30pm

PRESENTATION: 5:30 – 7:30pm

WHERE: Adobe Photo Systems Building, 601 Townsend Street, San Francisco, California

FREE AND OPEN TO ALL