Students from the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and the School of Sustainability will work with Dr. Claudia Mesch, art history, and Julie Anand, photography, from the School of Art, to explore art and sustainability issues raised by artworks in the ASU Art Museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition will include both past and present examples of artists exploring human interaction with the land, urbanization, natural and manmade materials, pollution, cultural sustainability and sustainable processes, and will explore how artists have brought issues of sustainability to a broader community, encouraged participation and dialog, and proposed creative solutions.
The exhibition, curated by Mesch and Heather Lineberry, Senior Curator and Interim Director of the ASU Art Museum, will include historic precedents, like the 19th century Hudson River school painters who painted classic American landscapes with encroaching signs of industrialization, as well as selections of work by contemporary artists like Matthew Moore, who has created compelling land art works on his family’s farm in the middle of the suburbs in West Phoenix, and Eddie Dominguez, who uses ceramics to explore human history and impact on the earth.
The students in the seminar will bring their different disciplines to their discussions and research. As the conversation deepens, the projects that emerge from the class will be accessible to the public in the gallery on a class bulletin board and on the website including a class blog. Class sessions with guest speakers from the fields of art, science and the humanities will be open to the public. The students in the seminar will also interact with the artists in residence during the larger fall season.
Visit the About section of our Web site or our blog for project details.
Over the past 2,000 years, organized learning has evolved. Today, however, there are social, economic and cultural needs not being met. American society has undergone massive shifts over the past 50 years but our universities have hardly changed at all. The very identity of the university is at stake. So, ASU is changing that identity. ASU is reinventing higher education in America. By breaking the mold, ASU has created a place where local solutions have global impact. Join us. And pursue the work you believe in.
Manfred Laubichler talks about teaching, theoretical biology, historical biology and stretching the limit of what is known.
Manfred Laubichler is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at ASU. His research covers three distinct yet overlapping areas: theoretical biology, the history of biology, and evolutionary developmental biology. He is also an affiliated professor in Philosophy.
The power of the sun is never more apparent than during these scorching summer months of June, July and August in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Whether dashing from our home to our car, or from our car to the grocery store (and lingering in the freezer aisle), for those brave souls who wave goodbye to the snowbirds and tough out this skin-blistering time, there is no reason to doubt the ancients’ quivering reverence to the sun god.
The sun’s power is bursting with the potential to transform our society and improve the quality of our lives. And this is exactly what we’re doing at ASU with an initiative called “Lightworks.” By harnessing the power of the sun, Lightworks is developing a biofuel compatible with diesel and jet fuel production, creating sustainable-friendly plastics, researching ways to mimic antibodies for better and less expensive cures and working on a range of other innovative projects including studying the process of photosynthesis as a way of generating energy for our planet.
For more information regarding these exciting projects contact:
R.F. “Rick” Shangraw, Jr.
Vice President for Research and Economic Affairs
480-968-4087
Rick.Shangraw@asu.edu
Denisse Leon, who graduated from ASU in 2007, talks about her own journey to pull together her many interests and the idea that you can’t really make mistakes as a student—each “mistake” is just a new experience.
Denisse Leon moved to the United States about 6 years ago from Mexico City to attend ASU, where she was an Entrepreneurship Ambassador in the spring of 2007. She graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in social and behavioral sciences, and is currently doing Americorps service at the National Farm Workers Center at El Mirage. She also works as a freelance web designer and marketing consultant, and plans to apply to the University of Oregon for a master’s in arts administration or intercultural service, leadership and management. Her main interests lie in helping promote the arts through different media and using art to create social change.
There has been a lot of talk about flexible learning environments, but it is often a discussion of face-to-face vs online experiences.
How do you blend the classroom experience with high-tech components to aid interactivity (with the teaching tools themselves) and participation?
For the past four years Decision Theater has provided students an enhanced learning experience. Not just students here at ASU, but groups as diverse as high-school students to post-graduate students to water managers.
This video was featured by Educause, a non-profit association which profiled this ASU facility as a creative learning environment.
As Dr. Deirdre Hahn explains,students are immersed in “an experiential very dynamic environment..a safe space that shuts off external distractions.”
Matthew Whitaker talks about giving meaning to freedom and the work he does as an associate professor of History at ASU.
Matthew Whitaker is an associate professor of History at Arizona State University. He earned his B.A. in Sociology, B.A. in History, and M.A. in United States History, from ASU. He then attended Michigan State University in Lansing, where he earned his Ph.D. Professor Whitaker specializes in Modern U.S. history, African American history, the African Diaspora, Civil and Human Rights, sports history, popular culture and the American West. His research focuses on African American leadership, social movements, activism, and the struggle for racial, economic, and gender equality in American history and life. His articles have appeared in many scholarly journals and encyclopedias, and his latest book is entitled Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West (University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
The Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) advances new ideas about the societal impacts of science and technology, and related policy problems. But like any mission-oriented research effort, we sometimes struggle to take these ideas and apply them in the real world. The realm of federal policy in particular, with its strong political forces, complex bureaucracies, and organizational inertia, seems a harsh environment for principled, intellectual arguments about how things could or should be.
One small idea, which we hope will grow, is to convene monthly meetings of program managers from agencies across the federal government. A program manager who disburses funding to researchers occupies an important, but often difficult position in the federal bureaucracy. On the one hand, they may have considerable influence on the way problems get framed, and on the way in which knowledge advances in particular areas. On the other hand, they may be limited by a variety of factors related to agency politics, the culture of particular scientific disciplines, and constricting performance and evaluation criteria.
Our main goal for this effort is to provide a forum for social learning among individuals who want to think differently about the funding and management of science and technology research. What are the best ways to link research outcomes with broader benefits? What innovations in program review can support this goal? There are many more such questions that program managers struggle with. It is our hope that through ongoing interactions with us and with each other, the people who actually implement science and technology policy can learn from each other, and that we can learn from them about how to frame our ideas in useful ways.
We held the first of these meetings last week, and judging by the level of enthusiastic discussion, the event was a success. Hopefully we can keep up interest, and broaden participation in a way that leads to a network of motivated and innovative science and technology policy professionals.
Five years ago, Arizona State University set out to transform its highly acclaimed anthropology department into a one-of-a-kind transdisciplinary school to respond to the challenges and opportunities of a rapidly changing world.
In part, it made official what was already happening—faculty and students in anthropology, math, modeling science, sociology, economics and the earth and life sciences, seamlessly collaborating to delve deeply into the big questions they were passionate about. But it also set the stage for a new mission: to keep anthropology strong and relevant in the new digital age and global knowledge economy.
We felt a responsibility—not only to our students, but to the world and future generations—to evolve and adapt to the world as it is, and to forge ahead as pioneers of social change. To ensure that the critical insights from the archaeological record, our knowledge of culture, and the understandings of how we evolve and what makes us human are not only voiced—but heard. And to do so now, at a time when the world is rethinking its trajectory and urgently looking for answers.
To meet the needs of a globalized world and the 21st century student, we restructured our existing degree programs to make them more flexible and responsive to contemporary career avenues, and added whole new approaches that defy traditional disciplinary labels. As a result, all of our students, regardless of their degree program, benefit from the intellectual fusion and expansion of the school, and the increased opportunities for support, research and collaboration that accompany our progress.
Quick facts:
In less than five years, we’ve added 3 new doctoral degrees (Applied Mathematics for the Life and Social Sciences, Environmental Social Science, Social Science and Health), 2 new bachelor’s degrees (Applied Mathematics for the Life and Social Sciences, Global Health), and a new certificate program (Immigration Studies).
The school’s expanded menu of global opportunities includes study abroad programs in Australia, Fiji, New Zealand and London, and field schools in Cyprus, Hadar (Ethiopia), Kampsville (Illinois, US), Southwest New Mexico, and South Africa. It also operates a full-time Teotihuacan Research Laboratory in San Juan, Mexico.
School of Human Evolution and Social Change faculty are serving as principle or co-principle investigator on 15 active cross-disciplinary grants, including 6 National Science Foundation Human and Social Dynamics projects, 2 NSF Human Origins: Moving in New Directions grants, 2 NSF Biocomplexity grants, 2 NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship awards, 2 NSF CAREER awards, and an NSF Coupled Natural and Human systems grant. In addition, they have received more than 30 anthropology related NSF grants for themselves and their students since the school’s inception.
JODI GUYOT
Director of Research Advancement and Communications
School of Human Evolution and Social Change
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University | P.O. Box 872402 | Tempe, Arizona 85287-2402
480.727.8739 | Fax: 480.965.7671 |
Office: School of Human Evolution and Social Change Bldg. Room 222
The p.a.v.e. program invested in six projects during this fiscal year.
- The Sustainable Symphony (Brain Viliunas). This orchestra, led by a School of Music doctoral candidate takes music to public spaces for free concerts and impromptu music education experiences. Their largest project to date has been produced in collaboration with the Phoenix Zoo. They have filed paperwork with the IRS to organize as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit entity, and are planning three concerts for next year.
- Intercollegiate Film Festival is off to a somewhat slower start with their project to host a web-based juried film festival for student filmmakers from top-ten film schools. The website has been designed but the project was put on hold while its organizers concentrate on completing their spring coursework.
- Formatted Pictures. The team has formed a limited liability company to produce issue-oriented narrative and documentary films. P.a.v.e. funds were used to purchase equipment. The company is organizing a screening for potential investors to be held in June.
- The Human Mirror Project. An interdisciplinary group traveled to India to perform and record their cultural interactions in a documentary film. Progress reports were received via a video blog. With the return of the company to the U.S. work on editing the documentary has begun and should be complete by the fall 2009 for potential distribution.
- Kromatic Entertainment. Team leader Marius Ciorcilan has been working with CJ Cornell on developing his product, an interactive media marketing kiosk, for marketability.
- Rehearsal Assistant. Software development for the Android platform was completed in February and there have been over 2500 downloads since. The team is now developing Rehearsal Assistant as an iPhone application available for purchase.
p.a.v.e
School of Theatre and Film
PO Box 872002
Tempe AZ 85287-2002
