The Wagner Free Institute of Science, Located at 1700 West Montgomery Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19121

We often see debates between experts on scientific issues that affect our lives and livelihoods. What can we do when the experts disagree but their decisions have enormous impacts on us? Do we try to influence their debate? Do we trust one side? Do we trust our gut feelings? Hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale has brought up these questions and issues. Join us for a panel discussion with speakers from a number of fields and disciplines who will help us understand the way we access and understand information and help us apply lessons learned from history in our decision-making process.

Moderator:
Babak Ashrafi, Executive Director of the Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science

Panel:
Susan Phillips, Reporter for WHYY and NPR, contributor to State Impact PA
Brook Lenker, Director of Fractracker.org
Sara Wylie, Director of Toxics and Health Research, publiclaboratory.org

The second annual Philadelphia Science Festival, taking place April 20-29, is presented by The Dow Chemical Company to celebrate science and technology. More than 105 institutions, museums and cultural and community centers are planning lectures, debates, hands-on activities and special exhibitions, most of them free. http://www.philasciencefestival.org/

Please note, lecture will be held at Tyler School of Art

The Foundations Department and Temple University Libraries, with the support of the General Activities Fund, present the Annual Foundations Lecture:
Artists & Authors, Ellen Harvey

Ellen Harvey’s work is in museum collections in the U.S. and Europe. A New Yorker, Harvey has had one-person exhibits in museums and galleries and completed noted public art commissions with Creative Time, Chicago Transit Authority and MTA Arts for Transit. She is currently working on a mosaic for the new Metro-North Yankee Stadium Station. Her book The New York Beautification Project was published by Gregory Miller and Co. in 2005. A catalog of her work, Ellen Harvey: Mirror, was published by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in conjunction with her exhibition there in 2006.

Join us for the March 2012 installment of Chat in the Stacks, as Temple scholars explore: “Is Education Under Assault” ? Faculty panelists include:

• Matt Tincani Profressor Tincani is an Associate Professor of Special Education at Temple and coordinator of the Master’s Degree Program in Applied Behavior Analysis. His research interests focus on teaching language and social skills to people with autism spectrum disorder, positive behavior support, and applied behavior analysis. He is author of numerous journal articles, book chapters, and books on these topics, including “Preventing Challenging Behavior: Positive Behavior Support and Effective Classroom Management” (Prufrock Press, 2011).He is also interested in how policy informs the education of children with with ASD and other disabilities in public schooling.

• Yasuko Kanno Professor Kanno is an Associate Professor of TESOL in the College of Education, Temple University. She is interested in linguistic minority students’ negotiation of identity and educational opportunities within institutional settings, and this interest has resulted in two books, Negotiating Bilingual and Bicultural Identities (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003) and Language and Education in Japan (Palgrave, 2008). Yasuko is currently working on several projects on linguistic minority students’ access to college, including statistical analyses of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) and the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), and an ethnographic study of linguistic minority high school seniors going to college. Her latest work is Linguistic Minority Students Go to College: Preparation, Access, and Persistence (with Linda Harklau, Routledge, 2012). As a teacher educator, she teaches a variety of TESOL courses, including an undergraduate introductory course in English Language Learner Education, graduate courses in sociopolitical aspects of language teaching and learning, bilingual education and bilingualism, and language teaching methods. At home, she is the mom of an energetic and incredibly social 8-year-old son.

• Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara Professor Bloomfield Cucchiara is a sociologist of education focusing on urban education policy. My research examines urban education policy and its implications for disadvantaged students. I do this in two distinct ways. First, I am interested in understanding the impact urban revitalization and redevelopment have on public schools. My research in this area is designed to provide an understanding of the relationship between public education and deindustrialization, urban revitalization, and other macro-level urban processes. What role do schools play in 21st century cities? How do processes such as urban transformation and gentrification affect policy and practice in public schools? In particular, I am interested in the extent to which these developments ameliorate or exacerbate existing inequalities between students, families, and schools. Second, I am interested in school reform in Philadelphia and its implications for equity and capacity. Much of my work on Philadelphia school reform has examined the ways the state takeover of Philadelphia’s schools and the resulting marketization of the district affected civic engagement and civic capacity around education. I have published in the American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, and the Journal of Education Policy.

BETTYE COLLIER-THOMAS on Women’s History March 22, 2:00 PM, the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection Join us for an annual Women’s History Month program at the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection. This year’s program features Temple’s own Dr. Bettye Collier-Thomas. A professor in the Department of History and the former director of the Temple University Center for African American History and Culture, Collier-Thomas is also a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is the founder and served as the first executive director of the Bethune Museum and Archives in Washington, D.C., the nation’s first museum and archives for African American women’s history. She is the author of the award-winning Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (2010) and editor of Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement. She is currently a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she is working on a book-length history of African American women and politics.

VINCENT FELDMAN and the Abandoned City in conversation with Ken FinkelMarch 13, 4:30 PM, Paley Library Register and spread the word on facebook!

Photographer Vincent Feldman has made a career of capturing the architectural ghosts of our city, the remainders of our built environment that have been rendered obsolete by the constant changes of the city and nation. His photography captures commercial, cultural and government buildings left vacant throughout Philadelphia. He has also worked on photography projects focusing on the built and natural environments of the Gulf Coast, the Ivy League schools and overseas, in Europe, Japan and China. Join photographer Vincent Feldman in conversation with Temple’s Ken Finkel, as they discuss Vincent’s artistic oeuvre around the abandoned city. City Abandoned: Charting the Loss of Civic Institutions in Philadelphia, Feldman’s first monograph, will be released by Paul Dry Books next Fall.

Since 1993, Vincent Feldman has produced photographs of public landmarks in the Philadelphia region creating a detailed inventory of abandoned civic structures. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Philadelphia at the Paley Design Center and the Open Lens Gallery at the Gershman Y, and in group exhibitions at Moore College of Art & Design, the Allentown Art Museum, the Philadelphia Art Alliance and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Feldman received his BFA from George Washington University and his MFA from Tyler School of Art. His work is in the collections of the Allentown Art Museum, the Free Library of Philadelphia, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Zeit-Foto Salon and KOWA, Tokyo. Feldman was awarded Pew Fellowship in 2001. He is currently a Master Lecturer at the University of the Arts and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Tyler School of Art and Philadelphia University.

Kenneth Finkel joined Temple University as a Distinguished Lecturer in 2008 having previously served as Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Library Company of Philadelphia, Program Officer at the William Penn Foundation and Executive Director of Arts & Culture Service at WHYY. At WHYY, he developed cultural programming for TV, radio and the web. Finkel posted weekly columns at Brownstoner-Philadelphia (Philadelphia Magazine’s “Best Blog” for 2010) and now contributes weekly essays illustrated by images from the Philadelphia City Archives at phillyhistory.org/blog/.

THE CITY DARK A Film Screening and Director’s Talk

February 28, 2:30 PM, Paley Library

Join us to watch The City Dark, filmmaker Ian Cheney’s exploration of how we, as dwellers of contemporary cities, relate to the night sky. After moving to light-polluted New York City from rural Maine, he asks: “Do we need the dark?” Exploring the threat of killer asteroids in Hawai’i, tracking hatching turtles along the Florida coast, and rescuing injured birds on Chicago streets, Cheney unravels the myriad implications of a globe glittering with lights. After the film, enjoy refreshments and a participate in a panel with Cheney and Temple scholars Barry Vacker of BTMM and Jonathan deJonge of Community and Regional Planning.

• About the director: Ian Cheney is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker. He grew up in New England and earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Yale. After graduate school he cocreated and starred in the Peabody Award-winning theatrical hit and PBS documentary King Corn (2007), directed the feature documentary The Greening of Southie (Sundance Channel, 2008), and co-produced the Planet Green film Big River (2009). Ian maintains a 1/1000th acre farm in the back of his ’86 Dodge pickup, which is at the center of his film Truck Farm (2011). He has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Men’s Journal, and on CNN, MSNBC, and Good Morning America. In 2011, Ian and longtime collaborator Curt Ellis received the Heinz Award for their environmental advocacy. An avid astrophotographer, Ian travels frequently to show his films, lead discussions, and give talks about sustainability, agriculture, and the human relationship to the natural world.

• About our faculty panel: Barry Vacker is a scholar and practicing filmmaker whose interests include how utopia, dystopia, and human destiny have been represented in art, media, technology, and culture. He uses an “arts and sciences” approach to creatively and critically theorize the intersection of media, philosophy, culture, and technology, all of which combine to shape models of utopia, dystopia, and destiny around the world. He has published numerous articles and book chapters, edited a textbook anthology, and engaged in the production of experimental projects across a variety of mediums. His recent publications include the text for Peter Granser’s photography book Signs (Hatje Cantz 2008). His recent experimental media projects include the first three volumes of the Theory Zero book series (Zero Conditions, Crashing into the Vanishing Points, and Starry Skies Moving Away, 2009), as well as the documentary Space Times Square (2007), which he wrote and directed. Space Times Square was awarded the “2010 John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology” by the Media Ecology Association. The film has screened in numerous festivals and conferences around the world: Brussels, Beijing, NYC, Hamburg, Dallas, Philadelphia, Paris.

• Jonathan de Jonge is a scholar at Temple University, School of Environmental Design, Department of Community and Regional Planning. De Jonge participates in and teaches a course, People, Places and Environment, where he facilitates a Think Tank on Land and Food. A community advocate, de Jonge serves on the Upper Moreland Township Planning Commission and chairs the local Environmental Advisory Council. He is also a member of the Pennypack Greenway Council. A native of the Netherlands, where he received his education, he majored in history. A world traveler, de Jonge spent many years in Australia and the surrounding areas.