PPL Speaker Series
The Department of Public Policy Leadership is honored to welcome a number of distinguished scholars and presenters who will be speaking with our students in the spring of 2009.
Dr. Harry Boyte of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota will be our third speaker of the semester. His presentation is titled “The fight for the Soul of America – Higher Education and the future of our Democracy” and will take place on Thursday February 19th, 2009, from 4:00-5:15 pm in the Tupelo Room of the historic Barnard Observatory (location is here).
According to Dr. Boyte's Web site, he "is founder and co-director of the Institute's Center for Democracy and Citizenship, and founder of Public Achievement, a theory-based practice of citizen organizing to do public work for the common good which is being used in schools, universities and communities across the United States and in more than a dozen countries. Boyte has been an architect of the center's 'public work' approach to civic engagement and democracy promotion, a conceptual framework on citizenship that has gained world-wide recognition for its theoretical innovations and its practical effectiveness." For more information on Dr. Boyte, click here.
Our second speaker for the spring of 2009 is Dr. Larry Hickman, Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Director of the Center for Dewey Studies. He will be meeting with our students for lunch on Thursday, February 5th at noon to talk about participatory and representative forms of democracy in the work of John Dewey, and how we can use the methods of the sciences as a model for thinking about the optimum balance.
Dr. Hickman will then give a public presentation on the philosophy of technology in Bryant Hall, room 209, at 4 p.m. on Thursday, February 5th. This presentation will be open to the public, and is part of the department of Philosophy and Religion's Forum Lecture series.
More information on the remaining speakers in our series will be posted here soon. If you have any questions, you can email them to us here (ppleader@olemiss.edu).
The first of our speakers in the spring of 2009 was Dr. John Lachs, Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, who spoke about "The Costs of Comfort" in the Tupelo room of the historic Barnard Observatory (location is here) on Thursday, January 29th of 2009 at 4 p.m. For a printable flier listing the details of this event, click here.
Dr. Lachs also had lunch with our students on Friday, January 30th at noon in the Odom conference room. Finally, he served as facilitator and keynote speaker for the Society of Philosophers in America's (SOPHIA) symposium, "Ethics at the End of Life," which will ran from Friday evening, January 30th through Saturday afternoon, the 31st. You can find more information here below (click here), or you can visit SOPHIA's Web site directly here (http://www.philosophersinamerica.com).
