Body, Land, Memory
These events prioritize human connection with lands, acknowledging the capacities of the more-than-human beings of the world to hold memories, serve as witnesses of history, and collaborate with humans at present.
What can we learn
when we listen to the stories the land holds?
- How does relationship to place serve as an antidote to loneliness?
- What do landscapes teach us about ways of being in the world?
- How might the Land, as an archive, keep humans accountable to history?
- In light of shifting economic outlooks, what models does nature offer for community and ways forward?
- What do responses to emerging technologies reveal about how we view ourselves and societies?
- How are we redefining our understanding of concepts like ‘trust’ and ‘privacy’ in the current moment?
- What can the impacts of cognitive offloading teach us about how humans learn and retain information?
- What is the role of language learning models in (re)writing our histories?
- What are traces of diasporic knowledges, and who is tracing them?
- Where can we look for physical traces of empires rising and falling?
Fall 2025
Spencer Lecture with Brea Baker
Brea Baker is the author of "Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership" (2024), which traces the experiences of Brea's own family's history of having land violently taken from them, in Kentucky and North Carolina, to explore historic attacks on Black land ownership and understand the persistent racial wealth gap. Ultimately, her grandfather's decades spent purchasing small parcels of land back resulted in the "Baker Acres"—a haven for the family, and a place where they are surrounded by love, sustained by the land, and wholly free.
Navigating Our Worlds: Ethics in the Digital Age - AI and Climate
This series dives into the complex ethical challenges of our increasingly digital society. In the spirit of a similarly titled Research Rising initiative – Securing Our Worlds – this series expands on topics that are impacted by emerging technologies across digital, social, and physical landscapes.
What are changing social norms regarding privacy?
How are human-technology relationships evolving?
What does increased reliance on technology mean for the health of the planet?
The series will explore the effects on the individual, as well as on our natural environment, and our social institutions.
What are changing social norms regarding privacy?
How are human-technology relationships evolving?
What does increased reliance on technology mean for the health of the planet?
The series will explore the effects on the individual, as well as on our natural environment, and our social institutions.
Spencer Lecture with Ocean Vuong in Conversation with Chloé Cooper Jones
Ocean Vuong and Chloé Cooper Jones are two contemporary writers who challenge readers to identify our collective responsibility to release the structures of a society that isn’t built for human thriving, so that we might come out whole; to ask what it means that in America, one’s worth is so often valued in direct correlation to a specific set of physical characteristics and production potential; and to express to us that a identifying and claiming one’s vulnerability grants access to super powers. They invoke generational time and living in visible bodies, pointing toward a way of being that is both strong and tender.