Guest Speaker Events

There will be three guest speaker events over the course of this symposium. While attendance to these will be limited to conference participants only, video recordings will be posted to the conference site shortly after the events. Symposium readers are encouraged to watch the videos, and any questions and comments will be sent to the speakers for response.

  Christine Corday

  Sunday, December 6, 4:00 pm EST

  See video recording here: Corday video

Christine Corday is an artist who engages a materials practice with the evolving human scale of perception and fundamental forces. She works with temperature, pressure, material states, elemental metals, and other created media often in collaboration with international scientists and science organizations, among them NASA, SETI (US), ITER (FR), ORNL (US), Enbio (IE), ZYBECK (US), UCLA Galactic Center Group (US) and KBNNO (FI). She has had solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015), the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis (2019), and the New York City High Line (2008). Awards and honors include a nomination for United States Artist Fellow (2016) and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Brian Wall Foundation (2019); the National Endowment for the Arts (2019), the Robert Lehman Foundation (2019) and the Lannan Foundation (2015). She lives and works in New York’s Hudson Valley.

   Charles Eisenstein

   Wednesday, December 9th, 4:00 pm EST

   See video recording here: Eisenstein video

Charles Eisenstein is a teacher, speaker, and writer focusing on themes of civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution. His numerous books include The Ascent of Humanity (2007), Sacred Economics (2011), The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible (2013), and Climate: A New Story (2018).

  

  David Abram

  Saturday, December 12, 4:00pm EST

  See video recording here: Abram video

David Abram – cultural ecologist and geophilosopher – is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Described as "revolutionary" by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by Science, David’s work engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform the relation between the human body and the breathing earth. He is a two-time recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, and recently held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and Ecology at the University of Oslo. A close student of traditional ecological knowledge systems of diverse indigenous peoples, David was the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a reappraisal of "animism" as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview (a broad reappraisal that is now underway in many disciplines). In recent years Dr. Abram's work has come to be associated with a broad movement loosely termed "new materialism," due to his espousal of a radically transformed sense of matter and materiality. David is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE); he lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.