Seminars
Each year the IAS sponsors several year-long seminars.
Remak Seminar and Distinguished Scholar Award for 2012-13
(co-sponsored by the Society for Advanced Study)
“Moral Reasoning in Context:
How Literary, Theatrical and Legal Narratives Affect Moral Perspective.”
Conveners: Fritz Breithaupt, Germanic Studies, and John Kruschke, Psychological and Brain Sciences.
Participants: Amy Cook, Theater and Drama
Jody Madeira, Law
Other faculty to be selected
This year-long seminar will study moral reasoning’s and perspective-taking in the context of narration. It will examine why and how people are siding with one person rather than another in situations of moral and legal conflict. The project will focus on narratives and how they influence people in their moral reasoning. While psychologists study generic situations abstracted for experimental control to understand moral reasoning, literary scholars study extended texts in their cultural context. Theater scholars look at the dynamic staging of narratives and legal scholars study textual and verbal narratives with real-world consequences. The proposed collaboration hopes to find some common processes of moral inference across these various scholarly domains. The seminar will connect psychology, cognitive science and humanities disciplines such as theater, philosophy, and legal studies. It will also contribute to the College’s 2012 Themester on “Good and Bad Behavior.”
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Sawyer Seminar (supported also by a grant from Mellon Foundation)
“Food Choice, Freedom, and Politics.”
Conveners: Richard Wilk, Anthropology, and Peter Martin Todd, Cognitive Science, Informatics, and Psychological and Brain Sciences.
The seminar examines how various disciplines frame the question of food and the choices made about it. These disciplines will include economics and psychology where the focus of choice is the individual, anthropology and sociology where such choices are often cultural, and biology and psychology where the preferences are often rooted in genetic issues. The seminar proposes to craft a series of “crossing points” memoranda where groups of faculty and graduate students from different disciplinary traditions propose ways of bringing their approaches into closer dialogue. Grant funds will fund a postdoctoral fellowship and a graduate dissertation award.
Participants: IU faculty and invited speakers.
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“The University, the Workplace, and the Changing Role of Professionalism”
(supported by the Office of Vice Provost for Research)
This year-long seminar will explore changing notions and standards of professionalism in our times. This project will focus both on the training and progression of knowledge and socialization by which students in the classroom seek to become experts in the workplace and the experience of those who now practice their craft in a variety of vocations. Through a series of discussions, readings, and lectures the seminar aims to stimulate original ethnographic research based upon work among student, scholar, and professional informant groups. The proposed research will document changing expectations and understandings of professional behavior, and will suggest innovative directions in which IU, in particular, can not only further its mission of training creative professionals well-suited to lead in the 21st-century workplace but become a leader in scholarly research regarding the professions.
Conveners: Ilana Gershon, Communication and Culture; Timothy Hallet, Sociology; and Eric Sandweiss, History.
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Translation Seminar
The Translation Seminar deals with the practical side of translation: the translators' tasks (the problems they face and the solutions they find to demonstrate the originality and skill of the translator) and the market for translation (how issues of copyright and the law, demands of the market, affect the availability, quality, and style of translations). Please click here for the 2012-2013 shedule of events.
All sessions will be held from 4:00 to 5:45 p.m. in the Slocum Room, Lilly Library. For further information, contact Breon Mitchell mitchell@indiana.edu and/or Sumie Jones joness@indiana.edu.