Browse
Recent Submissions
Now showing 1 - 5 of 23
- ItemPre-Olympic Rio de Janeiro: The Dynamics of Urban Change(Swarthmore College, 2015-04-01) Williamson, Theresa
- ItemPeter Gram Swing Lecture: Stanford Thompson(Swarthmore College, 2014-11-05) Thompson, Stanford
- ItemScience and Compassion: John W. Thompson's Trajectory From Swarthmore to the Nuremberg Trials(Swarthmore College, 2014-11-12) Weindling, PaulPaul Weindling’s lecture will focus on his research contained in his new book, John W. Thompson: Psychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust (University of Rochester Press). This book is a biography of a doctor whose revulsion at Nazi human experiments prompted him to seek a humane basis for physician-patient relations. As a military-scientific intelligence officer in 1945, Thompson was the first to name "medical war crimes" as a category for prosecution. His investigations laid the groundwork for the Nuremberg medical trials and for the novel idea of "informed consent." Yet, Thompson has remained a little-known figure, despite his many scientific, literary, and religious connections. Thompson has a connection to Swarthmore College having taught as professor of Physiology and Anatomy from 1929 to 1932.
- ItemWhy Do We Care for the Dead?(Swarthmore College, 2014-10-27) Laqueur, Thomas WalterIn the beginning there was the dead body: lifeless matter, soon to decay, from which all that was human had fled. Almost three thousand years ago Diogenes the Cynic told his students that when he died he wanted his corpse to be tossed over the wall for beasts to eat. He was gone; it did not matter to him. This talk asks why we have refused his example and it answers the question in two connected registers, first anthropological and then historical. Our species lives with its dead, materially and imaginatively; caring for them is the sign of our emergence from the order of nature into culture. It is the primal expression of our consciousness of temporality. The Dead make civilization on a grand and an intimate scale, everywhere and always but also in particular places, in particular times and in particular ways. The talk moves to the level of historical explanation and offers brief answers to three questions. Where are the dead?: how did the dominant resting place of the dead—the churchyard—come into being during the middle ages and why did the modern cemetery largely supplanted it. Who are the dead?: how and why since the nineteenth century have we come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and conversely why is being buried without a name has become so disturbing. Finally, What are the dead?: how did technologically sophisticated cremation—the rendering of the dead into indistinguishable inorganic matter—begin as a modernist fantasy of stripping death of its history and why did the project ultimately fail. Even the ashes of the Shoah meant to obliterate its victims have been re-inscribed in culture.
- ItemDo the Old Eat the Young?: The False Tradeoff Between Funding for the Young and the Old(Swarthmore College, 2014-10-21) Ghilarducci, TeresaThis talk, which will focus mostly on Social Security and pension funding, aims to generate critical thinking about who, why, and when does "inter-generational equity" get evoked in political economy debate.