Fall 2009-Spring 2010 Events Schedule

APPETITES

Fall 2009

Frances Moore Lappe – Opening Convocation

September 10, 2009 – 8pm – Swasey Chapel

“Why Hunger in a World of Plenty?”

That is the question that world food and hunger expert Frances Moore Lappe will address as the opening keynote speaker for Denison University’s 2009-10 campus theme, “Consumption.” Lappe, whose most recent book is “Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad,” will speak at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 10, in Swasey Chapel (200 Chapel Drive). Lappe is the author or co-author of 18 books, including the well-known “Diet for a Small Planet,” which J.M. Hirsch described as “the blueprint for eating with a small carbon footprint since long before the term was coined.” Lappe is the co-founder of three organizations including the Small Planet Institute, which she leads with her daughter, Anna Lappe.

Spring 2010

Giving Voice Productions

Six week residency at Denison University

January 8 – February 21, 2010

New Production  “Hook-ups and Hang-ups: College Students Speak Out” - 2/11-13/10 - Burke Black Box

Giving Voice Productions is committed to expanding the horizons and the definitions of theatrical form. It is their goal to “meet” contemporary audiences and create a space where pressing, raw, and relevant material can exist in an aesthetic of beauty and grace. They believe that this dynamic allows audiences to not only enjoy the theatrical event, but also receive and contemplate the subject matter.

Giving Voice Productions is committed to creating theatre from real and contemporary issues that are alive within the community. Through live performance and outreach efforts, they endeavor to inform, educate, entertain, and spark community discussion. Their performances are followed by in-depth talk-back sessions, which encourage the audience to be in dialogue with the artists and foster connections within the community.

Annie Leonard – The Story of Stuff

January 28, 2010 – 4:30pm – Slayter Auditorium

Annie Leonard examines the real costs of extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal, and she isolates the moment in history where she says the trend of consumption mania began. The “Story of Stuff” examines how economic policies of the post-World War II era ushered in notions of “planned obsolescence” and “perceived obsolescence” —and how these notions are still driving much of the U.S. and global economies today. Leonard’s inspiration for the film began as a personal musing over the question, “Where does all the stuff we buy come from, and where does it go when we throw it out?” She traveled the world in pursuit of the answer to this seemingly innocent question, and what she found along the way were some very guilty participants and their unfortunate victims.

Denison's Fifth Human Rights Film Festival

These films cover a range of human rights issues from freedom of expression and association in Afghanistan and Burma, international justice, and environmental protection in the Amazon. Please find below further information about the films.

Feb 2 - Crude (http://www.hrw.org/en/iff/crude)
Feb 9 - The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court (http://www.hrw.org/en/iff/reckoning)
Feb 16 - Burma VJ (http://www.hrw.org/en/iff/burma-vj)
Feb 23 - Afghan Star (http://www.hrw.org/en/iff/afghan-star)

The films will be screened at Slayter Auditorium at 7 pm.

Juliet Schor

February 4, 2010 – 4:30pm - Higley Auditorium

Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Before joining Boston College, she taught at Harvard University for 17 years, in the Department of Economics and the Committee on Degrees in Women's Studies. Schor's latest book is Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Scribner, September 2004). Born to Buy is both an account of marketing to children from inside the agencies and firms and an assessment of how these activities are affecting children.

Schor is author of the national best-seller, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (Basic Books, 1992) and The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need. The Overworked American appeared on the best seller lists of The New York Times, Publisher's Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe as well as the annual best books list for The New York Times, Business Week and other publications. The book is widely credited for influencing the national debate on work and family. The Overspent American was also made into a video of the same name, by the Media Education Foundation (September 2003).

A graduate of Wesleyan University, Schor went on to receive her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts. She also holds a chair in the Economics of Leisure Studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

Marie Wilson

March 2, 2010 – 4:30pm – Slayter Auditorium

An advocate of women’s issues for more than 30 years, Marie C. Wilson is founder and President of The White House Project, co-creator of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work ® Day and author of Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World (Viking 2004).

In 1998, Wilson founded The White House Project in recognition of the need to build a truly representative democracy – one where women lead alongside men in all spheres. Since its inception, The White House Project has been a leading advocate and voice on women’s leadership.

Before she took the helm at The White House Project, Wilson was, for nearly two decades, the President of the Ms. Foundation for Women. She is an honorary “founding mother” of the Ms. Foundation. In honor of her work, the Ms. Foundation has created The Marie C. Wilson Leadership Fund.

Over the last thirty years, Wilson’s accomplishments span becoming the first woman elected to the Des Moines City Council as a member-at-large in 1983, co-authoring the critically acclaimed Mother Daughter Revolution (1993, Bantam Books), and serving as an official government delegate to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China in 1995.

Wilson has been profiled in The New York Times “Public Lives” column, has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, National Public Radio and other national programs and is quoted widely for her expertise. Born and raised in Georgia, Wilson has five children and four grandchildren. She resides in New York City.

Guerrilla Girls On Tour

“Feminists Are Funny – The Food Edition”

March 4, 2010 – 7:00pm – Ace Morgan Theatre

Guerrilla Girls on Tour, an internationally acclaimed anonymous theatre collective, will present Feminist Are Funny – The Food Edition – an energetic romp through humorous historical moments in the lives and works of world renowned master chef Julia Child, acclaimed food writer M.F.K. Fisher, and the grand dame of southern cooking Edna Lewis. In addition to sharing the rich history of these women, the comedy also focuses on issues surrounding women and food such as body image, nutrition and global hunger. Feminists Are Funny – The Food Edition celebrates Guerrilla Girls On Tour’s famous posters, street theatre actions, and highlights current local issues and statistics on the relationship of women and food in each state they tour through.

Guerrilla Girls On Tour creates original comedies, vaudevillian-like street actions, edgy visual works and empowering residency programs that dramatize women’s history, advocate on behalf of women and artists of color and uses a fresh, unique approach to address current political issues.

That Takes Ovaries

March 26, 2010 – 6:00pm – Burke Recital Hall

That Takes Ovaries is an open mike movement, a play and a best-selling book (Three Rivers/Random House)-- all focusing on real-life stories from women and girls, and the bold, gutsy, brazen, outrageous, courageous things they have done. From playful to political, That Takes Ovaries is full of multicultural, sassy, often touching true tales of estrogen-powered deeds. Ovaries mixes art with activism and fun in an international grassroots movement for empowerment: Because women and girls everywhere have inspiring stories to tell, any woman or organization anywhere can host an Ovaries open mike. Theaters and campuses are invited to stage the play. Hundreds of open mikes and dramatizations have been held by theaters, national organizations and neighborhood women. Events are often fundraisers for local and global women and girls' causes, thereby offering women's organizations an exciting tool for raising community awareness and money, so that they, in turn, may continue their own good work for women.

Anita Mannur – Book Reading

April 1, 2010 – 4:00pm – Women’s Studies Library

Professor Mannur will hold a reading and discussion featuring her new publication "Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture".

This book provides food for thought as it considers the metaphors literature, film, and TV shows use to describe Indians abroad. The book considers food to be a central part of the cultural imagination of diasporic populations, and maps how it figures in various expressive forms. The book examines cultural production from the Anglo-American reaches of the South Asian diaspora, ranging from novels—Chitra Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night—and cookbooks such as Madhur Jaffrey’s Invitation to Indian Cooking and Padma Lakshmi’s Easy Exotic, in order to illustrate how national identities are consolidated in culinary terms.

Lisa Suhair Majaj – Poetry Reading

April 6, 2010 – 4:30pm - Barney Davis Boardroom

Lisa Suhair Majaj is a Palestinian-American poet and scholar. Born in the United State, Majaj was raised in Jordan, and earned university degrees in Lebanon and the United States. Her poetry and essays have been widely published. In 2007, she was awarded the Del Sol Press Annual Poetry Prize for her poetry manuscript Geographies of Light.

Malathi de Alwis

April 19, 2010 – 4:30pm – Burton Morgan Lecture Hall

Malathi (Mala) de Alwis is a feminist scholar and activist at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka. She also teaches in the MA Program in Women's Studies at the Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Colombo and was Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research, New York, previously. She is currently coordinating a multi-sited, multi-lingual, multi-disciplinary research project entitled: "Post-Tsunami Reconstruction in Contexts of War: A grassroots study of the geo-politics of Humanitarianian Aid in Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia."

De Alwis earned her Ph.D. in Socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago, where she was a founding member of the Women Against War Coalition and a winner of the Ruth Murray Memorial Prize for Best Essay in Gender Studies. She is also a poet and short story writer and has been involved in several film projects. She has for many years contributed to an anonymous feminist column, Cat's Eye, which is published every Wednesday in the English daily, The Island.