Science and Democracy, a lecture series aimed at exploring both the promised
benefits or our era's most salient scientific and technological breakthroughs
and the potentially harmful consequences of developments that are inadequately
understood, debated, or managed by politicians, lay publics, and policy institutions.
Arundhati Roy
Author of The God of Small Things (Booker Prize, 1997)
"Can We Leave the Bauxite in the Mountain?"
Field Notes on Democracy
Commentator:
Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and Director,
Humanities Center at Harvard.
Moderated by:
Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies,
Harvard Kennedy School
TODAY
5:00 - 7:00p
Piper Auditorium
Gund Hall, GSD
48 Quincy Street
Harvard University
Abstract: "What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been
hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions
has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and
the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin,
constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of
maximizing profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that
has mutated go back to being what it used to be?
What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term
vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive,
short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to
our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and
nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human
race?"
This event is organized by the Program on Science, Technology, and Society, at
the Harvard Kennedy School and co-sponsored by the School of Engineering and
Applied Sciences, the Graduate School of Design, the South Asia Initiative at
Harvard, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment. For more
information on Science, Technology, and Society events at Harvard University,
please visit:
www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/. This lecture and discussion is free and
open to the public.
Contact:
Lisa Matthews
Events Coordinator
Harvard University Center for the Environment
24 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
lisa_matthews(a)harvard.edu
p. 617-495-8883
f. 617-496-0425
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