Humanities (Audio)

This talk explores the needs of the poor and homeless around the world, charting the interplay between formal and informal settlements. The key example for this talk will be the favelas of Saõ Paulo in the context of a broader concern with Latin American urbanism and the role of individual initiative, social forces and politics as agencies of urban transformation. Built environmen

This program explores the decolonizing potential of Indian aesthetic-social philosophy by challenging two entrenched colonial prejudices: the supposed radical dissimilarity and inferiority of pre-modern Indian traditions compared to modern social theory. Through an analysis of the Upanishads and Vaisnava theology and poetry, Sudipta Kaviraj, professor of Indian Politics and Intelle

The site of Göbekli Tepe is well known as a settlement of the transitional phase in SW-Asia, in which the greater mobility of the Palaeolithic increasingly gave way to the more permanent settlement of the Neolithic. This talk uses the example of Göbekli Tepe to explore the linkage of buildings with ecology, climate, economy, cultural, political, symbolic systems, and creation of

What defines a person’s character, and how does it shape who they are? In this lecture, Susan Wolf, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, challenges traditional ideas about character. She argues that character is more than just a set of traits or values an individual endorses—it can include aspects of ourselves we may not even recognize or approv

Troubled interactions are moments when communication breaks down in subtle, often unnoticed ways. In this program, Waverly Duck, an urban ethnographer and professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara, discusses these breakdowns, revealing surprising aspects of how we create meaning and self-identity. Through video and audio recordings, Duck shows how misunderstandings lead people to

This presentation will briefly trace 70,000 years of cultural evolution from the ancient crossing from Sunda to Sahul, via the swift continental colonization during the Ice Age, through the severe impacts on survival during the Last Glacial Maximum, and the socio-territorial reconfigurations during Holocene sea-level rise. The Australian Aboriginal world had become characterized by

The transition from Neolithic villages to early cities marked the greatest social transformation faced by our species before the Industrial Revolution. Our ancestors had to learn how to live in new settlements that had more people, higher densities, and more activities than had been known previously. The new adaptations to urban life involved changes in society and social processes

Pragmatism is a “philosophy” in two senses of the term. It is a general outlook on life and an academic theory of the universe and our place in it. In this program, Aaron Zimmerman, professor and chair of the Philosophy Department at UC, Santa Barbara, discusses the nature of America's pragmatism. The axiom of pragmatism is Alexander Bain’s (1865) theory of belief, which was

Humans construct their physical worlds in part by designing and constructing new tools, habitations, and in due course diverse buildings and, in some cases, towns and cities and construct their symbolic worlds by putting words together to tell stories, articulate plans, tell lies, seek truth, and much more. This talk offers hypotheses that address a key question for anthropogeny: H

This talk provides a deep time perspective for assessing the behavioural implications of the creation of the earliest known structure and the technologies used in its making. Evidence for the earliest structure appears relatively late, about 500,000 years ago in Zambia, and before the evolution of Homo sapiens. The next oldest structures were made by Neanderthals in Europe, 176,000