You are invited to attend the fourth lecture in this fall’s SSCS Lecture Series, on Monday, November 30, at 5:30, in the Alumni Reading Room at the Pratt Library. Jennifer Telesca, Assistant  Professor of Environmental Justice at Pratt Institute, will present her research on "Science as Alibi: On the Technocratic Paradigm of Governing Bluefin Tuna." The SSCS lecture series is sponsored by the program in Critical Visual Studies. The Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies invites faculty and scholars from around the world to present their work to the Pratt community. Students in the Critical Visual Studies Symposium seminar will introduce speakers and prepare questions for a Q&A session after each presentation. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Last May, Pratt's undergraduate catalog officially added the minor in Sustainability Studies, meaning the program has officially concluded its first year in operation.  It has been a productive year, with heavily enrolled sections of SUST 201 The Sustainable Core, as well as elective seminars such as SUST 405 Production Consumption & Waste and SUST 401 Power Pollution & Profit.  By February, the number of electives in the minor had expanded to include offerings in SSCS, Math & Science, Interior Design, Industrial Design, and Construction Management.  (Click here for a complete list of courses approved in the minor.)

Sustainability courses included explorations of the urban environment.  In September, students in SUST 405 Production Consumption & Waste canoed the Gowanus Canal. After a discussion of the area's history, we entered the water and began paddling up to the northern terminus of the canal before turning south and exploring the foliage, animals, and businesses that call the canal home.  Our journeys revealed floating garbage and the smell of sulphur, but also swimming fish and fishing birds, scrap metal and concrete production alongside flora, fauna, and even some artwork.

Jennifer E. Telesca will join the Pratt Institute in fall 2014 as Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice in the Department of Social Science and Culture Studies. Her research examines the tension between marine conservation and the global commodities trade, and asks for whom are the oceans governed. Her dissertation, Red Gold: On the Global Politics of Regulating Marine Life is based on three years of ethnographic research about the management of the prized bluefin tuna by a treaty body known as the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), where she is an accredited observer. A chapter in the edited volume, The New Public Good: Affects and Techniques of Flexible Bureaucracies (Berghahn forthcoming) details some findings. Her work on the concept of “visual citizenship” recently appeared in the journal, Humanity. Telesca holds dual Master’s degrees in Law and Society (NYU) and in Anthropology (UConn-Storrs). She earned her PhD in January 2014 from the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU.

This fall, Professor Telesca's courses include a section of SUST 201 The Sustainable Core meeting Wednesdays at 5pm, and a SS490 course The Global Ocean that relates to the themes described above.  Students interested in registering for these courses may contact Liberal Arts Advisor Erich Kuersten for more information (ekuerste@pratt.edu).