Stanley Aronowitz, Distinguished professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and one of the key figures in Cultural Studies as well as sociology and the labor movement, will be speaking with Michael Pelias (LIU - Philosophy) on
Friday, December 9th,  from 5:15-7:30, at Pratt Institute Room: 107/ENG Bldg (formerly 110, the lecture room straight ahead from the stairwell upon entering the Engineering building...)

The lecture/presentation "The State of Academic Unionism" is hosted by Pratt Faculty's union, UFCT Local 1460.

Please RSVP ASAP as seating will be limited. Moreover, students, friends, and guests are welcome, but the organizers will need to know just how many to accommodate.
RSVP to Kye Carbone at kyecarbone@gmail.com

Stanley Aronowitz has taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York since 1983, where he is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education. He received his B.A. at the New School in 1968 and his Ph.D from the Union Graduate School in 1975. He studies labor, social movements, science and technology, education, social theory and cultural studies and is director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work at the Graduate Center.
He is author or editor of twenty-five books including: Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters (2008); Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (2006); Just Around Corner (2005); How Class Works (2003); The Last Good Job in America (2001); The Knowledge Factory (2000); The Jobless Future (1994, with William DiFazio); and False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (1973, 1992).
Stanley is founding editor of the journal Social Text and is currently a member of its advisory board. Most recently, he co-founded Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination and serves as co-editor in the journal's editorial collective. He also serves on the advisory board of WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society, and has sat on the editorial boards of Cultural Critique and Ethnography. He has published more than two hundred articles and reviews in publications such as Harvard Educational Review, Social Policy, The Nation, and The American Journal of Sociology. Prior to coming to the Graduate Center he taught at the University of California–Irvine and Staten Island Community College (now The College of Staten Island). He has been visiting professor or scholar at University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Paris VIII, Lund University (Sweden), and Columbia University.

http://www.stanleyaronowitz.org/new/about

Michael Pelias teaches Philosophy at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus. His courses include the ancients, Machiavelli to Nietzsche, Philosophy and Film, Philosophy of Money, and Continental Philosophy since Hegel. He is the co-mananging editor of Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, a member of the 15th Street Manifesto Group and a member of the Long Island University Faculty Federation's negotiating committee.

Theodor Adorno, Self-portrait.

Theodor Adorno on Theory and Practice.
From Problems of Moral Philosophy.  Stanford University Press,1995: 4-5. [Lectures: May 7, 1963 - July 23, 1963.]

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I urge you therefore to exercise a certain patience with respect to the relations between theory and practice.  Such a request may be justified because in a situation like the present - one about which I do not entertain the slightest illusion, and nor would I wish to encourage any illusion in you - whether it will be possible ever again to achieve a valid for of practice may well depend on not demanding that every idea should immediately produce its own legitimizing document explaining its own practical use.
The situation may well demand instead that we resist the call of practicality with all our might in order ruthlessly to follow through an idea and its logical implications so as to see where it may lead.  I would even say that this ruthlessness, the power of resistance that is inherent in the idea itself and that prevents it from letting itself be directly manipulated for any instrumental purposes whatsoever, this theoretical ruthlessness contains - if you will allow this paradox -- a practical element within it.  Today, practice - and I do not hesitate to express this in an extreme way - has made great inroads into theory, in other words, into the realm of new thought in which right behavior can be reformulated.  This idea is not as prardoxical and irritating as it may sound, for in the final analysis thinking is itself a form of behavior.  In its origins thinking is no more than a form in which we have attempted to master our environment and come to terms with it - testing reality is the name given by analytical psychology to the function of the ego and of thought - and it is perfectly possible that in certain situations practice will be referred back to theory far more frequently than at other times and in other situations.  At any rate, it does no harm to air this question.
It is no accident that the celebrated unity of theory and practice implied by Marxian theory and then developed above all by Lenin should have finally degenerated in [Stalinist] dialectical materialism to a kind of blind dogma whose sole function is to eliminate theoretical thinking altogether.  This provides an object lesson in the transformation of practicism into irrationalism, and hence, too, for the transformation of the practicism into a repressive and oppressive practice.  That alone might well be a sufficient reason to give us pause and not be in such haste to rely on the famous unity of theory and practice in the belief that it is guaranteed and that it holds good for every time and place.  For otherwise you will find yourself in the position of what Americans call a joiner, that is to say a man who always has to join it, who has to have a cause for which he can fight.  Such a person is driven by his sheer enthusiasm for the idea that something or other must be done and some movement has to be joined about which he is deluded enough to believe that it will bring him a kind of hostility towards mind that necessarily negates a genuine unity of theory and practice."

Conference: Radical Aesthetics and Politics: Intersections in Music, Art, and Critical Social Theory
Friday, 9 December 2011 10am - 6pm
Roosevelt House, Hunter College, CUNY
47-49 East 65th Street, New York, NY 10065

*Free* and open to the public Space is limited - reserve your seat now

In the past few decades, the study of sonic, visual, textual, and other media practices have emerged as productive areas of cultural analysis and critique. Often constitutive of paradoxes and tensions within society, these aesthetic practices have prompted critical engagements with structures of power and knowledge. Researchers and artists have sought to deconstruct particular relationships between aesthetics and power, creating renewed and emergent questions with which current social theory must engage. For instance, how might we think about the "œpublic sphere" in terms of nodes of encounters with the sonic, the visual, and the textual? What forms of political action and sociality emerge from civic engagements with visual, sonic, and textual culture? How are sonic and material landscapes engaged with as embodied practices? What might this imply about the corporeality of the political, the ethical, and the technological? What are the disjunctures and syntheses between artists and scholars concept-driven productions and the ways in which audiences interpret and construct life-worlds with these productions?

This multidisciplinary conference aims to explore these questions centering on the intersections between aesthetic practices and radical political action. The presentations engage with practices within sonic, visual, and textual culture, and understand these not merely in terms of the symbolic or the ideal, but also in terms of the material relations embedded within these practices. This conference is thus concerned with the ideological lives of aesthetic practices. Rather than focusing solely on overtly politicized artistic expression, however, this conference interrogates the boundaries of the political in music and art (and vice versa).

We seek to take a radical approach to aesthetics and politics by getting at the root of knowledge systems and changing the concepts of contemporary political, ethical, and aesthetic debates. This conference thus asks how we may think through and act on political commitments in art and music, and how social theory may displace and elaborate on the concepts of cultural and ethical debates.
Please visit http://chreculture.blogspot.com/<http:></http:>
for the full conference program and schedule.
Email Portia Seddon *to register*: portiaseddon@gmail.com

Critical & Visual Studies at Pratt Institute via Pratt Institute Libraries

‎"Doing research in the humanities or social sciences? Then you need to check out the Project Muse, where you can find scholarly full text articles from over 400 titles! For more info on Project Muse and other databases available through the Pratt Library visit http://library.pratt.edu/find_resources/articles_databases/databases_by_subject/ "

The text and slides of "Until (and a bit after) Darwin" the first portion of the SLAS Faculty Research Seminar with Chris Jensen of Math & Science are now up and available on the Until Darwin website.  Click here or on the image above to go to the page.    When Chris puts his online, we'll post the link.

Please join us for this semester's faculty research seminar, which is being held on Monday, November 7th from 12:30-2:00 in Dekalb 206. This is a brown bag affair, so bring your lunch. We will provide coffee. Below you will find a description of the seminar. I hope to see you there.


Andrew W. Barnes, Ph.D.
Dean
School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Pratt Institute
200 Willoughby Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
718.636.3570
 

Cave Canem Brings the Drama
Annual Benefit Performance
October 24, 2011

Free for Pratt Faculty, Staff, and Students.

Cave Canem presents its annual fall benefit performance, directed by Ted Sod. Lili Taylor, Suzzanne Douglas, Samantha Maurice, Tracie Morris & John Douglas Thompson will perform selections from dramatic works by award-winning writers: Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination, Jessica Hagedorn’s Stairway to Heaven, May Joseph’s Fled, and Claudia Rankine & Casey Llewellyn’s Existing Conditions.
Pratt Institute
200 Willoughby Avenue
Brooklyn, NY

For those outside of Pratt:  Purchase your ticket today!