Ford School Public Events

Sujatha Jesudason is the founder and Executive Director of Generations Ahead (http://www.generations- ahead.org/), an organization that seeks to advance a social justice perspective in the public policy debates on genetic technologies. She began working at the intersection of race, reproduction, and genetics at the Center for Genetics and Society in 2004, and has been active as an organizer, advocate, and researcher in communities of color and on women's liberation issues for over 19 years. Her recent projects include developing a national collaborative campaign against sex selection, making the connections between past, present, and future eugenic technologies, and framing genetic justice as a human right. She serves on the Board of Directors of the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, and earned her PhD in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Pablo Suarez is the Associate Director of Programs, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and a consultant to the Environment Finance Group, United Nations Development Programme. His work as researcher and consultant investigates the integration of climate information into decision making for reducing vulnerability, both at community level and through national and global policies. He has consulted about climate change at Oxfam America; World Food Programme (WFP); Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); World Bank; ProVention Consortium; Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

From the Publisher:

Vinny DeMarco might be a latter-day Don Quixote except that he tilts his lance at real obstacles to social justice: lobby-locked state legislatures and Congress, stonewalling the public will. And he makes impossible dreams come true. In twenty years of organizing campaigns in Maryland, he has led successful efforts to pass gun control laws (against National Rifle Association opposition), to hike cigarette taxes to prevent youth smoking, and to extend health care to hundreds of thousands of low-income workers. He has also built a unique alliance of mainstream and conservative faith groups, which helped secure rare bipartisan votes in Congress for the enactment in July 2009 of landmark FDA regulation of tobacco manufacture and marketing.

The world's response to climate change is deeply flawed. The conventional wisdom on how to deal with climate change has failed and it's time to change course. To date, climate policies have been guided by targets and timetables for emissions reduction derived from various academic exercises. Such methods are both oblivious to and in violation of on-the-ground political and technological realities that serve as practical 'boundary conditions' for effective policy making. Until climate policies are designed with respect for these boundary conditions, failure is certain. Using nothing more than arithmetic and logical explanation, Dr. Pielke offers a comprehensive exploration of the problem and suggests a more practical resolution, including investment to create a more carbon-efficient economy and cost-efficient carbon-capture technologies.

'Our Patchwork Nation' is a comprehensive look at who we are as a country and where we are going using Patchwork Nation's 12 community types and examining what they mean for the the nation's Economic,
Political and Cultural future.

Our Patchwork Nation has been called, 'a captivating and at times surprising analysis, both rigorous and accessible' by Kirkus Reviews. The PBS NewsHour's Jim Lehrer, says Our Patchwork Nation is 'a book to keep always at your side and in your mind.' And the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne calls it 'a wonderful book that takes us way beyond red and blue - while also explaining the social, regional and economic roots of our partisan and ideological color wars.'

Prospective students interested in applying to the BA program (admit term Fall 2010) should plan to attend this information session. The BA Program Faculty Director, John Chamberlin, and the Ford School Admissions Staff will walk students through the application process and give an overview of the program.

Richard Sclove, Founder and Senior Fellow of the Loka Institute

Commentator: Andrew Maynard, Professor of Environmental Health Sciences and Director of the Risk Science Center, University of Michigan

Co-Sponsors: Risk Science Center and the College of Engineering, University of Michigan

In 2007, the U.S. Army introduced its newest counterinsurgency weapon into Iraq and Afghanistan: civilian social scientists. As members of the Human Terrain System (HTS), the social scientists are embedded in combat brigades, where they provide commanders with research and advice. HTS has been controversial from the start; many social scientists attack it for melding academia and national security and for violating research ethics codes. In this talk, I historicize HTS within the broader context of the relationship between social science and national security policy since the 1950s. By examining the cases of the Special Operations Research Office and Project Camelot, I argue that HTS is simply the most recent example of the national security state's decades-old effort to use social knowledge to bureaucratically and technically manage complex problems of foreign and military policy.

Emissions trading policies initially relied on 'squatter's rights' principles granting emissions allowances to existing polluters for free. Recently, however, policy designers have largely abandoned this approach, requiring polluters to buy allowances from the public through auctions. Given the high financial stakes, this is a momentous shift. Given how skeptical experts and decision makers have been of the political viability of allowance auctions, and the opposition of powerful economic interests, it is also a remarkable political development. This presentation will document the surprising emergence of a new paradigm of public resource ownership, as well as offering some thoughts on why this paradigm suddenly gained political traction. The presentation will also explore an ongoing tension between two competing visions of public ownership. How this tension may be resolved remains a vital question for future emissions trading policies.

New drugs and vaccines could save millions of lives in the developing world. But drug and vaccine development is expensive, and many of these badly needed health technologies promise markets too small to interest the for-profit pharmaceutical industry.