FSI scholars approach their research on the environment from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Center on Food Security and the Environment weighs the connection between climate change and agriculture; the impact of biofuel expansion on land and food supply; how to increase crop yields without expanding agricultural lands; and the trends in aquaculture. FSE’s research spans the globe – from the potential of smallholder irrigation to reduce hunger and improve development in sub-Saharan Africa to the devastation of drought on Iowa farms. David Lobell, a senior fellow at FSI and a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, has looked at the impacts of increasing wheat and corn crops in Africa, South Asia, Mexico and the United States; and has studied the effects of extreme heat on the world’s staple crops.
The BP Oil Spill: Environmental Justice Implications
-
Join us for a discussion on human rights and environmental justice implications surrounding the BP oil spill from regulatory, litigation and conceptual perspectives.
Introduced and moderated by Dr. Helen Stacy, Co-ordinator, Program on Human Rights in the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law and Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute.
Panelists:
Meg Caldwell, Director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program; Executive Director, Center for Ocean Solutions, Woods Institute for the Environment. Professor Caldwell's scholarship focuses on the environmental effects of local land use decisions, the use of science in environmental and marine resource policy development and implementation, and developing private and public incentives for natural resource conservation.
Deborah Sivas, Luke W. Cole Professor of Environmental Law and Director, Environmental Law Clinic. Professor Sivas's current research is focused on the interaction of law and science in the arena of climate change and coastal/marine policy and the ability of the public to hold policymakers accountable.
Ursula Heise, Director, Program in Modern Thought & Literature and Professor of English; member of the Executive Committee of the Program in Science, Technology & Society; Affiliated Faculty of the Woods Institute for the Environment. Author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, (forthcoming) and The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature (in progress).
Stanford Law School
Room 280B
Conferences
Human Rights Education
In partnership with the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies (ICA) and the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), the Program on Human Rights (PHR) offers the Stanford Human Rights Education Initiative (SHREI), which promotes human rights education in California community colleges.
Human Well-Being and Human Rights Collaboratory
This initiative, initially funded by the Stanford Science and Humanities Center under the Presidential International Initiative, looks at the contribution by the humanities to global human rights debates. It offers three quarters of graduate and faculty workshops on human well-being and the environment. The Collaboratory highlights three areas of interest: environmental humanities, cultural heritage and humanitarian intervention in the inter-war years.
Mobile Development Meets Design Thinking
-
A class was given in the dSchool last spring. In this class small interdisciplinary teams focused on a term-long design project, taking advantage of the design process structures and methods that have been developed in the d.school. The course developed as a collaboration between Stanford, the University of Nairobi and Nokia Africa Research Center. The focus area was finding ICT solutions to the healthcare needs of people living in Kibera slum outside Nairobi.
Under the guidance of Jussi Impiö at Nokia and the Computer Science faculty, 27 students from the University of Nairobi Computer Science department conducted need finding studies at a number of health-related sites, including clinics, hospitals, community health workers, community leaders, and government offices. They read background materials, made observations, and talked with a wide variety of stakeholders. Their reports became the basis of the Stanford teams' initial understanding of users and needs. Communication with the group in Nairobi was also maintained throughout the course, using a Facebook group to facilitate discussions, as well as several teleconference sessions.
Working in small teams, 20 Stanford students from a wide range of disciplines worked over 10 weeks to develop initial design concepts to respond to some of the needs that had been identified. Click on the title of each project to view their final presentations:
- mNote: an online archive for community health worker notes. This application empowers community health workers by preserving the flexibility and control they appreciate in their current paper notebooks, but adding digital knowledge management capabilities.
- M-MAJI ("mobile water"): an electronic information system that allows people to use their mobile phones to identify clean water sources in their community. The application seeks to decrease the time and money spent searching for water, improve water quality, and foster vendor accountability by providing a mechanism for user feedback.
- Babybank: a dedicated savings plan designed specifically for pregnant women in the slums of Nairobi. By leveraging a popular cell phone payment system, M-Pesa, the application aims to make savings easier, so that expecting mothers can afford the services that will keep themselves and their babies healthy.
- Mazanick: an application to provide support and advice to pregnant women via SMS, with the aim of helping motivate them to attend prenatal appointments.
- PillCheck (Kifaa cha Tenbe): a mobile application to help people in Kibera find information on the availability and pricing of malaria drugs quickly.
- PatientMap :a system to make the waiting process in clinics more transparent, and to increase patient trust in the medical system.
This summer, two follow up trips are planned, with Nairobi students due to spend several weeks at Stanford, while a number of students from the Stanford group will visit Nairobi to explore possibilities for developing their projects further. Building on the success and lessons learnt so far, the Designing Liberation Technologies course will be open to a new set of students next academic year.
Wallenberg Theater
Joshua Cohen
Program on Global Justice
Encina Hall West, Room 404
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
0
jcohen57@stanford.edu
Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, and Professor of Political Science, Philosophy, and Law
Joshua Cohen is a professor of law, political science, and philosophy at Stanford University, where he also teaches at the d.school and helps to coordinate the Program on Liberation Technology. A political theorist trained in philosophy, Cohen has written extensively on issues of democratic theory—particularly deliberative democracy and the implications for personal liberty, freedom of expression, and campaign finance—and global justice. Cohen is author of On Democracy (1983, with Joel Rogers); Associations and Democracy (1995, with Joel Rogers); Philosophy, Politics, Democracy (2010); The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays (2011); and Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (2011). Since 1991, he has been editor of Boston Review, a bi-monthly magazine of political, cultural, and literary ideas. Cohen is currently a member of the faculty of Apple University.
CDDRL Affiliated Faculty
CV
Document
Joshua_Cohen-CV.pdf
(65.24 KB)
File title
Joshua_Cohen-CV.pdf
Terry Winograd
Gates Computer Science 3B
Room 388
Stanford, CA 94305-9035
0
winograd@cs.stanford.edu
Professor of Computer Science
founding faculty member at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford
and CDDRL Affiliated Faculty
Terry Winograd is a co-leader of the Liberation Technology program at CDDRL and Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. His research focus is on human-computer interaction design, especially theoretical background and conceptual models. He directs the teaching programs and HCI research in the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group, and is also a founding faculty member of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.
Prof. Winograd was a founding member and former president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. He is on a number of journal editorial boards, including Human Computer Interaction, ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, and Informatica. Some of his publications includes Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (Addison-Wesley, 1987) and Usability: Turning Technologies into Tools (Oxford, 1992).
Terry Winograd received a B.A. in Mathematics from The Colorado College in 1966 and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from M.I.T in 1970.
Seminars
No Picnic: The Dynamics of Culture in the Contemporary Arab World
Paragraphs
An Abstract
All too frequently, students of democracy and democratization view the politics they analyze exclusively through the prism of constitutions, elections, and political actors. In the case of the Middle East, this involves worn out questions of religious fundamentalism, neo-colonialism, entrenched autocracy, the politics of oil and Israel, etc. While all of these are indeed relevant to understanding the perseverance of authoritarian political structures, it is equally crucial to understand the dynamics of culture, and the ways in which forms of cultural expression are developing, and are channeled and managed. In his recent analysis of the region, Hicham Ben Abdallah points out that, while legal and political authorities certainly define the contours of what is permissible or not, it is the shared system of collective beliefs which in turn shapes the law and politics, and it is in the realm of culture that these shared beliefs are produced and consumed. The wearing of veil, for example, is not mandated by any legislation outside of Saudi Arabia and Iran, and yet it a growing practice throughout the region, part of an increasingly powerful salafist ideological norm that is at least as powerful as any law.
Contrary to the hastily-borrowed western-paradigm of an inexorable development of secularism leading to an inevitable development of democracy, Ben Abdallah demonstrates the proliferation of cultural practices in which result societies, and individuals, learn to live in a complex mix of parallel and conflicting ideological tendencies -- with the increasing Islamicization of everyday ideology developing alongside the proliferation of de-facto secular forms of cultural production, even as both negotiate for breathing room under the aegis of an authoritarian state.
He finds any prospects for democratization complicated by parallel tacit alliances. On the one hand, a modus vivendi between the state and fundamentalists, in which the latter is permitted to Islamicize society, and is sometimes allowed a carefully-delimited participation in state structures, under the condition they restrain from attempting radically to reform the state. On the other hand intellectuals and artists refrain from frontal assaults on autocratic state structures, subtly limiting their militancy to non-controversial causes, while seeking the state's protection from extremism; their aim is to maintain some protected space of quasi-secular liberalism in the present, which they hope portends the promise of democracy to come.
For its part, the state is learning how to manage and take advantage of a segmented cultural scene by posing as the restraining force against extreme enforcement of the salafist norm, and by channeling forms of modernist cultural expression into established systems of institutional and patronage rewards (for "high" culture) and into a commercialized process of "festivalization" (for popular culture) that ends up as a celebration of an abstract, de politicized "Arab" identity.
Ben Abdallah refers us to the deep history of Islam, which protected and developed divergent cultural and intellectual influences as the patrimony of mankind. He suggests a new paradigm of cultural and intellectual discourse, inspired by this history while also understanding the necessity for political democratization and cultural modernism. We must, he argues, be unafraid to face the challenges in the tension between the growing influence of a salafist norm and the widespread embrace of new, implicitly secular, cultural practices throughout the Arab world.
Version in English at Le Monde Diplomatique, "The Arab World's Cultural Challenge"
All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Le Monde Diplomatique