PostHUMANities: Susan Pearson on thinking with children and animals

“Children are good to think with” is how Susan Pearson began her January 29th talk on “Sentiment and Savagery: Collapsing the Boundary Between Animals and Children in U.S. History,” the first lecture this spring 2015 semester in the Humanities Center’s ongoing “Posthumanities” speaker series. Prof. Pearson adapted her opening from anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’s well-known dictum, “animals are good to think with.” As with non-human animals, children’s existence—the ontological status of children, the category of child—can be used to productively problematize the conceptual basis of human being, whose superiority (among other species) and autonomy (as a natural and stable entity) have been targeted by posthumanist scholars over the last two decades. Continue reading PostHUMANities: Susan Pearson on thinking with children and animals

NSF National Research Traineeship (NRT): New NSF solicitation and Lehigh Idea Exchange

NSF’s National Research Traineeship (NRT) program, now in its second year, supports development of new, evidence-based approaches to graduate training. Through separate Traineeship and Innovative Graduate Education tracks, the program supports both development of comprehensive training programs in high-priority interdisciplinary research areas, and piloting of potentially transformative approaches to graduate education whether disciplinary or interdisciplinary.

Continue reading