SPEAKERS: Peter Levine (Tufts University), Catalina-Florina Florescu (Pace University), Gabe Mugar (IDEO Cambridge), Diana Ramírez-Jasso (Tecnológico de Monterrey), and Zenovia Toloudi (Dartmouth College)
MODERATOR: Eric Gordon
When is play a political act? When does it transgress and when is it simply a playing out of prescribed tasks? The final conversation of the semester will discuss how play functions in protest and resistance, how play generates discourse in public life, and how play transforms the relationship between the designer of systems and its players.
Peter Levine is the Academic Dean and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Civic Life. He has tenure in Tufts’ Political Science Department, and he also has secondary appointments in the Tufts Philosophy Department and the Tufts Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. He directs the Civic Studies Major at Tufts. Levine graduated from Yale in 1989 with a degree in philosophy. He studied philosophy at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, receiving his doctorate in 1992. From 1991 until 1993, he was a research associate at Common Cause. From 1993-2008, he was a member of the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy in the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. During the late 1990s, he was also Deputy Director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. Levine was the founding deputy director (2001-6) and then the second director (2006-15) of Tisch College’s CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Levine is the author of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America (Oxford University Press, 2013), five other scholarly books on philosophy and politics, and a novel. He has served on the boards or steering committees of AmericaSpeaks, Street Law Inc., the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, Discovering Justice, the Kettering Foundation, the American Bar Association’s Committee for Public Education, the Paul J. Aicher Foundation, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.
Catalina Florina Florescu holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Medical Humanities and Comparative Theater). She teaches at Pace U in Downtown Manhattan. She is the curator for the New Plays Festival at Jersey City Theater Center whose second edition is titled Return to Love. She is working on several projects, one of which is under contract with Routledge, Female Playwrights Intersectionality in Contemporary Romanian Theater.
Gabriel Mugar is a Senior Design Researcher at IDEO Cambridge, where he works with communities and organizations to design opportunities for learning, collaboration, and storytelling. He received his Ph.D. from the Syracuse University School of Information Studies.
Diana Ramírez-Jasso is Dean of the School of Architecture, Art, and Design in the Center-South Region of the Tecnológico de Monterrey. Her research interests span the history and theory of interiors, buildings, gardens, and landscapes, particularly as they intersect with discourses stemming from literature, philosophy, pedagogy, and art. She received the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the History and Theory of Architecture from Harvard University in 2012. She also holds a Master of Arts in Architecture from Harvard University and a Master of Science in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her recent work has focused on the perceived contributions of designed spaces to the shaping of modern subjectivity, a topic that she has explored by interrogating historical intersections between architecture, gardens, education, and the history of childhood.
Zenovia Toloudi is an architect, artist, and Assistant Professor at Studio Art, Dartmouth College. Her work critiques the contemporary alienation of humans from nature and sociability in architecture and in public space, and investigates spatial typologies to reestablish cohabitation, inclusion, and participation through digital, physical, and organic media. The founder of Studio Z, a creative research practice on art, architecture, and urbanism, Zenovia has exhibited internationally, including at the Biennale in Venice, the Center for Architecture, the Athens Byzantine Museum, the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art and the Onassis Cultural Center. She has won commissions from Illuminus Boston, The Lab at Harvard, and the Leslie Center for Humanities at Dartmouth. Zenovia's work belongs to permanent collections at Aristotle University (AUTh) and the Thracian Pinacotheca. Her essays have been published in Routledge, Technoetic Arts, and MAS Context. Zenovia is the recipient of The Class of 1962 Fellowship. She was a Public Voices Fellow; a Research Fellow at Art, Culture, and Technology Program at MIT; and a Fulbright Fellow. Zenovia received her Doctor of Design degree from Harvard's GSD (2011), a Master of Architecture degree as a Fulbright Fellow at the Illinois Institute of Technology (2006), and in 2003, she graduated from the AUTh in Architectural Engineering. Website: http://zenovia.net/
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If you have any questions, please email Vassiliki Rapti at vasiliki_rapti@emerson.edu
LOCATION:Zoom Meeting STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20210510T160000Z DTEND:20210510T160000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR