• Taking Risks: Oil Frontiers and the Accumulation of Insecurity 

  Watts, Michael (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2017-02-28)

  Oil frontiers are the social spaces associated with the exploration and development of one of the most global and strategically important resource sectors of contemporary capitalism: oil and gas fields. Through an examination ...
• Forty Years After: Reflections on Food, Famine and Hunger in the West African Sahel 

  Watts, Michael (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2017-03-02)

  Almost a half century ago, the West African Sahel – stretching from Senegal in the west to the Horn of Africa in the east – experienced a raft of massive food crises in which millions of people died from hunger and disease. ...
• Totentanz. Operationalizing Aby Warburg’s Atlas of images 

  Moretti, Franco (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2017-01-26)

  Aby Warburg’s last and most ambitious project, the Atlas Mnemosyne – conceived in 1926 and truncated three years later by Warburg’s sudden death – consists of a series of large black panels, on which are attached black-and-white ...
• Patterns and Interpretation 

  Moretti, Franco (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2017-01-24)

  Digitization has completely changed the literary archive. Historians of the novel used to work on a few hundred nineteenth-century novels; today, we work on thousands of them; tomorrow, hundreds of thousands. This new size ...
• Moral Deficiencies in the Arithmetic of Compassion 

  Slovic, Paul (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2016-10-27)

  In many human and environmental crises, individuals and their governments exhibit a morally troubling response to the risk of mass casualties that can be described by the phrase “the more who die, the less we care,” ...
• The Psychology of Risk 

  Slovic, Paul (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2016-10-25)

  Studies of risk perception examine the judgments people make when they are asked to characterize and evaluate hazardous activities and technologies. This research aims to aid risk analysis and policymaking by (i) providing ...
• A Brief History of Flight from the State 

  Scott, James (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2016-03-10)

  “Zomia,” the designation invented by Willem van Schendel for that portion of upland Southeast Asia that has, until recently, evaded incorporation into nation states and empires, could be, metaphorically, extended to other ...
• The Domestication of Fire, Plants, Animals, and…Us 

  Scott, James (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2016-03-08)

  If we want to know where we are headed as a species, it helps to know how we got here in the first place. Our current situation is entirely novel in a long historical view. For 95% of our existence on earth we were foragers ...
• The Political Economy of Patriarchal Systems 

  Folbre, Nancy (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2015-11-12)

  In “The Political Economy of Patriarchal Systems”, Folbre examines feminist efforts to theorize the emergence and evolution of gender inequality no longer invoke some abstract, a-historical “patriarchy.” Rather, they explore ...
• Monsters of the Economic: Inequality, Fear, and Loathing in America 

  Folbre, Nancy (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2015-11-10)

  In “Monsters of the Economic: Inequality, Fear, and Loathing in America”, Folbre examines the trend toward extreme income inequality within the U.S. and the global economy as a whole is clear. But the numbers don’t reveal ...
• Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists have Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change 

  Oreskes, Naomi (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2015-03-11)

  The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. In particular, American scientists, dating back to Roger Revelle ...
• Crying Wolf v. Fiddling while Rome Burns: Historical Perspectives on Scientists' Social Responsibility 

  Oreskes, Naomi (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2015-03-09)

  Scientists working on climate change and other environmental issues often speak of the risk of “crying wolf,” concerned about losing credibility if the threats they are documenting do not turn out to be as serious as current ...
• The Logical Structure of Human Civilization 

  Searle, John (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2014-09-11)

  The distinctive features of human civilization, as opposed to animal societies, are such things as money, property, marriage, government, etc. These are created and partly constituted by linguistic representations. For ...
• Consciousness as a Problem in Philosophy and Neurobiology 

  Searle, John (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2014-09-09)

  A main intellectual scandal today is that we do not have, in philosophy or neurobiology, a generally accepted account of consciousness. In this lecture, John Searle will offer the philosophical core of such an account, ...
• Simple Heuristics for a Complex World 

  Gigerenzer, Gerd (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2014-03-27)

  Whom to marry? How to invest? Whom to trust? Complex problems require complex solutions – so we might think. And if the solution doesn’t work, we make it more complex. That recipe is perfect for a world of known risks, but ...
• Better Doctors, Better Patients, Better Decisions 

  Gigerenzer, Gerd (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2014-03-25)

  In modern high-tech health care, patients appear to be the stumbling block: an uninformed, anxious, noncompliant folk with unhealthy lifestyles who demand treatments advertised by celebrities, insist on unnecessary but ...
• The Galilean imperative: A physicist's search for understanding 2 - Toward the physics of life itself 

  Bialek, William (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2013-10-30)

  Experiments have uncovered many of the mechanisms at work in the machinery of life, but there still is no theoretical framework that ties these discoveries together. A hint about how to construct such a theory comes from ...
• The Galilean imperative: A physicist's search for understanding 1- What have we learned, and how should we teach? 

  Bialek, William (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2013-10-28)

  To a remarkable extent, our understanding of the natural world is built from a small set of very deep ideas. I’ll try to give some sense for the nature of these ideas, for their power and scope. I will also try to explain ...
• From "Mr. Mom" to "Deadbeat Dads": Why paternal commitment is so variable in the human species and what factors elicit it? 

  Hrdy, Sarah (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2013-04-04)

  Compared to other mammals, human offspring are slow-maturing and outrageously costly to rear, yet men's motivation to care for children is highly variable. Some fathers will do anything to remain nearby and care for their ...
• The origin of emotionally modern humans: How did humans become such "other-regarding" apes? 

  Hrdy, Sarah (Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation, 2013-04-02)

  Humans are remarkably similar to other apes. Like us, chimpanzees and orangutans are extremely clever, use tools and exhibit rudimentary understanding of causality and what others intend. However, other apes are not nearly ...

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