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Festival features award-winning film
In memory of the internationally known human rights activist Alison L. Des Forges (pictured here), who was a victim of the crash of Flight 3407 on Feb. 12, 2009, the award-winning documentary “My Neighbor, My Killer” will be screened April 19 at 4 p.m. in the Screening Room (Room 112), Center for the Arts, North Campus. A discussion with the filmmaker, Anne Aghion, will follow the screening.
Gacaca (Ga-CHA-cha), which literally means “justice on the grass,” are open-air courts established by the Rwandan government in 1999 as an experiment in reconciliation after the slaughter of 800,000 Tutis and Hutu moderates in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Citizen-judges tried confessed genocide killers who were imprisoned and later sent home to face their neighbors, while traumatized survivors were asked to forgive them and accept them back into their villages. This film will give us a rare look at how neighbors—both perpetrators and victims of genocide—react to each other after unspeakable horrors.
Aghion, an Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, will discuss the film and her experiences with the Gacaca court over the 10-year period she spent observing them in their local community.
Des Forges worked to improve public education in Buffalo and was, for the last 20 years, senior adviser to the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. As a historian, she was one of the world’s leading experts on Rwanda.
The event is free and open to the public and is co-sponsored by the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, Buffalo Human Rights Center and the UB Gender Institute.
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Nobelist to address history of universe
“History of the Universe in a Nutshell, from the Big Bang to Now, and On to the Future,” is the decidedly big-picture topic for Nobel Laureate and NASA scientist John Mather when he delivers the 18th annual Moti Lal Rustig Memorial Lecture, April 20 at 5 p.m. at 225 Natural Sciences Complex, North Campus. Sponsor is the UB Department of Physics.
Admission is free and the public is invited to attend.
Mather, senior astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., was project scientist for NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which measured the spectrum of the heat radiation from the Big Bang, discovered hot and cold spots in that radiation, and hunted for the first objects that formed after the great explosion.
He will explain Einstein’s biggest mistake, how Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe, how the COBE mission was built and how the COBE data support the Big Bang theory. He will also show NASA’s plans for the James Webb Space Telescope, which will look even farther back in time than the Hubble Space Telescope, and will peer inside the dusty cocoons where stars and planets are being born today.
Mather received the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics with George F. Smoot. He is the recipient of many other honors and awards, including his 2007 listing in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Climate change talk uses local case study
“Assessing the Impact of Climate Variability and Change in Local Planning and Policymaking” is the subject of a luncheon presentation by Himanshu Grover, assistant professor of urban and regional planning in the School of Architecture and Planning, April 13 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in 9 Norton Hall, North Campus.
The event is free but an RSVP is required for lunch; please contact Laura Mangan at CeppRSVP@buffalo.edu if so interested.
Grover, who will use the Buffalo Niagara metropolitan area as a case study, says there remains a distinct lack of attention to climate change in local environmental and development planning, notwithstanding reliable scientific data confirming the increasing rate of climate variability and change (CV/C) attributable to global warming. A major reason for this lack of concern is local decision-makers' inability to effectively understand and use the climate change information available.
Grover’s research was supported by a 2010-11 Civic Engagement Research Fellowship.
Soil amendment offered during Earth Week
In celebration of Earth Week 2012, UB Campus Dining and Shops (CDS) will host a Community Compost Day on April 18 at the Statler Commissary from noon to 6 p.m., on a first come, first served basis. All members of the UB community are invited to pick up free soil amendment from the CDS food decomposer machine for use in their own flower and vegetable gardens.
The CDS Statler Commissary (located off of Service Center Road near the Maple Rd. entrance) began its composting program eight years ago as a small outdoor food pile, and it has since grown into a large machine-run operation. Recently, CDS installed a new industrial-sized Eco-Smart food decomposer at the commissary, replacing the original medium sized Eco-Smart machine. The latter has been relocated to the Crossroads Culinary Center, the residential dining center now under construction in the Ellicott Complex.
The soil amendment produced by the food decomposer machine is an organic fertilizer rich in nutrients ideal for any flower or vegetable garden.
Michael A. Smith to deliver Hourani lecture
Michael A. Smith, McCosh Professor of Ethics at Princeton University and one of America’s leading moral philosophers, continues with his delivery of the 2012 George F. Hourani Lectures in Moral Philosophy presented by the Department of Philosophy, April 13 at 4 p.m. in 509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus. Smith has titled his lecture “Constitutivism, Reasons, and Rationality.”
Smith is one of the most important philosophers working in the field of meta-ethics, the investigation of the preconditions of everyday normative ethics. He also is one of the main proponents of a Neo-Humean approach to practical reason. In 2000, his acclaimed 1994 book, “The Moral Problem” won the first APA Book Prize for excellence in scholarship.
Smith also is the author co-author of several other notable books published by Oxford University Press and has held visiting posts at universities in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the U.K., Sweden, Germany and Japan.
In 2010, he was awarded a Humboldt Research Award (“Forschungspreis”) by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.
George Fadlo Hourani, who endowed this lecture series, was SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Islamic Culture and Thought at UB from 1967 until his death in 1984 and was deeply respected and loved by his colleagues and students.
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