Join Marine Science Semester faculty and alumni to learn more about the Fall 2019 program!
Stories from Earth
Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Natural Sciences Inaugural Lecture- Rachel Beane
Thursday, March 7 7:30 pm
Kresge Auditorium
Fiery-volcanic eruptions, earth-shattering quakes, and continents on the move have forged the planet we call home. Take a journey from mid-coast Maine to Russia and New Zealand with geoscientist Rachel Beane. She will share captivating photos from the field, and from the microscope, as we explore the processes that have shaped our planet for millions of years. In so doing, we also will learn how the tiniest of minerals record some of Earth’s biggest stories.
Dr. Rachel Beane is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Natural Sciences in the Department of Earth and Oceanographic Science. With support from the National Science Foundation and Bowdoin College, she has conducted research on volcanic rocks in New Zealand and the western U.S., subduction zone metamorphic rocks in Russia, Kazakhstan and Greece, and igneous and metamorphic rocks in Maine.
Prof. Beane is associate dean for Academic Affairs at Bowdoin College for which her primary foci are faculty development and mentoring, and faculty diversity initiatives. She leads national professional development workshops for science educators through the National Association of Geoscience Teachers and On the Cutting Edge, an NSF funded project focusing on geoscience faculty development. She is recipient of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers Neil Miner teaching award for “exceptional contributions to the stimulation of interest in the Earth Sciences” and the Bowdoin College Sydney B. Karofsky teaching prize for her “ability to impart knowledge, inspire enthusiasm, and stimulate intellectual curiosity.” She is also a fellow of the Geological Society of America.
Free and open to the public.
Good afternoon!
The Maine Environmental Education Association is hosting is annual statewide conference “Strengthening Maine Communities Through Environmental Education” at the University of Maine’s Hutchinson Center, in Belfast, Maine on March 14-15, 2019.
The research symposium is March 14th and is cohosted with the Maine Math and Science Alliance. The full Conference is March 15th, is cohosted with Unity College.
The conference will bring together 150+ leaders, educators, and students from throughout Maine and New England to share innovative environmental education strategies, and strengthen teaching, public communication, and leadership skills – all in serving to enhance the relationships among Maine’s people, communities and environment.
Registration is open now!
Conference participants will have the opportunity to choose from over 25 workshops, participate in a nature-based makers space, environmental education resource share, learn about preliminary results from the statewide Census for Community-based Environmental Learning, explore exhibits, network and students can gain support on job and internship applications. Teachers can earn contact hours for attending this conference and scholarships are available. To learn more about the conference and to register visit www.meeassociation.org.
Please let your students know about this opportunity. There are scholarships available, so if cost is a barrier for your students, please have them reach out. Thank you!
Sincerely,
Alex Brasili
Alexandria Brasili (Bowdoin Alum)
Research Associate
Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance
(207) 230-4617 • 219 Capitol Street, Suite 3, Augusta, ME 04330
Are you interested in working on policy issues? Are you curious about government, or politics? Do you have a strong conviction about education, or the environment?
Join fellow students from Bates and Colby with these shared interests for “Policy Day” on Friday, March 1. We’ll travel to the State House in (transport provided) Augusta and meet alums from all 3 schools. You’ll learn what lobbyists and policy analysts do, what legislators do, and what a career in the executive branch can look like.
We’ll leave campus around 12:45 PM, and be back before 6. In between, you’ll get to listen to and ask questions of people pursuing public policy careers in a variety of ways.
Space is limited so you must rsvp here to sign up:
Please join us for the opening of The Ramp Gallery’s spring exhibit: Topophilia: A Love of Place. Opening remarks at 2pm on Friday, February 22. The Ramp Gallery is located in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, basement level. Curated by Blanche Froelich, ’19, the Ramp Gallery features student art work from all four class years.
Professor Allen Springer will explore how contemporary international institutions are responding to the challenges posed by a wave of populist and nationalist sentiment, which often challenges the relevance of the institutions themselves. How do institutions operating in such diverse arenas as security, humanitarian, and environmental policy absorb and adapt to these pressures and attempt to confront effectively issues ranging from major transboundary movements of people seeking political asylum to global climate change?
Springer is a scholar of international environmental law and policy, focusing on issues of multilateral environmental governance, particularly in a North American context. He is the author of The International Law of Pollution: Protecting the Global Environment in a World of Sovereign States, and Cases of Conflict: Transboundary Disputes and the Development of International Environmental Law. A graduate of Amherst College and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Springer joined the Bowdoin faculty in 1976, serving as Bowdoin’s Dean of Students from 1980-82 and chairing the department of government and legal studies on several occasions. Springer delivered the Karofsky Faculty Encore Lecture in 2002, and in 2006 received the Bowdoin Alumni Council Award for Faculty and Staff.
William Nelson Cromwell, a successful and nationally respected New York lawyer, established the professorship which bears his name as a gesture of admiration for the College which produced many of the men who worked for and with his law firm. Born in 1854, Cromwell rose quickly to prominence in the world of legal affairs in New York. The William Nelson Cromwell Chair was provided for in his estate upon his death in 1948. It is Bowdoin’s only chair designed essentially for prelaw study.
Free and open to the public.
How might “thinking like an aquifer” help challenge the conjoined crises of ecologies, democracies and hermeneutics that define the contemporary? To explore this question, this lecture offers an experimental ethnographic account of aquifer depletion on the U.S. Great Plains. Combining visual and textual imagery, it charts how depletion accretes over generations to become a porous threshold of belonging indistinguishable from partisan and epistemic divides. In doing so, it offers a wider reflection on the ways auto-ethnography of settler legacies may illuminate anti-essentialist approaches to the social worlds emerging along frontiers of destruction and change.
Lucas Bessire is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma whose work addresses extraction, power, and genre. He is the author of Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and creator of the Ayoreo Video Project (2017). He is currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Insitute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. During his time at Radcliffe, Bessire is completing an auto-ethnographic account of aquifer depletion on the High Plains. The book project charts how people inhabit the imminent ends of groundwater in order to reflect more broadly on the defining conundrums of our political present and the potential of ethnography to cross divides.
Bessire is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Science Foundation, the Reed Foundation, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He earned a certificate in documentary filmmaking and a PhD in anthropology from New York University.
Sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the Earth and Oceanographic Science, Environmental Studies, and Latin American Studies Programs.