Calendar

Speakers:

Biyu Jade He (NYU Medical Centre)
Hakwan Lau (UCLA)
Victor Lamme (University of Amsterdam)
Johannes Fahrenfort (University of Amsterdam)

Where in the brain are the neural correlates of perceptual consciousness?  Some leading theories of consciousness, including global workspace and higher-order thought theories, hold that these correlates centrally involve prefrontal cortex.  Other leading theories, including first-order and integrated information theories, hold that these correlates centrally involve sensory cortices, with prefrontal cortex playing at most a secondary role.  In recent years much experimental evidence has been brought to bear on both sides of the question.

In this debate, Hakwan Lau (UCLA) and Biyu Jade He (NYU) will defend the view that neural activity in prefrontal cortex is important for conscious perception, while Victor Lamme (Amsterdam) and Johannes Fahrenfort (Amsterdam) will argue that prefrontal activity is not important for conscious perception.

This event will feature a thought-provoking panel discussion with sexual and reproductive justice experts on the value of the sexual and reproductive justice framework and how it can be applied to diverse stakeholders, settings, and contexts. Panelists will also highlight examples from around the world of momentum towards sexual and reproductive justice.

Event Information

Free and open to the public; registration is required for both in-person and online attendance. For additional information, please visit the event webpage. Please email Malia Maier at mm5352@cumc.columbia.edu with any questions. All in-person attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 policies.

Hosted by the Global Health Justice and Governance Program at Columbia University.

The pandemic compels us to ask fundamental questions about our place in the world: the many ways humans rely on one another, how we vitally and sometimes fatally breathe the same air, share the surfaces of the earth, and exist in proximity to other porous creatures in order to live in a social world. What we require to live can also imperil our lives. How do we think from, and about, this common bind?

In What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology, Judith Butler shows how COVID-19 and all its consequences—political, social, ecological, economic—have challenged us to reconsider the sense of the world that such disasters bring about. Drawing on the work of Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and critical feminist phenomenology, Butler illuminates the conditions in which we seek to make sense of our disorientation, precarity, and social bonds. What World Is This? offers a new account of interdependency in which touching and breathing, capacities that amid a viral outbreak can threaten life itself, challenge the boundaries of the body and selfhood. Criticizing notions of unlimited personal liberty and the killing forces of racism, sexism, and classism, this book suggests that the pandemic illuminates the potential of shared vulnerabilities as well as the injustice of pervasive inequalities.

Exposing and opposing forms of injustice that deny the essential interrelationship of living creatures, Butler argues for a radical social equality and advocates modes of resistance that seek to establish new conditions of livability and a new sense of a shared world.

Speaker

Judith Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the author of several books, most recently The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020). Butler’s previous Columbia University Press books include Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), and Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987).

Respondents

Mia Florin-Sefton is a Ph.D. candidate and University Writing Instructor in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University, where she specializes in 20th and 21st-century transatlantic anglophone literatures and culture. She is also working on a project that looks at the history of sex glands and early history of hormone replacement therapy in the context of theories of racial degeneration and eugenics post-World War I.

Professor Goyal is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center and founding director of the major in Medical Humanities. Professor Goyal completed his residency in Emergency Medicine as Chief Resident while finishing his PhD in English and Comparative Literature. His research interests include the health humanities, the study of the novel, and medical epistemology. His writing has appeared in The Living Handbook of Narratology, Aktuel Forskning, Litteratur, Kultur og Medier, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. He is a Co-Founding Editor of the online journal, Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal

Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former President of the Modern Language Association of America. Along with a group of local scholars, artists and activists, Hirsch is currently co-directing the Zip Code Memory Project, an initiative that seeks to find art and community-based ways to repair the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods.