Past Events

A roundtable with Mary Louise Pratt and Berkeley faculty.

Panel Discussants: Mary Louise Pratt, Claire Kramsch (Berkeley Language Center), Bharati Mukherjee (English), Geoffrey Nunberg (Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University) and José David Saldívar (English, Ethnic Studies)

Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University.

Panelists: Donna Haraway, Chris Chafe, Greg Niemeyer, Charis Thompson, and Alla Efimova.

Donna Haraway is a prominent theorist of the relationships between people and machines, and her work has incited debate in fields as varied as primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto, first published in 1985, is now taught in undergraduate classes at countless universities and has been reprinted or translated in numerous anthologies in North America, Japan, and Europe.

Panel Discussants: Frederick Wiseman, Laura Nader (Anthropology), Candace Slater (Spanish & Portuguese) and Loïc Wacquant (Sociology)

Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman uses the “direct cinema” tradition of documentary filmmaking—continued filming of human conversation and the routines of everyday life with no music, interviews, or voice-over narration—to powerfully examine social institutions in America.

Panel Discussants: Michael Pollan, Catherine Gallagher (English), Ignacio Chapela (Environmental Science, Policy and Management) and Patricia Unterman (restaurant critic, the San Francisco Examiner)

Michael Pollan's work examines the intersections between science and culture, focusing most specifically on food. Pollan is the author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, winner of the James Beard Award, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which was named one of the ten best books of the year by both The New York Times and The Washington Post, and The Botany of Desire, among others.

Baker with David Henkin (History) and Carla Hesse (History).