Isaac Newton proposed Universal Gravitation in 1687, when the Principia Mathematica was published. The notion that stars, planets and apples followed the same rules everywhere was, and remains, a novel idea. Newton's theory was suffi-cient until the middle of the 19th century when improved technology exposed inconsistencies. In 1915, Einstein advanced a theory that extended Newton's ideas of gravity. Since then, the most exquisitely subtle experiments have been performed to test Newton and Einstein. To the current limits of precision, these theories have been confirmed. But are they complete?

The University of Kentucky Department of Physics and Astronomy is pleased to welcome the public to our astronomical observatory. Part of our program of public outreach is a presentation on an interesting topic in astronomy followed by a visit to the observatory. The Kentucky SkyTalk is held on the second Thursday of every month.  A 45 minute program on astronomy will begin at 7:00 PM in Room 155 of the Chemistry-Physics Building. After the presentation, you are invited to view the sky through our 20-inch telescope, weather permitting.

Free parking is available on the top floor of parking structure #2, next to the observatory. With the exception of paid parking, without a valid parking permit, leaving your vehicle somewhere other than next to the observatory will result in a parking citation. Please note that Rose Street is closed south of the Chem-Physics building.

All are welcome and there is no charge. Tell your neighbors. Bring your kids.

A flyer in pdf format and a link to a campus map are available here:  https://pa.as.uky.edu/observatory

Helen Lawton Smith

Helen Lawton Smith is Professor of Entrepreneurship, Department of Management, Birkbeck, University of London. Her research career has focused on the links between entrepreneurship, innovation, public policy and regional development in national and international contexts. She is the Founder and Research Director of the Oxfordshire Economic Observatory, School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University (http://oeo.geog.ox.ac.uk) and is Director of the Birkbeck Centre for Innovation Management Research (http://bbk.ac.uk/innovation). She is the author of nine books and of over ninety journal articles and book chapters and is Associate Editor, Strategic Change:Briefings in Entrepreneurial Finance. She is the UK principal investigator of a European Union project Transforming Institutions by Gendering Contents and Gaining Equality in Research  (TRIGGER) (2013-2017).

Health Justice and Ending the War at Home

Jenna M. Loyd

One of the forgotten gains of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s is in making a place for health as a right and means of politics. Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978 situates the struggle over health in Los Angeles within the context of both the Vietnam War and domestic conflicts over the racial economy and social welfare. The book describes how Black freedom, antiwar, welfare rights, and women’s movement activists formed alliances to battle oppressive health systems and structural violence, working to define health as a matter of individual and collective self-determination. This talk reflects on the legacy of these movements for the contemporary moment of Black Lives Matter.

Jenna M. Loyd received her PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and is assistant professor of public health policy and administration at the Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a coeditor of Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis.

Practical Panarchy; Assessing Adaptive Capacity of Regional Water Systems in the United States to Changing Climate

During the 20^th century, large public investments led to the development of complex regional scale water management systems across the United States.  Currently, these social-ecological systems are characterized by legal conflict, social gridlock and continued erosion of many ecosystem services. Changing climate may continue this trajectory, but it may also provide a catalyst for renewal of ecosystems and a window of opportunity for institutional change.  This presentation will review preliminary results and synthesis from an interdisciplinary team of legal scholars, geographers and ecologists who assessed the resilience of six regional water systems; the Columbia, Klamath, Rio Grande, Platte and Rio Grande river systems, along with the Everglades wetlands to changing climate.  Preliminary results indicate the value of an historical resilience assessment to understand patterns of abrupt and surprising patterns of development, to identify legal, social and ecological opportunities and obstacles to climate adaptation. Law and policies (such as Endangered Species Act or Clean Water Act) can establish boundaries or define ecological thresholds, and as a result, constrain actions designed to explore adaptation options.  In other cases, a reassessment of rights have led to the end of gridlock, and opened a window to new and collaborative approaches to water governance.  

Lance Gunderson is a systems ecologist who is interested in how people understand, assess, and manage large ecosystems.  He has worked as a research ecologist for National Audubon, as a botanist for the US National Park Service in south Florida, and as a research scientist at the University of Florida. He was the founding chair of the Department of Environmental Studies at Emory University and is currently a Professor in that department.  He is Co-Editor in Chief of Ecology and Society. He chaired the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council committee on Ecological Effects of Road Density. He has also served as the executive director of the Resilience Network and is currently Chairman of the Board of the Resilience Alliance. He is a Beijer Fellow with the Beijer International Institute for Ecological Economics, Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, and a Senior Fellow with the Agropolis Fondation for Sustainability in France.  He has been involved in the in environmental assessment and management of large-scale ecosystems, including the Everglades, Florida Bay, Upper Mississippi River Basin, and the Grand Canyon. 

Between the state and the home: Interpretations of violence within everyday life in Cairo, Egypt

This talk will explore the relationship between state violence and domestic violence amongst low-income residents of Cairo, Egypt. Building on work in feminist geopolitics, which has emphasized the importance of the corporeal within discussions of national and global politics, I interrogate narratives and interpretations of violence within everyday life. In doing so, keen attention is paid to the language used to define and explain violence by interlocutors. In these accounts, ‘violence’, is often understood as being devoid of care and is juxtaposed against ‘discipline’—understood as an act of care meant to correct inappropriate behavior. I ask: can interpretations about violence in the home contribute insights into patterns of violence practiced by the state against its citizens and what, if any, broader implications does this present for Egypt, a country still grappling with political transformation four years after the ‘Arab Spring.’

(Re)Producing Citizenship through (Health)Care: Latina Immigrants’ Experiences of Reproductive Healthcare in Atlanta, GA

State and local immigration laws create an environment of insecurity for undocumented immigrants, with intensified policing at the level of social reproduction especially after 9/11. Focusing on Latina immigrants and their access to and experiences of reproductive healthcare, this talk examines how an environment of insecurity intermingles with deleterious notions about Latina sexuality and reproduction in order to create a gamut of obstacles that Latina immigrants must face in order to obtain reproductive healthcare. I explore how Latina immigrants navigate – and sometimes resist or subvert – these obstacles and “demand” good healthcare through tactics such as the use of assertiveness and informal medical information networks. I suggest that in exploring the ethics of care inherent in their actions, as well as the ethics of care lacking in the actions of health service providers, we can see how Latina immigrants are attaining the rights (health and healthcare) and enacting the duties (raising healthy families) of citizens, even as the treatment they receive often construes them as unworthy of such rights and turns their acts of duty into deviance. By interrogating the informal carework they must undertake to obtain formal (health)care, this talk highlights ways that undocumented Latinas “fight back” in ways that are often rendered invisible by virtue of their inextricable entanglement with the mundanity of everyday life. Such instances of resistance are often ignored in studies of citizenship and geopolitics, which tend to focus more on visible acts of both policing and resistance, like arrests and public protests. I contend that although immigrant policing has intensified at the level of social reproduction, strategies and tactics deployed by immigrants push back at the same level and allow Latinas to exist in a setting that wants them to do anything but. Further, Latina immigrants deploy carework to procure good healthcare even as they are characterized and treated as unworthy, thereby reworking citizenship at the intimate level of the body and subverting harmful stereotypes and treatment along the way.

"Living Care-fully: Understanding Interdependence in Livelihoods through Inter-generational Relationships in northern Ghana"

This talk will explore the potential contribution of a feminist ethics of care to livelihoods approaches. I argue that autonomy and independence frame our current approaches to understanding how people support themselves, obscuring the interdependent nature of connections that found our lives. Drawing on fieldwork in rural northern Ghana, I will explore interdependencies by focusing on the experiences of women engaged in intergenerational relationships as they encounter emerging dependencies associated with ageing and illness. I will briefly discuss the unfolding negotiations of strategies between an elderly woman and her daughter-in-law, examining the challenges of producing a morning meal. I will then move to explore how married women face constraints from strong patriarchal values that require her to focus labour and resources on her husband and his family. However, illness in an elderly parent may compel a daughter to provide end of life care. Women then work to legitimize a reorganization of their strategies to ensure that they can meet the needs of an ailing parent. These stories demonstrate how women's lives are deeply connected to others and their strategies address the needs of others. They highlight the need for consideration of an ethics of care in livelihood approaches, where interdependencies, dependencies and vulnerabilities can be acknowledged for their foundational roles in shaping strategies.

Title: Massacres and Protesting Hateful Capitalism: Lessons to be learned from Mexico's activists



Abstract: Protests sparked by news of the September 26 massacre of rural students in Iguala, Mexico have spread across the country as people demand their return. Even with news of their deaths, the demand for their return, ALIVE, does not change. This demand echoes four decades of protest for the return of the desparecidos, those who were forced to disappear by corrupt governments. Such a declaration indicates the fight of the eternal revolutionary, that is of the one who will stop fighting once the dead can be brought back to life. The revolutionaty potential in this message explains, in part, the government's violent repression of this demand and of the refusal of the US government to acknowledge it. In Mexico, such protests have woven together with those against feminicidio (the killing of women with impunity) and against the juvencidio(the killing of youth with impunity) as part of the Mexican drug war funded by the United States. In this paper, I triangulate the struggles sparked by the Iguala massacre, feminicidio and juvenicidio to show how they seek to generate an international and activist public engaged in related struggles across the Americas, including in northern North America, where socially vulnerable populations battle the forces to disappear them from history and geography. Such struggles require a theoretical and activist openness to the lessons to be learned from Mexico and other struggles across the Americas where a vernacular of protest reveals insightful theorizations of these neoliberal times.