| THE PHILOCTETES CENTER FOR THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF IMAGINATION
at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute
invites you to a Roundtable
Saturday, January 12, 2008 at 2:00pm
at
The Philoctetes Center
247 East 82nd Street
WEATHER AND THE IMAGINATION
Oscar Wilde famously quipped, "Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me nervous." This roundtable will explore "weather talk" in its varied forms and multiple layers of signification. Now that it is almost universally acknowledged that human activities are radically altering our global climate, it is essential to examine the diversity of ways in which humans encounter weather. Climate, after all, is a statistical abstraction; weather is what we live each day. The roundtdable will be an interdisciplinary dialogue addressing questions such as: How do different cultures interpret and apply meteorological forecasts? How do perceptions of weather-related risk vary? How do common images and narratives shape experiences of weather? Can the arts help us think critically about the values and assumptions we bring to our interactions with the earth's atmosphere? Relevant disciplines include meteorology and climatology, psychology and psychoanalysis, sociology, economics, history, anthropology, literature, and the visual arts.
http://www.philoctetes.org/Calendar/Weather_and_Imagination/ |