Core Events are open to the entire community!
First-year students are required to attend. More details will be added below as they become available.
2023-2024 Core Events
Fall 2023
Dr. Tania El Khoury
Friday, September 15, 11:45am-12:40pm
Thorne Hall
Tania El Khoury is a live artist whose work focuses on audience interactivity and its political potential. She creates installations and performances in which the audience is a witness and an active collaborator. Tania’s work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 32 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. Tania is Distinguished Artist in Residence of Theater & Performance and the Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College in New York. She holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is associated with Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK and is a co-founder of the urban research and live art collective, Dictaphone Group in Lebanon.
The talk is free and open to the public. Dr. El Khoury's installation Cultural Exchange Rate will be on display from September 11-15. Advanced reservations for Cultural Exchange Rate are required and can by made here.
Spring 2024
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Tuesday, February 6, 11:45am-12:40pm
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.
Braiding Sweetgrass is Occidental's 2023-24 Community Book Program selection.
Dr. Earyn McGee
Monday, March 4, 11:45am-12:40pm
Dr. Earyn McGee is an aspiring Natural History TV Show Host. She’s merged her love for lizards and passion for social justice to create the very popular social media game #FindThatLizard. Every Wednesday at 5pm MST, she posts a photo of a lizard camouflaged in its natural environment and invites participants to find it. The captions that go with each photo often give the players natural history facts about the lizards, while Dr. McGee also uses this as an opportunity to talk about conservation and social issues.
Dr. McGee’s graduate studies focused on the impact of stream drying on the lizard population. She’s also exploring ways to get more black women into natural resources careers. Committed to diversity and inclusion, Earyn was graduate student mentor to the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars program. The program aims to increase the diversity within the conservation field.
Earyn earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from Howard University. As well as both a Master of Science and PhD in Natural Resources with an emphasis in Wildlife Conservation and Management from the University of Arizona.
2022-2023 Core Events
Fall 2022
Anne Kaneko: "Intersectionality in Climate Organizing"
Monday, October 17, 11:45am-12:40pm
The 2022 Antoinette and Vincent M. Dungan Lectureship on Energy and the Environment
Filmmaker Ann Kaneko talks about her road to making Manzanar, Diverted and how she came to the fight for climate justice. How did the convergence of her family's legacy of WWII incarceration, three generations in Tongva lands/Los Angeles and a love for nature bring her to tell this story? What has she learned on this journey and where can the film take us?
Manzanar, Diverted is available to the Oxy community for viewing through the Panopto platform. You can access the film by using the link below and logging in using your Oxy username and password.
Steph Cha
Wednesday, November 9, 11:45am-12:40pm
Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay, Occidental's 2022 Community Book Program selection. You House Will Pay is winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She’s a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor, and is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology.
Spring 2023
Dr. Jessica Hernandez "Beyond Acknowledgements: Indigenous Ways of Knowing"
Monday, March 20, 11:45am-12:40pm
The 2023 Antoinette and Vincent M. Dungan Lectureship on Energy and the Environment
Despite the undeniable fact that Indigenous communities are among the most affected by climate devastation, Indigenous ways of knowing are nowhere to be found in mainstream environmental policy or discourse. And while holistic land, water, and forest management practices born from millennia of Indigenous knowledge systems have much to teach all of us, Indigenous ways of knowing has long been ignored, otherized, or perceived as “soft”–the product of a systematic, centuries-long campaign of racism, colonialism, extractive capitalism, and delegitimization. In this presentation, Dr. Hernandez will present ways in which we can honor Indigenous ways of knowing.
Dr. Alexia Arani "Transformative Justice 101: Safety Beyond Police"
Wednesday, April 19, 11:45am-12:40pm
How do we re-imagine public safety to prioritize social groups that are disproportionately impacted by systemic and interpersonal harm? How do we create communities of care that prevent, interrupt, and intervene in violence? This talk will seek to answer these questions by providing attendees with frameworks, tools, and resources for enacting Transformative Justice. Borne of feminist and queer/trans of color organizing lineages, Transformative Justice is a social movement that seeks to disrupt violence and repair harm without relying on the police. This talk will focus in particular on the small, everyday acts that we can all begin practicing now—in our intimate relationships, college campuses, and wider social communities.
