The following seminars for NSS faculty, staff, and students have been scheduled for Spring 2021. 

Date: March 4, 2021 9:30am to 10:30am

Title: Colors & shapes: Hard to learn patterns (for preschoolers)

Speaker: Dr. Ji Yun Son (Professor of Psychology)

Description: What are the patterns that are easy to see in the world? It turns out that the patterns we see are, in part, a function of our expertise. But in many domains, abstract patterns are the goal of learning and expertise. We will look at the patterns that are hard for preschool children to see, methods that allow them to learn those patterns, and then apply those insights to students learning about math and science.

Title: Colors & patterns: Easy to pose, but hard to solve, puzzles (even for researchers)

Speaker: Dr. Michael Krebs (Professor of Mathematics)

Description: Mathematicians love puzzles.  To illustrate why, in this talk, we introduce a family of challenges where one must color in squares in a grid subject to certain constraints.  Then we look for patterns in the solutions in an effort to generalize our findings.  Warning: There will be active learning.  So come prepared to attempt some of these yourself!  This talk is primarily targeted at non-mathematicians, but my hope is that non-mathematicians and mathematicians alike will enjoy trying their hand at these two-dimensional coloring puzzles.

Meeting information: https://calstatela.zoom.us/j/88155073255
Meeting ID: 881 5507 3255

Date: March 8, 2021 from 11:00am to 12:00pm

Title: “The Spartan Genos: Notions of Heredity, Consanguinity, and Eugenics in Ancient Sparta.”

Speaker: Dr. Timothy Doran (Associate Professor of History)

Description: Timothy Doran, a scholar of ancient Sparta and associate professor of history at CSULA, explains how a set of intertwined cultural ideals of purity, consanguinity, hereditarianism, and eugenic ideology existed in Sparta and ultimately prevented the Spartan state from replenishing its citizen body with non-citizens. 

Meeting information: https://calstatela.zoom.us/j/83988760522
Meeting ID: 839 8876 0522

Date: March 18, 2021 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Title: "Infamous confessions: Human Rights and the Language of State Terror.”
Speaker: Dr. Gabriela Fried Amilivia (Professor of Sociology)

Description: In this presentation, I explore key narratives, a so-called perpetrator “confession,” by a Uruguayan infamous criminals, Tróccoli, recently convicted in Rome’s “Condor Trials” (July 2020) about his actions/human rights crimes against humanity during the dictatorship as a space where battles for memory, truth, and justice emerge and become visible. I will present a summary of our analysis on the discursive strategies and mechanisms of silencing and denial in these public “confessions” in contemporary Uruguay, more than 40 years after the crimes, to visualize the process of construction of public discourses on impunity in social memory.

These types of “confessions” reveal how silences enter the process of collective memory production. They also serve as an illustration of the ways in which personal narratives of “confessions” about the recent past are used to (re)produce a public discourse of impunity and oblivion. I will end with a wider reflection on insights into the social memory processes that invisibilize responsibilities in State terrorism crimes and allow us to investigate how silencing and invisibilization mechanisms operate and are reproduced in our contemporary societies.

Meeting information: https://calstatela.zoom.us/j/83590486915
Meeting ID: 835 9048 6915