Guest Speaker to Give Lecture via Video Conferencing

Thursday September 23rd from 7:30 to 8:30 pm will mark the college's first live video-conferencing lecture! The lecture is also a Cultural Enrichment event, and will be held in the library's Auditorium. Guest Speaker Bill Freudenburg has been invited by the library and the college to speak on "Learning the Lessons of Katrina". In light of this upcoming event the library wanted to offer a little bit of background info about the guest speaker:

William Freudenburg is the Dehlsen Professor of Environment and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published extensively on society-environment relationships, particularly on resource-dependent rural communities and on natural hazards and risks. His articles have been published in interdisciplinary journals such as Science, Risk Analysis, Risk, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change, as well as in numerous sociological journals, including American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Rural Sociology, Social Problems, and Social Forces. Much of his recent work has focused on “disproportionality” -- the tendency for environmental damage to be associated with a surprisingly small fraction of the overall economy. His latest book, with Robert Gramling, Shirley Laska, and Kai Erikson, is Catastrophe in the Making (Island Press, 2009), which analyzes the lessons to be learned from the "un-natural disaster" of Hurricane Katrina.

He has received numerous awards and honors for his work, including the Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Sociology of Environment and Technology from the American Sociological Association (ASA), and "best article" awards from the Pacific Sociological Association and three different ASA sections. He won the Award of Merit from the Rural Sociological Society (RSS) Natural Resource Research Group, as well as winning the RSS's inaugural (2006) Fred Buttel Award for the Best Article of the previous several years. Dr. Freudenburg is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has served as a panelist or member of five different committees of the National Academy of Sciences/ National Research Council. He has also served on numerous other scientific advisory committees, including those for the U.S. Departments of Energy and Interior, and he was the first American Sociological Association Congressional Fellow to serve in the House of Representatives.

Needless to say, we at the library are very excited to have a speaker with such credentials to lecture at LaGrange College. Not only does it promise to be a culturally enriching event, but also it is the perfect opportunity for the library to utilize some of its technological features, such as the brand new video-conferencing system and the other multi-media aspects of the library's auditorium. It is our hope that this event will be the first of many video-conferencing lecture and events to come!