Kate Brown, an award-winning historian at the University of Maryland, discusses “plutonium cities” in the U.S. and Soviet Union at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 13, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

A day later, Kerry Emanuel, an influential professor of meteorology at MIT, presents Uncertainty, Modeling and Climate Change at 4 p.m. Friday, Jan. 14, in Room 204 of Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave.

Titled Plutopolis: How Secrecy, Security and Radiation Made Model Communities and Model Citizens in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., Brown’s talk is sponsored by the politics department and the Mellon Innovation Fund. For more information, please contact 207-786-8295.

Emanuel’s talk is sponsored by the chemistry, physics and geology departments and the environmental studies program. To learn more, please contact 207-786-6924.

Brown is the author of the book A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2005). Her presentation at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ will compare the communities surrounding early plutonium plants, in Hanford, Wash., and Maiak, Russia.

Named one of Time Magazine’s 100 influential people for 2006, Emanuel was in the news the previous year thanks to a study, published less than a month before Hurricane Katrina, linking the increasing force of hurricanes to the rise in global temperature.

An associate professor of anthropology and coordinator of Native American research at the University of Maine, Darren Ranco discusses the influence of Native American tribes on environmental legislation in a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College lecture at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 17, in Room 204 of Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave.

A member of the Penobscot Indian Nation, Ranco presents the talk The Clean Air Mercury Rule and Indian Tribes: Sovereignty, Subsistence and Participation. Made possible by the Mellon Innovation Fund at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, in conjunction with a faculty project researching prehistoric conditions in Penobscot Bay, the event is open to the public and refreshments will be available. For more information, please call 207-786-6490.

Ranco’s lecture will examine how tribes in Maine and the nation commented on and participated in the Clean Air Mercury Rule proposed by the Bush administration in 2004 and 2005, and how these comments reveal environmental values and concerns of tribes that relate to sovereignty, subsistence rights and practices, and forms of involvement in federal rule-making.

Ranco’s research focuses on methods that U.S. indigenous communities, particularly in Maine, use to resist environmental degradation and protect their cultural resources. Those methods include traditional approaches to diplomacy; and raising awareness of ways in which society’s attempts to equalize rights or access to resources may, in fact, have the opposite effect, depriving groups or individuals of their own, often minority, cultures.

Ranco teaches classes on indigenous intellectual property rights, research ethics, environmental justice and tribal governance. He has a particular interest in how better research relationships can be created among universities, native and non-native researchers, and indigenous communities. He has a master’s degree in environmental law from Vermont Law School and a doctorate in social anthropology from Harvard.

Featuring three panelists, Monday’s symposium is titled Latin American Indigenous Movements in the 21st Century: Frontiers of Activism. It takes place in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave., and is sponsored by the Mellon Innovation Fund, the environmental studies program, the anthropology department, the social science division and the Multicultural Center at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Tuesday’s roundtable discussion is titled Indigenous Environmental Activism Among Near and Distant Neighbors and includes two of the Monday panelists and two Native Americans from Maine. It will explore forms and roles of native environmentalism and its engagements with Western environmental policies. This takes place in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St., and is sponsored by the Mellon Innovation Fund, the environmental studies program and the Multicultural Center.

The programs have been put together by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College faculty including a group associated with the Latin American Studies general education concentration at the college. General education concentrations, or GECs, part of the college’s core curriculum, are groupings of courses oriented around a common theme and often drawn from diverse academic departments and programs.

Monday’s panel is composed of three activists involved in indigenous politics in Latin America: Patricia Gualinga, Victor Montejo and Trevor Stevenson ’00.

Gualinga is a member of the Kichwa indigenous community of Sarayaku in Amazonian Ecuador. She has spent years leading the community against oil exploration on indigenous lands, a process that has put Sarayaku in the international spotlight. Gualinga has also ensured that women’s voices are heard in the movement for indigenous rights and environmental justice.

Her efforts have taken her around the world and led to collaborations with non-governmental organizations in the United States and Ecuador, as well as participation within the Ecuadorian government and CONAIE, Ecuador’s national indigenous federation.

Montejo is a Jakaltek Maya from the Northwestern Highlands of Guatemala, where he was a schoolteacher before coming to the United States. He fled Guatemala in 1982, after his brother, also a teacher, was assassinated by government soldiers and his own name appeared on death lists.

For the last eight years Montejo has chaired the Native American Studies Department at the University of California, Davis. In 2003, he gave up a Fulbright grant to run for Congress in Guatemala, and was elected in December of that year. He is the author of several books.

Stevenson is originally from Wyoming, where he was involved in environmental and indigenous issues. He has worked with indigenous movements in Latin America for more than a decade and has extensive experience in coordination between indigenous peoples and local governments and NGOs. He has served as the executive co-director of the Washington, D.C.-based Amazon Alliance for Indigenous and Traditional Peoples and their Environment.

Gualinga and Stevenson will join two members of Maine Wabanaki tribes in Tuesday’s event. Brenda Commander is serving her fourth term as chief of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians. She is overseeing tribal efforts to restore the Meduxnekeag River, a tributary of the St. John River that flows through tribal lands. Through partnerships with private and government agencies in Canada and the United States, the tribe is improving the water quality of the river for cultural and environmental reasons.

John Banks has been director of the Penobscot Nation’s Department of Natural Resources since the department’s founding in 1980. During that time he has overseen the implementation of an extensive water quality testing program for the Penobscot River to ensure that the river complies with state and federal clean water standards.

In addition, Banks and his department have played an important role in the newly formed Penobscot River Restoration Trust, which is raising money to pay for a removal of dams that would reopen 1,000 miles of river habitat along the Penobscot.

Titled Some Promising Ways to Reduce Prejudice: Recent Advances in the Psychology of Intergroup Contact, this lecture is open to the public at no cost. This event is made possible by the Mellon Innovation Fund, the Harward Center for Community Relationships at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and the college’s psychology department.

The contact hypothesis is the argument that contact among members of different groups will reduce existing prejudice and improve social relations between them. Outstanding issues from decades of research into the concept include the circumstances under which intergroup contact is most influential; whether individual contacts result in the reduction of prejudice towards a group; and factors that drive contact effects.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Brown will present findings from field research on contact between different kinds of groups (disabled, ethnic, political) and will explain how these results could affect policymaking.

Brown is director of research and professor of social psychology in the School of Psychology, University of Sussex, where he has taught since 2004. He previously taught at the University of Kent for 25 years, helping to establish the Department of Social Psychology there. He is the author of numerous articles and two books, most recently, Prejudice: Its Social Psychology (Wiley), whose second edition is slated for release in August 2010.

Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at , visits ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College to offer a lecture exploring how humans think of bodies and souls at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 6, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road.

Titled “Bodies and Souls,” Bloom’s talk is part of a series hosted by the departments of philosophy and psychology, with funding from the Mellon Innovation Fund at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. The event is free and open to the public.

Bloom will discuss the notion that humans are in their sense, which emerges in childhood, of a fundamental distinction between physical entities, such as bodies, and psychological entities, such as souls. He will connect this perception to such aspects of human nature as the attraction to certain religious beliefs and the relationship between disgust and morality.

Bloom also studies differences in the ways that human minds understand physical objects and social worlds, exploring how such mental processes can contribute to belief in religion. He has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, as well as such mainstream publications as The New York Times, Britain’s Guardian and .

He is past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, a major journal in that field. Since receiving his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990, Bloom has authored or edited four books, including Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (Basic Books, 2004) and How Children Learn the Meanings of Words (MIT Press, 2000). His current project is titled Everything You Believe About Pleasure Is Wrong.

The Mellon Innovation Fund at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, supported by a $450,000 award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, supports projects undertaken by faculty to initiate fresh approaches, new directions and novel undertakings in their research and scholarship and in the academic program. The fund encourages pursuit of faculty work in ways intended to make a lasting impact on the college.