OHC lectures
2024–25 Re-imagine
The Oregon Humanities Center (OHC) presents its 2024-25 endowed lectureship series centered on the theme of Re-imagine. This series highlights the original human superpower: our mind’s capacity to transform the world around us via imaginative thought.
To re-imagine is to reconceive. Starting from the most basic, established principles and distinctions, re-imaginers set their intelligence, their experiences, their histories, and the fruits of their research free to play, turning dilemmas and situations we think we know over and around, probing their crevices, their sticky points, and their soft spots, tugging at their loose ends. The mindset of re-imagine opens alternatives, options, and possibilities that may have been overlooked. It prompts new questions and spawns new approaches to the now, the yesterday, the tomorrow.
The speakers in this series represent a range of disciplines, perspectives, and backgrounds, but what they have in common is a commitment to engaging problems, challenges, and obstacles as generative prompts to creativity: to re-envisioning and re-imagining.
At this crucial moment in our history, we need to ask: How might we use the power of human imagination—and re-imagination—to engage creatively and critically with the circumstances of our lives? What new insights or research will be uncovered in the reimagining process? And, what new, more equitable and nourishing pathways can be forged?
Clark Lecture
“Surviving Together”
Patty Krawec, Anishinaabe/Ukrainian writer and speaker who belongs to Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty 3 territory, Canada; and author of Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future (2022)
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Watch a recording of the lecture
Listen to her UO Today interview
O’Fallon Lecture
“Queering Reproductive Justice: An Invitation to Create Our Collective Future”
Candace Bond-Theriault, Black queer feminist lawyer, professor, writer, mother, and social justice advocate; and author of Queering Reproductive Justice: an Invitation (2024)
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Watch the recording of the lecture.
Listen to her UO Today interview
Cressman Lecture
“Re-imagining the Other/Ourselves: Finding the Human in the Age of AI”
Allison Pugh, professor of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, and author of The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (2024)
Thursday, April 17, 2025
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Listen to her UO Today interview
Lorwin Lecture
“Re-imagine: Our Social Change Ecosystems”
Deepa Iyer, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives, Building Movement Project; and author of We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future (2015) and Social Change Now: A Guide for Reflection and Connection (2022)
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Watch the recording of the lecture
Listen to her UO Today interview