Group Topics for “Legacies” Symposium
The topic of this year’s symposium is “Legacies”, and it will be broken down into four major groups:
1. Physical Legacies: Preservation and conservation efforts are dedicated to commemorating the heritage of a location. Areas declared to hold historical, environmental or cultural significance are set aside with the goal of keeping them open for future generations to experience, yet most of the time, decisions over physical legacies are anything but clean-cut. The Three Gorges Dam was built over protests that centuries of undocumented history would be lost to flooded land, but to demand preservation of all the artifacts of one of the birthplaces of civilization would effectively paralyze economic progress. In contrast, Costa Rica has made it no secret that it employs a strategy of environmental preservation to sustain a tourism-driven economy. In light of these examples and others, this group will discuss how such initiatives are chosen, executed and managed. How can we reconcile the construction of physical legacies with the need for progress, and what happens when opinions clash over the value of a legacy? How do such places and our perspectives of them continue to evolve?
2. Legacies of Inquiry: Thomas Kuhn argued that science proceeds as a series of paradigms around which inquiry is organized. At the core of each scientific paradigm are untestable assumptions, but around their perimeters are a myriad of testable hypotheses. Further, paradigms have life cycles: they are born, enjoy productive periods, and then are abandoned when new, more useful paradigms emerge. The history of science is the history of these different ways of approaching and testing the world replacing one another. This group will discuss the role of legacies of inquiry in shaping the way we think about the world and create new knowledge. For example, how do current paradigms (e.g. evolution) affect the way we approach problems? For the humanities and social sciences, what is the role of the canon in shaping how we approach questions and do research? When do scientific paradigms or literary canons cease to be useful to the advancement of knowledge?
3. Institutional Legacies: Although the people associated with a given institution will change, the institution itself may retain core ideals, goals, and practices. Duke University, for example, has meaning to its students long after graduation day, and many alumni are willing to donate money in order to maintain Duke’s scholarly (and athletic) presence for generations. An institution like Duke also impacts people who have never set foot on Duke’s campus, and one of an administrator’s most important roles is to control Duke’s institutional footprint. Of course, universities are not our only institutions. This group will be open to discussing corporate culture and impact, industrialization, the legacies of political institutions, and how different types of institutions shape each others’ legacies.
4. Maintaining Legacies: A legacy must only be created once, but it must be maintained in perpetuity. When we encounter groups or organizations, institutions, and even disciplines, we see a living artifact that has been passed down through many generations. As the times change, this legacy has been altered from its original vision many times by many people with different aims. What should take precedence when we work to maintaining a legacy? Whose vision of it should be privileged and why? This group will cover issues from maintaining legacies of previous generations, adjusting legacies to new innovations, and living up to a legacy’s exemplars.
