Please noted that this event has been cancelled.

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Please join the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and School of Interdisciplinary Studies for two sabbatical talks:

“Social Entrepreneurship, Specialty Coffee Production, and Transnational Trade in the Northern Philippines”
Dr. Lynne Milgram
3:00 P.M. - 4:00 P.M
While the fair-trade-certified coffee movement created advantageous terms for producers, its perceived inadequate concern for higher quality and its uneven producer-vendor relations have given rise to social entrepreneurial initiatives marketing more directly-traded, specialty coffee. The latter’s practice champions business transparency, high quality, and sustainability. As these enterprises expand, however, questions arise regarding the extent to which operations can scale up from their start-up premises and still maintain quality standards and a social justice mandate to engage socioeconomic infrastructure change for producers?
Engaging these issues, this paper analyzes new northern Philippine Arabica coffee enterprises that employ “fairly traded” practices. I argue that while social entrepreneurs have established more equitable terms for their local and transnational trade, people’s subsistence needs can challenge enterprise sustainability. By shortening commodity chains, paying higher prices, and providing cultivation training, Philippine social entrepreneurs have enabled farmers’ engagement in alternatives to conventional mainstream and fair trade markets. Yet, Philippine farmers’ lack of income diversity, weak government support, and competition among traders for limited supplies, can frustrate entrepreneurs’ efforts. Given coffee culture’s growing third wave, I explore whether Philippine entrepreneurs’ timely initiatives might still resolve these push-pull tensions to yield an industry for, and more responsive to, stakeholders needs.
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“Artists, autobiography, auto fiction”
Dr. Charles Reeve
4:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M.
An “embarrassment,” Paul de Man said. “Disreputable” and “self-indulgent.” He was speaking about autobiographies, and no doubt his assertions would intensify if he focused specifically on artists’ autobiographies, given how that sub-genre doubles down on unreconstructed Romanticism. Omissions, misrememberings and outright lies notwithstanding, though, artists’ autobiographies have been popular ever since the Vita of Renaissance sculptor Bevenuto Cellini was unearthed and published in 1728. If anything, as Julie Rak shows, autobiography enjoys more popularity now than ever before—and artists’ accounts contribute robustly to that popularity. Why? What launched that interest in the first place and what sustains it now?