Festival of Scholars

An annual celebration of research, scholarship, and creativity

April 27 - May 1, 2015

Inquiry, Art, and Knowledge for a Better World: Multidisciplinary Conversations and Poster Session

Date: Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Time: 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Location: Lundring Events Center
Description: How can one make the world a better place? Philosophy, English, science, psychology, business, and other disciplines will contribute their views. Students will present posters on their research, a student keynote speaker will present a philosophical paper on disenchantment/re-enchantment, and student panelists will continue the discussion. Please join us for this special event. All are welcome!

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Student Abstracts at this Session

Student(s):
Carla De Lira

Faculty Mentor:
Dr. Bryan Rasmussen
A Sample Poster: KaleidoscopeLA: Experiential Cartography of Urban Daily Life

KaleidoscopeLA.Org derives from this study about spatial experience to provide a new perspective about daily routes in Los Angeles. KaleidoscopeLA includes an online collection of daily routes as a way to navigate Los Angeles not only by the standards set by conventional maps, but by the variety of emotional connections associated with users' frequented environments. In Phase I, the ideas of theorists such as Yi Fu Tuan and Michel de Certeau were used to create the website's conceptual framework for the Javascript-based map display. Phase II expanded to neighborhoods outside of Downtown by collecting routes more efficiently with a map drawing application that provides several map templates and drawing tools. Ultimately, KaleidoscopeLA shows how recording these routes contributes to community identity when present on the streets where perfectly drawn lines do not exist.
Student(s):
Danielle Lindamood

Faculty Mentor:
Dr. Nathan Tierney
Keynote Paper: Moral Vision and Ethical Idealization

Looking through the lens of tradition-based ethics, this paper explores the role moral vision plays in the possibility of ethical idealization in a world facing the 21st century problems of modernity and disenchantment. Traditions are socially-embodied arguments, represented by the way people live their lives. Tradition-based ethics use traditions from different cultures to inform what constitutes a good or bad ethic, creating diverse perspectives on opinions of what it means to live a good life and be a good person. Tradition-based ethics differ from the more modern, abstract ethical theories because they do not assert there is one true way, but rather that there are many paths to the good life. In this optimistic piece, I assert that ethical idealization is possible, if only through the diversity of thought and creativity that different traditions represent and, of course, through reason.
Student(s):
David Montoya
and Blake Abla Filo and Kevin Parr

Faculty Mentor:
Dr. Nathan Tierney, Dr. Rahuldeep Gill, and Dr. Bryan Rasmussen
Panel Discussion: Responses to the Discenchantment of Modern Life

David Montoya (Dr. Nathan Tierney, faculty mentor)
Abstract: Disenchantment is a major concern in our society that will lead to stagnation of culture and progressive thought, which will bring about the death of philosophy. In order to give the problem proper consideration, a careful and thorough analysis of disenchantment and its implications must take place. After the problem is properly established, I will set out to solve the problem by shaking the certainty of disenchantment's assertions, and find the cure in doubting and in the distinction of what we can know, and what we claim to know.

Blake Abla Filo (Dr. Rahuldeep Gill, faculty mentor)
Abstract: Neo-paganism offers an enchantment that is egalitarian and individualized allowing for personally meaningful beliefs that resonates with the individualism of modernity. With estimates from 750,000 to 2,000,000 Neo-pagans in the U.S. alone, a pagan revival is taking place, fueled by the religious pluralism and acceptance of personal beliefs.

Kevin Parr (Dr. Bryan Rasmussen, faculty mentor)
Abstract: Disenchantment is the problem of the human object, where humans become things when we try to extricate the inextricable, taking away the human experience from the human. Rather than remove ourselves from the meaning-making process, we ought to be at the forefront of it, making things human, because this is how we truly interpret the world.