Society’s preoccupation with numbers will come under the spotlight at a free University of Queensland public seminar on Thursday, April 11.
Professor Scott Slovic will speak at a Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies seminar at the Social Sciences and Humanities Library conference room, level 1, from 2pm.
Professor Slovic is professor of English and director of the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities at the University of Nevada, Reno, in the United States.
"I come from a society that appears to believe in numbers, that trusts quantitative information as a relatively firm version of ‘the truth,’ while anything non-quantifiable tends to come under suspicion," Professor Slovic said.
"In the United States, people want to know ‘the bottom line.’ What does it all add up to, what does it cost? We`re ready to pull out our wallets and pay for whatever we want at a given moment, and yet we`re likely to fight to avoid changing our lives if that`s what`s called for to achieve our purposes.
"We have difficulty realizing that changing our lives may be the cost of certain things we profess to want. Data, statistics, and technical scientific jargon seldom inspire soul-searching and major lifestyle reform."
Professor Slovic said an ambivalent devotion to quantifiability emerged in many different aspects of American and international experience.
"But I think the benefits and the limitations of numbers — of numerical thinking — are particularly clear and poignant in the environmental context," he said.
"As a scholar of contemporary environmental literature, chiefly in the United States, I have taken a special interest in certain kinds of environmental topics — such as human population growth, global climate change, and biodiversity/extinction — that seem to require assessment and explanation by way of statistics and ‘numerical discourse.’
"Environmental writers have realized that readers tend to have minimal sensitivity to information expressed through numbers."
During the first semester of 2002, Professor Slovic is serving as the A.W. Brooks Fellow in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History and as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at UQ.
A graduate of Stanford University and Brown University, he has published numerous articles and is the author or editor of eight books in the field of environmental literature, including most recently Getting Over the Color Green: Contemporary Environmental Literature of the Southwest (University of Arizona Press, 2001).
The Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies’ 2002 seminar program aims to promote the research culture of the arts and humanities and showcase the diversity of research currently being undertaken within the fields of critical and cultural studies.
For further information, contact Professor Scott Slovic 3365 1412 or Ms Andrea Mitchell, Centre For Critical and Cultural Studies telephone (07) 3365 7182 Mobile: 0412 474 978 web: http://www.arts.uq.edu.au/cccs/