HTA conference featuring climate change expert Andrew Light
Andrew Light, a distinguished senior fellow in the climate program at the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., will discuss responsible geoengineering when he presents the keynote address at the 39th Humanities and Technology Association (HTA) conference, hosted by Salve Regina.
His talk, “What Would Responsible Geoengineering Look Like,” will be presented at 4 p.m. Friday, Nov. 3 in the DiStefano Lecture Hall.
Light is professor of philosophy, public policy and atmospheric sciences at George Mason University, where he directs the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. He has served as senior adviser and India counselor to the U.S. special envoy on climate change, and as a staff climate adviser in the secretary of state’s Office of Policy Planning in the U.S. Department of State. In this capacity, he was co-chair of the U.S.-India joint working group on combating climate change, chair of the interagency climate working group on the sustainable development goals, and served on the senior strategy team for the UN climate negotiations.
Scheduled for Nov. 2-4, the HTA conference will continue last year’s theme of morality and creativity in a technological age. Though the pursuit of the good and the beautiful is in some ways timeless, the impact which technology has come to have on contemporary society forces us to confront new moral challenges while presenting us with the opportunity to create works of art that alternately augment and contrast with the world of our machines.
The traditional fields of ethics and aesthetics are thus cast in a new light, one which the conference will continue to explore. Running alongside ethical challenges is the potentially redemptive power of art. How might art humanize the often-times dehumanizing world of modern technology? What role might it play in a world of machines and devices? How can the pursuit of the beautiful today inspire or otherwise clarify the pursuit of the good?
The Humanities and Technology Association is an interdisciplinary scholarly society that explores the impact of technology on human life from a broad range of perspectives.
For more information, including the conference schedule, visit the conference website.
