Rolf Buchdahl Lecture on Science, Technology and Values – Composing Smart Grids: Society, Politics, and Talking about a New Energy Future

Rolf Buchdahl Lecture on Science, Technology and Values
Sponsored by the NCSU Interdisciplinary Program in Science, Technology & Society, with support from the family of Dr. Rolf Buchdahl
Friday, March 30, 2012, 7:30 PM
West Wing Auditorium, D.H. Hill Library, NCSU Campus

Professor Tarla Rai Peterson, Texas A&M University
“Composing Smart Grids: Society, Politics, and Talking about a New Energy Future”

Details at: http://ids.chass.ncsu.edu/sts/lecture.php

Tarla Rai Peterson is a Professor in the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M University, where she holds the Boone and Crockett Chair in Wildlife Conservation Policy. She also serves as a Guest Professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Adjunct Professor of Communication at University of Utah. Her research focuses on the intersections between communication, environmental policy, and democracy, seeking to provide a theoretically rich analysis of environmental policy that is useful to those who seek to transform the ways humans inhabit the planet. Her research has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Swedish Research Council for Environmental and Spatial Planning, and various government agencies (US Environmental Protection Agency, US Dept. of Energy, Swedish Nature Management Agency). Her publications include Social Movement to Address Climate Change: Local Steps for Global Action (2009), Discursive Constructions of Climate Change: Practices of Encoding and Decoding (Special issue of Environmental Communication, 2009), Green Talk in the White House: The Rhetorical Presidency Encounters Ecology (2004), and Sharing the Earth: The Rhetoric of Sustainable Development (1997) and Communication and the Culture of Technology (1990). Her research is published in scholarly journals such as Agriculture and Human Values, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Conservation Biology, Ecological Modeling, Environmental Practice, Environmental Values, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Journal of Applied Communication Research, and Journal of Wildlife Management, as well as in several book chapters and symposium proceedings. She also maintains an active Theory to Practice Program including design, facilitation and evaluation of community-based planning efforts related to environmental and energy issues.