Munroe Center for Social Inquiry at Pitzer College

As of March 12, 2020, the remaining MCSI lectures for the spring semester have been canceled due to the recent worldwide developments of COVID-19.

MCSI is proud to announce our Spring 2020 Theme: Human Suffering and the Divine Hiddenness.

For centuries, philosophers and theologians have been debating the question of why God, who is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, is hidden, absent or silent in the face of human suffering. In our lecture series, we have invited prominent scholars from a range of disciplines and from different parts of the world to address and help us understand an array of topics pertaining to the problem of Divine Hiddenness.

Check out the video of the MCSI lecture by Siva Vaidhyanathan which kicked off this year's MCSI lecture series on Perception in a Social World.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy” In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, wh...

Great talk yesterday by Jody David Armour, Roy P. Crocker Professor of Law, University of Southern California, on unconscious bias.

Jody David Armour, USC Professor of Law and an expert on racial profiling, will be speaking on October 9 at 4:15 p.m. in Benson Auditorium on “Unconscious Bias: The Social Construction of Black Criminals.”

Tonight!

MCSI Lecture: “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy” - Pitzer College Media Theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging.

In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It’s an account of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems. And it’s an indictment of how “social media” has fostered the deterioration of democratic culture around the world, from facilitating Russian meddling in support of Trump’s election to the exploitation of the platform by murderous authoritarians in Burma and the Philippines.

FMI:

MCSI Lecture: “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy” - Pitzer College Media Theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging.

“Conspiracy Theory–Conspiracy Fact,” Pitzer’s 2017 MCSI speaker series, kicks off on Tuesday! Ben Collins of “The Daily Beast” and Nick Schou of “OC Weekly” will share a journalistic perspective on contemporary and classic conspiracy theories. FMI: https://www.pitzer.edu/mcsi/fall-2017-conspiracy-theory/

The Munroe Center for Social Inquiry’s 2017-2018 theme is “CONSPIRACY THEORY – CONSPIRACY FACT: Understanding a perplexing social phenomenon.”

If recent news headlines are any indication, CONSPIRACY THEORY – CONSPIRACY FACT represent a prevalent theme in contemporary public discourse, be it theories that the attacks on 9/11/2001 were an “inside job,” that Volkswagen engineers conspired to disguise their vehicles’ emissions profiles, or that U.S. elections have been “rigged” or otherwise improperly influenced by foreign or domestic actors.

In Fall 2017, Pitzer hosts a distinguished series of investigators from fields as various as Philosophy, History, Political Science, Anthropology, Journalism & Media Studies will share what they have learned about conspiracies and conspiracy theories.