Polymathic Pizza

"Everyone should know that you can’t live in any other way than by cultivating the soul.” –Apuleius, Roman writer

A hoe is an instrument a farmer uses to cultivate the land, to prepare the soil for planting and growth.  What are the tools we might employ in the cultivation of our self, of our soul?  Words can be used to churn up the soil of our soul and reveal the life underneath. Words too are seeds, which when planted in lyrical rows spring forth as poetry.  David St. John is one such sower of words who cultivates a deeper understanding of our...

PLEASE NOTE DATE CHANGE: This event will now be happening on Tuesday, October 3rd.

“Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome.” --Rosa Parks

“I speak not for myself but for those without voice… those who have fought for their rights… their right to live in peace, their right to be treated with dignity, their right to equality of opportunity, their right to be educated.” --Malala Yousafzai

The sentiments above live out in the scholarship and life of Estela...

"There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment."  --Hunter S. Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself…and, of course, the Boogieman."  --Pat Paulsen, comedian

Some things are not the best to cultivate.  Take for instance, misplaced, inordinate fears that are broadcast across the airwaves everyday--bear attacks, flesh-eating bacteria, work-place violence. The likelihood of any of these terrors happening is exponentially lower than getting hit by lightening....

“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn

“Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.” – William Shakespeare

Mindfulness is more than just a mindset.  It is the purposeful practice of discovering and cultivating the moments in life, and in those moments breath more meaning into our life.  Varun Soni, Vice Provost for Campus Wellness and Crisis Intervention and dean of Religious Life and co-chair of the Mindful USC initiative, hopes that the USC community...

“A polymath is one who not only mastered one or several disciplines, but one who synthesizes them, integrates them.”  Sidney Harman

Integrate:  Combine (one thing) with another so that they become a whole. Oxford Dictionary

Dr. Bonnie Ruberg integrates. Her research explores gender and sexuality in contemporary digital cultures, with a focus on LGBTQ issues in video games.  A genuine polymathic practitioner, Ruberg utilizes integration to create, educate, reimagine, and challenge our gendered world.   For our opening session of the spring 2017...

Caring is not an idea one typically couples with polymathy.  The polymath is simply defined as a person who has mastered multiple areas of expertise and integrates them to innovate and problem solve.  But what if caring was added as fundamental principle of polymathy?  Dr. Pamela Schaff fits this more complete polymathic model, who, while serving as associate professor of clinical pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine, is also in her spare time working on her Ph.D. in English and creative writing.  Her motivation is simple:  she believes exposure to the arts and...

These days when we hear the term sustaining, we typically think of the environment and the science of climate change. Rates of carbon emissions; renewable energy; food scarcity; pollution, etc. are the variables that come to mind.  But how people from diverse populations and from different countries come together to sustain the environment and their social worlds is the cultural-sociological approach missing in the sustainability equation above.  Professor of Sociology Pierrette Hongadneu-Sotelo has been studying, thinking, and writing about the relationship between migration and...

In a world that with sharp divisions, landscape architecture is a powerful tool to marry social and ecological justice.  It has the capacity to address the most pressing and fundamental problems facing the world today, amongst which are climate change, water and food security and deforestation.  Landscape architecture must set the boundaries for policy makers and orient social movements. Bold and inspired projects can lead policy and point the way for future developments. The political agency of the profession must be forcibly reactivated and the power of landscape architecture...

PLEASE NOTE DATE CHANGE TO THURSDAY

“Tinkering is fooling around with phenomena, tools, and materials. It’s whimsical, enjoyable, fraught with dead ends, and ultimately about inquiry.” The Art of Tinkering

Fiddling, playfulness, and tinkering.  These approaches, attitudes, and instruments of inquiry are fundamental to polymathic praxis. As professor of electrical engineering, professor of computer science, professor of linguistics, professor of pediatrics, and professor of psychology, Shri Narayanan is a paragon polymath who tinkers across his multiple fields of...

Translating is an essential skill for the polymath.  To traverse disciplinary languages, to find the common parlances that can speak across scholarly divides—this is an essential art that polymaths of the past have mastered.  Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Sherry Velasco is just this sort of linguistic polymath, and she practices translating through multiple modalities.  In her research, Velasco translates and interprets languages in the traditional sense, but she also translates and interprets across the esoteric languages of various disciplines such as gender...