Grawemeyer Award winners to give public talks

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Recipients of the 2017 Grawemeyer Awards will discuss their award-winning ideas at the University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in April.

UofL presents the annual prizes for outstanding works in music composition, ideas improving world order, psychology and education and gives a religion prize jointly with Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. This year’s awards are $100,000 each.

The schedule for the 2017 Grawemeyer Awards Lecture Series, which is free and open to the public, is as follows:

• American composer Andrew Norman will discuss his award-winning, 47-minute orchestral work, “Play,” which explores the relationship of choice and chance, free will and control. It investigates the ways musicians in an orchestra can play with, against, or apart from one another and maps concepts from the world of video gaming onto traditional symphonic structures. The discussion will be held April 6 at 3 p.m. in UofL School of Music’s Bird Hall.
• Dana Burde, an education and political science scholar and former aid worker, will speak April 18 at 1 p.m. in the Ekstrom Library’s Chao Auditorium. She received the award for ideas improving world order for her book, “Schools for Conflict or for Peace in Afghanistan,” which examines the influence foreign-backed funding for education has on war-torn countries and how such aid affects humanitarian and peace-building efforts.
• Renowned social ethicist Gary Dorrien will present “Breaking White Supremacy: The Black Social Gospel as New Abolitionism” April 18 at 7 p.m. in the seminary’s Caldwell Chapel. He will discuss how the Black Social Gospel movement became an important tradition of religious thought and resistance and provided the intellectual underpinnings of the civil rights movement.
• On April 19 at 5 p.m. in the Ekstrom Library’s Chao Auditorium, education award winners Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy will discuss their book, “The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education,” which explores the role of teachers in perpetuating serious, thoughtful political deliberation in schools. The authors, who both work for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education, contend social studies teachers should encourage conversations about difficult political issues.
• Marsha Linehan, director of the University of Washington’s Behavioral Research and Therapy Clinics at the Center for Behavioral Technology, will present “Dialectical Behavior Therapy: Where We Are, Where We Were and Where We’re Going” April 20 at noon in Strickler Hall’s Middleton Auditorium. She was selected for the 2017 psychology award for developing a therapy to treat chronically suicidal patients and extending its power to help people with borderline personality disorder and other behavioral disorders.

UofL graduate and philanthropist Charles Grawemeyer created the awards program in 1984 to pay tribute to the power of creative thought and emphasize the impact a single idea can have on the world. Grawemeyer further distinguished the awards by requiring the selection process involve a lay committee to ensure the winning ideas are comprehensible to a broad audience.

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