The University of Colorado at Boulder will host an international conference on "Media, Spiritualities and Social Change" June 4-7 that will feature several free public talks, including one by Nina Rothschild Utne, editor-at-large of Utne Reader magazine.
About 100 scholars, activists, journalists and businesspeople are expected to participate in the conference, which will explore ways in which activists, spiritual leaders and the media intersect to create social change. The public events will be held at various locations on campus, and also will include roundtables and an evening film.
Among the conference speakers are Mark Silk, director of the Leonard Greenberg Center on Media and Public Life at Trinity College; Ronald Grimes, professor of religion and culture at Wilfrid Laurier University; Osprey Orielle Lake, an internationally known allegorical monument maker and founder of the International Cheemah and Mari Monument projects; and Utne.
"The event was conceived as a way to bring together increasingly diverse voices and approaches to the idea of spirituality as an expression of 'lived' values that address the pressing and mediated issues of contemporary times from poverty to environmentalism," said conference co-director Monica Emerich of CU-Boulder's Center for Media, Religion and Culture. "The range of papers from across disciplines and the participation by so many activists and professionals outside of the academy tells us the conference concept is timely and urgent."
Utne's talk on "Futurefit: How Do We Shift Paradigms With Flow and Efficiency, on All Levels?" will be held Wednesday, June 4, at 6 p.m. in Old Main Chapel. Silk will give his talk titled "Think Locally, Act Globally" on Thursday, June 5, at 3:30 p.m. in the University Memorial Center room 235. Grimes' talk, "Mediating the Santa Fe Fiesta: Ritual, Media and Conflict in the Santa Fe Fiesta," takes place on Friday, June 6, at 8:15 a.m. in UMC room 235. Lake will give a multimedia presentation on Friday, June 6, at 11:30 a.m. in UMC room 235.
Several CU-Boulder professors will participate in roundtable discussions on the topics "The Green Imperative: Challenges for the Green Movement," "Conscious Capitalism: In the Spirit of Business" and "Media, Activism and Philanthropy: Images and Voices of Influence." The roundtable discussions will be held Thursday, June 5, at 2 p.m., in the UMC in rooms 235, 247 and the Aspen Room.
A film titled "The Global Oneness Project: Finding Our Shared Values Through Film" will be shown on Thursday, June 5, at 7 p.m. in Eaton Humanities room 150.
The conference is co-sponsored by CU-Boulder, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, CU-Boulder's Center for Media, Religion and Culture, Naropa University, the Reynolds School of Journalism and Center for Advanced Media Studies at the University of Nevada at Reno and the Fred W. Smith Ethics Seminar Series, which is supported by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation.
For more information and a complete schedule of the free public events visit .