The College of Arts and Sciences invites you to the 2015-2016 Full Professor Lecture Series. The fourth lecture in the series, "On the Anthropology of Bicycles and (Un)Common Sense," will be given by Luis Vivanco, Professor of Anthropology, on Tuesday, March 15, at 5:00 p.m. in the Waterman Memorial Lounge.

As some anthropologists are fond of saying, common sense is neither common nor sensical. Is it not a body of earthy and self-evident wisdom? Perhaps. But it is also a wily concept and social category of knowledge with complicated cultural dimensions and social, political, and institutional lives. Professor Vivanco will explore the construction, performance, and uses of common sense in urban bicycle culture and political advocacy in the U.S. and Colombia.

Luis Vivanco has been at UVM since 1997. He received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Princeton University. His scholarship has focused on the culture and politics of environmental social movements and ecotourism in Latin America, and the visual politics of wildlife film. In recent years, his work has turned to the intersections of urban mobility and sustainability discourse, focusing on the construction of bicycles as green transportation. He has held two Fulbright Scholar Awards (Costa Rica 2004, Colombia 2014) and in 2012 won the George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award, UVM's highest teaching honor.

A recording of the lecture will be made available at the online media blog http://blog.uvm.edu/compute-cas-media/ and eventually at the College of Arts and Sciences website.   

Information:  656-3166

The College of Arts and Sciences Full Professor Lecture Series was designed to give newly promoted faculty an opportunity to share with the university community a single piece of research or overview of research trajectory meant to capture the spark of intellectual excitement that has resulted in their achieving full professor rank.