Knox Pods

Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City details the crisis in affordable urban housing experienced here in Knoxville. Discussing the problem are four members of the Knoxville Homeless Coalition: Gabe Cline-Snell, Volunteer Ministry Center's Chief Clinical Services Officer; Misty Goodwin, Knoxville-Knox County Community Action Committee's Homeward Bound Program; Bruce Spangler, Chief Executive Officer of Volunteer Ministry Center; Lisa Higginbotham, Knoxville Homeless Management Information System data analyst.

Why do some monuments provoke such powerful emotions while others are forgettable? "Monumental Issues: Thinking about Monuments in Public Spaces" is a presentation by Dr. Jeffrey H. Jackson with additional material by Dr. Ellen K. Daugherty. It provides a broader context for debates about historical monuments and the role these markers play in local communities today. Looking at monuments as both public history and public art helps us understand how we make sense of our past and what role we want our past to play in our common future.

Jackson is the J.J. McComb Professor of History at Rhodes College in Memphis; Daugherty is Professor of Art History at Memphis College of Art. The program was sponsored by Humanities Tennessee.

Here are links to some of the works mentioned in the recording. (If you listen in the browser, right-click and open in a new tab as these monuments are mentioned, so that you can keep listening.)

• Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
• The Painted Monument to the Soviet Army in Bulgaria
• Free Speech Monument
• Piazza del Campidoglio with replica of equestrian Marcus Aurelius statue
• Monument Avenue with Robert E. Lee equestrian statue
• The Four Moors
• General Sherman statue
• Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment
• Emancipation Memorial and views of Lincoln Park with Bethune statue
• Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. figural memorial in Washington, D.C. and abstract memorial in Memphis
• "Samey" statues in Lafeyette Park
• Mass-produced Confederate/Union soldiers, The Hiker, Spirit of the American Doughboy
• Reflecting Absence
• Korean War monument
• Spiral Jetty
• Marvelous Sugar Baby
• Wheatfield: A Confrontation
• Uncle Jack statue
• Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth Hahn/Cock and Nelson's Ship in a Bottle
• Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection

Dr. Diane Kelly is the Director of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has numerous research publications and awards, including the Karen Spärck-Jones Award from the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group and the Association for Information Science and Technology Research Award. For the Knox County Public Library’s Truth and Consequences Symposium on July 28, 2017, Dr. Kelly's presentation, "How We Interact with the Internet, and How it Interacts with Us," explains what search engines do and the research findings about how they influence our behavior.

New York Times best-selling author and journalist Wendell Potter has covered Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court. After a long career in health insurance public relations, he had a crisis of conscience and blew the whistle on a corrupt industry in his book Deadly Spin. His latest book is Nation on the Take. For the Knox County Public Library’s Truth and Consequences Symposium on July 28, 2017, Potter’s presentation is entitled “Fake News, Profit-driven Media, and Confirmation Bias.”

Stephanie Welch found bad news and good news in the book Toward the Healthy City: People, Places, and the Politics of Urban Planning by Jason Corburn. With “healthy city planning” based on participatory action, coalition building, and ongoing monitoring, Corburn hopes to address health disparities caused by the built environment and the policies that shape it. Welch was Community Development and Planning Director of the Knox County Health Department (Recorded September 19, 2012).

Jack Neely is Executive Director of the Knoxville History Project and one of Knoxville’s most popular writers. As part of the library's Truth and Consequences Symposium, he reviews the development of newspaper journalism in Knoxville and looks back at major news events in East Tennessee. Sponsored by the Jane L. Pettway Foundation and the Knox County Public Library Foundation. 

"How intelligent are non-human animals? Do they have self-awareness? Do they have deep relationships with one another in ways that echo our own relationships? These kinds of questions have been asked by humans for centuries," says Dr. Todd Freeberg, Professor of Psychology and adjunct scholar in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee. He reviews Beyond Words: How Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.

John Rawls warns against a political life dominated by dogmatic fanaticism or apathetic resignation. The University of Tennessee Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy and the Knox County Public Library invite you to participate in a study of his book, Justice as Fairness: A restatement. Each podcast episode is in a discussion format facilitated by a University of Tennessee faculty member with expertise on Rawls's work. No previous knowledge of Rawls's work is expected.

This is part five, The Question of Stability, with Dr. David Reidy of the Department of Philosophy (recorded February 22, 2010).

John Rawls warns against a political life dominated by dogmatic fanaticism or apathetic resignation. The University of Tennessee Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy and the Knox County Public Library invite you to participate in a study of his book, Justice as Fairness: A restatement. Each podcast episode is in a discussion format facilitated by a University of Tennessee faculty member with expertise on Rawls's work. No previous knowledge of Rawls's work is expected.

This is part four, Institutions of a Just Basic Structure, with Matt Deaton of the Department of Philosophy (recorded February 15, 2010).

John Rawls warns against a political life dominated by dogmatic fanaticism or apathetic resignation. The University of Tennessee Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy and the Knox County Public Library invite you to participate in a study of his book, Justice as Fairness: A restatement. Each podcast episode is in a discussion format facilitated by a University of Tennessee faculty member with expertise on Rawls's work. No previous knowledge of Rawls's work is expected.

This is part three, The Argument from the Original Position, with Dr. Iris Goodwin of the College of Law (recorded February 8, 2010).