Leadership
The President and Organizer of SPC Pacific is Olav Bryant Smith, who teaches at California State University, Chico, and Butte College, and was the co-founder, graphic designer, and co-editor of Empirical Magazine.His book Myths of the Self: Narrative Identity and Postmodern Metaphysics offers studies of Kant, Heidegger, Whitehead, and Ricoeur that lead to a narrative theory of identity on the basis of an ontology of creative transformation and expression. Smith is currently building on the first work with the creation of a process-personalist ethic of care. He also has interests in theology and spirituality—Eastern and Western.
Contact: Olav Bryant Smith osmith@csuchico.edu, California State University, Chico, Philosophy Dept., 400 W. 1st St., Chico, CA 95929
Past Programs at Pacific APA
2023 – Topic: “The Poetics and Politics of Hope“
Shannon Hayes (Tennessee State University) – “On the Poetic and the Imaginary in Lugones’s Decolonial Feminism”
Bonnie Sheehey (Montana State University) – “Salvage and Respair: Hope in the Work of Jesmyn Ward”
2022 – Topic: “Aesthetics and Politics“
Martina Ferrari (Oregon State University) – “Refusing Representation: On Ephemeral Art and the Disappearing Daughters of Juárez”
Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez (University of North Texas) – “Unearthing an Underground Tongue: Creativity
and Coalition as Decolonial Resistance”
2021 – Topic: “Philosophy and Literature“
Benjamin P. Davis (University of Toronto) – “Context and Critique: Diasporic Ethics in Edouard Glissant and Stuart Hall”
Justina Torrance (Harvard University) – “Sick Souls and Dying Empires: William James and Herman Melville on Despair”
Shannon Hayes (Tennessee State University) – “The Poetics of Loss and Relation in Edouard Glissant and Roland Barthes”
Pacific APA, Vancouver, British Columbia, Westin Bayshore Hotel (full program here)
Thursday, April 18, 2019, 6:00 PM
Topic: Ecology and Creativity East and West
Chair: Russell Duvernoy, Seattle University
Speakers:
“The Way Back: Daoist Reveral and Phenomenological Reduction,” Meillin Chinn, Santa Clara University
Commentator: Russell Duvernoy, Seattle University