Past Events

What Kind of Monuments Do We Deserve? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Jackson In-Person | Streaming Online

What Kind of Monuments Do We Deserve?

Beyond debates over keeping statues up or tearing them down and changing the names of schools and streets lie more fundamental questions at the intersection of personal and public memory. We know how to honor and memorialize idealized heroes; we know less about remembering complicated, real people, who did extraordinary things—let alone how to remember historical figures who changed the …

How Is Art A Weapon in War? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

How Is Art A Weapon in War?

There is a long and global tradition of artists—visual, performing, and literary—creating arresting, even beautiful works that address the horrors of war. How is art used as a form of protest, to change minds as well as hearts? What happens to its meaning over time—as war persists, and as new battles erupt? And what does it say about us all …

What Is a Good Tourism Job Now? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Riverside In-Person | Streaming Online

What Is a Good Tourism Job Now?

Riverside County’s economy depends on tourists—visitors to downtown Riverside’s Mission Inn, concertgoers in Indio, wine drinkers in Temecula, Canadian snowbirds who flock to the Coachella Valley. These travelers and their wallets have produced a surge in low-wage, low-benefit jobs in hotels, restaurants, bars, shops, and other businesses that often fail to present opportunities for advancement and career-building. Because of this, …

Can Decolonization Explain Everything? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

Can Decolonization Explain Everything?

Join us in person or live online for this program, and please note the earlier time – 6pm PST.

People place blame for inequality, climate change, political polarization, and other current woes on all kinds of bad actors and influences: authoritarians, corporations, globalization, social media. But the decline of Western empires during the 20th century was arguably the catalyst for it …

What Is the Value of Art? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

What Is the Value of Art?

The headlines that make breaking news in the art world most often concern a piece’s financial worth, which nearly always means how much a private collector paid for it. But for most of us, the value of art has very little to do with a dollar amount. Rather, art provides an avenue to a diverse range of critical discussions, evokes …

How Has Computer Code Shaped Humanity? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

How Has Computer Code Shaped Humanity?

Nearly 80 years after engineers programmed the first electronic computers, most of us still regard machines as supremely rational collections of electrical circuits, speaking in binary “1”s and “0”s. It can be easy to forget that software, the digital instructions that tell computers how to do their jobs, springs from the minds of living, breathing people. And these coders imbue …