Carleton Convos

Carleton Convo with Françoise Baylis | April 5, 2024

Françoise Baylis CM, ONS, PhD, FRSC, FCAHS, FISC delivered the Carleton convocation address on Friday, April 5 from 10:50 to 11:50 a.m. in Skinner Chapel. Her address, “Altered Inheritance: The Era of Designer Babies,” discussed the ethics surrounding human genome editing and delved into her work on the subject.
Baylis is distinguished research professor, emerita at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She is a philosopher whose innovative work in bioethics, at the intersection of policy and practice, has stretched the boundaries of the field. Her work challenges people to think broadly and deeply about the direction of health, science, and biotechnology, and aims to move the limits of mainstream bioethics and develop more effective ways to understand and tackle public policy challenges.
Baylis is the author of Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing, which won the 2020 PROSE Award in Clinical Medicine. In a review of the book for The New York Review, Natalie de Souza wrote, “She offers an authoritative, comprehensive guide to the ethical issues around CRISPR, and her central message is clear: heritable human genome editing shouldn’t be treated as inevitable, and the decision to undertake it should be a collective one.” In a review of the book for Science, Adam Hayden wrote, “Commitments to justice, responsibility, accountability, and consensus building are features of a socially just science and bioethics. Toward this end, Altered Inheritance is a foundational tool in the path ahead.”
Baylis was a member of the planning committees for the first and third International Summit on  Human Gene Editing (2015 and 2023), a member of the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Developing Global Standards for Governance and Oversight of Human Genome Editing (2019–21), and a member of the WHO Working Groups on a Global Guidance Framework for the Responsible Use of the Life Sciences (2021). She is a member of the governing board for the International Science Council and vice chair of its Committee for Freedom and Responsibility in Science.
Baylis is a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Nova Scotia, as well as an elected  Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and the  International Science Council. In 2022, she was awarded the Killam Prize for the Humanities,  Canada’s most distinguished award for humanities scholars.
Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations

Carleton Convo with Steve Hanson | March 29, 2024

Inspirational speaker Steve Hanson delivered the first convocation address of spring term on Friday, March 29 from 10:50 to 11:50 a.m. in Skinner Chapel. His address, “Your Time is Now,” is a reminder that everyone has the power to affect positive change and make a difference. Centered around the concept that time is both an asset and a commodity, Hanson’s work emphasizes the importance of mindfulness and encourages his audience members to consider how they can spend their time to live meaningful lives. In his address, he shared personal experiences of pain, struggle, and joy in order to empower and uplift his audience. As a self-described “man on a mission,” he is determined to open a dialogue that welcomes candid conversations about the challenges everyone faces and how those challenges impact esteem and abilities at school, in the workplace, and even at home.
Hanson’s life experience motivates his work as an inspirational speaker. As a young child, he experienced severe bullying, which resulted in anxiety and low self-esteem. As an adult, Hanson was able to transform his life through a journey of self-discovery that taught him self-acceptance and vulnerability. In his work, Hanson shares the wisdom he has gained through that journey to encourage his audiences to change their lives for the better. Hanson provides his audience members with tools to combat fear, guilt, shame, and self-doubt in order to let go of what is holding them back from embracing their unique gifts. 
Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations

Carleton Convo with Mayor Jaylen Smith | February 23, 2023

Jaylen Smith, the youngest African American mayor in U.S. history, delivered the final winter term convocation at Carleton's Skinner Chapel on Friday, February 23. Smith was elected as mayor of Earle, Arkansas in December 2022 at just 18 years old, making him one of a select few teenagers to take office in U.S. history, and the youngest African American to ever become a mayor. A lifelong resident of Earle, Smith based his campaign on revitalizing the economy and infrastructure, in particular attracting a supermarket to the small city and increasing safety resources throughout the police and fire departments. Smith’s trailblazing career has attracted attention from national media, including appearances on CBS News, ABC News, The Jennifer Hudson Show, The Towanna Murphy Show, and a feature in The New York Times, among many others.
Prior to his term as mayor of Earle, Smith was president of Earle High School’s student government, class president, and was involved with the community and high school in numerous other ways. Smith graduated from Earle High School in 2022 and now attends Arkansas State University Mid-South online after completing his mayoral duties each day. Smith was also recognized with a President’s Award at the King Kennedy Awards of the Arkansas Democratic Black Caucus in 2023.
Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations

Carleton Convo with Gin Hammond ’93 | February 16, 2024

Actress and author Gin Hammond ’93 delivered convocation at Carleton's Skinner Chapel on Friday, February 16. Hammond’s address, “Returning the Bones,” covered her award-winning play turned novel by the same name. In its theatrical format, Returning the Bones is a one-woman show, with the protagonist inspired by the extraordinary life of Hammond’s aunt, Carolyn Beatrice Hammond Montier, whom she affectionately refers to as Bebe. In the play, Hammond portrays the ups and downs of Bebe’s life as a pioneering Black doctor in the mid-twentieth century, facing racism and prejudice to pursue her passion for helping others. In an interview with The Seattle Times, Hammond revealed that it took her a decade to interview her aunt and collect the “jaw-dropping” information about her life that inspired the play. Returning the Bones has received significant praise from critics as well as nominations for the Gregory Awards, including Outstanding Play, Outstanding Performance, Outstanding Director, and Outstanding Sound Design. Hammond’s book adaptation of the play was published in 2023 and will be available for purchase before the start of her convocation address.
Beyond her work on Returning the Bones, Hammond is an award-winning actress who has performed at venues including The Guthrie, Arena Stage, The Longwharf Theatre, The Pasadena Playhouse, the ART, The Berkshire Theatre Festival, and The Studio Theatre in Washington D.C., where she won a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Lead Actress for her performance of The Syringa Tree. Hammond has also received a Kathleen Cornell award and Washington state grants from Allied Arts, the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, Artist Trust, and 4 Culture, as well as from the NEA, and has recently been nominated for a Washington State Governor’s Arts & Heritage Award. She has also performed internationally in Russia, Germany, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, England, and Belgium. Hammond has taught voice, voice-over, public speaking, dialect coaching, and has appeared on commercials, in audiobooks and radio plays, and in video games including BattleTech, Dota 2, State of Decay and its sequel, and Halo 3: ODST. She was also the director and dialect coach for the video game Post Human W.A.R. and has begun working in the field of motion capture.
After earning her BA at Carleton, Hammond went on to earn her MFA at Harvard University/Moscow Art Theater. She is also a certified Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework™. Hammond currently lives in the Seattle area, where she is deeply involved in the city’s theater scene, including with ACT Theater, Seattle Children’s Theater, Book-It Repertory Theater, Washington Ensemble Theater, 5thAve. Theater, Seattle Rep, Taproot, Village Theater, and various Sandbox Artists Collective productions as well as various film projects.
Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations. 

Carleton Convo with Dudley Edmondson | February 9, 2024

Dudley Edmondson—nature photographer, filmmaker, author, and advocate for nature—delivered the convocation address, “My Career Working with the Natural World,” at Carleton's Skinner Chapel on Friday, February 9. His talk detailed his unique personal experiences sharing and living in nature.
Edmondson has spent more than three decades as a photographer of nature and wildlife. His passion and love for the outdoors motivated him to create his groundbreaking book, Black & Brown Faces in America’s Wild Places (2006), which profiles the lives of many African Americans who are deeply connected to nature. Edmondson’s work highlighting Black outdoor role models contributes to his goal of helping more people of color explore the outdoors. 
Edmondson’s belief that nature has an innate ability to heal the mind and the body has led him on a life path of sharing his love and passion for nature with others. He has worked with a multitude of communities across the country in order to help urban youth and youth of color to experience the beauty of the natural world. His first-hand experience watching the ways that young people’s lives are changed for the better with exposure to nature has reinforced his desire to inspire people to discover their personal understanding and respect for everything that nature has to offer. 
“In wilderness the ability to embrace freedom and be your true self is the healing medicine the mind needs,” Edmondson explains on his website. 
Edmondson is also the author of What’s that Flower: A Beginner’s Guide to Wildflowers (2013), which breaks down the most common wildflowers of the eastern United States. Over the course of his career, his work has been featured in over 100 publications and his photographs have been showcased in a plethora of national galleries. 
Edmondson attended Ohio State University and now calls Duluth, Minnesota home, where he is an avid outdoorsman, enjoying several recreational activities including birdwatching, mountain and fat biking, fly fishing, and trail running, among many others.
About Black & Brown Faces in America’s Wild Places:
Written after four years of crisscrossing America, the book contains interviews with people from all walks of life. In speaking with a spectrum of people from private citizens to working biologists and even national park rangers, Edmondson fulfills the book’s purpose to create a set of “Outdoor Role Models” for the African American community. Readers can identify and connect through seeing someone who reflects how they look but also be inspired through reading about their passion for nature and love of the outdoors. Each copy of the book includes a children’s version on the inside back cover, for sharing with a child in your community or household.
Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations. 

Carleton Convo with Ben Raines | February 2, 2024

Environmental journalist, researcher, and filmmaker Ben Raines delivered the convocation address, “Finding Clotilda – The Last Slave Ship,” at Carleton's Skinner Chapel on Friday, February 2. Raines’s talk detailed his discovery of Clotilda, the last known slave ship carrying enslaved Africans to the United States, and how the histories of those on the ship continue to be profoundly important. His presentation is connected with his book, The Last Slave Ship – The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning (2022), which stems from his discovery of the wrecked remains of the slave ship in 2018. 
While the Atlantic slave trade was legally abolished in the U.S. in 1808, the slave trade continued illegally for decades. In 1860, a group of plantation owners organized for the Clotilda to smuggle 110 captured African people between the ages of 12 and 30 across the Middle Passage to Mobile Bay, Alabama. After the ship’s journey, it was set on fire and sunk to hide the evidence. The Clotilda’s story is particularly impactful as its survivors provided some of the best-recorded, concrete first-person accounts of the Atlantic slave trade, surviving the Middle Passage, and memories of Africa. Raine’s discovery of the wreck of the Clotilda in 2018 fueled his re-examination of the stories of the enslaved people and the enslavers, whose lives were all intertwined with the last known slave ship in America.
Raines has also won dozens of awards for his coverage of environmental issues. He is the author of the book Saving America’s Amazon: The Threat to Our Nation’s Most Diverse River System, about the looming threats to the unparalleled biodiversity of the rivers of Alabama. It was actually his knowledge of the river systems of Alabama that led to his discovery of the Clotilda, according to The New York Times. Raines is also the co-author of Heart of a Patriot with U.S. Senator Max Cleland, which follows Cleland’s journey from veteran and triple amputee to the U.S. senate. Raines is also the writer and director of the award-winning film The Underwater Forest about exploring the 70,000 acre cypress forest off the Alabama Coast. He is also the writer and producer of America’s Amazon, a PBS documentary that has been aired on stations around the country, among others. His film work has appeared on the Discovery Channel and National Geographic TV. Raines has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The Today Show, Good Morning America, the BBC, England’s Channel 4, NBC Nightly News, and CBS Evening News. Raines has also written news coverage on environmental issues that has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. 
Raines earned a degree in filmmaking from New York University. He lives with his wife in Fairhope, Alabama aboard the Suzanne, an 82-year-old river boat moored on the Tensaw River.
Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations. 

Carleton Convo with Francis Fukuyama | January 26, 2024

Stanford professor and author Francis Fukuyama delivered the convocation, “The Global Challenge of 2024,” at Carleton's Skinner Chapel on Friday, January 26. Fukuyama’s talk addressed the major setbacks the world has seen to liberal democracy, including the outbreak of two large wars, and asked the question: What are possible global outcomes that will emerge in the year 2024?
Fukuyama is best known for his scholarship and his work advancing political theory. His book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), argued that Western democracy and free-market capitalism could indicate the end of sociocultural evolution. The book has been met with much debate over the years and has been translated for over twenty different foreign editions. Fukuyama has also written a variety of other books on development and and international politics, including Trust (1995), The Great Disruption (1999), Our Posthuman Future (2002), State Building (2004), Nation Building (2005), America at the Crossroads (2006), Falling Behind (2008), The Origins of Political Order (2011), Political Order and Political Decay (2014), Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018), and most recently, Liberalism and its Discontents (2022).
Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a faculty member of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also the director of Stanford’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy and a professor (by courtesy) of political science. He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and at the Center for Global Development. He also serves as a member of the Board of Governors of the Pardee RAND Graduate School and the Volcker Alliance, a member of the Board of Trustees of the RAND Corporation, and a member of the American Political Science Association and Council on Foreign Relations. Fukuyama was also previously a member of the political science department of the RAND Corporation, and the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State. From 1996–2000, he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. From 2002–2010, he was Vernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University.
Fukuyama received his BA from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard. He is married to Laura Holmgren and is the father of three children.
Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations. 

Carleton Convo with Jerron Herman | January 19, 2024

Award-winning dancer, writer, model, and disability rights advocate Jerron Herman delivered the convocation address, “EMBRACE: On kinship,” at Carleton's Skinner Chapel on Friday, January 19.
Herman’s artistic process is supported by his personal history with disability as well as the social legacies of disability aesthetics; this process leads him to create art that undermines notions of production—the simple facts of how the art is made—in favor of creating something welcoming. Herman views art as a form of empowerment, reflecting in a feature video by Great Big Story that he has “always been an advocate for those to pursue the antithesis of the thing that is their limitation.”
Herman has performed, collaborated on, and choreographed many original works, including his most recent piece, “VITRUVIAN,” which premiered in 2022 as a modern interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virtruvian Man. Through Herman’s expert expression, the Virtruvian Man is portrayed as a Disabled Black Man.
Herman received the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in 2021 and the Grants to Artists Award from Dance/NYC’s Dance and Social Justice Fellowship Program in 2020. His writing on art and culture has been published in the U.S. and internationally and his play “3 Bodies” was published in Theater Magazine in 2022. He has also featured as a cover story of Dance Magazine. As a model and disability rights advocate with hemiplegia cerebral palsy, Herman has partnered with brands including Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, The Jewelry Library, FFORA, Samsung, and Google.
Herman is a trustee and vice chair of Dance/USA. In the spring of 2022, he became an Artist/Scholar in Residence at Georgetown University. He earned his BA in Media, Culture and Arts from The King’s College in 2013.
Herman’s convocation talk coincides with the Perlman Teaching Museum’s exhibition Towards A Warm Embrace by artists Ezra Benus and Finnegan Shannon ’11. Open January 11–April 14, 2024, the exhibition explores disability justice and accessibility practice with the underlying premise that access is something everyone has a responsibility toward.
Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations

Carleton Convo with Lis Frost ’99 | January 12, 2024

Lis Frost ’99 delivered the convocation address at Carleton College on Friday, January 12 in Skinner Chapel. Frost is a lawyer with expertise in voting and constitutional law, particularly protecting and defending voting rights. In her talk, “Fighting for Democracy in Court: The Rise of Election Litigation, and Some of the More Hidden Threats to Voting Rights,” Frost spoke on the threats to American democracy present in 2024, and shared her experiences on the front lines protecting and expanding the right to vote in the U.S.
Frost’s work played a significant role in the 2020 election cycle through her endeavors to uphold the voting rights of millions of Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Later in the 2020 cycle, she also  managed a coordinated defense against the “unprecedented attacks in courts across the country,” which sought to cast doubt on the outcome of the presidential election. Frost has also appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court in several seminal redistricting cases—often referred to as “gerrymandering”— four of which were won in favor of her clients.
In 2021, Frost formed the nation’s largest democracy-focused law firm, Elias Law Group, with several colleagues. Frost serves as the chair of litigation. Elias Law Group’s mission is to help democrats win elections, protect and promote voting rights, and help progressives make positive change.
After graduating from Carleton College in 1999, Frost received a degree from the University of Washington School of Law, where she operated as the editor-in-chief of the Washington Law Review. 
Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations

Carleton Convo with Staffan Ingemar Lindberg | October 27, 2023

Staffan Ingemar Lindberg is a professor of political science, one of five principal investigators for Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), and the founding director of the V-Dem Institute through the University of Gothenburg. He delivered the convocation address, “Democracy and Autocracy Worldwide: 3rd Wave of Autocratization Escalating,” at Carleton's Skinner Chapel on Friday, October 27. His address focused on threats to democracy in the world and in the U.S., based on data analysis of current trends and the spread of far-right, anti-pluralist/liberal parties around the world.
V-Dem is a highly utilized source of democracy data thanks to its extensive and holistic collection of indexes from around the world. Lindberg is also the founding director of Demscore, research infrastructure which provides free access to some of the world’s largest data sets on democracy, environment, migration, social policy, conflict, and representation. Lindberg has co-authored the books Varieties of Democracy (2020) and Why Democracies Develop and Decline (2022) and was the editor of Democratization by Elections: A New Mode of Transition (2009). His book Democracy and Elections in Africa (2006) was awarded “Outstanding Title” by Choice Magazine in 2007. Lindberg is also the author of over 60 articles on democracy, accountability, elections, autocratization, democratization, clientelism, sequence analysis methods, women’s representation, and voting behavior, which have been featured in a wide array of journals, including AJPS, World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Politics, Political Science Quarterly, World Development, Party Politics, European Journal of Political Research, and many more. Lindberg has also conducted a variety of research projects focused on Ghana and published on a variety of topics focused through that lens. He is an experienced consultant on development and democracy, and has worked as an advisor to international organizations, ministries, and state authorities.
Currently, Lindberg is leading several sizable research projects, including “The Case for Democracy,” “Varieties of Autocratization,” and “Failing and Successful Sequences of Democratization,” all through the University of Gothenburg and V-Dem. 
Lindberg earned his PhD at Lund University in Sweden. His dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Juan Linz Award for Best Dissertation in 2005.
He was previously a professor at Kent State University, and an assistant and associate professor at the University of Florida. He has been at the University of Gothenburg since 2010 and is a Wallenburg Academy Scholar. 
Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations