This fall, the Syracuse University Humanities Center is not only hoping students will stop and smell the roses, but also close their eyes and listen to the roses blowing in the breeze.

The Syracuse Symposium is an annual lecture series put on by the Humanities Center, and this year the lectures focus on the topic of listening.

“If you think about sounds in nature, we tend to find those considerably more relaxing, but we’ve got an awful lot of mechanical noise in the world, and that disperses our attention,” said professor Dympna Callaghan, the interim director of the Humanities Center. She took over the job of spearheading the Syracuse Symposium from last year’s director, Gregg Lambert.

In everyday life, Callaghan said we are bombarded by noise so much that we tend to tune things out, such as the loud honk of a car horn. And that’s what this lecture series hopes to instill in its audience: the importance of the act of listening.

Callaghan stressed the difference between hearing and listening, meaning that it takes concentration to actively listen to something and comprehend its meaning.

“Hearing is a physical capacity, whereas listening is a form of attention,” she said.

SU’s Humanities Center will celebrate its fifth year on campus in June. Before the Humanities Center was established in 2008, the Syracuse Symposium was a product of The College of Arts and Sciences, beginning in 2001, when then Chancellor Kenneth Shaw asked faculty to create an event that the entire university could benefit from, and therefore inspire campus-wide conversation.

The Faculty Advisory Board that runs the Humanities Center consists of professors from a wide variety of fields of study in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. However, when deciding on a topic for the Syracuse Symposium, students and professors from outside of VPA were also allowed to pitch ideas. For instance, “listening” was a suggestion from the School of Education. Past themes have included concepts like examining identity.

According to the Syracuse Symposium’s website, this year’s lecture series will feature a total of 17 presentations for the fall semester, ranging from a personal account of a Holocaust survivor to a speech from the founder of Buddhist Global Relief, and from listening to performances of Native American musical instruments to watching the SU Human Rights Film Festival.

Confirming what Callaghan said she believes is an “impressive lineup,” Stephen Kuusisto, the head of the honors program and an internationally acclaimed poet, will perform some of his original poetry later on in the semester’s Syracuse Symposium series.

The first event of the lecture series is “How to Talk to People About Things: Negotiation and Listening in Everyday Life,” a talk by published author and theatrical improvisational performer Misha Glouberman. He is speaking Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in Hall of Languages room 107 and, like all of the Syracuse Symposium lectures, this event is free and open to the public.

Glouberman is the co-author of “The Chairs are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City,” a book describing his life and the lessons he has learned. His speech on Thursday will mainly focus on learning the art of negotiating with others — especially when emotions run high. His knowledge draws on information he learned from Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, according to the Syracuse Symposium website. But also, Glouberman will speak about the importance of listening when negotiating.

If unable to attend the Thursday evening lecture, Callaghan said students are welcome to go meet and hear him in a more personal, seminar-like setting featuring a free catered breakfast Friday morning at 9:30 in the Humanities Center.

“It’s a real opportunity to engage one-on-one with a very unique, creative thinker,” Callaghan said, encouraging students to come ask Glouberman questions about being an experienced professional in improvisational theater. But she also encourages students to ask the published author about the process of writing a book.

Collectively, Callaghan said the series is one she looks forward to being a part of. The annual lecture series has been a great success in past years, so she said this year’s turnout should not disappoint.

The importance of being able to listen is something that everyone should turn more attention to, she continued, and then said, “The series of events we’ve got in this symposium is really an opportunity to listen — to just sit back and listen.”

Said Callaghan: “We’re very good at talking in our world, but we need to learn to listen.”

 

Published on September 10, 2013 at 12:13 am

Contact Kristin: klross01@syr.edu | @kriskross22