The Geothermal Project at Mount Holyoke College (Gamble Auditorium)
Karla Youngblood, Associate Vice President for Facilities Management

Restorative and Transformative Justice in Massachusetts, 2024 (Cleveland L2)Lucas Wilson, Professor of Economics and Critical Race and Political Economy on the Ford Foundation

Cognitive Neuroscience: What the human brain tells us about the human mind (Cleveland L1)
Mara Breen, Professor of Psychology and Education and Co-Chair of Psychology and Education

Heads and Tails and Histories of Money (Cleveland L3)
Desmond Fitz-Gibbon , Associate Professor & Chair, Department of History and Chair, Nexus Track in Museums, Archives, and Public History

Course Descriptions:

The Geothermal Project at Mount Holyoke College (Gamble Auditorium)
What is taking place on Skinner Green? Join for this special Back to Class session, where alum Karla Youngblood FP'99, associate vice president for facilities management, shares about the geothermal project on campus. Learn about this once-in-a-century endeavor, which will reduce campus greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2030, significantly advancing the College's goal of carbon neutrality by 2037. 

Restorative and Transformative Justice in Massachusetts, 2024 (Cleveland L2)
A brief overview of what programs and practices exist in the Commonwealth that go by the name of Restorative Justice or Transformative Justice. While similar, these two approaches to community involvement in harm and harm reduction are distinct. After offering a way to think about Restorative Justice and Transformative Justice, this lecture summarizes diversionary and therapeutic RJ programs and TJ initiatives in Massachusetts. Finally, we talk about the role of RJ and TJ in the work of repairing democratic institutions in our post-pandemic society.

Cognitive Neuroscience: What the human brain tells us about the human mind (Cleveland L1)
In the Mount Holyoke archives, there is a photo of a Psychology lab from 1911 in which can be seen brain tissue in a jar, plastic brain models, and machines to create an array of precise lights and sounds. In this lecture, Professor Breen will describe how brain science has evolved since that photograph was taken, with special focus on human neuro-imaging methods, including non-invasive neural electrical signal recording – electroencephalography (EEG) – which can be used to study real-time perceptual processing. Professor Breen will describe how students in her lab are using EEG to study children’s reading acquisition through a research partnership with the Springfield Museums.

Heads and Tails and Histories of Money (Cleveland L3)
Despite being one of the oldest technologies in human history, money remains both familiar and strange. Nearly everyone has used it, held it, or wished for more of it, but no one has come up with a definition that captures all of its complexity. Using examples from the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, this class will explore the history and nature of money to reveal how people in the past used it to organize and give meaning to their worlds