Ashland University’s Winter 2018 Commencement will be held on Dec. 15 at 10 a.m. in Kates Gymnasium inside the Physical Education Center on the Ashland University campus. The speaker for the event will be Dr. Steve Fuller, professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. His speech title is “Staying Human in the Twenty-First Century: It’s Harder Than It Sounds.”
No tickets will be required for the event, which is open to the public. The ceremony will be streamed live at www.ashland.edu and broadcast live in the Student Center Eagles’ Nest and the Student Center Auditorium. Faculty and students who are participating in the ceremony are to assemble at 9:15 a.m. in the Conard Field House, located just west of the Physical Education Center.
A light lunch event will be held following the graduation ceremony in the lower level of the John C. Myers Convocation Center. Each graduate and two members of his or her family will be guests of AU for the luncheon. Those planning to attend the luncheon following commencement should contact Dining and Conference Services at 419-289-5249.
Fuller, who currently holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at Warwick, is a philosopher-sociologist in the field of science and technology studies. He has published in the areas of social epistemology, academic freedom, and the subjects of intelligent design and transhumanism. Fuller was born in New York City and graduated from Columbia University in History and Sociology before gaining an M.Phil. from Cambridge and Ph.D. from Pittsburgh, both in History and Philosophy of Science.
He is most closely associated with the research program of social epistemology. Originally trained in the history and philosophy of science (Ph.D., 1985, University of Pittsburgh), he is the founder of the research program of social epistemology. It is the name of a quarterly journal he co-founded in 1987, as well as the first of his more than 20 books. His most recent work has been concerned with the future of humanity, or ‘Humanity 2.0.’ He has spoken in over 30 countries, often keynoting professional academic conferences, and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts since 1995. He was awarded a D.Litt. by Warwick in 2007 for significant career-long contributions to scholarship.
He was appointed to the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology in 2011, and is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, the leading ‘ecomodernist’ think-tank and an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the leading ‘transhumanist’ think-tank. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Since 2013, he has been a member of Edge, the ‘third culture’ at the edge of knowledge, contributing to its annual questions. His major areas of research are the future of the university and critical intellectuals, the emergence of intellectual property in the information society, the interdisciplinary challenges in the natural and social sciences, the political and epistemological consequences of the new biology, science and religion, the future of humanity.
Since coming to Warwick in 1999, he has supervised several Ph.D. students, taught on the Doctoral Training Program and the MA in Social Research. He has been convener of the MA in Philosophy and Social Theory and now teaches on Politics and Social Theory. At the undergraduate level, he has taught the social theory of law, sociology of knowledge and science and, most recently media sociology. He welcomes students working in the sociology of knowledge, history, philosophy and sociology of science, the nature the university and intellectual life, and normative issues relating to recent developments on the impact of science and technology on the political order, especially concerning our changing conceptions of the biological and what it means to be human.