Assistant Provost

Message from the Assistant Provost and Dean of the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies

Tanya R. Saunders

The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) demonstrates the creative power of collaboration and the potential of the College’s Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies.

When accomplished and willing faculty emerge from the focus of the College’s five schools to cross disciplinary boundaries, they create new communities of learners. Freeing up new terrains for the emergence of unexplored ideas, these networks offer students and audiences new opportunities for action. They also posit better approaches to sustainability that improve the human condition.

Poverty, hunger, environmental degradation, human misery, war, dwindling resources, and economic stagnation are not constrained within any particular discipline or course of study. Solutions to these enormous challenges to justice and sustainability are to be discovered through collaboration and innovation. Solutions are also to be discovered through a willingness to bring theory and experience into a larger conversation. These urgent and necessary dialogues give human voice and human immediacy to what might more easily be relegated to the abstract comforts of faceless numbers and unemotional data.

This year’s FLEFF programming streams invite us to bring informed intellect, involved heart, and willing hands together to consider the continuum leading from critical engagement to decision, execution, and consequence. The four programming streams shorten the virtual and real distances that undergird camouflage and games. They direct us to the critical dialogues of counterpoint. Yet they also point us to the compelling intimacies of self-reflection, self-indulgence, and self-deception.

From the most far-reaching technology, gaming, and communication systems to the most intimate encounters captured by the written word, the expressive arts, and the documentation of shoulder-to-shoulder struggle, FLEFF’s diversity of forms open up avenues for new understandings and new formations of common cause with others in the global community. I cordially invite students, faculty, and staff from Ithaca College, honored guests, and the larger Ithaca community to join these public and private debates on what is required of each of us as privileged members of the human community.

FLEFF presents a broad spectrum of intellectual engagement and potential for individual, collective, and institutional action. The 2008 festival challenges all of us to reconnect, to reimagine, to re-create, and to reaffirm our commitment to the demands of justice and sustainability.