Catalyst Conversations: What is Home?

Catalyst Conversations presents: What is Home?

Speakers: Shellburne Thurber, Emmanuel Oppong-Yaboah, and Amy Clark

Moderator: Bridget Alex

Supporting Sponsor: Biomed Realty

What makes a place home? Is it shelter, memory, family, or something older—an instinct shared across species? From the first human hearths to birds' nests, animal dens, and the landscapes of migration and diaspora, home is both a place we inhabit and an idea we carry with us.

This Catalyst Conversations program brings together photographer Shellburne Thurber, Boston Poet Laureate Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah, and paleoanthropologist Amy Clark for an interdisciplinary exploration of belonging, place, and the spaces that shape us. Through photography, poetry, and science, they will consider how humans create homes, how memory transforms them, and why the search for home remains one of our most enduring stories.

Moderated by paleoanthropologist, science writer, and educator Bridget Alex, this conversation invites us to reflect on one of humanity's most enduring questions: What does it mean to belong?

Check-in begins at 6:00 PM

A Community Reception with refreshments will be held in the MIT Welcome Center building lobby immediately following the program.

Catalyst Conversations public programs are free to attend, however donations are appreciated. Please email: events@catalystconversations.org if you need assistance registering for the event.

SPEAKERS

For much of her career, Shellburne Thurber has been engaged in an ongoing photographic investigation of the relationship between constructed space and human energy. Long intrigued by the idea of lived space as an extension of the body and a site for projection, she has photographed a wide variety of subjects. Early on, she turned her camera to family and friends and their homes, and she has since created projects around images of generic back road motels, churches, abandoned and derelict homes and hospitals, and historic sites. She is especially interested in spaces that straddle the line between public and private.

Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah – Boston poet laureate will recite poems about home, and its counterpart, living in the Diaspora.

Paleoanthropologist Dr. Amy E. Clark’s research focuses on the evolution and emergence of modern humans and closely related hominins, such as Neanderthals. She is particularly interested in using the archaeological record to understand the evolution of traits that are particularly well-developed in our species, such as cumulative culture and hyper social behavior. In so doing, she explores the relationships between humans and physical spaces, such as the home. Her research also focuses on the structure and size of human populations and how they were configured on the landscape. She uses the spatial structure of living spaces to obtain information on group size, social relationships, and mobility patterns and to study changes in the way humans structured space over time. She currently has an active fieldwork project in Morocco near the city of Essaouira on the Atlantic coast. Amy received her PhD from the University of Arizona in 2015. Since then, she has held several positions including as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Toulouse, France (supported by the Fyssen Foundation), a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oklahoma, and taught within the Department of Anthropology at Harvard as a College Fellow before becoming an Assistant Professor in 2023.

MODERATOR

Dr. Bridget Alex is a paleoanthropologist, science writer, and educator. In addition to teaching in HEB, I'm an editor for SAPIENS magazine. Over the years, I've taught undergraduate and graduate courses in human evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, and science communication. My pop-science stories have appeared in outlets including Discover, Science, Smithsonian, Atlas Obscura, and Audubon. I earned my PhD in 2016 from Harvard in Anthropological Archaeology & Human Evolutionary Biology. My research focused on understanding the processes by which Homo sapiens spread globally as other human groups, like Neanderthals, went extinct over the past 200,000 years. With methodological expertise in radiocarbon dating and geochemical analyses, I conducted fieldwork in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and the Levant.