The Case for Working with Your Hands
Speaker:
Matthew Crawford
24 Mar 2011
8:00 PM
Great Hall, Memorial Union
Matthew Crawford is a philosopher and mechanic. His bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work is about the once familiar and now uncommon experience of making and fixing things with your hands. He makes a case for reclaiming some measure of self-reliance and encourages people to reconnect with their material world and value the manual trades. Crawford majored in physics as an undergraduate and then turned to political philosophy, earning a PhD from the University of Chicago. He is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and also runs a motorcycle repair business in Richmond, Virginia. Part of the National Affairs Series on Innovation.
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This lecture was made possible in part by the generosity of F. Wendell Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995 at age 97, was born in Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City, graduated from Grinnell College and Harvard Law School and practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to manage his family's farm holdings and to practice law. His will helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the annual earnings on which, in part, helped to support this activity.