Newsroom

  John Ryle, Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology, in conversation with Peter Rosenblum, Professor of International Law and Human Rights
Olin Humanities, Room 203  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The international human rights movement is in crisis, with a decline in support from major powers, and key institutions such as the International Criminal Court in disarray. In Sweden, however, the government has mounted a large-scale war crimes trial – now in its third year – the most extensive trial in Swedish history. Two directors of Lundin Oil, once the country’s largest energy company, stand accused of complicity in crimes committed during oil exploration in Sudan: in the words of a headline in Bloomberg News, "Oil Billionaire Ian Lundin Risks Jail”.

In bringing the Lundin directors to trial the Swedish government is projecting a principle of universal jurisdiction that dates back to the Nuremberg trials and before – the idea that no one anywhere should be beyond the reach of the law. The prosecutions at Nuremberg of executives of German companies that used slave labor in the 1939-45 World War were limited, but it has been argued that the new wave of corporate prosecutions under national law – of which the Lundin trial is the leading example – are an indication of a possible future for the pursuit of human rights. The directors of Lundin Oil are accused of aiding Sudan government forces in a campaign of violent displacement during the 1983-2005 civil war in Sudan (the conflict that led to the independence of South Sudan in 2011). The prosecution alleges that Lundin requested security from the government of Sudan in the knowledge that this would involve forcible displacement, and that they allowed airstrips built by Lundin to be used by Sudan government helicopter gunships to attack villages and kill or expel their inhabitants. But the two Lundin executives deny the charges, asserting that the company operated lawfully.

As an anthropologist and human rights researcher with experience in the Sudanese oil zone, John Ryle was called to testify in the trial (one of more than ninety witnesses, including thirty from South Sudan), spending a day under examination on the witness stand in the District Court in Stockholm. He will discuss his experience of participation in the trial, the nature of the communities that live in the oil zone, and their indigenous legal systems, the distinction between restorative and retributive justice, and connections to the current crises in Sudan and South Sudan, and the realities of research in war zones, where often, in the phrase of the late US senator Hiram Johnson, truth is the first casualty.

  Bard Center for the Study of Hate 2025 Interns Showcase (with pizza!)
Barringer House  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This past summer the Bard Center for the Study of Hate sent ten student to intern with NGOs that focus on hate, or some subset of it, to work, learn, and analyze how these groups think about hate. You’re invited to join them as they discuss their experiences (over a pizza lunch) Monday, October 27, 2025 in the Barringer Global Classroom.

Students interested in the 2026 internships are encouraged to attend. Feel free to email Ken Stern at [email protected] with any questions.

George Shulman, Professor Emeritus, NYU Gallatin
Olin Humanities, Room 204  5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Prof. Shulman’s paper explores the "the Dionysian" in the work of Nietzsche and Norman O. Brown, as mediated by  Freud and Melanie Klein. It works through 2 basic questions: what did this trope denote and connote?  Does the idea "the Dionysian" explain the fascist threat to democratic politics, or does it render both the premise of democratic politics and the crucial antidote to fascism? 

Please contact Pınar Kemerli at [email protected] for a copy of the paper ahead of the workshop.

  A Talk with the President of French Polynesia, Moetai Brotherson
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
As the prospects of deep sea mining increase in the region, French Polynesia bears the weight of nuclear testing and unfinished decolonization in the Pacific.  Its journey illustrates the quest for justice, resilience, and lasting peace across the region. 
President Brotherson is from Tahiti. He has a degree in computer science and has  held various offices in the region since 2001. In 2007 he published a novel, Le Roi Absent (“The Absent King”). In 2010 he participated in the O Tahiti Nui Freedom expedition, which sailed a single-hulled Polynesian outrigger canoe from Tahiti to Shangha. French Polynesia is an autonomous overseas collectivity of France.  He has been president since 2023.

Moderated by Daniel Brinkerhoff Young, Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Union College
Union College, Lippmann 100  4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us for the third session of the Hudson Valley Political Theory Workshop this Friday, April 11. Spring Semester workshops will take place at Union College. The Hudson Valley Political Theory Workshop is a new collaborative project launched by Bard College and Union College. The workshop aims to bring together political theorists working in or near the Hudson Valley Region in a series of workshops to share their work in progress, create new networks, and open up possibilities for new collaborative research projects that further advance humanities.We are delighted to welcome Daniel Brinkerhoff Young, Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Union College.

  Memory-Studies Talk Series: Elise Giuliano
Olin Humanities, Room 303  12:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This talk discusses Dr Giuliano's current research about discourse among ethnic minority populations in Russia’s regions and how to think about the subjectivity and identity of ethnic minorities in multi-ethnic states. Following the end of communist rule in eastern Europe in 1989, most of the new nation-states dedicated themselves to reconstructing a history that viewed Soviet domination following WWII as a departure from their nation’s natural democratic path. Leaders in the post-Soviet states that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 took a more differentiated approach, especially with regard to the recent Soviet past. In Ukraine, especially since Russia’s invasion in 2022, public memory about Soviet history has become more urgent and politicized. This talk will consider what varied interpretations of critical historical episodes mean for the attempt to define a coherent nation-state and discuss how citizens’ lived experiences and personal family histories interact with attempts by political authorities to define a common public memory.


Download: Giuliano.pdf

  Reem-Kayden Center Room 102  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join the Alexander Hamilton Society at Bard for an insightful discussion with diplomat and public servant Matthew Nimetz. On March 28th at 5 pm, Nimetz will explore the state of American foreign policy under a second Trump administration. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from an expert with decades of experience in diplomacy, law, and public service.


Download: Poster-for-AHS-Speaker-EventMatthew-Nimetz.pdf

A talk from Sandipto Dasgupta, Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Sandipto Dasgupta is Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research. For the academic year 2024-25, he is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in Social Sciences and Historical Studies. He is the author of Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony, which reconstructs the institutionalization of nascent postcolonial futures through a historical study of the Indian constitution making experience. 
 Sponsored by 
Dean of the College, Division of Social Studies, Asian Studies, Global and International Studies Program, Human Rights Project, Politics, Middle Eastern Studies, and Union College Political Science Department, and Dean of Academic Department and Programs

Hudson Valley Political Theory Workshop is a new collaborative project organized by Bard College and Union College. The workshop aims to bring together political theorists  working in the Hudson Valley Region in a series of workshops to share their work in progress, create new networks, and open up possibilities for new collaborative research projects that further advance humanities.

Olin Language Center, Room 115  1:30 pm – 2:50 pm EST/GMT-5
Join students from the course "The 2024 Election and You" as we discuss what is at stake in the election and why voting is important to you.

Online Panel with Tareq Baconi, Aslı Ü. Bâli, and Shay Hazkani. Moderated by Ziad Abu-Rish.
Online Event  10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This panel explores how the Hamas-led attack on October 7 and the Israeli war on Gaza have changed and intensified specific dynamics shaping Palestinian, Israeli, and regional/international politics. Taking seriously that history did not begin on October 7, and that the level of death, displacement, and destruction in Gaza caused by the Israeli military has raised the specter of genocide, this panel moves beyond adjudicating the nature of the war to interrogate its reverberations, reflections, and consequences for Palestinian, Israeli, and regional politics. Where does Hamas stand strategically vis-a-vis its objectives, other Palestinian factions, and the Palestinian people? What social, demographic, and institutional transformations are taking place within the Israeli state and society? In what ways is the regional and international order fundamentally different or affected by the past year?

  Nassim Abi Ghanem in Conversation with Michelle Murray
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This conversation between Nassim Abi Ghanem (Bard College Berlin) and Michelle Murray (Bard Annandale) will shed light on developments in Lebanon, particularly the Israeli bombardment and ground invasion of the country. Questions addressed will include the nature of domestic politics in Lebanon, the relationship of Hezbollah to those politics and the genocide in Gaza, the goals and methods of Israeli political and military leadership for Lebanon, and the regional and global reverberations of those policies. The conversation will be followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Nassim AbiGhanem is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Bard College Berlin.
Michelle Murray is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Bard College.

Nassim Abi Ghanem’s areas of expertise include peace and conflict, non-state actors’ involvement in international politics, conflict management and peacebuilding, social network theory, and the Middle East. Abi Ghanem earned his PhD in International Relations from the Central European University (CEU) in 2022. Abi Ghanem’s research focuses on peacebuilding processes, particularly on the involvement of local actors in peacebuilding tools such as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR), and social reconciliation. Outside academia, Abi Ghanem advises regional and international organizations on programmatic initiatives taking place in Lebanon and is Lebanon’s country expert for Bertelsmann Stiftung Transformation Index for 2022 and 2024.

This event is cosponsored by the Global and International Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Human Rights, and Politics Programs at Bard College.

A Conversation with Blake Zeff
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  1:30 pm – 2:50 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join students from Common Course 124: The 2024 Election and You for a conversation with Blake Zeff on what goes on inside campaigns during the final week of the election cycle. Zeff is an expert in policy and strategic communications who has worked on several political campaigns, including working as a spokesperson for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

  Mie Inouye, Assistant Professor of Politics
Olin Humanities, Room 201  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Hudson Valley Political Theory is a new collaborative project organized by Bard College and Union College. The workshop aims to bring together political theorists  working in the Hudson Valley Region in a series of workshops to share their work in progress, create new networks, and open up possibilities for new collaborative research projects that further advance humanities.

This talk explores the problem of habituation and freedom through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s community organizing project in the Deep South from 1961-1964. We begin from the premise that political organizing aims to habituate people to new norms and conceptions of the world by engaging them in repetitive, collective, embodied practices, in other words, rituals. Habituation seems to be necessary to overcome entrenched patterns of thought and behavior that are produced by and sustain oppressive social arrangements. But habituation might also seem to limit the freedom of habituated subjects by foreclosing alternatives and limiting conscious choice. Turning to a study of two rituals that animated SNCC’s community organizing project—the canvass and the mass meeting—this talk argues that SNCC organizers understood these practices as simultaneously habituating and liberating for both organizers and the communities they organized. Sponsored by The Dean of the College, Division of Social Studies, Global and International Studies Program, Human Rights, Politics, and Union College Political Science Department and Dean of Academic Department and Programs.
 

Hegeman 204  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Keith Kahn Harris, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and Senior Lecturer at Leo Baeck College
Olin Humanities, Room 202  4:30 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The period since October 7, 2023 has seen the emergence of a "complicity discourse" manifested in injunctions to speak publicly about Israel-Palestine. While this is particularly prevalent in pro-Palestinian activism, pro-Israel groups also associate silence with complicity. This lecture explores the profound implications for Jewish life of competing demands that Jews be public. It is becoming necessary for Jews across the political spectrum to re-consider the value of the private, mundane realms of Jewish existence.

Keith Kahn-Harris is a British sociologist and writer. He is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and a senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College. The author of eight books, his next book Everyday Jews: Why the Jewish People Are Not Who You Think They Are will be published in March 2025.

Victoria Hanna
Chapel of the Holy Innocents  5:45 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Building on ancient Kabbalistic traditions that see language, the voice, and the mouth as tools of cosmic creation, Victoria will reveal the Hebrew alphabet as an instrument for playing with the mouth. By thinking with foundational Kabbalistic texts such as the Book of Creation (Sefer Yetzirah) and the writings of Abraham Abulafia, Victoria will demonstrate how the letters have been, and can be, used for daily work with speech and the body. She will also perform works inspired by the biblical Songs of Solomon, as well as late antique Jewish amulets. 

Victoria grew up in Jerusalem in an Orthodox Jewish family with roots in Egypt and Iran. She has performed and taught at universities around the world including Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan University, Virginia Tech, Monash University, Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University. Her work combines Jewish mysticism, Dada, surrealism, and feminism.

Part of Hudson Valley Climate Solutions Week
 
Bertelsmann Campus Center; George Ball Lounge  4:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Did you know over eight million environmentalists did not vote in the 2020 presidential election and over 13 million skipped the 2022 midterms? This lack of turnout not only impacts election outcomes, but also how much priority elected politicians give to environment and climate issues. Help us change those numbers! Join us for postcarding to low propensity environmentalists, with proven messaging that will help get them to the polls.

No prior experience required!


 

Learn more about the effort at Environmental Voter Project:

Learn More
 

  Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This panel on the terms "Anti-Semitism" and "Anti-Palestinian Racism" is part of the Spring 2024 common course Keywords for Our Times: Understanding Israel/Palestine and will be open to the Bard College community as a whole. The course critically explores the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine with a focus on contemporary Gaza, and the vocabularies we use to understand it. The course brings scholars from a range of disciplines together to help students understand the histories of and contestations around important concepts and ideas that define our contemporary moment, and to stimulate informed dialogue within our community. Participating in the panel on the terms "Anti-Semitism" and "Anti-Palestinian Racism" will be Ken Stern of Bard College and Radhika Sainath of Palestine Legal.

Kenneth S. Stern is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate. He is an award-winning author and attorney, and was most recently executive director of the Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation. Before that he was director of the division on antisemitism and extremism at the American Jewish Committee, where he worked for 25 years. Stern is the author of numerous op-eds and book reviews, appearing in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Forward, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and elsewhere. He most recently published The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate (New Jewish Press, 2020), and previously published Loud Hawk: The United States vs. The American Indian Movement. Mr. Stern graduated from Bard College in 1975.

Radhika Sainath is a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, where she oversees the organization’s casework on free speech, censorship, and academic freedom. Prior to joining Palestine Legal, Radhika represented clients in individual and class action civil and constitutional rights cases involving discrimination, human rights abuses, and prison conditions at one of California’s most prestigious civil rights firms. Radhika has successfully litigated numerous state and federal class actions and other federal civil rights cases. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, Jacobin, and Literary Hub. Radhika is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and the University of California, San Diego. She is based in Palestine Legal’s New York City office and is admitted to the California and New York state bars.

This event is cosponsored by the Politics Program, the Middle Eastern Studies Program, the Global and International Studies Program, the Human Rights Program, and the Center for Human Rights and the Arts.

Finberg House library  10:00 am – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The 2024 Social Philosophy Workshop brings together early career scholars from across the humanities and social sciences who examine contemporary social and political issues. Papers are pre-read, with workshop time devoted to commentators introducing and responding to each paper, followed by general discussion.

Registration is required in order to receive the pre-read papers.

The address for Finberg House is 51 Whalesback Road, Red Hook, New York 12571.

Generous support for this workshop has been provided by the Philosophy, Politics, and Interdisciplinary Study of Religions programs at Bard; Bard's Office of the Dean of the College; the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard; and the American Philosophical Association.

Finberg House library  10:00 am – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The 2024 Social Philosophy Workshop brings together early career scholars from across the humanities and social sciences who examine contemporary social and political issues. Papers are pre-read, with workshop time devoted to commentators introducing and responding to each paper, followed by general discussion.

Registration is required in order to receive the pre-read papers.

The address for Finberg House is 51 Whalesback Road, Red Hook, New York 12571.

Generous support for this workshop has been provided by the Philosophy, Politics, and Interdisciplinary Study of Religions programs at Bard; Bard's Office of the Dean of the College; the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard; and the American Philosophical Association.

  Olin Auditorium  1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture on the term “Genocide” is part of the Spring 2024 common course Keywords for Our Times: Understanding Israel/Palestine and will be open to the Bard College community as a whole. The course critically explores the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine with a focus on contemporary Gaza, and the vocabularies we use to understand it. The course brings scholars from a range of disciplines together to help students understand the histories of and contestations around important concepts and ideas that define our contemporary moment, and to stimulate informed dialogue within our community. Presenting the lecture on the term "genocide" to the course and the wider campus community will be Omer Bartov, the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.

Omer Bartov's early research concerned the crimes of the German Wehrmacht, the links between total war and genocide, and representation of antisemitism in twentieth-century cinema. More recently, he has focused on interethnic relations and violence in Eastern Europe, population displacement in Europe and Palestine, and the first generation of Jews and Palestinians in Israel. His books include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023). Bartov is currently writing a book tentatively titled The Broken Promise: A Personal-Political History of Israel and Palestine. His novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, was published this year in the United States and Israel.

This event is cosponsored by the Politics Program, the Middle Eastern Studies Program, the Global and International Studies Program, the Human Rights Program, and the Center for Human Rights and the Arts.

Arie M. Dubnov, George Washington University
Hegeman 106  4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Three pivotal terms— "refugee," "return," and "repatriation" — played an exceptionally significant role in shaping international planning and discourse after World War II.  Exploring the interconnections of international history and the history of political and religious concepts, the talk examines how these terms acquired distinct meanings within the framework of international policies and how they echo to this day in the context of the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict.  

Arie M. Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies. Trained in Israel and the U.S., he is a historian of twentieth century Jewish and Israeli history, with emphasis on the history of political thought, the study of nationalism, decolonization and partition politics, and with a subsidiary interest in the history of Israeli popular culture. Prior to his arrival at GW, Dubnov taught at Stanford University and the University of Haifa. He was a G.L. Mosse Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a participant in the National History Center’s International Decolonization Seminar, and recipient of the Dorset Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and a was Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford.

  Gabriel Hetland, Associate Professor of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latina/o Studies
Faculty Affiliate, Sociology Department, SUNY Albany
Olin 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This will be a book talk. In case you want an image of the book or other details, click here.Is democracy possible only when it is safe for elites? Latin American history seems to suggest so. Right-wing forces have repeatedly deposed elected governments that challenged the rich and accepted democracy only after the defanging of the Left and widespread market reform. Latin America’s recent “left turn” raised the question anew: how would the Right react if democracy threatened elite interests?
This book examines the complex relationship of the Left, the Right, and democracy through the lens of local politics in Venezuela and Bolivia. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, Gabriel Hetland compares attempts at participatory reform in cities governed by the Left and Right in each country. He finds that such measures were more successful in Venezuela than Bolivia regardless of which type of party held office, though existing research suggests that deepening democracy is much more likely under a left party. Hetland accounts for these findings by arguing that Venezuela’s ruling party achieved hegemony—presenting its ideas as the ideas of all—while Bolivia’s ruling party did not. The Venezuelan Right was compelled to act on the Left’s political terrain; this pushed it to implement participatory reform in an unexpectedly robust way. In Bolivia, demobilization of popular movements led to an inhospitable environment for local democratic deepening under any party.

Democracy on the Ground shows that, just as right-wing hegemony can reshape the Left, leftist hegemony can reshape the Right. Offering new perspectives on participation, populism, and Latin American politics, this book challenges widespread ideas about the constraints on democracy.

Lecture by Yuliya Yurchenko
Avery Art Center; Ottaway Theater  10:10 am – 11:30 am EDT/GMT-4
Yuliya Yurchenko is a senior lecturer in political economy at the Department of Economics and International Business and a researcher at the Political Economy, Governance, Finance, and Accountability Institute, University of Greenwich, UK. She will speak about her book, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital (Pluto, 2017).

Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Alexander Hamilton Society at Bard is inviting you to our speaker event this Friday evening. On September 29 at 5:00 pm in Olin 102, Dr. Kori Schake will be discussing the future of US grand strategy with Malia Du Mont ’95 moderating.

Dr. Schake is the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Before joining AEI, Dr. Schake was the deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. She has had a distinguished career in government, working at the US State Department, the US Department of Defense, and the National Security Council at the White House. She has also taught at Stanford, West Point, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, National Defense University, and the University of Maryland.

Please join the Alexander Hamilton Society in welcoming Dr. Schake this Friday.

Refreshments will be provided!

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The AHS Chapter at Bard is honored to host Development Associate at Bard Prison Initiative and US Air Force Veteran Julia Liu to discuss the role of women in the Air Force. Refreshments will be provided!


Download: Poster-for-AHS-Speaker-Event-Julia-Liu-2.pdf

Dr. Jill McCorkel, professor of sociology and criminology at Villanova University and the founder and executive director of the Philadelphia Justice Project for Women and Girls
Olin 102  5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Women are the fastest growing segment of virtually all sectors of the carceral system (jail, prison, parole, and probation). This is also the case at the back end of the system, among those serving extreme sentences of 50 years in prison or more. People serving these sentences refer to their experience as "death by incarceration" given that sentence length and statutory limitations and exclusions from parole eligibility guarantee that they will die in prison. The number of women serving these sentences has exponentially increased in recent decades. The vast majority are survivors of gender violence. Their criminal convictions are often directly or indirectly tied to their encounters with violence and abuse. In this talk, I'll discuss why and how this is happening and what we can and should be doing about it. 

https://www.jillmccorkel.com/
Philadelphia Justice Project for Women and Girls

 

U.S. Foreign Affairs in Europe
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Alexander Hamilton Society at Bard is inviting you to their speaker event tonight! On April 17th, 6:00 PM at OLIN 102, Mr. Daniel Fata will be talking about U.S. Foreign Affairs in Europe.



Mr. Fata is a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy. Currently, he is a Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies(CSIS).



* Food and refreshments will be available



Bring a friend!

with speakers June Nemon and leaders from the Stony Run Tenants Union
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:10 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This event is part of the Political Organizing Speaker Series, Spring 2023

with speakers Becky Simonsen and Puya Gerami
Olin Humanities, Room 203  5:10 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
More information on the work of these speakers can be found here.

This event is part of the Political Organizing Speaker Series, Spring 2023

  Inaugural De Gruyter–Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:15 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Part of “Judgment, Pluralism, & Democracy: On the Desirability of Speaking with Others” conference.Stream the Keynote Lecture on YouTube


Download: De-Gruyter-HAC-Lecture-posterFinal.pdf

Weis Cinema  4:30 pm – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Prof. Michel DeGraff is a leading linguist known as one of the most prominent Haitian creolists. He is a professor at MIT and the  founder of the MIT-Haiti Initiative promoting learning of science and technology in Kreyòl. His New York Times opinion piece, "As a Child in Haiti I Was Taught to Despise My Language" (published in October 2022), will be an entry point to this lecture where he will provide an analysis of some of the long-lasting nefarious impact of colonialism in Haiti, especially in the realms of education. The eventual objective is to enlist lessons from history in order to help usher better futures for those sufferers whom Fanon calls the “Wretched of the Earth” and whom Jean Casimir calls the “ Malere ”—better futures in Haiti and beyond.

Professor J.T. Roane, assistant professor of geography at Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk is drawn from Roane's recently published book, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU Press, 2023). Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated insurgent assembly—dark agoras—in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods. In acts that ranged from the mundane refashioning of intimate spaces to confrontations over the city's social and ecological arrangement, Black communities challenged the imposition of Progressive visions for urban order seeking to enclose or displace them.

Panel discussion at Bard College with Masha Gessen (Bard/New Yorker), Anna Nemzer (TVRain/RIMA), Archie Magno (Bard)
Moderated by Ilia Venyavkin (RIMA)
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In his recent Nobel Prize lecture Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov called independent journalism “the antidote against tyranny” and promised that Russian journalists would never give up. Still, if we look at the history of independent media in Russia, we will see that the hope that unbiased media coverage would protect society from relativism, conspiracy theories, propaganda and — at the end of day — from dictatorship, has proven unjustified. Or has it?

The panel will discuss the history of the past 20 years of Russian independent journalism: How did dictatorship in modern Russia become possible? What did independent media do wrong? Have we learned anything new about freedom of speech that we did not know before? 

At the panel we will also present the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA) — a joint digital initiative of Bard College and PEN America to protect the work of Russian journalists from censorship.

The event is sponsored by Center for Civic Engagement, the Gagarin Center at Bard College, and PEN America.

Chapel of the Holy Innocents  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
PASOLINI AND THE SACRED

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was an Italian filmmaker, poet, journalist, and public intellectual. Contradiction defined his life and work: he was a communist who rejected and was rejected by the Italian communist party, a gay man who refused to be a spokesperson for the gay community, a bourgeois intellectual who idealized the subproletariat. He was also an avowed atheist whose gaze was turned obsessively toward representations of the sacred. He sought out the sacred in lands far removed from his own—places like Yemen and Tanzania—while still hoping to find traces of it in the fast-paced world of his native Italy during the post-War economic boom. The figure of Christ was omnipresent in his works, as was the ambiguous specter of the Catholic Church. He invested in the sacred as a language, an aesthetic, a currency, a lost past, and a fading present. In this discussion, we will explore Pasolini’s complex, often contradictory views on the sacred. 

Email: [email protected] with questions.

Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Bard’s new Carceral Studies speaker series launches with a visit from the NYU Prison Education Project. Their recently published book Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality explores how the car, despite its association with American freedom and mobility, functions at the crossroads of two great systems of entrapment and immobility– the American debt economy and the carceral state. We will be joined by four of the Lab members, a group representing formerly incarcerated scholars and non-formerly incarcerated NYU faculty. 

Dmitri Bykov
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Dmitri Bykov is a preeminent Russian author of prose fiction, poetry, biography, and essays, who is currently residing in exile in the United States as a vocal critic of Putin's regime. His hugely popular “Citizen Poet” project, launched in 2011, provided poetic commentary on contemporary political and cultural events, as Bykov's numerous articles, broadcasts, interviews, and blogs still do, aiming “to help Russia to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.”
 
In this lecture Bykov explores the roots and sources of Putin’s mythology, explains his success in capturing public opinion in Russia and predicts the decline of his political era. Bykov examines in detail the origin of Putin’s image and the meaning of secret service in Russian collective subconsciousness. Woland of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (1967); Ostap Bender of Ilf and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Little Golden Calf (1931); and Colonel Stierlitz, the hero of the 1973 Soviet TV series about a Soviet spy operating in Nazi Germany, are the true heroes of Bykov’s analysis, while “the small bureaucrat Putin” is relegated to its margins.

Sean McMeekin, Archie Magno, and Michelle Murray
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Russia escalated the war against Ukraine eight months ago, shocking the world and leading to a major upheaval in international politics. The goal of this roundtable is to explicate why this happened from an analytical distance. Bard scholars Sean McMeekin, Archie Magno, and Michelle Murray will discuss the causes and effects of Russia’s assault against the neighboring state in the context of general problems of war and peace that humanity, mutatis mutandis, has faced throughout its history. Three decades between the attack on Ukraine and the end of the Cold War revived age-long dreams of eternal peace due to an impression that the most bitter national and ideological antagonisms in Eastern Europe belonged to the past. Many “new wars” (Mary Caldor) abounded, but they remained relatively small-scale and asymmetrical. Before February 24, 2022, war itself appeared to many to be illegitimate, since it was portrayed in Western media as a clash between the forces of civilized democracies and those of authoritarian “rogue states.” Now, in contrast, the world seems to be thrown back to the earlier patterns of aggression, reminiscent of “old” wars of imperial conquest and geopolitical competition among great powers. Along with the participants of the roundtable, the Bard community is invited to ponder the gravity of this situation from the perspectives of history, political science, and philosophy.

  Bertelsmann Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  2:30 pm – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The talk will explore current challenges related to voting rights, including   jurisprudence regarding the 26th Amendment (which lowered the voting age to 18), voting on college campuses, including the litigation at Bard, and issue of non-citizen voters.

Attorneys, Michael Donofrio and Douglas Mishkin, who helped shape Bard’s legal case with regard to voting rights on campus, will join Yael for the Q&A portion of the talk. 

In addition to Yael Bromberg’s work with AGF, she serves as a Lecturer at Rutgers Law School, where she teaches Election Law & the Political Process, and is a Visiting Associate with the Eagleton Institute of Politics. She currently works with the Harvard Kennedy School's William Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice on a youth voting rights project, and serves on the advisory council for American Promise, an organization dedicated to ending big money in our political system. She previously worked in the Washington, D.C. headquarters of Common Cause, and taught and supervised litigation in Georgetown University Law Center’s Civil Rights Clinic and Voting Rights Institute.

  Henderson 106 (Mac Lab)  4:30 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In February 2022, Russia launched an unprovoked, genocidal attack against the Ukrainian people. This lecture will review the origins of the conflict, how the United States and our NATO allies are likely to respond and what possible outcomes are on the horizon.

Scott Licamele ’91 is a Russia expert with over 20 years of experience dealing in the former Soviet Union. He has worked in various Russia-related capacities, including capital markets (at Sberbank CIB, Troika Dialog, and Alfa Bank) and government-related activities (at an NGO in Russia which was funded by the United States Information Agency in the 1990s). Licamele has lived and worked in Russia and Ukraine for seven years and is fluent in Russian. He is a graduate of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he studied Russian political economy. He received his BA in European History at Bard College. Licamele is currently unaffiliated with any Russia-related business or political entities.

Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung 
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities,
Stanford University


This event is presented on Zoom.
11:50 am – 1:10 pm EDT/GMT-4
Olympic design needs to express the universal values that the Olympic Movement promotes, and it should be understood easily by a global audience; at the same time, it needs to set the host apart from other nations visually and highlight the uniqueness of its culture. This is a particularly difficult task for non-Western countries, whose national culture and identity can easily fall victim to Orientalism when presented on the world stage. This lecture examines the design style and strategies chosen for the 1988 Summer Olympics and how this design project, which is deemed successful by many, “spectacularly failed” to understand the concepts such as universalism, modernity, modernist design, and Orientalism.

Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung studies politics and aesthetics of modern design with a focus on South Korean and Silicon Valley design. She received her PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in 2020. Trained in graphic design, Gabrielle also writes on the issues of design and feminism. Her book project, Toward a Utopia Without Revolution: Globalization, Developmentalism, and Design, looks at political and aesthetic problems that modern design projects generated in South Korea, a country that has experienced not only rapid economic development but also immense political progress in less than a century, from the end of the World War II to the beginning of the new millennium. In Fall 2022, she will join the Department of Art History and PhD Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine as Assistant Professor of Korean Art History.

E. Tammy Kim (New York Times)
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
When the U.S. military finally withdrew from Afghanistan, an old tally reappeared in the news. Our “forever wars” were not only the live military operations we’d pursued in the Middle East since 9/11; they also encompassed some 500 U.S. bases and installations all over the world, stretching back to the early 20th century. Some call this “empire;” some call it “security,” even “altruism.” In East Asia, the long arm of U.S. power reaches intimately into people’s lives. 

South Korea has hosted U.S. military personnel since World War II and remains a primary base of operations in the Asia Pacific. Some thirty thousand U.S. soldiers and marines are stationed there, on more than 70 installations. In 2018, U.S. Army Garrison Humphreys opened in the city of Pyeongtaek, at a cost of $11 billion. Humphreys is now the largest overseas U.S. military base by size and the symbol of a new era in the U.S.-South Korea alliance. Meanwhile, South Korea has become the tenth-richest country in the world and has one of the largest militaries—thanks to universal male conscription and an extraordinary budget. The country’s arms industry is also world-class, known for its planes, submarines, and tanks.

This talk will draw on reporting and family history to explore the evolving U.S.-South Korea alliance. How do the martial investments of these historic “allies” affect the lives of ordinary South Koreans—and Korean Americans? And if the two Koreas are still technically at war, what kind of war is it?

E. Tammy Kim is a freelance magazine reporter and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, covering labor issues, arts and culture, and the Koreas. She cohosts Time to Say Goodbye, a podcast on Asia and Asian America, and is a contributing editor at Lux, a new feminist socialist magazine. She holds fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation and Type Media Center. In 2016, she and Yale ethnomusicologist Michael Veal published Punk Ethnography, a book about the aesthetics and politics of contemporary world music. Her first career was as a social justice lawyer in New York City.

This event is part of the Asian Diasporic Initiative Speaker Series.

For more information, please contact Nate Shockey: [email protected].

Andre Haag, Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Hawaii, Manoa
Online Event  5:00 pm – 6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
The field of post/colonial East Asian cultural studies has recently rediscovered the transpacific potential of the theme of ethnic passing, a problematic that is deeply rooted in North American racial contexts but might serve to disrupt global fictions of race and power.  Although tropes adjacent to ethnonational passing frequently appear in minority literatures produced in Japan, particularly Zainichi Korean fiction, the salience of the phenomenon was often obscured within the avowedly-integrative and assimilative cultural production of Japanese colonialism. This talk will challenge that aporia by demonstrating how the structural possibility of Korean passing left behind indelible traces of racialized paranoia in the writings of the Japanese colonial empire that have long outlived its fall.  Introducing narratives and speech acts in Japanese from disparate genres, past and present, I argue that paranoia was as an effect of insecure imperial modes of containing the passing specters of Korea and Korean people uneasily absorbed within expanding Japan by colonial merger. I trace how disavowed anxieties of passing merge with fears of treachery, blurred borders, and the unreadability of ethnoracial difference in narrative scripts that traveled across space, from the colonial periphery to the Japanese metropole along with migrating bodies, between subjects, and through time. If imperial paranoia around passing took its most extreme expression in narratives of the murderous 1923 “Korean Panic,” popular Zainichi fiction today exposes not only the enduring structures of Japanese Koreaphobia (and Koreaphilia) but the persistence of shared anxieties and precarities binding former colonizer and colonized a century later. 

This meeting will be on Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/89025574917

Has Covid-19 changed the way we communicate or write about pandemics? 
Online Event  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Covid-19 has become a staple headline for the past two years. Has it changed the way we communicate or write about pandemics? Amy Maxmen, an award-winning science writer who covers the entanglements of evolution, medicine, science policy and of the people behind research, will join us to discuss. Amy won the Victor Kohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting in 2021 for her body of work covering Covid-19 and other diseases.

RSVP here

  Jorge Maldonado Rivera is a union representative with the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) and a former staff organizer with UNITE HERE.
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Yellow Room 214  3:30 pm – 4:50 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk is part of a speaker series on political organizing. It is co-sponsored by the Center for Civic Engagement, the Human Rights Project, and the Political Studies program. It is open to all members of the Bard community, especially students interested in labor organizing.

As China sets to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, we look at the games
Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
China will host the 2022 Winter Olympics amid controversy—the worsening Covid-19 pandemic and a diplomatic boycott of the games over China's treatment of the Uyghur Muslims. Should the games go on? Jules Boykoff says no—for reasons that go beyond COVID and genocide. The Olympics create serious problems for local populations. Join us for a discussion that looks at why the Olympics are broken.

RSVP here

  Online Event  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Join us for a panel discussing the challenges to voting access at the local and national level. We will be joined by two experts and participants in recent efforts to secure ballot access here at Bard in order to explore the nature of challenges in the Hudson Valley and across the nation.

This panel will feature speakers Yale Bromberg (Bromberg Law LLC & Lecturer, Rutgers School of Law) and John Pelosi (Pelosi Wolf Spates LLP.)

Join via Zoom.
Passcode: 167459

Sponsored by The Common Course: The Making of Citizens: Local National Global and the Center for Civic Engagement.

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Peace is the goal for every country, community, and, hey, family. (See, we're funny here at BGIA.) In general, peace is the absence of war and violence. Through its work on the Global Peace Index and the Positive Peace Framework, the Institute for Economics and Peace takes peace and peace building further. It focuses on strengths not deficits and individual action on creating and sustaining positive societies.

Join us on Thursday, November 18 at 12pm for an hour long Positive Peace Workshop. In this workshop, participants will learn how to better think about actions and approaches to creating peaceful societies. It will focus on policy, strategy, and implementation. If you're interested in conflict resolution, policymaking, and peace building, don't miss this virtual event. RSVP required. 

Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  5:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Join us for a screening of the documentary followed by a discussion with the filmmaker, Avi Mograbi, and the co-director of Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence, Avner Gvaryahu.

  Panel I: Arts of Resistance, 10:00am - 12:00pm
Panel II: Systems and Power, 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Finberg House  Panel I: Arts of Resistance, 10:00am - 12:00pm

Mie Inouye, “W.E.B. Du Bois on ‘The Art of Organization’”

Rohma Khan, "Tipping Point: Immigrant Workers' Activism in the Taxi and Restaurant Industries"
 
Jomaira Salas-Pujols, “Black Girl Refusal: "Acting Out" Against Discipline & Scarcity in Schools”
 
Pınar Kemerli, “Muslim Nonviolence in an Age of Islamism: War-resistance and Decolonization in Turkey”

Panel II: Systems and Power, 2:00pm - 3:30pm

Rupali Warke, “The Zenana that incited war: Maharajpur, 1843”
 
Lucas Pinheiro, “Data Factories: The Politics of Digital Work at Google and MTurk” Yarran Hominh, “The Problem of Unfreedom”
 

Afghanistan: 20 Years On 
Online Event  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in 2001, in an effort to capture and defeat Al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden. Twenty years later, Joe Biden ended this "forever" war this past summer, noting that Washington achieved its goal of capturing bin Laden. Yet, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was chaotic, as thousands of Afghans scrambled to leave the country. Was withdrawal the right decision? Did the U.S. achieve its goal in Afghanistan? To answer thse questions, we'll be joined by former U.S. State Department official Annie Pforzheimer. Ms. Pforzheimer served as the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul from 2017-18. She also served as the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Afghanistan. She will be joined by Bard professor Fred Hof, also an alumnus from the State Department. Via Zoom. RSVP required. 

  A Guide to the Field and Turning It Into a Career
Olin Humanities, Room 201  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Among the fields that white men continue to dominate is international relations/foreign policy. Elmira Bayrasli is working to change that. Join us on Monday, September 13, at 6pm, as she discusses her multidisciplinary career, which has included stints at the U.S. State Department working for Madeleine Albright, as the chief spokesperson for the OSCE Mission for Bosnia-Herzegovina, and now as both the founder of a nonprofit focused on empowering women in foreign affairs and director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program. Learn about how to navigate the male-dominated field and get that dream job.

9/11: 20 Years On 
Online Event  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
September 11. 2001 was the first foreign attack on U.S. soil. Not long after, then U.S. President George W. Bush put forward an aggressive plan to retaliate against the perpetrators. It gave birth to the "war on terror," which has been a core component of U.S. foreign policy since. How has this war on terror impacted U.S. foreign policy and America's place in the world? Joining us to answer that question and dive into a look at 9/11 20 years on are Karen Greenberg, Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law and the author of the forthcoming book, Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, Maha Hilal, the inaugural Michael Ratner fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and author of Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11, and Jamil Dakwar, BGIA professor and the Director of the ACLU's Human Rights Program. Via Zoom. RSVP required. 

Foreign Policy in the Digital Age
Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Foreign policy is among the things that the Internet has revolutionized. No longer is diplomacy confined to oak-paneled rooms and gilded corridors. This change, as New York Times reporter Mark Landler noted, “happened so fast that it left the foreign policy establishment gasping to catch up.” Author Adam Segal joins us for a conversation about how technology has changed diplomacy, geopolitics, war, and, most of all, power. 

 

A conversation about activism and change
Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
George Floyd's murder in May 2020 shined a brutal light on racism and inequality, not only in the U.S. but throughout the world. It renewed energy into the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Today, BLM is widely embraced and conversations about how to end systemic racism have become mainstream. What changed? And how are activists working to build on this momentum and achieve change? Talaya Robinson-Dancy and Cammie Jones join us virtually on Thursday, June 24 at 12pm for the Chace Speaker Hour to discuss. Talaya Dancy was the Founder and President of the Black Body Experience Council at Bard College and was the co-head of the Womxn of Color United club. Cammie Jones is the Executive Director of Community Engagement and Inclusion at Columbia University. Please join us on Zoom. 
 

We'll be in-person in NYC this fall!
Online Event  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join us to learn more about the BGIA program, our courses, internships and our in-person semester in NYC this fall.



To apply for  the fall '21 semester, please visit: https://bard.studioabroad.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=Programs.ViewProgram&Program_ID=41053

What have we learned about the coronavirus?  
Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Last March changed all of our lives. What have learned about the coronavirus? Now that there are vaccines, how quickly will we go back to "normal?" What does the future hold for future pandemics? We'll be joined by Laurie Garrett, author of many books on pandemics, including The Coming Plague, and Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project. Save the date: Wednesday, March 10, at 12pm EST/6pm Vienna. You don't want to miss this talk. RSVP required.

Learn more about the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program.
Online Event  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Are you an undergrad eager for a career in international relations or foreign policy? Where do you start? What do you need to be considered? Join us to learn more about the Bard Globalization and International Affairs semester away program for Summer 2021/Fall 2021. We’ll help you get placed at a top organization, while earning academic credit. RSVP required.

A Look at the Arab Spring a Decade Later
Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
A decade has passed since hundreds of thousands poured into Cairo's Tahrir Square, igniting the Arab Spring. What has happened since? Join us on Thursday, February 11 (exactly 10 years to the day that Hosni Mubarak stepped down), at 12pm EST/6pm Vienna. We'll be joined by Century Foundation's Thanassis Cambanis, author of Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story, and Michael Hanna, author of Arab Politics Beyond the Uprisings. RSVP required. 

Should the US set up a truth commission after the Trump presidency? 
Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
We kick off our 2021 Chace Talk series with a discussion on Trump and truth, specifically, whether it's worth considering a truth and reconciliation commission. We’ll be joined by Bard College professor Omar Encarnación, who penned an article, “Truth After Trump,” for Foreign Policy magazine. Join us on January 28 at 12pm EST/6pm Vienna. RSVP required. 

Online Event  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
All of us work and study on a large campus and live in a thinly populated rural area. We tend to inhabit virtual bubbles where we are surrounded by people who see things the way we do. And whether we are newcomers to the Mid-Hudson Valley or longtime residents, we do not always understand the “signs” we encounter. What do yard signs in election season or “thin blue line” flags tell us about the landscape in which we live? What do colonial estates-turned-museums reveal about enduring inequalities? What murals and monuments “hide” in plain sight because they do not match our pre-set ideas about the place we may (or may not) feel we belong to? Who harvests the local crops but cannot afford to shop at the farmers’ market?
 
In an effort to shine some light on systemic racism and anti-racist alternatives in our everyday surroundings, the Division of Social Studies is organizing a “Reading the Signs” roundtable over Zoom as well as an accompanying online archive. The roundtable will also offer Bard community members an opportunity to reflect on the implications of the election on November 3rd, whatever the outcome happens to be.

Call for Contributions!
What signs do you think need reading? What is an image, flag, space, mural, monument, memorial, item of clothing, word/phrase, etc. that points to instances of systemic racism in the past or present? What is a sign that points to anti-racist precedents in the past and/or emancipatory possibilities for the future?
 
In the days leading up to the roundtable, the Social Studies Division invites all Bard community members (students, staff, and faculty) to send photos, videos, audio recordings, and other documents of systemic racism and anti-racism to [email protected].
 
All contributions must be accompanied by a brief written statement (anything from a few sentences to a substantial paragraph) that provides initial context, explanation, and interpretation.
 
The roundtable will feature many of these contributions, which can be made anonymous upon request. The Division of Social Studies will also maintain an online archive of signs that will be available to Bard community members before and after the event.

Join via Zoom 
Meeting ID: 863 8920 3500
Passcode: 583480

Online Event  2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This event will take place at 8pm Vienna time.Join Zoom EventThis event is sponsored by the Open Society University Network

More than a week after the election, results may remain unclear but the narrative of “where we go from here” will have started to form. Professor Walter Russell Mead and Matt Taibbi, author, journalist, and contributing editor for Rolling Stone, will discuss the future of US foreign policy and the immediate lessons of the 2020 election.

Matt Taibbi '92 is a journalist, contributing editor for Rolling Stone, and the author of several bestselling books including, most recently, Hate Inc., an incisive look into how media is “manufacturing discontent” and driving polarization in the US. Taibbi is also the publisher of a newsletter on Substack and cohost of the Useful Idiots podcast.

A live broadcast of “How to Fix Democracy,” a talk-show hosted by Andrew Keen and produced by Bertelsmann Foundation and Humanity in Action
Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This is a hybrid event, with a maximum of 20 Bard students attending in person at the Ottaway Film Center. Students interested in attending in person may RSVP to Nik Slackman at [email protected].

We invite additional members of the campus community and the public to attend via Zoom webinar.

Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://bard.zoom.us/j/83654732077?pwd=TnJOb25HVEZ5SmVNZTM0L0FiTm9Idz09
Passcode: 945151
Or iPhone one-tap :
    US: +16465588656,,83654732077#,,,,,,0#,,945151#  or +13126266799,,83654732077#,,,,,,0#,,945151#
Or Telephone:
    Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location):
        US: +1 646 558 8656  or +1 312 626 6799  or +1 301 715 8592  or +1 669 900 9128  or +1 253 215 8782  or +1 346 248 7799
Webinar ID: 836 5473 2077
Passcode: 945151
    International numbers available: https://bard.zoom.us/u/kbBuu8IXhP

CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art  Marking one week prior to the presidential election and flying until the votes have been counted and the election results are ratified, CCS Bard will present Flag, 2005, by Frank Benson. Flag was first flown at CCS Bard in 2005 as part of an exhibition titled Uncertain States of America. Fifteen years later, the echoes of that title reverberate through our media as well as our psyches. Hoisting Flag at this time, on the 50-ft. pole at the entrance to the Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art, provides a visual representation of the distorted and perilous period in which we live, as the nation struggles through several simultaneous crises and hurtles toward the most consequential election of our lives.

CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art  Marking one week prior to the presidential election and flying until the votes have been counted and the election results are ratified, CCS Bard will present Flag, 2005, by Frank Benson. Flag was first flown at CCS Bard in 2005 as part of an exhibition titled Uncertain States of America. Fifteen years later, the echoes of that title reverberate through our media as well as our psyches. Hoisting Flag at this time, on the 50-ft. pole at the entrance to the Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art, provides a visual representation of the distorted and perilous period in which we live, as the nation struggles through several simultaneous crises and hurtles toward the most consequential election of our lives.

CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art  Marking one week prior to the presidential election and flying until the votes have been counted and the election results are ratified, CCS Bard will present Flag, 2005, by Frank Benson. Flag was first flown at CCS Bard in 2005 as part of an exhibition titled Uncertain States of America. Fifteen years later, the echoes of that title reverberate through our media as well as our psyches. Hoisting Flag at this time, on the 50-ft. pole at the entrance to the Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art, provides a visual representation of the distorted and perilous period in which we live, as the nation struggles through several simultaneous crises and hurtles toward the most consequential election of our lives.

CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art  Marking one week prior to the presidential election and flying until the votes have been counted and the election results are ratified, CCS Bard will present Flag, 2005, by Frank Benson. Flag was first flown at CCS Bard in 2005 as part of an exhibition titled Uncertain States of America. Fifteen years later, the echoes of that title reverberate through our media as well as our psyches. Hoisting Flag at this time, on the 50-ft. pole at the entrance to the Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art, provides a visual representation of the distorted and perilous period in which we live, as the nation struggles through several simultaneous crises and hurtles toward the most consequential election of our lives.

CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art  Marking one week prior to the presidential election and flying until the votes have been counted and the election results are ratified, CCS Bard will present Flag, 2005, by Frank Benson. Flag was first flown at CCS Bard in 2005 as part of an exhibition titled Uncertain States of America. Fifteen years later, the echoes of that title reverberate through our media as well as our psyches. Hoisting Flag at this time, on the 50-ft. pole at the entrance to the Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art, provides a visual representation of the distorted and perilous period in which we live, as the nation struggles through several simultaneous crises and hurtles toward the most consequential election of our lives.

CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art  Marking one week prior to the presidential election and flying until the votes have been counted and the election results are ratified, CCS Bard will present Flag, 2005, by Frank Benson. Flag was first flown at CCS Bard in 2005 as part of an exhibition titled Uncertain States of America. Fifteen years later, the echoes of that title reverberate through our media as well as our psyches. Hoisting Flag at this time, on the 50-ft. pole at the entrance to the Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art, provides a visual representation of the distorted and perilous period in which we live, as the nation struggles through several simultaneous crises and hurtles toward the most consequential election of our lives.

CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art  Marking one week prior to the presidential election and flying until the votes have been counted and the election results are ratified, CCS Bard will present Flag, 2005, by Frank Benson. Flag was first flown at CCS Bard in 2005 as part of an exhibition titled Uncertain States of America. Fifteen years later, the echoes of that title reverberate through our media as well as our psyches. Hoisting Flag at this time, on the 50-ft. pole at the entrance to the Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art, provides a visual representation of the distorted and perilous period in which we live, as the nation struggles through several simultaneous crises and hurtles toward the most consequential election of our lives.

CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art  Marking one week prior to the presidential election and flying until the votes have been counted and the election results are ratified, CCS Bard will present Flag, 2005, by Frank Benson. Flag was first flown at CCS Bard in 2005 as part of an exhibition titled Uncertain States of America. Fifteen years later, the echoes of that title reverberate through our media as well as our psyches. Hoisting Flag at this time, on the 50-ft. pole at the entrance to the Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art, provides a visual representation of the distorted and perilous period in which we live, as the nation struggles through several simultaneous crises and hurtles toward the most consequential election of our lives.

  Online Event  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Jessica Segal, a candidate for Dutchess County Court Judge on the Democratic and Green tickets will visit Bard to talk about her campaign and judicial elections. A Q&A will follow.



https://bard.zoom.us/j/88292871383?pwd=Nm43S2hZUHR2a0xoMUY5VTNXdjV5dz09

  Online Event  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Assembly Member Kevin Cahill who represents the 103rd District in the New State Assembly (which includes Bard College) will be visiting campus to discuss his campaign for re-election.

Please register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMpceGprD8iE9TmxgdVkVl9Qvl2r5m0qizv

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Mastering the Interview
Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Bard Globalization and International Affairs program will be hosting a professional development series so that you can learn more about the program and get a glimpse of what we offer. Brush up on your cover letter and resume writing and get updated tips on interviewing amid the time of Covid-19. Click on the Event Brite link to sign up and learn more. 

Cutting-edge cover letters
Online Event  4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Sign up on EventBrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bgia-professional-development-info-sessions-tickets-121414240261

The Bard Globalization and International Affairs program will be hosting a professional development series so that you can learn more about the program and get a glimpse of what we offer. Brush up on your cover letter and resume writing and get updated tips on interviewing amid the time of Covid-19. Click on the Event Brite link to sign up and learn more. 

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Dr. Kiron Skinner, former director for policy planning at the US State Department and senior adviser to the Secretary of State, will join Walter Russell Mead to discuss what a second Trump administration's foreign policy priorities and challenges might be.

To join via Zoom:
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Passcode: 927841
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The Power of the Public Intellectual Series, moderated by Bard College Professor and Wall Street Journal “Global View” columnist Walter Russell Mead, is a series of virtual dialogues focused on the stakes and core issues of the 2020 US election. Professor Mead will be joined by distinguished policy experts, academics, and public servants to discuss the choice America will make this November. Over the course of several livestreamed events, the series will provide insight into both campaigns’ perspectives and the potential consequences, particularly for foreign policy, of either outcome.Kiron Skinner, Taube Professor of International Relations and Politics at Carnegie Mellon University, was senior policy adviser to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Skinner also served as director of policy planning, one of the State Department’s most influential positions.. Skinner also serves as director of policy planning, one of the State Department’s most influential positions. Skinner is the founding director of Carnegie Mellon’s Institute for Politics and Strategy (IPS) and a renowned expert in foreign policy. She served on President Trump’s national security transition team in 2016.
 Learn more about the OSUN 2020 U.S. Election Series

Resume writing
Online Event  10:00 am – 11:00 am EDT/GMT-4
The Bard Globalization and International Affairs program will be hosting a professional development series so that you can learn more about the program and get a glimpse of what we offer. Brush up on your cover letter and resume writing and get updated tips on interviewing amid the time of Covid-19. Click on the Event Brite link to sign up and learn more. 

  Online Event  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
PS 265 Campaign 2020 will host Karen S. Smythe, who is running as the Democratic nominee for the New York State Senate in the 41st Senate District for a talk and Q&A. The event is open to the Bard community. 

Join via Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/93787740088?pwd=aExsNVNxekxBVlpnQWxwY2g4R09RQT09
 

  Online Event  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Students beginning Senior Projects in Political Studies and related programs are invited to join librarians Jeremy Hall and Alexa Murphy for a one-hour workshop to learn strategies for navigating the library's resources, searching effectively, and accessing sources.

Topic: Research Workshop for Political Studies Seniors
Time: September 18, 2020 1:00pm Eastern Daylight Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
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Study Away in NYC! Experience International Affairs First-Hand
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Meet with BGIA Director Elmira Bayrasli and Associate Dean of Civic Engagement and Director of Strategic Partnerships Brian Mateo for an overview about the program based in NYC, including:

- BGIA faculty and course offerings
- Internships and student projects
- Our dorms in NYC
- How to apply to BGIA
- Q&A

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Anna Rosmus, an author and researcher whose high school essay exposed the Nazi past of her home town, will speak about her research and experiences, the importance of historical truth, and the challenges of being labeled a traitor, following the showing of The Nasty Girl, a film based on Anna’s life. Cosponsored by Center for Civic Engagement, German Studies, Hannah Arendt Center, Historical Studies, Political Studies.

  Neil Roberts; Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Political Theory, and the Philosophy of Religion at Williams College
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5
His talk features pieces of his latest book project that examines what it means to live free, the challenges of genres of pessimism, and finally provides a way forward for the pessimistic.  
Neil Roberts received a B.A. in Afro-American Studies and Law & Public Policy from Brown University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago with a specialization in political theory. A high school teacher, debate coach, and NCAA Division 1 soccer player prior to graduate school, Roberts is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation as well as a member of the Caribbean Philosophical Association Board of Directors.

His present writings deal with the intersections of Caribbean, Continental, and North American political theory with respect to theorizing the concepts of freedom and agency. Roberts is co-editor of both the CAS Working Papers in Africana Studies Series (with Ben Vinson) and a collection of essays (with Jane Anna Gordon) on the theme Creolizing Rousseau (2015), and he is the guest editor of a Theory & Event symposium on the Trayvon Martin case. In addition to being on the Executive Editorial Board of the journal Political Theory and former Chair of CPA Publishing Partnerships that includes The C.L.R. James Journal and books with Rowman and Littlefield International, he is author of the award-winning book Freedom as Marronage (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and the collaborative work Journeys in Caribbean Thought (2016). His most recent book is A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (2018) from The University Press of Kentucky. Roberts served as President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2016 to December 2019. Since July 2018, he has been the W. Ford Schumann Faculty Fellow in Democratic Studies.

Hegeman 308  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Join EUS faculty, staff, and students for food, drink, and conversation.We will be introducing the Spring 2020 EUS course listings, discussing internship opportunities, requirements, and the development of a new EUS course on Environmental Racism.All are welcome!

  Stacey Liou
Ph.D. candidate
Department of Political Science, University of California, Irvine
Olin Language Center 120  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
How do political assemblies like protests and demonstrations capture the attention of public audiences? Such gatherings are a major way that people around the world understand political action and use it to challenge the status quo, especially in today’s political climate. Drawing on archival material related to 1992 “Rodney King Riots” and a major 1994 march challenging California’s Proposition 187, I argue that political assemblies capture public attention through a complex interplay of speech, physical presence and affect, which together convey the force of a political collective. In this talk, I will focus on the ways a public gathering creates a sense of collective identity and intention. I engage theories of gender performativity to explain that there is no essential political collective assembled in the streets; instead, collectivity is the performative effect of gathering.

  Anna Terwiel
Visiting Assistant Professor in Political Theory, Trinity College
Olin Language Center 120  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The US imprisons more people than any other country: 2.1 million people are currently confined in jails and prisons. In the face of mass incarceration, there are growing calls not just for prison reform but also for prison abolition. Abolitionists liken their efforts to the fight against slavery, but how can they realize such far-reaching political change? I argue that the prison abolition movement can realize its commitments to justice, freedom, and equality only if it keeps problematization—the practice of unsettling established assumptions—at its core. I develop this argument through a case study of a mass hunger strike in apartheid South Africa in which doctors challenged indefinite detention as a violation of medical ethics. The case shows not only that professional associations may contribute to prison abolition by problematizing confinement, but also that the domain of prison abolition should be understood expansively to include the forced confinement of people with disabilities.

  Jennie Ikuta
Assistant Professor of Political Theory
Department of Political Science, University of Tulsa
Olin Language Center 120  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk builds upon recent contributions to the growing literature on Tocqueville and race by exploiting underappreciated parallels in Tocqueville’s thought between European feudalism and American racial subordination. Specifically, it provides a systematic account of racial aristocracy as a parallel to feudal aristocracy, thereby yielding a comprehensive structural account of American race-relations in Tocqueville’s thought. It shows how four key features of Tocqueville’s conception of feudal aristocracy—heritability, membership, privilege, and exclusion—provide the foundation for an implicit account of white supremacy. In this way, it demonstrates that Tocqueville conceived of the United States as a racial aristocracy; specifically, an aristocracy of whiteness. Reconstructing Tocqueville’s structural account of white supremacy therefore dispels the myth that he held a “prejudice” or “anomaly” theory of racism; that is, his views on race have more in common with those of W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles Mills, for example, than Gunnar Myrdal. The talk also explores the advantages of conceiving of whiteness as a form of aristocracy rather than property, and it concludes by reflecting upon the implications for achieving racial equality in the United States.

  Frances Negron-Muntaner, Columbia University
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In 2019, scholar, writer and artist Frances Negrón-Muntaner conceived the award-winning art installation Valor y Cambio to explore what people in Puerto Rico valued and to introduce the concept of a community currency. The project exceeded all expectations by attracting thousands of participants and inspiring the creation of community currencies in Puerto Rico and the United States. In this talk, Negrón-Muntaner reflects on the origins and impact of the project, and introduces a new concept arising from it: decolonial joy. This is a specific form of joy that arises when participants envision and experience a time where neither colonialism nor coloniality rule their lives.

  Emma Rodman
Ph.D. candidate
Department of Political Science, University of Washington
Hegeman 106  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Is the idea of equality in America an inherently democratizing ideal? Or, paradoxically, does a commitment to equality produce inegalitarian political effects? I take up these questions by looking at African American political thinker W. E. B. Du Bois's understudied idea of “social equality.” Rejecting the Jim Crow bifurcation of political equality from social equality, Du Bois argues that a racially egalitarian democracy requires addressing racism in social and interpersonal relations. I argue that his solution to this problem of social equality – a solution he terms “self-conscious manhood” – is an individualist one, open to people of all races, genders, and classes. Such a self-consciously manly individual achieves socially equal recognition from others by engaging in radical truth-telling and purifying isolation, and demonstrating both a free anarchy of the spirit and a will to strive and act. However, through a close reading of Du Bois’s works of biography, editorial, and fiction, I show that self-conscious manhood is committed to an exclusionary, atomized, and gendered ethic of self-creation rather than a democratic political and social order. Building on Du Bois’s own theorizing on the nature of social equality, I argue that these anti-democratic effects inhere not in Du Bois’s particular solution of self-conscious manhood but are instead intrinsic to the pursuit of social equality itself.

Tommy Buser-Clancy
Staff-attorney, Texas ACLU
Hegeman 204A  11:30 am – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Crystal Mason, a Black mother of three from Texas, thought she was performing her civic duty by filling out a provisional ballot in the 2016 election. She didn't know it would land her a five-year prison sentence, upending her family and the life she had built.

At the time, Crystal was on federal supervised release, a preliminary period of freedom for individuals who have served their full time of incarceration in federal prison. Nobody told her that the state considered her ineligible to vote. Yet the state of Texas contended that somehow, she should have known. Although the state didn’t even count her provisional ballot, it still intends to send her to prison for the crime of voting while the state considered her ineligible.

Join us for a presentation by Tommy Buser-Clancy, staff-attorney for Texas ACLU who, alongside the Texas Civil Rights Project, are fighting Crystal Mason’s case in the courts.

Professor Moshe Halbertal
NYU & Hebrew University
at 4:45pm in Olin 102 & Sunday, October 27th at 7PM at The Sixth Street Community Synagogue  Thursday, October 24th at 4:45pm in Olin 102

"The Biblical Book of Samuel and the Birth of Politics: Two Faces of Political Violence"
The Book of Samuel is universally acknowledged as one of the supreme achievements of biblical literature. Yet the book's anonymous author was more than an inspired storyteller. The author was also an uncannily astute observer of political life and the moral compromises and contradictions that the struggle for power inevitably entails. The lecture will explore the ways in which the book of Samuel understands political violence political violence unleashed by the sovereign on his own subjects as it is rooted in the paranoia of the isolated ruler and the deniability fostered by hierarchical action through proxies.


Sunday, October 27th at 7PM
The Sixth Street Community Synagogue
325 E. Sixth Street
New York, NY

"Confronting Loss: The Meaning and Experience of Mourning form the Talmud to Maimonides"
The experience of loss and mourning is a painful and ultimately inescapable feature of human life. Jewish law established practices of mourning that prescribe a rather detailed structure of the mourner’s conduct as well as the response of the community to the mourner and its obligation to provide consolation. Maimonides codified this body of regulations in his great code of Jewish Law, the Mishneh Torah, in the section titled “The Laws of Mourning.” This lecture will focus on the attempt to understand the meaning and practice of mourning in the Talmudic tradition and in Maimonides’ thought. It will explore the relationship of the concept of mourning in the Jewish tradition to other understandings of the dynamics of mourning such as Freud’s seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia.

  Dale Ho, ACLU Voting Rights Project Director
Olin Humanities, Room 201  4:45 pm – 6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
Since the 2010 midterm election, a wave of voter suppression laws has been unleashed around the country. The ACLU has been at the frontlines, successful challenging unnecessary voter registration requirements and barriers on Election Day in dozens of states. Attacks on voting rights have now grown to encompass not only registration and the ballot, but also the Decennial Census itself, which the Trump Administration sought to weaponize by attempting to add citizenship question to the census questionnaire. ACLU Voting Rights Project Director, Dale Ho, who argued the census citizenship question case in the Supreme Court, will address these issues and emerging threats to voting rights as we head towards the 2020 election.

  Ambassador Frederic Hof
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In 2018 Congress created the Syria Study Group, a bipartisan panel of 12 experts charged with assessing the situation in Syria, defining the U.S. policy objective in that war-torn country, and devising a strategy to accomplish the objective. Bard’s diplomat in residence, Ambassador Frederic C. Hof, served as a member of the Group, whose report is being issued on September 26. Please join Ambassador Hof for a discussion of what is in the report and what may be next for U.S. policy in Syria. 

Blithewood  10:00 am – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join us as a distinguished roster of historians, IR scholars, and economists discuss the legacy of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, which brought an end to World War I. Far from ending the “war to end all wars,” Versailles saddled the world with debts, imbalances, and festering geopolitical problems that helped lead to the Second World War, many of which are still with us today.

Speakers include: The Lord Skidelsky, Baron of Tilton, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy, Warwick University, and Member of the House of Lords, UK Parliament Dr. Nick Lloyd, King’s College London, and author, Passchendaele and Hundred Days Sean McMeekin, Francis Flournoy Professor of European History, Bard College Nur Bilge Criss, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, Bilkent University David Woolner, Professor of History, Resident Historian of the Roosevelt Institute Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Literature, Bard College Pavlina Tcherneva, Economics Program Director and Associate Professor, Bard College Jan Kregel, Director of Research, Levy Economics Institute L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics, Bard College, and Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute Jörg Bibow, Professor of Economics, Skidmore College, and Research Associate, Levy Economics Institute
Please click on this link to register for the event by April 29th: Registration form
 Schedule: 10:15 AM Welcome Remarks from Dimitri Papadimitriou, President of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM The First World War and the Versailles Treaty Dr. Nick Lloyd “The Hundred Days. How World War I Ended.” Sean McMeekin “Unfinished Business. 1918 on the War’s Eastern Fronts.” David Woolner, Nur Bilge Criss, and Richard Aldous Panel Discussion 12:00 - 12:30 PM Lunch 12:30 PM Eugene Meyer Lecture by Lord Robert Skidelsky “Could Germany have paid? John Maynard Keynes’s lesson for Britain and the Eurozone. ” with an introduction by Pavlina R. Tcherneva 1:30 - 2:00 PM Coffee break and student poster presentations 2:00 - 3:15 PM The Economic Consequences Moderator: Pavlina R. Tcherneva Jan Kregel “Keynes on International Relations: Gunboat Diplomacy, Free Trade and Capital Controls” L. Randall Wray “How To Pay for the War (against neoliberalism)” Jörg Bibow “Learning the Wrong Lessons: How Germany’s anti- Keynesianism has brought Europe to its knees”

2018 American Book Award–winning author Valeria Luiselli reads from her work
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
On Tuesday, April 23, at 6:00 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center, Valeria Luiselli reads from her work. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series and the Written Arts Program, and introduced by MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. Books by Valeria Luiselli will be available for sale, courtesy of Oblong Books & Music.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and has lived in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa, India, Spain, France, and New York City. She is the author of a book of essays, Papeles falsos/Sidewalks (2012, 2014), and the internationally acclaimed novel Los ingravidos / Faces in the Crowd (2013, 2014), which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. In 2014, she won the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 prize, an annual award honoring young and promising fiction writers. Her novel La historia de mis dientes / The Story of My Teeth (2013, 2015) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the Azul Prize in Canada; was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Best Translated Book Award, and the Impac Prize 2017; and was named one of the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of the Year. Her recent book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions won the 2018 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

Luiselli received her PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University. Her books have been translated into more than 20 languages, and her writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and the New Yorker. Her latest novel, Lost Children Archive (2019), which was written in English, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Luiselli was recently appointed as writer in residence in the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard College.
 PRAISE FOR VALERIA LUISELLI
“The novel truly becomes novel again in Luiselli’s hands—electric, elastic, alluring, new. . . . She is a superb chronicler.” —New York Times

“Riveting, lyrical, virtuosic. . . . Luiselli’s metaphors are wrought with devastating precision. . . . The brilliance of the writing stirs rage and pity. It humanizes us.” —New York Times Book Review

“Daring, wholly original, brilliant . . . fascinating. . . . Luiselli is an extraordinary writer [with] a freewheeling novelist’s imagination.” —NPR

“A comprehensive literary intelligence.” —James Wood, New Yorker

“A master. . . . Luiselli confronts big picture questions: What does it mean to be American? To what lengths should we go to bear witness? Will history ever stop repeating itself? All the while, her language is so transporting, it stops you time and again.” —Carmen Maria Machado, O Magazine

“One of the most fascinating and impassioned authors at work today.” —Literary Hub

Jia Lynn Yang, Deputy National Editor, The New York Times
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This talk will trace the current immigration debate back to the Supreme Court fight in 1922 over whether a Japanese-born man could naturalize, and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which established ethnic quotas favoring “Anglo-Saxons.” Because immigration debates have long been predicated on who counts as sufficiently “white,” the current system—in which there are far more Asian and Hispanic immigrants than European—challenges traditional notions of who counts as American. Yang will discuss how the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act set us on this current course, but left much unfinished work around race and national identity that we confront today during the Trump administration. The talk will also address media coverage of Trump’s immigration policies as well as how to infuse journalistic work with a sense of history.

Jia Lynn Yang is a deputy national editor at the New York Times, where she helps oversee coverage of the country. Previously, she was deputy national security editor at the Washington Post, where she was an editor on the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2018 for its coverage of Trump and Russia. She is writing a book on the history of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, Un-American Elements, forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2020.

A Photo and Film Exhibit
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Gallery 
A panel discussion, followed by a reception, will take place in Weis Cinema on Thursday, February 28, 5:00–6:30 p.m.

A Symposium Marking the 75th Anniversary of the Tehran Conference
Olin Hall  9:00 am – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Organized by the Bard College Center for Civic Engagement, in association with the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Smolny) of St. Petersburg State University, Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, the Roosevelt Institute, and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum

For most Americans, the most controversial—and famous—summit meeting of the Second World War remains the Yalta Conference, where, in the minds of many conservative critics, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt essentially handed over control of Poland and much of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. What is often overlooked, however, is that most of the agreements achieved at Yalta were first discussed over a year earlier at the Tehran Conference. Viewed from this perspective, the Yalta Conference represents the moment at which “the Big Three” put the finishing touches on what was already agreed at the Tehran gathering.

The aim of this joint U.S.-Russian symposium is to gain a deeper understanding of the Tehran Conference and what impact the decisions taken at this first, all-important summit meeting had on U.S.-Russian relations, not only during the Yalta Conference but also in the years that followed. The event will include presentations from leading historians and political scientists from the United States, Russia, and Great Britain, touching on historical topics such as Poland, the Second Front, future of Germany, postwar planning, shifting balance of power, Soviet entry into the war against Japan, as well as the current state of Russian-American relations.

The symposium will be accompanied by an exhibition of key documents and photographs from the FDR Presidential Library and the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library at the Stevenson Library at Bard College from November 26 to December 24, 2018.

The symposium is free and open to the public. No registration is required.
We will be webcasting via Facebook Live on the Bard Center for Civic Engagement Facebook page, beginning at 9:00 am on November 30.

You can download the symposium program via the link at the bottom of this page.Symposium Schedule9:00-10:00 a.m. Conference Opening: Understanding Tehran and Yalta A Moment in U.S.–Russian Relations - Jonathan Becker, Bard College What Tehran 1943 and Tehran 2018 Tell Us about Russian-American Relations - Darya Pushkina, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University, Russian Federation [via video-feed] New Documentary Evidence Regarding the Organization of the Tehran and Yalta Conferences – Olga Golovina, Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, Russian Federation [via video-feed]10:00–11:00 a.m. Keynote Address The Soviet Union in U.S. Strategic Planning during World War II – Mark Stoler, University of Vermont11:00–11:15 a.m. Coffee Break

11:15–12:45 p.m. Tehran in Retrospect: The Turning Point of the Second World War? Chair and Discussant – Yana Skorobogatov, Williams College Tehran and Stalin’s Grand Strategy - Sean McMeekin, Bard College At the Peak of Friendship: Soviet-American Perceptions from Tehran to Yalta – Ivan Kurilla, European University at St. Petersburg, Russian Federation Tehran as the Foundation of the Postwar World – Andrew Buchanan, University of Vermont12:45–2:00 p.m. Lunch Break

2:00–3:30 p.m. Yalta in Retrospect: Start of the Cold War? Chair - Richard Aldous, Bard College Looking Beyond Victory: FDR and the Russians at Yalta – David Woolner, Roosevelt Institute/Marist College/Bard College “I don’t think I’m Wrong about Stalin:” Churchill’s Strategic and Diplomatic Assumptions at Yalta - Richard Toye, University of Exeter, United Kingdom Stalin’s Victory at Yalta – Harold Goldberg, Sewanee–The University of the South Discussant – Yuri Rogoulev, Moscow State University, Russian Federation3:30–4:00 p.m. The Student Perspective Presentation of the Bard College Student-Curated Digital Exhibition on the Tehran and Yalta Conferences4:00–4:15 p.m. Coffee Break

4:15–5:45 p.m. The State of U.S.-Russian Relations Today Chair and Discussant – Robert Person, United States Military Academy, West Point The Puffer Fish and the Eagle: Russia and the United States since the End of World War II – Timothy Naftali, New York University A New Yalta? Is There an Affirmative Project in Russian Foreign Policy and Are We to Take It Seriously? – Artemy Magun, European University at St. Petersburg, Russian Federation Putin and America: U.S.-Russian Relations Today - Nina Khrushcheva, The New School5:45 p.m. Closing Remarks – David Woolner


Download: SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM.pdf View the program

  Greg Drilling
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:45 pm – 6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Greg Drilling recently served as a Finance Associate on Governor Andrew Cuomo' re-election campaign. In this role, he worked with a small team to create, organize, and implement a fundraising strategy that raised over $38 million. Greg also worked closely with the campaign's Research Director during the final six months of the campaign. Prior to working on Governor Cuomo's campaign, Greg worked as a Senior Political Fundraiser at a New York City-based consulting firm where his clients included federal, state, and local candidates. Greg graduated from Bard College and the Bard College Conservatory of Music in 2016 after completing degrees in Political Studies and Music Performance. He is currently on the advisory board for the Bard Conservatory.

Nina Hagel, Bates College
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Across the humanities and social sciences, appeals to authenticity have been subject to a variety of criticisms. Developments in postfoundational philosophy have challenged many of the foundational concepts underlying ideas of authenticity, such as a unitary self, transparent self-knowledge, and accounts of authentic roots. Many scholars are particularly critical of how authenticity is deployed in political life: authenticity claims may marginalize those deemed “inauthentic,” they may challenge facts and expertise in the name of feeling, and they may marginalize those who do not identify with their vision of the good. In this talk, I examine the political risks and possibilities of authenticity claims in a particular contemporary discourse—namely, in the self-descriptions of transgender children. At first glance, the authenticity claims in this discourse may generate troubling inadvertent effects: they may disseminate constraining and narrow standards of what it means to be “real,” they may encourage a false presentation of self in order to elicit rights and recognition, they may deem other identities less real and less valuable. I suggest that some of these effects arise from the particular frames we use to read these claims, and offer an alternative framing that may help us better negotiate their risks and grasp the political stakes of authenticity. In what I term a democratic frame, I show how there are certain ways of reading and deploying authenticity claims that can do the work of critique and resistance without becoming mired in potentially depoliticizing debates about ontological truths of the self, genuine self-knowledge, or “realness.” Such a reading separates the political stakes of authenticity from the ontological language often advanced by appeals to the term; showing that we don’t need to believe in a “true self” to grasp the political stakes of these claims. By attending to the ways we read authenticity claims, we might be able to counter the tendency to make automatic and unconscious determinations of authenticity, and enable the term to be deployed in freer and fairer ways.

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:30 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Panelists include

Jonathan Becker, Vice President for Academic Affairs
Erin Cannan, Vice President for Student Affairs
Cammie Jones, Assistant Dean for Civic Engagement
Simon Gilhooley, Assistant Professor of Political Studies
Joan Mandle, Executive Director of Democracy Matters

  Catherine Z. Sameh
University of California, Irvine
 
Olin Humanities, Room 102  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The anti-colonial thrust of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Iran has been narrated largely through key male theorists and politicians, primarily Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Shariati. Decolonial scholarship tends to resurrect this voice through its often uncritical and romanticized engagement with Shariati as the sole anti-colonial voice of Iran. Inviting attention to Iranian women’s rights activists as theorists in their own right, this talk will elaborate an alternative decolonial voice, one characterized by decoloniality’s very commitment to gendered analysis and unrelenting challenge to binary ways of thinking.

  Democratic Candidate for New York State Assembly District 103 (incumbent)
Barringer House Global Classroom  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Democratic Candidate for New York State Senate District 41
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This event is part of a series organized in coordination with the ELAS (Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences) courses PS 209, Civic Engagement, and PS 265, Campaign 2018. Please watch out for future announcements of other candidate visits to campus.
 

  Emily Bell, Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism
Olin Humanities, Room 102  3:15 pm – 4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Emily Bell is founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a leading thinker, commentator, and strategist on digital journalism. As editor in chief across Guardian websites and director of digital content for Guardian News and Media, Bell led the web team in pioneering live blogging, podcasting, multimedia formats, data, and social media, making the Guardian an internationally awarded beacon of digital transformation. She is coauthor of a number of lectures and papers on the transformation of journalism, including “Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present” (2012) with C. W. Anderson and Clay Shirky; coeditor of the book Journalism after Snowden (2017); and most recently, “The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley Re-engineered Journalism” (2017) with Taylor Owen.

  Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Based on demographic projections, most Americans believe that their society will transition soon to a majority-minority one. But the projections fail to adequately account for a major social and demographic phenomenon of the early 21st century: the rise of a group of young Americans with mixed minority-white ancestry. In a departure from the one-drop regime of past racism, these individuals appear to be growing up in mixed family settings, but because of the binary, zero-sum rigidities that still guide our thinking, they are mostly classified as minorities in demographic data. Without this classification, however, the emergence of a majority-minority society in the foreseeable future is far from certain. Moreover, the evidence we possess about the characteristics, social affiliations, and identities of mixed individuals contradicts an exclusively minority classification, except for partly black individuals, who suffer from high levels of racism. Taking into account the ambiguous social locations of most mixed minority-white persons, I suggest that, even should a majority-minority society appear, it will not look like we presently imagine it.

Inaugural Conference, History of Capitalism at Bard 
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  10:00 am – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Speakers include:
Kevin Duong (Bard)
David Kettler (Bard)
Zak Rawle (Bard)
Jane Glaubman (Cornell)
Joseph Sheehan (Bard)
Simon deBevoise (Bard)
Zeke Perkins (SEIU)
Ed Quish (Cornell)
Maggie Dickinson (CUNY)
Joy Al-Nemri (Bard)
Ella McLeod (Bard)
Laura Ford (Bard)
Holger Droessler (Bard)
 

Wakako Suzuki
PhD Candidate, UCLA
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
How and why did the political discourse of “little citizens” become a rhetorical tool enabling both national mobilization and social contestation in modern Japan? Despite the print media’s celebration of children’s citizenship and their status as subjects in Meiji Japan, the rights bestowed upon children were inconsistent, as were expectations of their actions as “little citizens” with a political identity. In this talk, I discuss how the development of formal education and the circulation of children’s magazines, such as The Boy’s World (Shōnen sekai, 1895–1933), created the historical conditions necessary to mobilize children as “little citizens.” At the same time, heterogeneous configurations of linguistic and literary practices in different cultural settings demonstrated various ways in which the vernacular conventions of childhood occasionally deviated from the operation of the state apparatus, functioning as a subversive force against the standardization of childhood. To exemplify such power dynamics, this talk highlights a series of literary works called shōnen-mono (stories about children and childhood), which emerged right after the First Sino-Japanese War (1864-1865) as a site of poetic imagination to resist social normalization and negate children’s subjection as imperial subjects under state power. By unpacking various symbolic constructions of “little citizens,” I demonstrate how the multilayered representation of children, as a part of discursive practices, lead to a complex interplay between standardization and decentralization in the politics and poetics of childhood in a modern capitalist society. 

Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice, 42 W 44th St, New York, New York 10036  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The United Nations is a key component of the post-WWII international system yet remains misunderstood and the target of criticism. Gillian Sorensen, senior adviser to the United Nations Foundation and longtime UN official, will discuss this institution in conversation with BGIA Director and Bard College Dean of International Studies James Ketterer. A reception will follow.

This event is part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series, cosponsored and hosted by the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice and supported by Foreign Affairs magazine. It is free and open to the public by RSVP.

Camille Robcis
Associate Professor of History, Cornell University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Hosted by Big Ideas 215: Of Utopias.
This talk explores the intersections of politics, philosophy, and radical psychiatry in 20th-century France. It focuses on a psychiatric reform movement called “institutional psychotherapy” that had an important influence on many intellectuals and activists, including François Tosquelles, Jean Oury, Felix Guattari, Frantz Fanon, Georges Canguilhem, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in Marxism and in Lacanian psychoanalysis, institutional psychotherapy advocated a fundamental restructuring of the asylum in order to transform the theory and practice of psychiatric care. More broadly, for many of these thinkers, the psychiatric offered a lens to rethink the political in the particular context of postwar France.

Camille Robcis is associate professor of history at Cornell University. Her teaching and research interests have focused on three broad issues: the historical construction of norms, the intellectual production of knowledge, and the articulation of universalism and difference in modern French history. Her first book, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (2013), examines how French policy makers called upon structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis to reassert the centrality of sexual difference as the foundation for all social and psychic organization. She is currently working on a history of institutional psychotherapy, a movement born after World War II that advocated a radical restructuring of the asylum in an attempt to rethink and reform psychiatric care.

Kristin Ross
Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature,
New York University
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5
The longest-lasting ongoing struggle in France today is the occupational attempt to block the construction of an international airport in farmland in western France, the ZAD, or “zone à defendre,” outside of Notre-Dame-des-Landes. In this talk I will consider a number of innovative practices reworked and lived by the inhabitants of the ZAD, in relation to historic examples such as the Commune de Paris of 1871. At the center of my presentation will be the notion of the territory and the logics of difference, possibility and autonomy it implies—the local, often rural construction of an autonomous zone, in secession from the state, which does not result in a closing in upon itself. What is a territory worth defending? What does it mean to defend a zone, or to work at creating—over time, and perhaps over a lifetime—a territory worthy of defense? How can a struggle whose particularity lies in being anchored in one place be extended to other territories?

Kristin Ross is professor emerita of comparative literature at New York University. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, she is the author of a number of books about modern and contemporary French political culture, all of which have appeared in French translation, including The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (1988); Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995); and May ’68 and Its Afterlives (2002). Her most recent book, Communal Luxury (2015), was published first in France by La Fabrique.

The Bard Fiction Prize winner and National Book Award finalist Karan Mahajan reads from his work.
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

On Monday, February 26, at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center, novelist Karan Mahajan reads from his work. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, and followed by a Q&A, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

Karan Mahajan studied English and economics at Stanford University before earning an M.F.A. in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers. His first novel, Family Planning (2012), was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs (2016), won the Bard Fiction Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, and the NYPL Young Lions Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, in addition to being named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Esquire, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and others. In 2017, Mahajan was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.
 


PRAISE FOR KARAN MAHAJAN
 “The Association of Small Bombs is wonderful. It is smart, devastating, unpredictable, and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. . . . Mahajan is the real deal.” —Fiona Maazel, New York Times Book Review

“A voracious approach to fiction-making . . . Mahajan has a cinematic attunement to the spectacle of disaster.” —New Yorker

“Mahajan is an incredibly assured stylist. . . . Hugely promising.” —Jay McInerney, Daily Beast

“Even when handling the darkest material or picking through confounding emotional complexities, Mahajan maintains a light touch and a clarity of vision.” —London Review of Books

“Mahajan . . . has already developed an irresistible voice with a rich sense of humor fueled by sorrow.” —Washington Post Book World

Matthew Lynch, Visiting Professor at Bard
 
Olin 301  5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The talk will use Michael Taussig’s discussion of the “public secret” in his book, Defacement, as a framing device to analyze issues of contemporary interest. Recent examples of monument destruction, national anthem protests, and other examples related to the topic will be displayed and discussed.

After, join us for a Religion Program Open House. Come discuss the critical study of religion in the liberal arts, learn about majoring and minoring in the Religion Program. We'll discuss course offerings, moderation, and highlights of the major.

Refreshments will be served.

A conversation between Roger Berkowitz and
Artemy Magun
Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Russian Revolution was largely absent from Hannah Arendt’s book-length exploration of modern revolutions. This absence follows from Arendt’s understanding of the Russian Revolution as a social revolution that follows the model of the French Revolution, and thus one that failed to offer anything new to our understanding of revolutions. Arendt’s dismissal of the Russian Revolution and also her critique of social revolutions has been controversial, and widely criticized for ignoring the driving force of revolutions to help the poor.

In spite of this, Arendt does return to the question of Russian revolution when she writes on the local workers councils (the Soviets). In this, she values the heritage of 1917, only to recognize that councils were soon suppressed by the Bolshevik party.

In this discussion between Roger Berkowitz and Artemy Magun, two Arendt scholars will ask whether Arendt was right in seeing the Russian Revolution as derivative from the French Revolution, whether her dismissal of Social Revolutions can be defended, and whether the revolution of her liking is possible in the present historical circumstances.  

Chris Gibson will discuss his new book, Rally Point: Five Tasks to Unite the Country and Revitalize the American Dream.
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Chris Gibson is currently the Stanley Kaplan Distinguished Visiting Professor of American Foreign Policy at Williams College since February 2017. He joined the United States Army in 1986 after graduating from Siena College. He served tours in the First Gulf War, Kosovo, and Iraq, rising to the rank of Colonel. He later taught American politics at West Point and was a national security affairs fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has received four Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, among other awards while in the military. He also holds a Ph.D in government from Cornell University. He served in the US Congress from 2011-2017. 
 

Webinar  7:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Jan Kregel, Director Levy Graduate Programs will be hosting an Information Session for students interested in the M.A. or M.S. in Economic Theory and Policy and the 3+2 or 4+1 programs.

  Katherine Benton-Cohen
Associate Professor of History, Georgetown University
Olin Humanities, Room 101  4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
“Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Progressive-Era America,” examines the enormous impact of the largest study of immigrants in US History. From 1907 to 1911, a staff of 300—over half of them women--compiled 41 volumes of reports and a potent set of recommendations that shaped immigration policy for generations to come. The talk will discuss the Commission’s surprising origins in US-Asia relations, its enthusiasm for distributing immigrants throughout the United States, and its long-term effect not just on federal policy, but on how Americans think about immigration in general.
 Katherine Benton-Cohen is associate professor of history at Georgetown University. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
She is the author of Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2009), as well as her forthcoming book on the history of the Dillingham Commission.

Ian Buruma in Conversation with John Ryle
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Ian Buruma
Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism

and

John Ryle
Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology and
​Executive Director of the Rift Valley 

part of

Global Action for Academic Freedom

7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The formation of the European Union looks like a success story: peace between the nations, prosperity based on open markets, and the stabilization of the rule of law. The recent development however, the extension to meanwhile 28 Nations, seems to have overburdened the union. While further nations in the East wish to participate, the UK prefers to leave the club. Other nations may follow. What is wrong with the EU? It seems to be out of balance, and no one knows how to regain it. Enlargement or concentration on the core states? Slowing down or accelerating the process of the union? More problematic is, however, the democratic deficit. To put it briefly: The EU enacts regulations without representation. The Union consists of a complex configuration of powers, it manifests many competences, but it lacks a constitution, and, most notably, a convincing legitimation. The technocrats plea for a Union without constitution, and hope to proceed their business undisturbed; the supranationalists plea for a real constitution and hope to get rid of all problems of the traditional nation state. But who is the people in the Union, and who is – referring to democratic standards - the sovereign? An analysis of the powers in the Union is a precondition for a clarification of all further questions.

BIO: MA, PhD and Habilitation at the University of Tuebingen, Germany; since 1996 Professor of Philosophy at the University of Education, Heidelberg, Germany; since 2009 Dean of the Department of cultural studies and humanities. Research focus: Political Philosophy, Philosophy of education.

Location: RKC 103 [MAP]
Start Time: 7 pm
Free & Open to the Public
Rsvp Not Required
 

Olin Humanities, Room 201  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Theodore J. Lowi (July 9, 1931 – February 17, 2017) was one of the most influential political scientists of the 20th century. Lowi authored numerous books included the hallmark “The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States”, along with “The Politics of Disorder”, “American Government: Incomplete Conquest”, and “Hyperpolitics: An Interactive Dictionary of Political Science”. He also edited “The Pursuit of Justice”, Robert F. Kennedy’s book about his tenure as attorney general.

Thomas Dumm is the author of six books that cover a range of topics in political theory and political culture as well as many articles and other essays. Among his books are Loneliness as a Way of Life (Harvard, 2008) and My Father’s House: On Will Barnet’s Paintings (Duke, 2014). He served as the founding co-editor of the international journal of contemporary political thought Theory&Event, as well as a non-fiction editor for the Massachusetts Review. His new book, a meditation on the (im)possibility of being at home in the twenty-first century, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.

NYTimes Obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/us/theodore-lowi-dead.html
 
Roger Berkowitz on Remembering “The End of Liberalism”: https://medium.com/amor-mundi/ted-lowi-in-memoriam-of-his-work-bc88822b3419#.8exnpsb2p

OPEN AND FREE TO THE PUBLIC.

  Olin Hall  8:00 am – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Bard College hosts the annual Student World Affairs Conference. This conference brings together students and faculty from across the Hudson Valley region, from colleges including Bard, Vassar, Marist, Dutchess, SUNY New Paltz, SUNY Albany, Barnard, and Mount Saint Mary. Students will present papers on a wide variety of topics covering every area of international affairs.

The keynote speaker will be Asha Castleberry, who teaches international politics at Fordham University, is a fellow at the American Security Project, and served in the Middle East with the US Army.

The conference is co-chaired by Michelle Murray (assistant professor of political studies and co-director of the Global and International Studies program) and James Ketterer (dean of international studies and director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs program). Miriam Roday and Linda Yuan are the student organizers.

Conference Schedule
8:00-9:00: Registration, Olin Atrium
9:00-10:00: Keynote Address, Olin Hall
10:15-11:30: Panel Group A
11:30-11:45: Break
11:45-1:00: Panel Group B
1:00-2:30: Lunch & Closing Ceremony, Olin LC 115


Download: SWAC 2017 program .pdf Download Conference Program

  Olin 203  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Come take part in a vibrant and important discussion about foreign policy under President Trump with fellows from the World Policy Institute, David Stevens and Jonathan Cristol.

A Lecture by Dana Naomy Mills
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
"In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of body and sound of the voice. This disclosure of 'who' in contradistinction to 'what' somebody is ... is implicit in everything somebody says and does." (Hannah Arendt)

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it.” (Martha Graham)

Since ancient times and across cultures, dance has provided a powerful form of human expression. This talk examines the political power of dance from a global perspective inspired by—and drawing upon—the work of Hannah Arendt.

This talk by Dana Naomy Mills, a 2017 Hannah Arendt Fellow, explores different dimensions of dance as a form of intervention into a politics more commonly articulated in words. Dance is understood as a system of communication that allows its subjects to speak with their bodies and to create embodied spaces, drawing attention to the radically egalitarian nature of dance with its ability to transcend all boundaries of gender, race and sexual politics. Drawing on diverse examples such as the work of dance pioneers Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan, gumboots dancers in the gold mines of South Africa, Dabke dancers in Palestine and the One Billion Rising movement challenging gender violence through flash mobs, the talk will present a reading of dance as a form of performing equality as well as distinction.

Laura Secor
contributor to The New Yorker and
author of 
Children of Paradise
The Struggle for the Soul of Iran
 
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Note the new location.

The inaugural event of the First 100 Days, a college-wide initiative combining civics and public media
Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater  7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Mark DannerJames Clarke Chase Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities

in dialogue withLeon BotsteinPresident, Bard College

introduced byAriana Gonzalez Stokas '00Dean of Inclusive Excellence

Free and open to the public; seating is first come, first servedLive WebcastTo view a live webcast of the event please visit: Watch Live!Give to the Bard Sanctuary Fund



Press Release: View

Please note change of location

a Dialogue

Mark Danner
James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities

Leon Botstein
President, Bard College
Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater  2:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Can't attend  in person? This will be webcast live:

http://www.totalwebcasting.com/view/?func=VOFF&id=bard&date=2016-11-11&seq=1

  Olin Hall  1:30 pm – 2:50 pm EST/GMT-5
A look back at the Campaign and Election 2016 and what the next challenges will be

with

Jonathan Becker
Vice President for Academic Affairs
Associate Professor of Political Studies

Roger Berkowitz
Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights

Michelle Murray
Assistant Professor of Political Studies

Ariana Stokas
Dean of Inclusive Excellence

  Elmira Bayrasli
Co-Founder, Foreign Policy Interrupted
Professor, Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5
The Internet promised to unleash free expression and democracy. Somehow, however, censorship has won out. In this talk Elmira Bayrasli will discuss the rise of authoritarianism in China, India, Turkey - and the erosion of human rights and civil liberties in the tech age elsewhere.  Elmira Bayrasli is author of From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places and co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted, a media and education platform dedicated to increasing female foreign policy voices.  She teaches a course called "Foreign Policy in the Internet Age" at the Bard Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA) program in New York City.

  New York State 103rd Assembly District
Preston Theater  1:30 pm – 2:50 pm EDT/GMT-4

Broadcast in BOTH Weis Cinema and the Multipurpose Room
 
Weis Cinema and Multipurpose Room, Bertelsmann Campus Center  9:00 pm – 11:55 am EDT/GMT-4

  Michael Miller
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Barnard College, Columbia University
Preston Theater  1:30 pm – 2:50 pm EDT/GMT-4

Broadcast in BOTH Weis Cinema and the Multipurpose Room
 
Weis Cinema and Multipurpose Room, Bertelsmann Campus Center  9:00 pm – 11:55 am EDT/GMT-4

  Candidate for New York State 19th Congressional District
Preston Theater  1:30 pm – 2:50 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Bertelsmann Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
A record 27.3 million Hispanics are eligible to vote in 2016, and almost 12 million of them are millennials. Will they actually turn out and vote in record numbers as well? How are local organizers seizing the ever-polarizing elections to compel Latinos to vote? What can we learn from history and Latinos' civic and political participation? 

Come to a panel discussion, moderated by managing editor of La Voz Mariel Fiori, to hear it from community activists and Bard faculty, including:

Professor Jonathan Becker, Vice President for Academic Affairs; Director of Bard Center for Civic Engagement; Associate Professor of Political Studies 

Laura García, Racial Justice Program Manager for YWCA Orange County and founder of Dreamers with No Borders

Sandra Oxford, President of the Sullivan County Branch of the NAACP and member of the NYS Working Families Party Committee 

Broadcast in BOTH Weis Cinema and the Multipurpose Room
 
Weis Cinema and Multipurpose Room, Bertelsmann Campus Center  9:00 pm – 11:55 am EDT/GMT-4

  Candidate for New York State 19th Congressionsl District
Preston Theater  1:30 pm – 2:50 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Destabilization, Risk, and Optimism in the World Today

David Stevens
World Policy Institute
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Ideas of risk and security impact every aspect of our lives: from financial well being, to civil liberties, to matters of war and peace, and general anxiety. However, how we come to our conclusions about what constitutes a risk is much less frequently discussed. Using examples from the US and throughout the African Diaspora, this talk will look at the role that bias plays in our assessment of the world, how we are building old biases into our future, and how tackling bias might reveal previously hidden opportunities for global well being.  A reception for students will follow the talk.

  Joan Mandle, Pd.D
Executive Director of Democracy Matters
Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Emerita, Colgate University
Preston Theater  1:30 pm – 2:50 pm EDT/GMT-4

Broadcast in BOTH Weis Cinema and the Multipurpose Room
 
Weis Cinema and Multipurpose Room, Bertelsmann Campus Center  9:00 pm – 11:55 am EDT/GMT-4

A Panel Presentation
Reem-Kayden Center, Room 103  4:30 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join Sandra Cuellar Oxford, Francena Amparo and William Sanchez to discuss their influence in local politics. This panel promises to inform the Bard Community on a variety of topics concerning local politics of the Hudson Valley.

  Foreign Policy Challenges, Opportunities and Surprises for the Next President
Olin Language Center, Room 115  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The next President of the United States will confront new challenges, opportunities and surprises as he or she attempts to shape US leadership in a changing world. How the future President responds to these events will indelibly shape US foreign policy and global perceptions of US power for years to come. What priorities should drive US foreign policy under the new President? What areas of the world are most important to US national interests? What are the limits and potential of US power? Join us for a discussion about the future of American foreign policy and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.  

Featuring:

James Ketterer, Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program
Christopher McIntosh, Bard College, Political Studies Program
Stephen Pampinella, SUNY-New Paltz, Political Science and International Relations
Pavlina Tcherneva, Bard College, Economics Program
 

Live Stream Available From ABC News 

Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema 

  Olin Humanities, Room 201  7:00 pm – 8:30 am EST/GMT-5
Want to tutor Bard Prison Initiative students next semester? Come to our first info session to learn how to apply.

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Kevin Duong
Cornell University, Department of GovernmentThe trial and execution of Louis XVI served as a founding act of French republican democracy. It was also a scene of irregular justice: no legal warrants or procedural precedents existed for bringing a king to justice before the law. In this talk, I describe how Jacobins crafted a new language of popular agency to overcome that obstacle—the language of redemptive violence. Although redemptive violence had roots in prerevolutionary notions of penal justice and social cohesion, its philosophical ambitions were revolutionary and modern. Analyzing that language illuminates how republican democracy became dependent on a distinctive ideology of extralegal violence at its origins. It also helps explain French republicanism’s enduring hostility to constitutionalism.

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  8:00 pm – 11:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Get out the vote!
Kline Shuttle Stop  9:00 am – 8:30 am EST/GMT-5
Vote for local and countywide positions such as Red Hook Town Board, Supervisor, Justice, Dutchess County Legislator and more! You can find more information about the candidates up for election by visiting: http://election.bard.edu/candidates/The Election@Bard Initiative will be operating a free shuttle for the community on 30min intervals from the Kline shuttle stop to the Barrytown polling place (St. John's Episcopal Church, 1114 River Road, Barrytown NY-12507).  Note: In order to vote at the Barrytown polling place, you must registered in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. You can check your registration status by clicking HERE.

by Dr. Ramona Bajema
RKC 103  6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Ramona Bajema has spent the past four years searching through the post-triple disaster remains to understand what cannot be washed away by a 100-meter high wave that obliterated entire cities, leaving only scraps, shards, and severed lives. The wave left debris in its wake, but there have been intangible forces that it could not erase—traces of memory, ghosts, and rituals that gave new life to long-abandoned public works projects, machi-tsukuri (town-building) plans, and disaster tourism. In addition to the clean-up of contaminated areas in Fukushima, a second wave of “recovery” and “reconstruction” has swept through northeastern Japan powered by slogans of hope and solidarity to people in despair hoping to go back in time. Bajema will discuss some of her observations of Sanriku’s recovery as she has witnessed them since 2011.
 

  Reem-Kayden Center Room 102  Call prospective voters in the Dutchess County area and let them know about Bernie Sanders!

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  The story of America’s role in the founding of the state of Israel has been the subject of intense mythmaking by both pro and anti Zionist writers. Truman himself was the mythmaker in chief; “I am Cyrus” was the way the former president described his role in the events. (Cyrus was the ancient king of Persia who, as the Bible tells us, issued the decree that allowed the exiled Jews to return from Babylon and rebuild Jerusalem.) In fact, the conventional stories by both pro and anti Zionist writers overstate the role of the United States in the emergence of Israel and overstate the real but limited role that political lobbying by American Jewish leaders and organizations played in shaping American policy.The founding myths about Truman, American policy and the role of American Jews in shaping that policy have clouded discussions of American-Israeli relations ever since. These myths exaggerate Israel’s past and by implication present dependence on the United States and distort understanding here and abroad of the political forces that help shape our Israel policy. That the myth both exaggerates and distorts the role of American Jews in the birth of the State of Israel contributes to confusion among American Jews and in the wider public even today.Those under the influence of these myths tend to embrace two errors: that America is more important to Israel than in fact it is, and that American Jews are more important to this relationship than they actually are. Neither one of these errors is inherently ‘pro-Israel’ or ‘anti-Israel’ or, for that matter, either anti-Semitic or pro-Jewish; both, however confuse public debate on an important topic and have more than once led policymakers in both Israel and the United States into dangerous miscalculations.**Please join us for a reception prior to the event beginning at 6:30 p.m. in the Olin Atrium

Olin Humanities, Room 202  Join a conversation about the Syrian challenge and the European Union facilitated by Nesrin McMeekin and Greg Moynahan.

This event is sponsored by Bard Model United Nations and The Center for Civic Engagement.

Risk or Opportunity?
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  a panel discussion with

Paul Kerr
Nonproliferation Expert at the Congressional Research Service

James Ketterer
Dean of International Studies & Professor of Political Studies

Michelle Murray
Assistant Professor of Political Studies & Co-Director of the Global and International Studies Program

In July 2015 the P5+1 and Iran concluded a landmark agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program.  Supporters of the agreement argue it will prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon for at least a decade and put in place an unprecedented inspections regime.  Critics contend the agreement does not go far enough to prevent Iran from constructing a nuclear weapon and will strengthen its position in the region.  Please join us for a panel discussion on the risks and opportunities associated with the nuclear agreement, the effects it will have on regional and international security and the ongoing political debate about the agreement within the United States.  

  Olin 102  Interested in applying for a Fulbright Scholarship, a Watson fellowship, or another postgraduate scholarship or fellowship? This information session will cover application procedures, deadlines, and suggestions for crafting a successful application. Applications will be due later this month, so be sure to attend one of the  two information sessions!

  Olin Language Center, Room 115  Join the CCE, the US State Department, and visiting international scholars to discuss regional topics in the middle east and central asia:
Angira Sen Sarma (India): Regional Cooperation in Afghanistan

Ali Soroosh (Afghanistan): Afghanistan and US Foreign Policy

Engy Tawfeik (Egypt): The US Role in the Middle East: Disengagement or reengagement?

All are welcome!

  Olin Language Center, Room 115  Join the CCE, the US Department of State, and visiting international scholars for a panel discussing various regional organizations and their relationship with US policy:
Prem Khanal (Nepal): 30 Years of SAARC: Regional Cooperation in South Asia

Lou Aguas (Ecuador): US Foreign Aid Conceptions: Civic Engagement and Human Rights

Dana Jaonera (Madagascar): Regional Organizations in Africa: US Involvement

All are welcome!

  Olin Language Center, Room 115  Join the CCE and visiting international scholars for a panel discussion focusing on regional topics in Africa:
Abdulrhman Khraise (Sudan): The Democratic Crisis in Africa

Abdul Ahmadu (Nigeria): Think Tanks and Foreign Policy Making: The Nigerian Experience

Boutkhil Guemide (Algeria): Oil Resources and Neo Colonial Rivalry in Africa: a New Scramble for Africa

All are invited!

  Olin Language Center, Room 115  Join the CCE and visiting international scholar Khatuna Burkadze (Georgia) for a discussion of historical and contemporary relations between the US and Georgia. 

  Olin Language Center, Room 115  Join the CCE and visiting international scholars for a panel on US Strategy:
Hamda Tebra (Tunisia): US Foreign Policy of Containment: From the Cikd War to the War on Terror

Spyros Litsas (Greece): USFP in the Era of Multipolarity: from Counterinsurgency to Cosmopolitan Patriotism

Pailin Kittereschai (Thailand): Food Superpower: from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana 

All are invited!

  Olin Humanities, Room 201  Join the CCE for two presentations by visiting international US foreign policy scholars:
Veronika Stoilova (Bulgaria): Hybrid War: A New Challenge for Global Peace and Security

Svitlana Pyk (Ukraine): Secret Diplomacy in World Wars

  The State of Labor, New Models of Organizing, and the Future of Work
Blithewood  This daylong workshop will address three primary themes: the state of the American labor movement, the future of work, and new models of organizing and worker power. An expert panel will address each topic, followed by a Q&A session.
The workshop is free and open to the public. 




Cosponsored by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and SEIU 775

  Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  CSA presents Yurumein Homeland: The Caribs of St. Vincent, a documentary about the Carib/Garifuna resistence against slavery in St. Vincent.

RSVP Here

BGIA (NYC)  Malia DuMont, '95
Director of Strategy, Office of the Secretary of Defense, US Department of Defense; former Special Assistant to the chief of staff in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas' Security Affairs.Mark E. Manyin
Specialist, Asian Affairs, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress; former International Affairs Fellow (Japan), Council on Foreign Relations.Sue Mi Terry
Senior Research Scholar, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University; former  Director for Korea, Japan, and Oceanic Affairs at the National Security Council (George W. Bush, Barack Obama); former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council (Barack Obama); former Senior Analyst on Korean Issues, Central Intelligence Agency.
The James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series is co-sponsored by Foreign Affairs. It is free and open to the public by RSVP.

Note that this is the first event in our new home inside the World Policy Institute. 108 West 39th Street, Suite 1000A, New York, NY 10018.

Signs and/or students will guide you when you exit the elevator on the tenth floor. 

Hegeman 204  Emil Dzhuraev
Center for Civic Engagement Teaching Fellow
Associate Professor, International and Comparative Politics
American University of Central Asia

As the five Central Asian states approach their first twenty-five years of independence, just how far they have gone toward modern statehood is an issue opened up to questions by a growing number of studies in politics of the region. While many outward traits of statehood have been easily adopted and looked becoming to these countries, a closer look reveals how problematic it has been for all five of them to actually become viable and stable states. The challenges these countries have faced, represented under the common rubric of their "post-soviet condition," allow some critical reflections on the predicament of modern state-building—or, of political constitution.

RSVP

BGIA (NYC)  Speakers: 

Pinar Kemerli, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Studies, Bard College; former Lecturer at Bogaziçi University.Cenk Sidar, Founder and Managing Director, Sidar GlobalAdvisors; foreign policy and economic advisor to the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the main opposition party in Turkey’s Grand National Assembly; frequent contributor to various outlets including Hurriyet Daily News, Radikal and Reflections Turkey.Respondent and Moderator:Nesrin Ersoy McMeekin, Lecturer in Social Studies, Bard College; former Lecturer in History, Koc University; and author of Turkey and the Bolsheviks: Relations between Kemalist Turkey and Bolshevik Russia during the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1922).
The James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series is cosponsored by Foreign Affairs. It is free and open to the public by RSVP.

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  The End of Labor Unions. So what?

Presented by David KettlerThe industrial movement of organized labor, in the United States as in most modernized nations, was arguably among the most consequential political developments of the twentieth century.  If one reads the most authoritative political science studies of the 1970s, the key characterizations would have to do with the "welfare rights" institutionalized in the "welfare state," the universal rise in living standards ("new middle class") and the "pluralist" or "neo-corporatist" modes of democracy that built and sustained those arrangements.  This reading was as pervasive among conservative or radical critics as it was in the "mainstream" of informed political commentary.  To the extent that these readings were more than ideological counters to the Communist ideological threat, they were accurate.  And the better analysts knew that these arrangements were first of all a function of the place that organized labor had at various key bargaining tables.  If one looks at the present day labor union statistics in the places where they were a major factor, they have effectively ceased to matter, except in Scandinavia.  The question why? is a subject of specialized studies.  The question what then? is an urgent topic among union professionals and intellectuals.  But the modest topic of my talk is to share some indicators of the change, and to discuss some consequences.Faculty and staff are invited to join us at 6:30 p.m. for a reception in the Olin Atrium prior to the event.  

RSVP Here

BGIA (NYC)  Barak Mendelsohn, Associate Professor of Political Science, Haverford College; Research Fellow, International Security Program, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University; Senior Fellow, Center for the Study ofTerrorism, Foreign Policy Research Institute; author ofExpansion and Decline: al-Qaeda's Branching Out Strategy and Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2015) and Combating Jihadism: American Hegemony and International Cooperation in the War on Terrorism (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
The James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series is cosponsored by Foreign Affairs. It is free and open to the public by RSVP.

Please visit our website for the complete list of upcoming public events: http://bgia.bard.edu/speakerseries/

Bard Globalization & International Affairs Program 36 West 44th St, #1011, NY, NY

Sawkill   Come hear what Castro is like in person, and how to become a dictator's favorite Jew!

Walter Russell Mead, James Chace Professor of International Affairs and Humanities, and Jonny Cristol, Director of Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program (BGIA), share some wild and crazy stories about careers spent in every corner of global affairs, public policy, and Cleveland. In addition, they'll discuss what BGIA can do for students who are interested in careers in the many fields related to international affairs.

Preston  The Persian Gulf region is never quiet, and the start of 2015 has been no exception: the death of the Saudi King; the collapse of the Yemeni government; the continued expansion of ISIS; and the new necessity of collaborating and negotiating with Iran, all foreshadow a year of major change, turmoil, and power shifts.

Join James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities Walter Russell Mead, Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program (BGIA) Director Jonathan Cristol, and Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern & Historical Studies Omar Cheta for a discussion of the current/latest instability in the Persian Gulf and its impact on both American grand strategy and specific policy decisions in the region.

  Internships and workshops focused around architecture, urban planning, sustainable living and agriculture!
Olin Humanities, Room 201  We are set for another great semester of internships, guest lectures and workshops.  We will hold our first bi-weekly group meeting this Wednesday at 7pm on the second floor of Olin–specific room TBA.  We will give a brief introduction to the three divisions of BardBuilds, as well as the expectations we have for members. Then figure out what internship or workshops you will be interested in!

Curious about interning and studying in NYC for a semester with BGIA?
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Interested in international affairs? The political context in particular country or region of world? Human rights? Immigration? Counterterrorism? Women's rights? Political risk analysis? International LGBTQ advocacy? International law? International education? Global public health?

How will you connect your academic interests to a related career?

The info session with BGIA Director Jonny Cristol and Associate Director Rachel Meyer
will cover:
-sample BGIA courses and Bard distribution requirements
-sample BGIA internship opportunities
-the application process
-financial aid questions
-life in New York City
-any and all other questions

BGIA is open to all moderated students with a demonstrated interest in international affairs.

***Coffee and donuts provided.*** 

RSVP Now!

BGIA (NYC)  Panelists include: 

Jeffrey Mankoff, Deputy Director and Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Program, Center for Strategic & International Studies; author of Russian Foreign Policy: The Return of Great Power Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

Andrew Nagorski, former Senior Editor, Newsweek International; faculty member, BGIA; author of Hitlerland American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (Simon & Schuster, 2012), among others.

Valerie Sperling, Professor, Department of Political Science, Clark University; author of Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (Oxford University Press, 2014), Altered States: The Globalization of Accountability (Cambridge, 2009), among others.

Jonathan Becker, Vice President of International Affairs and Civic Engagement, Bard College; author of Soviet and Russian Press Coverage of the United States (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).

Bertelsmann Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
A panel on Academic Freedom organized by the Human Rights Project and co-sponsored by: The Hannah Arendt Center, the Center for Civic Engagement, Students for Justice in the Middle East, Political Studies Program, History Program, and the Language and Literature Program

Organized and moderated by: Michiel Bot (Hannah Arendt Center) Omar Cheta (History) Connor Gadek (Students for Justice in the Middle East)

Panelists include:

Andrew Ross is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His most recent books include Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal (2014), Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (2009), and, as co-editor, The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace (2007). He has also written about academic freedom and overseas campuses of U.S. universities such as NYU Abu Dhabi.

Steven Salaita was “de-hired” from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign because of his tweets about Israel’s assault on Gaza this past summer. Before that, he was an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech. His books include Israel’s Dead Soul (2011), Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (2007), Anti-Arab Racism in the USA (2006), and The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (2006).

Katherine M. Franke is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University. Her recent publications include “Dating the State: The Moral Hazards of Winning Gay Rights” (2013), “Public Sex, Same-Sex Marriage, and the Afterlife of Homophobia” (2011), and “Eve Sedgwick, Civil Rights, and Perversion” (2009). She has been at the forefront of the academic boycott against the University of Urbana-Champaign and has been advising Steven Salaita’s lawyers.

This event is part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series, co-sponsored by Foreign Affairs. It is free and open to the public by RSVP. RSVP Here
BGIA (NYC)  Aaron Voloj Dessauer is a Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School.  Prior to that, he served as a legal advisor to the Permanent Mission of Germany to the United Nations, as a research assistant to Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, and as a Lecturer at Yale College.  He also served as an Adjunct Professor in law and philosophy at the University of Münster in Germany, where he taught courses on First Amendment Law, Laws of War, and Jewish Law.  The recipient of numerous academic awards and fellowships, Voloj Dessauer was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, at Harvard University, and the Yale Center for Law and Philosophy.  Previously, Voloj Dessauer was an Associate at the New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP.Dr. Dessauer's talk will focus on the tension between protecting civil liberties and preventing terrorist attacks.

Sustainability Careers with Non-Profits, Business and Government
Reem-Kayden Center  Join Eban Goodstein, Director of Bard's Center for Environmental Policy and MBA in Sustainability for the workshop "How to Get a Job Saving the Planet: Sustainability Leadership Careers in NGOs, Business and Government." Learn how our graduate programs prepare students for impactful careers leading change in these uncertain times.

Time: 5:00-7:00pm
Location: RKC 103

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  There will be a provocative discourse on issues concerning mass incarceration and the prison system. 

RSVP Here
BGIA (NYC)  Professor Mead will look at American engagement in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In so doing, he will explain and analyze how the U.S. now faces its sternest challenges since the end of the Cold War. He will discuss the argument that the Arab Spring, ISIS, Syria, Ukraine, etc. have made the idea of democracy promotion something that may be unpalatable to the American people and/or politically impossible. Nevertheless, it is possible that promoting democracy remains in the American interest.

Walter Russell Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and BGIA, and Editor of The American Interest.

This event is part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series, co-sponsored by Foreign Affairs. It is free and open to the public by RSVP.

  Olin Humanities, Room 201  Ralph Lemon is a choreographer, conceptualist, director, writer, and installation artist. He describes his talk as "about my work (art experiments) with Walter Carter (1907-2009), my centenarian collaborator from Little Yazoo City, Mississippi. Purportedly the oldest man in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Fifty years or so shy of being a full-time slave. But he was an ex-sharecropper, carpenter, gardener... his longest job was planting cedar trees. We had an 8 year "discussion" about our whereabouts, our bodies (and race of course), our belief systems, and mortality, through the most ineffable of languages, his and mine. It ultimately became speculative fiction. A complete collapse of past, present and future time. Something like that."

A discussion about Europe's concerns with the United States
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  A discussion of the future of NATO, Ukraine, the NATO draw down from Afghanistan, fighting ISIS, instability across North Africa, and more.

A Panel Discussion Featuring:

Simona Soare, Romanian National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (NUPSA) Center for East European and Asian Studies

Joe Burton, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Scott Silverstone, U.S. Military Academy at West Point

James Ketterer (moderator), Bard College Institute for International Liberal Education and Center for Civic Engagement




Download: Europe Wonders.pdf

RSVP Now!

BGIA (NYC)  Dr. Joe Dunn is the Charles A. Dana Professor of History and Politics, Chair of History and Politics at Converse College; author of: “I Have Done the Work”: The Times and Life of James Hutchison Kerr; Southern Women at the Millennium: A Historical Perspective on the Twentieth Century; among many others.This event is part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series, co-sponsored by Foreign Affairs. It is free and open to the public by RSVP.RSVP Here

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Join us for a panel discussion of incarceration in the United States with guest speakers Keith Reeves, Richard Smith, and Jed Tucker.
Part of the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement series of events.

  A Talk By Keith Reeves, Swarthmore College
Olin Humanities, Room 102  Professor Reeves will present work from his current project examining the effects of incarceration on Black males, followed by a Q&A session.

Part of the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement series of events.

  Olin Humanities, Room 205  This panel has been canceled and will be rescheduled for next semester.

Join a panel of researchers and representatives for a discussion of money in politics. 

Dinner will be served.
RKC 200  Please join us for the most in-depth information about the Levy M.S. program. Levy Institute Scholar and Director of Applied Micromodeling Thomas Masterson will be available to discuss the program curriculum as well as the research that takes place at the Institute.Dinner will be catered by Rusty’s Farm Fresh Eatery and the Bard Farm. Please RSVP by e-mailing Azfar Khan ([email protected]) and indicate your choice of meal: vegetarian, vegan, or nonvegetarian.Early Decision deadline: November 15 | Regular Decision deadline: January 15Visit us at www.bard.edu/levyms. 

  Olin Hall  3:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School and co-founder of Creative Commons. He is the author of Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—And a Plan to Stop It. Lessig will provide a stimulating presentation on the broken political system, big money dominance, and the corrupt funding that is destroying the American republic.

This event is part of the seventh annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference: "The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?" Admission is complimentary for Hannah Arendt Center members, Bard College faculty and staff, and students. Regular admission for the two-day conference is $20 per person. To view a full conference schedule, bios of featured speakers, and to register for the conference please visit hac.bard.edu. For more information or any questions about the conference, contact [email protected].

  Olin Hall  10:00 am EDT/GMT-4
Norman Rush is an American author, best known for his novel, Mating, which won the 1991 National Book Award and the 1992 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for its exploration of notions such as society, poverty, and heterosexual relationships.

This event is part of the seventh annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference: "The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?" Admission is complimentary for Hannah Arendt Center members, Bard College faculty and staff, and students. Regular admission for the two-day conference is $20 per person. To view a full conference schedule, bios of featured speakers, and to register for the conference please visit hac.bard.edu. For more information or any questions about the conference, contact [email protected].
 

The Seventh Annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference
Olin Hall  The two-day conference, “The Unmaking of Americans” will ask what aspirations and which dreams still animate American idealism. Americans today must confront the weakening of a collective vision of freedom and equality. And yet few dare to articulate a collective vision that might hold the country together. The Arendt conference brings together scholars, writers, and educators to ask, “Are there still American values worth fighting for?

America has long imagined itself a “city upon a hill.” Yet, we confront today a weakening of our collective vision. Americans are dismayed at the power of money, the decay of self-governance, and a bureaucracy impervious to popular control. And yet few dare to articulate a collective vision that might hold the country together. As Hannah Arendt argued nearly 50 years ago, “we face the ominous silence that answers us whenever we ask: 'What are we fighting for?'"

In the United States of America, there has long been an assumption that we had an answer to Arendt's question. We fight for freedom and democracy. We fight for equality and difference. Above all we fight for "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

Not only in America, but around the world, we confront a weakening of such political visions. In America, the ideals of freedom, equality, and a common destiny that have are in decline. On both the left and the right there is fear the country has lost its way. To explore the future of an American idea, we will sponsor "The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?"

Admission is complimentary for Hannah Arendt Center members, Bard College faculty and staff, and students. Regular admission for the two-day conference is $20 per person. To view a full conference schedule and bios of featured speakers, please click, here.

Join us for the live webcast! Oct. 9 and Oct. 10 at 10am EST.

Press Release: View

Bertelsmann Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Is America an exceptional nation? If so, of what is it a model? Democratic self-government? Something else? Does America's success or failure even matter for the fate of the world?


Please join us for an exciting public debate inspired by the topic of this year's Hannah Arendt Center Conference, "The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?" The debate will feature Bard Debate Union members, Bard College faculty, and cadets and faculty from the United States Military Academy at West Point. Their topic will be, "Resolved: Individualism is an American value worth fighting for." Sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center, Center for Civic Engagement, Bard Debate Union, West Point Military Academy, and the International Debate Education Association.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014 7PM
Location: Bard College, Campus Center Multipurpose Room
Free and open to the public

Campus Center, Multipurpose Room
Sponsored by: Hannah Arendt Center.

For more information, call 845-758-7878, e-mail [email protected], or visit https://hac.bard.edu/conference-fall14/page.php?listing_id=9066950.

Bertelsmann Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  Join the discussion with this panel on the events surrounding Ferguson and issues of police militarization, race and the justice system.

Panelists:

Alexandra Cox, Assistant Professor of Sociology, SUNY New Paltz
Quinton Cross, President and Executive Director of Staley B.Keith Social Justice Center
Simon Gilhooley, Assistant Professor of Political Studies
Allison McKim, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Delia Mellis, BPI Director of College Writing

Moderated by Shari Stiell-Quashie '16


Event followed by a discussion on campus climate culture in the George Ball Lounge at 7PM, sponsored by the Multicultural Diversity Committee.

Photo by David Broome, UPI.

  Curious about interning and studying in
NYC for a semester with BGIA?
Olin Humanities, Room 102  7:00 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Interested in international affairs? The political context in particular country or region of world? Human rights? Immigration? Counterterrorism? Women's human rights? Political risk analysis? International LGBTQ advocacy? International security? International education? Global public health?
 How will you connect your academic 
interests to a related career? 

The info session with BGIA Associate Director Rachel Meyer 
will cover:-sample BGIA courses and Bard distribution requirements
-sample BGIA internship opportunities
-the application process
-financial aid questions
-life in New York City
-any and all other questions
BGIA is open to all moderated students with a demonstrated interest in international affairs. 

Mona El-Ghobashy
Olin Humanities, Room 102  In the space of four short years, from 2011 to 2014, Egypt has gone through not one but several major political upheavals. In short order, a mass uprising toppled president-for-life Hosni Mubarak; the military hastily stepped in to steer the country; the first-ever free and fair parliamentary and presidential elections were held; and then a popular military coup toppled the elected president and put a military general in his place. The pivotal event of the coup was the August 2013 mass killing of deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi's supporters. This talk will discuss these political developments and reflect on how we should think about them. Is Egypt experiencing a failed democratic transition, an aborted revolution, or something else?

Mona El-Ghobashy is an independent scholar who writes on Egyptian politics. Her work has appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle East Report, Boston Review, and edited volumes. Supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, she is writing a book on Egyptian citizens' use of street protests and court petitions to reclaim their rights before and after the 2011 uprising. She was formerly an instructor in the political science department at Columbia University and an assistant professor of political science at Barnard College.Cosponsored by the Human Rights Project &
the Political Studies Program

  Addressing the increasing and overlapping challenges facing the United States across the Middle East and North Africa
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  featuring:

Walter Russell Mead
James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities
Bard College

James Ketterer
Director of International Academic Initiatives
Senior Fellow, Institute for International Liberal Education
Bard College

Ruth Beitler
Associate Professor of International Relations and Comparative Politics
United States Military Academy

This panel will be preceded at 6:00 PM by an information session regarding the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program in New York City (BGIA), a semester-long study-away intensive combining internship placements at leading international affairs organizations in New York City and specialized study with leading practitioners in the field.




Press Release: View

  Curious about having an internship and studying in NYC for a semester with BGIA?
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
BGIA is a one-semester residential program in the heart of New York City that offers undergraduates a unique opportunity to undertake specialized study with leading practitioners and scholars in international affairs, such as Walter Russell Mead, Joel Rosenthal, and others, and to gain internship experience with international affairs organizations. Recent internship placements have included Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, Oxford Analytica, Central American Legal Assistance, CNN, Council on Foreign Relations, East West Institute, Human Rights Watch, Open Society Foundations and many more.

The program has attracted students from programs such as Political Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Economics, Human Rights, Literature, History and Film, among others.
 Jonathan Becker, Vice President and Dean for International Affairs and Civic Engagement, will speak about the program and answer any questions you may have.

Stay for the panel at 6:30 PM
following the information session

New World Disorder:
US Grand Strategy in a Chaotic Middle East
featuring
Walter Russell Mead and James Ketterer
Bard College
Ruth Beitler
United States Military Academy

A Case Study of Education in Ghana
Olin Humanities, Room 102  Sophia Friedson-Ridenour '05
PhD candidate in Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The national development discourse in Ghana, echoing international agendas, cast female teachers as role models. Women’s mere presence in classrooms is presumed to make them transformational change agents for girls. Rather than empowering girls, however, female teachers, who themselves are often marginalized, tend to model and reproduce existing heteronormative gender/sexual identities that work against girls’ and women’s well-being, individually and socially. This lecture, based on ethnographic research in the Ashanti and Volta Regions, takes a critical look at how the paradigm of role models reinforces inequitable gender norms and expectations, inhibiting meaningful social change.

  Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Want to learn more about Cuba and U.S.-Cuban relations? Please join us for this special opportunity to discuss with a former high-ranking diplomatic official with experience in international relations since the early years of the Cuban Revolution. Visiting directly from Havana, Pepe Viera will talk about the past, present, and future of Cuba and its relations with the U.S. and will offer unique perspectives from Cuba itself. Viera has served in many high posts in the Cuban government since the 1960s, especially in Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including in the Cuban embassies in several countries and the Cuban Mission to the UN, but also in relation to the sugar and tourism industries. Please welcome Pepe and his wife Cecilia to Bard as they visit their grandson who graduated from Bard last semester.

A talk hosted by BGIA
BGIA (NYC)  Mr. Tamer Nagy Mahmoud was a drafter of the Egyptian Constitution of 2014 and will discuss the negotiations, compromises, successes, and failures surrounding the framing of the Constitution.

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP to attend (see link below).

  A Panel Discussion with Jennifer Hudson and Christoph Bartmann
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Christoph Bartmann is the author of "Life in the the Office" ("Leben im Buro") and is the Executive Director of the Goethe-Institut New York and North America. 

Jennifer Hudson is a Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center and teaches in the BPI Program. She holds a PhD in political science (political theory) from Columbia University and has taught at Columbia College, Barnard College, Long Island University, the Columbia Summer High School Program, and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. 

  Olin Humanities, Room 202  Infrastructure has recently emerged as core site for innovative research in anthropology, and within the social sciences in general. Much of this work has sought to analyze infrastructures from a technopolitical perspective, whereby there is no a priori distinction to be made between technological artifacts and political projects, with both seen as being inscribed in the other from the very beginning. This talk considers the interpretive possibilities that arise when a technopolitical account is given of pre-modern infrastructure, drawing on the archaeological case of Inka highways in the pre-colonial Andes. It also considers the pitfalls in seeking to translate such analytical frames across modern and non-modern worlds, arguing that in the end, a technopolitical approach must always rely on modernist categories to some degree, even as it seeks to critique them.

Darryl Wilkinson is an archaeological anthropologist whose research addresses the themes of materiality, power and indigenous ontologies in the ancient Andes. He received his PhD from Columbia in 2013, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Cultural Analysis and a member of the 'Objects and Environments' research seminar at Rutgers University. His research has been published in the journals World Archaeology and the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

  James Ferguson
Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  This paper develops an argument that new kinds of welfare states in the global South are opening up possibilities for new sorts of politics.  Against an analysis of the limitations of traditional ideas of nationalization in Africa, it seeks to show that new forms of social assistance are allowing the question of national ownership of wealth to be reimagined in new ways -- ways that may allow the idea of a ”rightful share” to take on a quite different significance than it does in traditional discussions of nationalization of natural resources. Taking recent campaigns for a “Basic Income Grant” (BIG) in South Africa and Namibia as a window onto these new political possibilities, it argues that a new politics of distribution is emerging, in which citizenship-based claims to a share of national wealth are beginning to be recognizable as an alternative to both the paradigm of the market (where goods are received in exchange for labor) and that of “the gift” (where social transfers to those excluded from wage labor have been conceived as aid, charity, or assistance).  Beyond the binary of market and gift, the idea of “a rightful share”, it is suggested, opens possibilities for radical political claims that could go far beyond the limited, technocratic aim of ameliorating poverty that dominates existing cash transfer programs.

James Ferguson is the Susan S. and William H. Hindle Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. His research has focused on southern Africa (especially Lesotho, Zambia, South Africa, and Namibia), and has engaged a broad range of theoretical and ethnographic issues.  His works include The Anti-Politics Machine: 'Development,' Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho; Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt; and Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order.

  Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Panel discussion with Roger Berkowitz, Bruce Chilton, Nicholas Lewis, Ann Lauterbach, and Matthew Mutter.

Please join us for a panel on Faith and Politics as seen through the lens of Marilynne Robinson's writing. Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, penned Housekeeping, the book chosen for the Bard Big Read.

  Roy Licklider at BGIA
BGIA (NYC)  Negotiating a peaceful end to civil wars, which often includes an attempt to bring together former rival military or insurgent factions into a new national army, has been a frequent goal of conflict resolution practitioners since the Cold War. In practice, however, very little is known about what works, and what doesn't work, in bringing together former opponents to build a lasting peace.

Professor Licklider will speak as part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series, co-sponsered by BGIA and Foreign Affairs Magazine.

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Elizabeth Saunders Speaks at BGIA
BGIA (NYC)  The talk will discuss the role of presidential leadership in US foreign policy and international relations, focusing on how presidents shape decisions about whether and how to use military force.

This event is part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series and is co-sponsored by Foreign Affairs.It will be held at 33 W 44th Street, Suite 1011, New York, NY 10036. It is free and open to the public. Please RSVP. For additional information, please contact us at [email protected].

On Art, War, and the Avatars of Filmmaking
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Screening followed by Q&A with the filmmakers.Both films are in Spanish with English subtitles.   The Guernica Variations (Guillermo Peydró, 2012, 26 min): Picasso’s Guernica is the image of a disproportionate attack on unarmed civilians to demoralize and subjugate a whole population, it encapsulates a turning point that ushered in today’s use of terror against civilians.This film received the 2013 Best Documentary Award from Uruguay’s International Short Film Festival, among other awards, and has been widely screened at museums, including the Reina Sofia National Museum.    City of Signs (Samuel Alarcón, 2009, 62 min): When César Alarcón travels to Pompeii to collect ‘psychophonies’ - electronic voice phenomena - from Vesuvius’s great eruption, he finds that none contain sounds from the year 79 AD. Eloquent voices from the recent past will nonetheless lead him to the exploration of Roberto Rossellini’s mysterious life and film production. This film received the 2011 Román Gubern Essay-Film Award, among other awards. 

Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Please join the Human Rights Project on Sunday, February 16 at 5:30pm in Weis Cinema for a screening of Academy Award Nominated film Trouble the Water (2008) and a conversation with the film’s editor and co-producer, Todd Woody Richman.

Trouble the Water is a documentary which follows an aspiring rap artist and her husband during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis called it “superb,” and Rogert Ebert commended the film for conveying the reality of New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane while exposing the outrageous behavior of government agencies. The film received tremendous acclaim, winning the Grand Jury Award, The Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights, and the Working Films Award at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as receiving an Oscar Nomination.Todd Woody Richman is a veteran documentary film editor whose past work includes How to Survive a Plague (2012), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), and Bowling for Columbine (2002).The film will be followed by a Q&A with editor and co-producer of the film, T. Woody Richman. More information about the movie can be found hereOrganized by the Human Rights Project.  
*Childcare provided

  Brought to you by the Bard Palestinian Youth Initiative and the Middle Eastern Studies Department
Preston  Over the course of two weekends the Bard Palestinian Youth Initiative and the Middle Eastern Studies Department will be screening four incredible Palestinian films that present a complex, vivid portrait of Palestine that goes far beyond the headlines. These two documentaries and two narrative films capture the beauty, heartbreak, and spirit of Palestine. Join us for four nights of visiting Palestine without leaving Annandale-on-Hudson.

  Reem-Kayden Center 103  Daniel Klaidman, journalist and author, will deliver an inside look at the early years of the Obama administration. Klaidman will speak about the choice to use drones as a primary instrument of counter-terrorism and the personal struggles of individual policy-makers within the administration over the moral and ethical dimensions of this strategy.

Klaidman is author of "Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Administration," a landmark publication that shaped much of the popular understanding of the targeted killing campaign. The book features extensive interviews with high-ranking administration officials that reveal the internal battle over the use of drones.

Klaidman is a special correspondent for Newsweek and writes for The Daily Beast. He is formerly the managing editor for Newsweek and led the magazine during it's award-winning coverage of the September 11 attacks and aftermath.

Reem-Kayden Center 115  Adam Sitze
Amherst College
Assistant Professor of Law, Jourisprudence, and Social Thought

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Our politics have been so divided in recent years that our national debate is increasingly turning to the Constitution and its fundamental principles.

Seth Lipsky, the author of "The Citizen's Constitution: An Annotated Guide," has been described in the Boston Globe as "a legendary figure in contemporary journalism," and on TheAtlantic.com as possessing "the most interesting mind in journalism." He has also been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing. Lipsky will be a Visiting Professor at Bard in the Spring 2014 Semester and teach a course: "How to Form an Opinion." He writes: "This course focuses not on what to think but on how to form an opinion and write an essay, column or blog posting that will get past an editor and into print. Emphasis is laid on the role of reporting and on the competitive nature of journalism." The founding editor of The New York Sun, Mr. Lipsky is a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, where he was formerly foreign editor and a member of the editorial board. Mr. Lipsky was a private soldier in the United States Army and combat correspondent in Vietnam for Pacific Stars and Stripes.

  Tushevs Aerials Fly a Drone at Bard
Blithewood  Drone hobbyists and artists Georgi and Nina Tushev fly their drone around Bard at Blithewood. 
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  Deconstructing Holocaust Denial: how science and history are distorted to promote hate
BGIA, 36 West 44th Street, #1011; New York, NY 10036  Kenneth Stern '75 

Director on Antisemitism, Hate studies and Extremism, American Jewish Committee;  author of numerous books, most recently Antisemitism Today: How It Is the Same, How It Is Different and How to Fight It 

  The Terrorist-Criminal Nexus: An Alliance of International Drug Cartels, Organized Crime & Terror Groups
BGIA, 36 West 44th Street, #1011; New York, NY 10036   Vanessa Neumann

Senior Fellow, Center for the Study of Terrorism, Foreign Policy Research Institute; Associate, University Seminar on Latin America at SIPA (Columbia University); regular contributor, Weekly Standard

  A Discussion Led by Roger Berkowitz Based Upon Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez
RKC 103  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join us for an active-learning program of community conversation that uses Richard Rodriguez's autobiography Hunger of Memory as a jumping-off point for discussion.

"I became a man by becoming a public man."
—Richard Rodriguez

The evening's discussion will address the tensions between cultural identity and U.S. citizenship, the responsibilities inherent in citizenship, and what it means to live a "public life."

Free copies of Hunger of Memory are available but supplies are limited. E-mail [email protected] for your copy.

Made possible by the New York Council for the Humanities

  Seminar Room 1  Visiting the LA Art Book Fair, realize that “art” books no longer necessarily about visual art … in fact, most are not.  “Art” now connotes something else, a non-commercial cultural product … Art projects like Rolling Jubilee, K Hole, Care of Editions might once have been perceived through the lens of activism … Ability of conceptual art projects to reflect and concretize the abstraction of capital’s flows … conceptual art being perhaps best medium through which to perceive something as conceptual and abstract as capital … Film, theater, literature, poetry, experimental music and dance disappear as separate disciplines with no distribution/revenue structures left to support them, and migrate into the art world … the strengths and weaknesses of this situation.Chris Kraus is a writer and critic based in Los Angeles.  Her most recent novel is Summer of Hate.  In 2012, she co-curated the exhibition Radical Localism: Art, Media and Culture from Pueblo Nuevo’s Mexicali Roseat Artists Space with Richard Birkett and Marco Vera.  This work has led to further writings on the expanding art world and outpost culture, including Kelly Lake Store (n+1, Summer 2013).  She contributed to ICA Philadelphia Four Roads Jason Rhoades book, and writes about art and culture for various magazines.

Arles, France 2013

Organized by Thomas Keenan, Suhail Malik, and Tirdad Zolghadr
Arles, France  tical transformations in the name of justice have been organized and taken place since the first “The Human Snapshot” Conference at Arles in 2011, the second LUMA Foundation Conference in 2013, “The Flood of Rights,” will ask how technologies of image-capture and the channels of communication have in recent years transformed the very terms of human rights. That is, while “The Human Snapshot” explored the possibilities and limitations of the intersections between human rights, photography, and universalism, our focus now turns to the platforms and media of these intersections, and on how the newly produced and disseminated universalizing pressures on morality, law, civic engagement, and their institutions are themselves transfigured in the process.

Read more about the conference at:

Flood of Rights Webpage

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  The Levy Institute of Economics is starting it's Master of Science in Economic Theory and Policy program from the Fall of 2014. The program emphasizes theoretical and empirical aspects of policy analysis through specialization in one of four Levy Institute research areas: macroeconomic theory, policy, and modeling; monetary policy and financial structure; distribution of income, wealth, and well-being, including gender equality and time poverty; and employment and labor markets.

The Master of Science program draws on the expertise of an extensive network of scholars at the Levy Economics Institute, a policy research think tank with more than 25 years of economic theory and public policy research. During the two-year M.S. program, students are required to participate in a graduate research assistantship carried out by Levy Institute scholars and faculty. Undergraduates in economics or related fields have an opportunity, through a 3+2 program, to earn both a B.A. and the M.S. in five years.

  "Potential Partners in the Pacific? Mutual Interests and the Sino-NATO Relationship.”
BGIA, 36 West 44th Street, #1011; New York, NY 10024  LTC Tania Chacho

Academy Professor, Department of Social Studies. United States Military Academy at West Point

Email [email protected] if you're interested in attending
Email  Environmental Collective is planning on sending 10 students to Power Shift 2013. 10,000+ youth leaders will converge in Pittsburgh, PA to fight for our future. Together we’ll build the movement to fight fracking, divest from fossil fuels, build a clean energy future, and stop the climate crisis. Power Shift 2013 will take place October 18 - 21st in Pittsburgh, PA.

IF YOU WANT TO GO--SEND THIS INFO  IN AN EMAIL BY THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 AT 5PM. NO EXCEPTIONS.
--->1.) You must register and pay for your ticket or get in contact with Olivia by Wednesday. (http://www.wearepowershift.org/register)

--->2.) Please send your emergency contact you put down on the Power Shift registration, your cellphone number, email, food allergies, your roommate gender preference if any and if you are a Bard Driver.

--->3.) Email 2 sentences about why you want to go. 

Olin Language Center, Room 115  Join us for an evening lecture with sustainability expert and Bard MBA Faculty, Hunter Lovins. Lovins will discuss her work with the government of Bhutan and the UN to develop a new roadmap for global economic sustainability. Please join her for a progress report. All are welcome to attend. 


Hunter Lovins, Bard MBA Faculty; President of Natural Capitalism, Inc.
Hunter Lovins J.D., Loyola Law School; B.S. (Sociology, Political Science). L. Hunter Lovins is president and founder of Natural Capitalism Solutions (NCS). NCS educates senior decision makers in business, government, and civil society to restore and enhance natural and human capital while increasing prosperity and quality of life. Lovins is also currently a faculty member at Bainbridge Graduate Institute and the chief insurgent of the Madrone Project. Lovins has consulted for scores of industries, governments, and large and small companies worldwide. Recipient of such honors as the Right Livelihood Award, Lindbergh Award, and Leadership in Business, she was named Time Magazine 2000 Hero of the Planet and in 2009 Newsweek dubbed her a “Green Business Icon.” She has co-authored nine books and hundreds of papers, including the 1999 book Natural Capitalism, 2006 e-book Climate Protection Manual for Cities, and the 2009 book Transforming Industry in Asia. She has served on the boards of governments, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit companies. Lovins’s areas of expertise include natural capitalism, sustainable development, globalization, energy and resource policy, economic development, climate change, land management, fire rescue, and emergency medicine. She developed the Economic Renewal Project and helped write many of its manuals on sustainable community economic development. She was a founding professor of business at Presidio Graduate School, one of the first accredited programs offering an M.B.A. in sustainable management.



Download: Hunter Lovins_EventPoster_WEB.pdf

Trauma, Human Rights and Displacement

Olin Humanities, Room 102  Settlerness—the conception, practice and production of the settler self—has been subject to several transformations in the history of Palestine/Israel. During the recent decades, new forms of representation of settlerness have emerged in this space of colonial relationships. Human rights, trauma, and displacement are acquiring new meanings in settler practices and discourses. Their appropriation by various actors of the Israeli settler formation opens to new analytical and theoretical refinements in the understanding of the existing relationships between Israelis and Palestinians.

Nicola Perugini is an anthropologist. He teaches at Al Quds BARD Honors College (Jerusalem) and is currently a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. His work focuses on colonialism, space and law in Morocco and Palestine; asylum seekers and the politics of migrations in Italy; embedded anthropology in war contexts. He is writing a book on settler deployments of human rights, trauma and displacement discourses in Palestine/Israel.

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Tejaswini Ganti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and its Program in Culture & Media at New York University. A visual anthropologist specializing in South Asia, her research interests include Indian cinema, anthropology of media, production cultures, visual culture, cultural policy, nationalism, neoliberalism, capitalism, ideologies of development and theories of globalization. She has been conducting ethnographic research about the social world and filmmaking practices of the Hindi film industry since 1996 and is the author of Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Duke University Press 2012) and Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2004; 2nd edition, 2013).

  Translating Revolution: Hannah Arendt and Arab Political Culture
Olin Humanities, Room 205  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Hannah Arendt has famously lamented in On Revolution (1963) that the revolutionary tradition of the United States was lost on the “‘revolutionary’ countries in the East” and the United States alike. On Revolution has received more attention in Arab translation circles than any of her other works – including her Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) which overshadowed On Revolution in the West. In the context of a wider Arab reception history of Arendt, this paper examines two Arabic translations - Khayri Hammad’s critical translation Ra’i fi al-thawrāt (1964, republished in excerpt in Cairo, 2012) and Abdel-Rahman Bushnaq's Franklin Foundation-endorsed translation of her favorite book, Between Past and Future, in 1974 - in order to discuss 'Lesser-evilism', Arab authoritarianism and the current uprisings against both.

Jens Hanssen is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history at the University of Toronto. His book publications include “Fin de Siècle Beirut” (Oxford, 2005) and two co-edited volumes: “Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire,” (Beirut, 2002); and “History, Space and Social Conflict in Beirut” (Beirut, 2005). He has recently published in “The New Cambridge History of Islam” (2010), in the “International Journal of Middle East Studies” (2011), “Critical Inquiry” (2012) and an article “Reading Arendt in the Middle East” (http://www.perspectivia.net/content/publikationen/orient-institut-studies/1-2012/hanssen_hannah-arendt). He is co-editing the “OUP Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History” and “Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age.” During his visit to Baghdad in June 2003, he filmed a short documentary (posted on youtube.com) on academic life in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. He is currently conducting research on intersections between German-Jewish and Arab intellectual histories. He also investigates the legacy of the 19th-century Arabic revival and reform movement on contemporary political developments.

  "The struggle against antisemitism, holocaust denial and neo-nationalism in Hungary and Eastern Europe."

Arendt Center  12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In 1951, László Z. Bitó and his family were deported from Budapest to a small village near the Soviet border by the Hungarian Communist regime. Three years later, Bitó was sent to a forced labor unit in the coal mines of Komlo, Hungary. During the revolution of 1956, he organized the takeover of the labor camp. After Russian tanks crushed the uprising in November, he escaped to Austria and from there immigrated to the United States when he was 22 years old. He was granted asylum in the United States and came to Bard College in the winter of 1956–57. He graduated from Bard College in 1960 as a pre-med biology major and went on to obtain his doctorate from Columbia University in medical cell biology. His research led to the development of Xalatan, a drug that has saved the sight of millions of glaucoma sufferers. He has published more than 150 scientific articles and received, among many other honors, the highest recognition in the field of eye research, the Proctor Medal. Upon retiring from Columbia University as an emeritus professor of ocular physiology, he returned to Hungary and his first love of writing. Of his 14 nonscientific books—novels, essays, and three anthologies of some of his more than 100 newspaper and magazine articles—some have appeared in translations in half a dozen countries.The moral blindness, the acceptance of aggression and violence has always been the central question of his literary works. The answers to these questions Bitó is exploring in two roles - as a successful writer, and also as a man who has known much suffering.

  A Lecture by Dana Yahalomi
Olin Humanities, Room 102  During the lecture Dana Yahalomi, Public Movement Leader, will present key strategies developed by the movement alongside examples of previous actions. In the last six years, Public Movement has explored the regulations, forces, agents, and policies, formations of identity and systems of ritual which govern the dynamics of public life and public space. The Movement was founded in December 2006 by Omer Krieger and Dana Yahalomi, who later assumed sole leadership in 2011.The lecture will conclude and open into discussion with the recent action SALONS: Birthright Palestine? (February - April 2012, New Museum, NYC) which used the phenomenon of Birthright Israel(1) in order to raise questions about nationality and heritage, as well as about the politics of tourism and branding. In a series of performative public discussions, each adopting existing formats of discursive forums, different publics presented and debated upon related questions and issues that would inform, affirm and/or oppose the proposal to initiate a Birthright Palestine program.

Public Movement is a performative research body which investigates and stages political actions in public spaces. It studies and creates public choreographies, forms of social order, overt and covert rituals. Among Public Movement's actions in the past and in the future: manifestations of presence, fictional acts of hatred, new folk dances, synchronized procedures of movement, spectacles, marches, inventing and reenacting moments in the life of individuals, communities, social institutions, peoples, states, and of humanity.

Public Movement has taken responsibility for the following actions: "Accident" (Tel- Aviv, 2006), "The Israel Museum" (Tel- Aviv, 2007), "Also Thus!" (Acco Festival, 2007), "Operation Free Holon" (The Israeli Center for Digital Art, 2007), "Change of Guard” (With Dani Karavan, Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, 2008), "Public Movement House" (Bat Yam Museum, 2008), “Emergency” (Acco Festival, 2008), “The 86th Anniversary of the assassination of President Gabriel Narutowicz by the painter Eligiusz Niewiadomski” (Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 2008), "Spring in Warsaw" (Nowy Teatr, 2009), "Performing Politics for Germany" (HAU Berlin, 2009), “Positions” (Van AbbeMuseum, 2009), “First of May Riots “(HAU Berlin, 2010), "University Exercise" (Heidelberg, 2010), "SALONS: Birthright Palestine?" (New Museum, New York, 2012), “Rebranding European Muslims” (Berlin Biennial, 2012, Steirischer Herbst, 2012), “Debriefing Session” (Baltic Circle, Helsinki, 2012), "Civil Fast" (Jerusalem, 2012) and "The Reenactment of the Mount Herzl Terrorist Attack" (Upcoming).

The lecture has been supported by Artis www.artiscontemporary.org

1 Birthright Israel is a 10-day free trip for Jews between the ages of 18 to 26 who travel around Israel together on a bus. It was founded in 1999, sponsored by the government of Israel and American Jewish philanthropy. Over 300,000 people have participated in the program since its founding. Birthright Israel was founded in the hope to address the following concerns: detachment of diaspora Jews to the state of Israel, an increase in intermarriages between Jews and non-Jews and a need to sustain the Israeli-American Lobby, which for years served Israel with political advocacy and a great source of funding.

Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  A panel discussion on the democracy in Myanmar, also known as Burma. Since the dawn of the Arab spring, democratization in previously authoritarian regimes has been a topic that sparks hope as well as concern for the future. Myanmar had its first elections in 20 years in 2010 after long years of political repression and control. Although it had been widely claimed that the elections were rigged and the constitution unsupported, Myanmar has been moving towards a more open society since then. For the first time, people are allowed to gather and protest in public, and the media is allowed significant freedom to express independent opinions as well as expose conflicting issues. The new government freed political prisoners many of whom were previously denied even to exist, and one of the prisoners is the noble laureate Daw Aung San Su Kyi, the head of the opposition. On the flip side of the coin, however, there had been increasing conflicts between religious groups and the civil war with ethnic people is still on-going despite the attempts to bring peace to the ethnic regions. In this critical time of transition period, it becomes important to identify the issues that Myanmar has to face in order to direct the country on the right path.

Panelists:
U Ba Win - Vice President of Bard Early College Policies and Programs
Professor Kristin Scheible - Assistant Professor of Religion
Professor Ken Haig - Assistant Professor of Political Studies
Thant Ko Ko - Bard senior (Class of 2013)

Center for Civic Engagement Community Actions Award Event

*Light refreshments afterwards

  The Future of US Relations with Iran
Olin Humanities, Room 102  An off-the-record discussion of US-Iran relations from a micro and macro perspective. 

Jonny Cristol, Director, BGIA;

and

Scott Silverstone, Professor of International Relations, United States Military Academy at West Point; faculty member, BGIA

moderated by Michelle Murray, Assistant Professor of Political Studies, Bard College

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  The applications are coming in for the fall 2013 BGIA program. Next fall we will be offering courses including: Ethics in International Affairs; Writing on International Affairs; Power, War, and Terror; and more. Students will intern in organizations throughout the city. We have had students of all majors and students of all majors are welcome.

We can answer any and all of your questions!

  First Meeting
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Down the Road Cafe  Amnesty International at Bard is a club of students committed to human rights and activism.  For our first meeting, we will discuss our interests and passions as well as our goals and norms for the group.

  Olin, Room 203  A lecture on UN peacekeeping initiatives during civil wars led by Professor Darya Pushkina of Smolny College.

  A Talk/Talk-Back with Tim McCarthy
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Talk and discussion with dinner beforehand: To attend the pre-talk dinner with Tim, e-mail [email protected].

Timothy Patrick McCarthy teaches history, literature, and public policy at Harvard University, where he also directs the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Tim also blogs for the Nation, and is an activist, scholar, and author.

  Olin Language Center, Room 115  Featuring Walter Russel Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest magazine; Michelle Murray, Assistant Professor of Political Studies; Jonny Cristol, Director, Bard Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA) Program, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Studies; Saim Saeed (’13); and Sarah Stern (’13).

  Obama and the Muslim World
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Professor Anouar Majid(New England University) In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama promised to “extend a hand” if Muslims are “willing to unclench [their] fist.” But can Obama’s policies break away from centuries of failed opportunities to understand Islam and Muslims in their own terms? In this talk, Anouar Majid will make an attempt to chart out a path of genuine and constructive dialogue, one that takes into account the pitfalls of both American and Muslims histories, the delusions of power on both sides, and the shortcomings of politics as usual.Anouar Majid is founding director of the Center for Global Humanities and Professor of English at the University in New England in Maine. His work has been profiled in the Bill Moyers Journal and in Al Jazeera's Date in Exile program, as well as by several national and international media organizations. His new book, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Islam and Other Minorities (2009), traces the ideological origins of the concept of minority to the long wars of Islam and Christianity in medieval Europe.

"HIGH" AND "LOW": POPULISM AND ANTI-POPULISM IN ARGENTINA
Olin Humanities, Room 102              Peronism, the movement founded by Juan Perón and Evita, has despite two repressive regimes and an extended ban on its existence proven to be an almost hegemonic, yet also quite divided, political movement in Argentina. Its party expression, the P.J., is arguably one of the largest mass parties in Latin America. Yet “Peronism” has been particularly hard to define ideologically, or even politically. Some analysts have viewed it as initially “fascist” and now authoritarian; others have regarded it as a basically social-democratic party, relying on its labor constituency; still others view Peronism as the vehicle of the greatest political and social democratization ever witnessed in Argentina. Certainly, “populist” Peronism has historically extended from the far left to the far right, passing through all shades of center. I attempt to define it in terms of a new theoretical concept for politics: the “low”. Furthermore, I argue that the Argentine “party system” as a whole is, in fact, durably structured by a political “high”-“low” cleavage. More conceptually, populism, widespread in Latin America and long a subject of intractable theoretical debate, and the less noticed but equally powerful phenomenon of anti-populism, are also best grasped in terms of the concepts of “high” and “low” in politics.             The political dimension of “high” and “low”, cross-cutting the more universal one of left and right, can be applied to numerous electoral arenas, including that of the United States, particularly in regard to political appeals and their sociologically-differentiated reception. In far fewer countries, such as Argentina, the political space structuring the party system is fully two-dimensional. Such two-dimensional spaces are particularly rich in the strategic possibilities they offer to politicians, parties, and other political actors when it comes to forging credible alliances, as political actors are then not constrained by the linearity of the more typical, unidimensional, left-right political spectrum. The presentation will visually familiarize you with the puzzling historical transformations of the Argentine party system over the last six decades, while highlighting what remains its even more puzzling, yet stable, spatial configuration.
This seminar will be preceded by a reception in  Olin Atrium at 6:30 p.m.  Please join us! 

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  Fall 2008
 
Wednesday, November 19 
 
Sanjib Baruah 
 
Constructing Insiders and Outsiders:
Citizenship Practices in Northeast India
   Despite some destabilization associated with globalization, citizenship remains firmly grounded in the nation.  The citizen/foreigner binary is foundational to the contemporary global political imaginary.  However, in order to continue our engagement with citizen as political agent, political thinking must overcome the moral geography of this binary.  I have been looking at a couple of cases in Asia, where the citizen-foreigner binary is not of much help for negotiating the empirical terrain of the politics of citizenship.  In this paper, I will speak on Northeast India, where citizenship practices have developed a serious fault-line.  Not only are thousands of cross-border migrants suspected to be illegal, there is a widely shared view that foreigners are able to vote and exercise significant political influence.  But the issue is not that simple.  It cannot be separated from how the sub-continent’s post-partition cartography came about.  The citizen/foreigner binary is only one among many frames that shape perceptions.  There are other frames reflecting values such as solidarity toward other humans or towards one’s ethnic kin, or simply political pragmatism.  Perhaps such competing frames reflect fissures inherent in all national projects.  I try to develop a robust contextual vocabulary of citizenship that incorporates the reality of a transnational economic space and the values of civility and solidarity.     
This seminar will be held in Olin 102 beginning at 7:00 p.m.,
and will be preceded by a reception in the Olin atrium
at 6:30 p.m.  Please join us!