Crisis— • noun (pl. crises) 1 a time of intense difficulty or danger. 2 the turning point of a disease, when it becomes clear whether the patient will recover or not.
ORIGIN Greek krisis ‘decision’, from krinein ‘decide’.
(Oxford English Dictionary)
Crisis refers to both the temporal condition of social calamity and in its original Greek usage, a moment of decisive intervention. This series will explore the construction of crisis in popular discourse. Who gets to name and define the nature of crisis within a given historical juncture? How is crisis engendered? How are gendered lives and identities transformed by and through crisis? How do prevailing discourses of epidemiology shape societal responses to crisis? In this age where terrorism, disaster, pandemic, peak-oil apocalypse and ecological frailty have stirred public fears, are we beginning a unique historical epoch of meta-crises— an era of permanent states of emergency and chronic “hysteria”? Are we entering a cultural and historical moment where the pursuit of social justice and the defense of the public good require ever-constant vigilance? We will examine the political uses of crisis. In other words, we will think through how progressive and reactionary social forces create opportunity amidst crises. As well, this series will contemplate the relative value of those decisive interventions undertaken by artists, activists, politicians and citizens during times of social uncertainty and danger. The lectures and other events in this series will explore the deeply personal and collective costs of environmental, social and market crises. The events in this series will consider these and other questions of crisis in global, domestic and local contexts.
Thursday September 17, 7:00 pm, Sanford Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
During the 2001 economic collapse in Argentina, the seamstresses at Brukman’s clothing factory took over the operation the owners had abandoned. They reorganized it on a self-management model, without a doubt the most inspiring of the many new economic experiments in that country.
The name Brukman’s went from being a symbol of worker exploitation to being a site of revolutionary labour participation – all workers, no bosses.
Isaac Isitan followed these courageous women over many years, their struggle to get the operation running again, their expulsion from the factory, months of battling to get it back, and tangles with the law.
This is the story of a venture that began as a means of survival and became a genuine school for civics. Besides following the labour politics, the film also gets close to the women as individuals finding a way to put dignity into their working lives.
September 23, 7:30 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Graciela Monteagudo is a community artists, scholar, and intellectual, born and raised in Argentina. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College and has a strong background in philosophy from her graduate and undergraduate studies at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. She is presently a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Anthropology Department and holds a Graduate Studies Certificate in Women's Studies. Graciela has published several articles on her research for which she has received prizes and awards. She is presently the Cesar Chavez Fellow at Dartmouth College.
Monteagudo's research is focused on social movements in Latin America, from a gender and class perspective. She has been collecting empirical and theoretical data on Argentina social movements since 1980's while still in Argentina and has completed her doctoral research recently. Her dissertation project builds on long-term relationships forged with university scholars, civic activists and workers in her native country.
Since 2002, Monteagudo has coordinated the Argentina Autonomista Project (AAP), an exchange program designed to enhance communication between scholars, students and activist from the United States, Canada and Europe with social movements in Argentina. The AAP hosts delegations and organizes residencies for undergraduate and graduate students in recovered factories, as well as presentations with Argentinean workers in the United States, Mexico and Canada. Some of her work has included coordinating puppet and street theater actions at protests in Buenos Aires, Vieques in Puerto Rico, the UK, and throughout the US. As a member of Bread and Puppet Theater Since 1994, Graciela performed and coordinated units in parades and marches throughout the US and Latin America.
Marcelo Vieta teaches in the Division of Social Science and is a PhD candidate (ABD) in the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought, both at York University (Toronto, Canada). He is currently completing his fieldwork with various worker-recuperated enterprises in Argentina and is also a researcher with the University of Toronto's Social Economy Centre on a project titled "The Social Economy and Economies of Solidarity: Emerging Initiatives from Latin America." Vieta's academic interests include theories and histories of workers' control and self-management, alternative economic arrangements, cooperativism, Argentine political economy and history, media theory, critical theory of technology, social interactional aspects of Internet sociability, and existential phenomenology. Vieta has in recent years published book chapters and journal and magazine articles in both Spanish and English on the following themes: Argentine and Latin American worker-recuperated enterprises, workers' co-operatives and workers' control, Argentine political economy, prefigurative politics, the philosophy and sociology of Internet-mediated communication, phenomenological methods for researching technologically-mediated practices, the phenomenology of multiplayer video games, the media theory of Marshall McLuhan, email surveillance, the corporatization of the university, and critical perspectives on online education. In the past two years, Vieta has helped co-organize, together with the extension program of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires and several other research and activist organizations from the Americas, two conferences in Buenos Aires, Argentina on the theme of the possibilities and realities of the workers' economy attended by progressive academics, workers, and workers organizations from five continents. He is also currently guest-editing on the theme of the next issue of Affinities Journal on the "new cooperativism" and has recently taught a graduate seminar on the "genealogy of autogestión (self-management)" at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. Vieta is also a co-founder and current member of the autonomous educational project Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry (TSCI), which organizes critical education events, exhibits, and reading groups exploring concrete, conceptual, and artistic ways out of the enclosures of contemporary life.
Co-sponsored with the Religious Studies Department
October 22, 7:30 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Richard Bernstein is currently the Vera List Professor of Philosophy at the Dept. of Philosophy of the New School for Social Research. His recent book publications include Radical Evil: A Philosophic Interrogation (2002) wherein he crtiques the appeal to evil as a political tool that obscures complex issues, blocks thinking, and stifles public discussion and debate; Freud and the Legacy of Moses (1998); and Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (1996). He received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1958 from Yale University with a dissertation on “John Dewey’s Metaphysics of Experience.” In addition to the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research, he has taught at Yale University, Hebrew University, Haverford College, Catholic University of America, University of Pennsylvania, and Frankfurt University. He was chair of the Dept. of Philosophy at the Graduate Faculty of the New School from 1989 to 2002.
November 11, 7:30 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Andrea Tone is the Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine. A professor of history, she holds joint appointments in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine and the Department of History at McGill University. Her scholarship explores women and health, medical technology, sexuality, psychiatry, and industry, particularly the intersection between patient experience, cultural contexts, and technological and economic change in nineteenth and twentieth-century America. She is the author of several books and edited volumes, including Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, which was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and, most recently, Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History, with Elizabeth Siegel Watkins. She has just finished a book on the history of tranquilizers (forthcoming with Basic Books) and is beginning research on a project on Cold War psychopharmacology funded by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Her work has been featured on ABC News, PBS, National Public Radio, the CBC, the History Channel, and in the New York Times.
Presentations will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Geneva Room of the Warren Hunting Smith Library, on Pulteney Street, on the HWS campus unless otherwise noted.
All morning roundtables will be held from 9 to 10 a.m. in Room 212 Demarest Hall, the Fisher Center.
