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Silvia Federici
"Feminist Autonomy, Global Crisis, and the Question of the Commons"
7 p.m., Sanford Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Inaugurating the Fisher Center's 2012-2013 focus on Gender, Collectivity and the Common, is a feminist activist and scholar long associated with asserting the inextric ability of feminist issues from questions of the common.
Bio: Silvia Federici is a long time feminist activist, teacher and writer. Emerita Professor at Hofstra University, she has also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. Federici is the author of numerous essays on feminist theory, women's history, political philosophy and education.
Kaushik Sunder Rajan
"The Scandal of the Trial: HPV Vaccines, Knowledge / Value, and Experimental Subjectivity"
7 p.m., Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
In April 2010, the Indian Council for Medical Research halted the experimental administration of Gardasil, a vaccine developed by Merck to prevent human papilloma virus infection, to tribal girls in Bhadrachalam, in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. This controversy points to the politics around pharmaceuticals and health in India today. What is their relation to global logics of biocapital? What kinds of experimental subjectivity get produced as a consequence?
Bio: Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Biocapital (Duke, 2006) and editor of Lively Capital (Duke, 2012).
Michael Hardt
"The Right to the Common"
7 p.m., Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
The right to the common is becoming a central demand of many contemporary social struggles. The first task of this lecture is to define the common and articulate its characteristics in distinction from boththeprivateandthepublic. Thesecondtask is to explore the ways in which different social movements, including Occupy, are oriented toward the common.
Michael Hardt is the chair of the Literature Program at Duke. He is co-author with Antonio Negri of Declaration as well as the Empire trilogy (Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth). He currently serves as editor of The South Atlantic Quarterly.
"When the 'World on a Plate' Visits Your Table: Culinary Conundrums of Gender, Nationality, Memory and Marriage,"
October 19, 7:30-9 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Abstract: The World on a Plate is a phrase that has often been used to discuss the amalgamated ways that American food culture has evolved. In particular, when we think about African American culinary history it is necessary to consider the various cultures and histories that have influenced its existence. Building off these historical discussions, Psyche Williams-Forson turns to the contemporary moment to detail some of the ways in which African/African American food cultures have intermingled. In this talk she describes the meeting of African American and Ghanaian cultures and cuisines inside her household and the complex gender issues at play as she and her Ghanaian husband negotiate culinary practices. By reflecting on the tensions involved when other women cook for her husband, Williams-Forson uses theory and auto-ethnography to question how the broad sociopolitical forces of gender, race, class, and Diaspora play out around meals in her home.
Bio: Psyche Williams-Forson is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park and an affiliate faculty member of the Women's Studies and African American Studies departments and the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity. She is an Associate Editor of Food and Foodways journal and author of the award-winning book (American Folklore Society), Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (2006), which examines the complexity of black women's legacies using food as a form of cultural work. Her new research explores class, entrepreneurship, consumption, and citizenship among African Americans by examining domestic interiors from the late nineteenth-century to the early twentieth-century.
She is the author of several articles and book chapters and the recipient of numerous fellowships including a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the Winterthur Museum and Library.
(2008 Film, Directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy)
November 16, 7:00-9 pm, Sanford Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Film Synopsis: The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country's most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community. But now, bulldozers are poised to level their 14-acre oasis.
The Garden follows the plight of the farmers, from the tilled soil of this urban farm to the polished marble of City Hall. Mostly immigrants from Latin America, from countries where they feared for their lives if they were to speak out, we watch them organize, fight back, and demand answers:
Why was the land sold to a wealthy developer for millions less than fair-market value? Why was the transaction done in a closed-door session of the LA City Council? Why has it never been made public?
And the powers-that-be have the same response: "The garden is wonderful, but there is nothing more we can do."
If everyone told you nothing more could be done, would you give up?
The Garden has the pulse of verité with the narrative pull of fiction, telling the story of the country's largest urban farm, backroom deals, land developers, green politics, money, poverty, power, and racial discord. The film explores and exposes the fault lines in American society and raises crucial and challenging questions about liberty, equality, and justice for the poorest and most vulnerable among us. Visit the film website.
"Gender and Food Activism in Italy"
February 15, 7:30-9 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Abstract: This talk will ponder whether and how gender plays a role in contemporary Italian food activism. The literature on food and gender suggests several forces that may affect men's and women's participation in food activism, for example, women's identification with feeding; the male-female division of food labor; gendered sensory, corporeal, and emotional relations to food; and gendered meanings surrounding food. This talk uses ethnographic interviews conducted in 2009 with leaders of several Italian Slow Food chapters and in 2011 with a range of food activists in Cagliari, Italy, to ask how their gendered experiences with food in Italian culture might contribute to or detract from efforts to make the food system more just, more sustainable, more responsive to local communities, and of higher quality.
Bio: Carole Counihan is Professor of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She has a BA in history cum laude from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Counihan's research centers on food, culture, gender, and identity in the United States and Italy. Supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, she authored A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (University of Texas Press, 2009), which is based on food-centered life histories collected from Hispanic women in the town of Antonito, Colorado. Counihan is also author of Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence (Routledge, 2004) and The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power (Routledge, 1999). She is editor of Food in the USA: A Reader (Routledge 2002), with Penny Van Esterik, of Food and Culture: A Reader (Routledge 1997, 2008), and with Psyche Williams-Forson of Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World (Routledge 2011). She is editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Food and Foodways. Counihan has been a visiting professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy since 2005, and she has also been a visiting professor at Boston University and the University of Cagliari (Sardinia), Italy.
March 14, 7:30-9 pm, Sanford Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Film Synopsis: Berliner's film will investigate the basic means for survival—food. By focusing on the creation, actualization, and beneficiaries of Healthy Food for All, a unique program initiated by Remembrance Farm and the Cornell Cooperative Extension, the film will demonstrate demand and compassionate supply create by a network of small businesses and individuals vested in making a difference.
Bio: Outside of the classroom, Media & Society / Psychology major Lucia Berliner '12, plans socially conscious events and programs on campus such as ArtFest, a Japan relief fundraiser, and EcoFusion, a free after school program designed to connect middle school children to various facets of environmental stewardship. A lifelong Hudson River activist, Berliner was born and raised in the Hudson Valley where she has always been fortunate enough to have access to healthy local foods, a goal she hopes to help make a reality for all people.
"Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Reflections on the Origins and Character of Contemporary Food Activism,"
April 11, 7:30-9 pm, Geneva Room Warren Hunting Smith Library
Abstract: In this talk I will reflect upon how food activism has become "feel good politics". Drawing on nearly a decade's work with students who enrolled in the food and agriculture track in UC Santa Cruz's Community Studies major, I have found that most contemporary food activism in the US consists of teaching others how to eat and grow food rather than contesting state or corporate practices. This, I argue, is a convergence of neoliberalism's politics of the possible, the governmentality of healthism, and the desire for connection. While such activism affords those enrolled the pleasures of doing good by eating well, it largely neglects the deep social injustices propagated in the production and consumption of food.
Bio: Julie Guthman is an Associate Professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz where she teaches courses primarily in global political economy and the politics of food and agriculture. Since receiving her PhD in 2000 in Geography from the University of California at Berkeley, she has published extensively on contemporary efforts to transform the way food is produced, distributed, and consumed, with a particular focus on voluntary food labels, community food security, farm-to-school programs, and the race and class politics of "alternative food." Her first book, Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in California, (University of California, 2004), won the Frederick H. Buttel Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement from the Rural Sociological Society and the Donald Q. Innis Award from the Rural Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. Her new book, Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (University of California, 2011) challenges many of the taken-for-granted assumptions about the so-called obesity epidemic, including that it can be addressed by exposing people to the "right" food.
"Apparitions of Full Citizens: When Should the Civic Imprisonment of Felons End?"
February 9, 2010 at 7:30 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Michael Leo Owens (Ph.D. State University of New York-Albany, 2001) is Associate Professor of Political Science and Religion and a research partner for the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative at Emory University. He is also the co-organizer of the Atlanta Reentry Mapping Network for the Urban Institute, a research initiative by scholars and community stakeholders to study together the spatial distribution and social dynamics of ex-prisoner reentry in metropolitan Atlanta. The author of God & Government in the Ghetto: The Politics of Church-State Collaboration in Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Dr. Owens's current projects include Prisoners of Democracy, a multi-method study of punitive public policies and attitudes in the United States that impede the reintegration of ex-felons as democratic citizens. In recognition of his past research, Dr. Owens was awarded a 2006-2007 Visiting Fellowship to the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; a 2004 Norton Long Young Scholar Award from the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association; and the 2000 Young Scholar Award from the Urban Affairs Association and Sage Publications. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Housing Institute; the Governing Board of the Urban Affairs Association; the Executive Council of the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association; the National Academic Advisory Board of City Hall Fellows; and the Editorial Review Boards of the Urban Affairs Review and Journal of Urban Affairs. Before joining the Emory faculty, Dr. Owens conducted public policy research for the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government and the New York State Temporary Commission on Constitutional Revision. He also served on the legislative staff of the New York State Senate.
"Letters from the Dead" One-Woman Show featuring Carol Lawes
March 9, 2011 at 7:30 pm, The Headless Sullivan's Theater, 427 Exchange Street
Letters from the Dead began as a collectively-created image event commemorating the murder of thousands of youth killed in inner city violence in Toronto's Caribbean diaspora. The event comprises a silent funeral procession in the street. Bringing together the messages from the dead and media reports on violence, and the losses of living, the performance traces one woman's attempt to bury her grandson and convey his demands for justice in the present.
"Memory, Urban Violence and Performance,"
Rountable discussion
March 10, 2011 at 9 am, The Fisher Center for the Study of Women and Men (Demarest 212).
Honor Ford-Smith is a scholar, theatre worker and poet. She was educated in Jamaica at St Andrew High School and after studying theatre began teaching at the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston. She became co-founder and artistic director of Sistren (Sisters), a theatre collective of mainly working-class Jamaican women that works in community theatre and popular education. Currently Sistren continues to carry out community performance and education in Kingston, Jamaica. Ford-Smith was also a member of the Groundwork Theatre Company, created in 1980 as the repertory arm of the Jamaica School of Drama; it became an autonomous company in 1987.
She researched, edited and contributed to Sistren's book "Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women," published in 1986 and re-issued, with a new afterword by Ford-Smith, in 2005. A collection of poems, "My Mother's Last Dance," appeared in 1996. Among her many theatre projects have been the collectively created "Fallen Angel and the Devil Concubine ," a dramatic adaptation of "My Mother's Last Dance," and "Just Jazz," an adaptation of Jean Rhys's "Let Them Call It Jazz." Her most recent publication is "3 Jamaican plays: a postcolonial anthology" published by Paul Issa Publications, Kingston, Jamaica in 2010.
Ford-Smith moved to Toronto, Canada in 1991, receiving her doctorate in education from the University of Toronto in 2004. Her PhD dissertation "Performing nation: the pedagogy and politics of postcolonial Jamaican performance" for OISE- University of Toronto is a discussion of the ways in which performance operates as an embodied language for decolonization and the construction of the postcolonial nation. She continues to write, to work in performance and to teach at York University in Toronto where she is an Associate Professor in the Community Arts Practice program under the Faculty of Environmental Studies.
Leo Srole/ Fisher Center Lecture:
"Once Convicted, Forever Doomed: The Politics of Punishment in the U.S."
April 20, 2011 at 7:30 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library.
Khalilah L. Brown-Dean is the Peter Strauss Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Yale University. She is a Resident Fellow of the Institute for Social and Policy Studies and a Research Fellow at the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. Dr. Brown-Dean received her Ph.D. in Political Science from The Ohio State University in 2003 and a B.A. in Government from The University of Virginia in 1998. Brown-Dean's current research agenda focuses on the political dynamics surrounding the American criminal justice system. Her book manuscript (under contract with the Yale University Press), Once Convicted, Forever Doomed: Race, Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement, and Fractured Citizenship, explores the tension between crime control policies and notions of citizenship. Brown-Dean is completing a second book manuscript, Diversity and Democracy, that evaluates the quest for democratic inclusion through the lens of ethno-racial identity. She was named a 2009 Justice Advocacy Senior Fellow by the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute and is a past recipient of the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Research. Brown-Dean has served as a political analyst, advisor, and commentator for CNN, PBS, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Crisis Magazine, the Comcast Network, and several governmental agencies, community organizations, and international media outlets.
"Engendering the Punitive State: Workfare and Prisonfare in Post-Civil Rights America"
September 22, 2010 at 8 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Loïc Wacquant is professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Institute for Legal Research, Boalt Law School, University of California at Berkeley, where he is affiliated with the Program in Medical Anthropology, the Global Metropolitan Studies Program, the Center for the Study of Race and Gender, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, and the Center for Urban Ethnography. He is also a researcher at the Centre de sociologie européenne in Paris. Wacquant is the author of over one hundred scholarly articles published in journals of sociology, anthropology, criminology, social theory, social policy, philosophy, psychology, and urban and cultural studies, and translated in a dozen languages. Among his books are An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (1992, with Pierre Bourdieu, translated in 19 languages), Les Prisons de la misère (1999, translated in 16 languages), Body and Soul: Ethnographic Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2000/2004, translated in 7 languages), The Mystery of Ministry: Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics (published in 5 languages in 2005), Das Janusgesicht des Ghettos (2006, translated in 3 languages), Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (2008, translated in 6 languages), and Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (forthcoming with Duke University Press in Spring 2009, translated in 6 languages).
"Latinas and Imprisonment in the U.S."
October 20, 2010 at 7:30 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Juanita Díaz-Cotto, Ph.D., was born in Puerto Rico and raised between Puerto Rico and New York City. Active in human rights struggles for over thirty years - including those of women, lesbians and gays, prisoners, and people of color inside and outside the U.S. - she considers herself very much both an activist and an academic. Dr. Díaz-Cotto is author of: CHICANA LIVES AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE: Voices from El Barrio (2006) (winner of an International Latino Book Award and a ForeWord Magazine Book Award); GENDER, ETHNICITY, AND THE STATE: Latina and Latino Prison Politics (1996); and editor, under the pseudonym of Juanita Ramos, of COMPAÑERAS: Latina Lesbians (An Anthology)/Lesbianas latinoamericanas (3rd ed., 2004) and SINISTER WISDOM 74: Latina Lesbians (2008). Dr. Díaz-Cotto is a Professor of sociology, women's studies, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is also Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies Program. Dr. Díaz-Cotto has given lectures and presentations in Argentina, Barbados, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Ireland, Italy, México, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, South Africa, and over 40 cities in the United States. Her lectures and presentations have covered a wide range of issues including: criminal justice/prisons; Latinas/os and women of color in the U.S.; Latin American feminisms; race and ethnicity; gender, sexuality, and heterosexism; class and income inequalities; oral history and ethnographic research; and community organizing.
"Representational Battlegrounds: Photography from Japanese American Incarceration to Abu Ghraib"
November 10, 2010 at 7:30 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Jasmine Alinder is an Associate Professor of History and Co-Coordinator of Public History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She published Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (University of Illinois Press, 2009), which is due out in paperback in the fall of 2010. Her current research, with support from an American Council of Learned Societies Charles Ryskamp fellowship, focuses on photography and the law. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of Michigan in 1999.
"Apparitions of Full Citizens: When Should the Civic Imprisonment of Felons End?"
February 9, 2010 at 7:30 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Michael Leo Owens (Ph.D. State University of New York-Albany, 2001) is Associate Professor of Political Science and Religion and a research partner for the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative at Emory University. He is also the co-organizer of the Atlanta Reentry Mapping Network for the Urban Institute, a research initiative by scholars and community stakeholders to study together the spatial distribution and social dynamics of ex-prisoner reentry in metropolitan Atlanta. The author of God & Government in the Ghetto: The Politics of Church-State Collaboration in Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Dr. Owens's current projects include Prisoners of Democracy, a multi-method study of punitive public policies and attitudes in the United States that impede the reintegration of ex-felons as democratic citizens. In recognition of his past research, Dr. Owens was awarded a 2006-2007 Visiting Fellowship to the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; a 2004 Norton Long Young Scholar Award from the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association; and the 2000 Young Scholar Award from the Urban Affairs Association and Sage Publications. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Housing Institute; the Governing Board of the Urban Affairs Association; the Executive Council of the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association; the National Academic Advisory Board of City Hall Fellows; and the Editorial Review Boards of the Urban Affairs Review and Journal of Urban Affairs. Before joining the Emory faculty, Dr. Owens conducted public policy research for the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government and the New York State Temporary Commission on Constitutional Revision. He also served on the legislative staff of the New York State Senate.
"Criminal Intimancy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality"
March 9, 2011 at 7:30 pm, Geneva Room, Warren Hunting Smith Library
Regina Kunzel is the Paul R. Frenzel Land Grant Chair in Liberal Arts and Professor in the Departments of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and History at the University of Minnesota. Kunzel earned her Ph.D. at Yale University. An historian of the 20th-century U.S., Kunzel focuses on gender and sexuality and the intertwined histories of deviance and normalcy. Her book, Criminal Intimacy: Sex in Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2008) was awarded the American Historical Association's John Boswell Prize, the Modern Language Association's Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Award, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies, and was a finalist for the American Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Prize. Kunzel is also the author of Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945 (Yale University Press, 1993), as well as articles on the history of prison sexual culture, single pregnancy, and gender and professionalization, and her work has been published in The American Historical Review, GLQ, Radical History Review, Journal of Social History, and anthologies. Kunzel co-authored a special issue of Radical History Review, "The Queer Issue: New Visions of America's Lesbian and Gay Past," No. 62 (Spring 1995). Kunzel has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council.
Hannah Landecker
January 26
If cells animate life, how do imaging technologies breathe new life into cells? And, if visual imaging media change, does cell life become reanimated in new ways too?
University of California, Los Angeles Associate Professor of Sociology and of Society and Genetics Hannah Landecker addresses the intersection of cinema and life science, beginning with early uses of cinematography in experimental biology in the first decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on feminist science studies about biology, embodiment, materiality, and the technologization of life, she asks: What role did (or does) time-lapse imaging play in modern life science, particularly against a background of techniques of fixation and formalization that tend to kill or abstract living things in order to understand them? How then do these imaging techniques serve as a conduit between scientific and popular notions of life? Author of numerous articles and chapters, she received the Suzanne J. Levinson Prize: (best book in life sciences and natural history) for her recent book, Culturing Life: How Cells Become Technologies.
Shelley Jackson
February 19
What happens when monsters become reanimated almost two centuries later? When bodies and words are put in motion anew?
Writer Shelley Jackson will illustrate a discussion of itinerant language and the living dead with passages from or about works, including her groundbreaking hyperfiction Patchwork Girl and her current project SKIN, a "mortal work of art" published in tattoos on the skin of 2095 volunteers, some from countries outside the United States, including Argentina, Jordan, Thailand and Finland. Described as "among the most provocative of feminist hypertexts," and as a "brilliant hypertext parable of writing and identity," Patchwork Girl is about the "female companion to Frankenstein's monster whose 'birth takes place more than once. In the plea of a bygone monster; from a muddy hole by corpse-light; under the needle, and under the pen.'" She is author as well of the novel Half Life, the short-story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, hypertexts My Body and The Doll Games, children's books with her own illustrations, including The Old Woman and The Wave and Sophia, The Alchemist's Dog. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Conjunctions, The Paris Review, Bookforum, The Believer, The LA Times, The Village Voice and Cabinet Magazine. She is co-founder (with artist Christine Hill) of The Interstitial Library and headmistress of the Shelley Jackson Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children. The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award, she has degrees from Stanford and Brown and teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the New School University. She lives in Brooklyn and at www.ineradicablestain.com.
Moving Words Workshop with Shelley Jackson
Friday, February 20
12 - 3 p.m.
R.S.V.P. to fishercenter@hws.edu to reserve a spot.
March 2, 3, 4
Anime Film, Grave of the Fireflies, Monday, March 2, Sanford Room, 6:30 p.m.
Taking place toward the end of World War II in Japan, Grave of the Fireflies is the poignant tale of two orphaned children, Seita and his younger sister Setsuko, who try to survive amidst widespread famine and the callous indifference of their countrymen. Some critics consider it one of the most powerful anti-war movies ever made. Animation historian Ernest Rister compares the film to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and says, "it is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen."
Panel discussion follows film with Professors Les Friedman, Lisa Yoshikawa and Leah Shafer, and students.
Anime Film, Tekkonkinkreet, Tuesday, March 3, Sanford Room, 6:30 p.m.
Tekkonkinkreet centers on a pair of orphaned street kids - the tough, canny Kuro (Black) and the childish but mysteriously intuitive Shiro (White) - as they deal with Yakuza attempting to take over Takara Machi (Treasure Town). Tekkonkinkreet is a pun on "tekkin concrete," the Japanese term for reinforced concrete; it suggests the opposition of the concrete city against the strength of imagination. This film won the 2008 Japan Academy Prize for Animation of the Year, the Grand Prix award at the Anima 2008 festival, the prestigious Best Film Award at the 2006 Mainichi Film Awards, and was named the number one film of 2006 in the annual "Best of" roundup by the New York Museum of Modern Art's Artforum magazine.
Panel discussion follows with screenwriter Anthony Weintraub, and Japanamerica author Roland Kelts.
Roland Kelts
March 4
Is there something more to the U.S.'s fascination with Japanese anime and manga? How are anime films and manga comics cultural channeling zones, opened by the horrors of war and disaster and animated by the desire to assemble a world of new looks, feelings and identities?
Professor at the University of Tokyo, Sophia University and the University of the Sacred Heart Tokyo, Roland Kelts addresses the movement of Japanese culture into the West as sign and symptom of broader reanimations. With uncertainty now the norm, style, he argues, is trumping identity, explaining, in part, the success of Japanese pop and fashion, design and cuisine in the West. As Western mindsets encounter a rapid decline in longstanding binaries - good/evil, woman/man, black/white - Japan's cultural narratives evolve in borderless, unstable worlds where characters transform, morality is multifaceted, and endings inconclusive. Animation allows an aesthetic freedom wherein these transformations and gender ambiguity may be given fuller play than in live action films. Nothing appears fixed. No surprise, perhaps, argues Kelts, coming from the only people to have suffered the immediate transformations of two atomic bombs and the instant denigration of their supreme polar father: the Japanese Emperor. Author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the US, Kelts is also a contributing writer and editor for A Public Space and Adbusters magazines, and a columnist for The Daily Yomiuri. His articles have appeared in The Village Voice, Newsday, Cosmopolitan, Vogue and The Japan Times. He is the editor in chief of Anime Masterpieces, an anime lecture and screening series. Kelts divides his time between New York and Tokyo.
Films, panels and lecture are co-sponsored by Comparative Literature, Media and Society, The Young Memorial Trust for International Peace and Understanding, and Anime Central, and presented in association with Anime Masterpieces, a project of Gorgeous Entertainment.
Astrid Hadad
March 25
Smith Opera House
What happens when cultural stereotypes and iconic images are brought to life live on the stage, cabaret style?
With a baroque sharp-edged brilliance, Mayan-Lebanese artist Astrid Hadad embodies multiple images of woman: the passionate, the rebellious, the naive, the dreamer and the "femme fatale," venomous or scorned. Her unique musical styles include rock-infused Mexican ranchero music, cumbia, La rumba . . . etc. Her method of reinterpreting, performing, and creating popular music has been termed "Heavy Nopal." She points her artistic blade with "Astrident" humor at machismo, fundamentalism, and the powerful elite. This is a show that earned Astrid the title of "walking museum of popular culture," and is not to be missed for either her music or costumes. The show relieves depression, revives the weak, intoxicates (without alcohol) the sober, and excites the hedonistic. Pure animation. Hadad holds a degree from from the Centro Universitario de Teatro de la Ciudad de Mexico. As an actress, she has participated in telenovelas: "Teresa", "Yo no creo en los hombres," "gente bien," and a wide variety of programming on international channels such as "HBO ole." Her filmic work includes a significant role in Solo con tu pareja and the documentaries Hasta el ultimo trago corazon and the prize-winning Astrid Hadad la Tequilera. Hadad has performed in China, France, Peru, Canada, and Lebanon, and her eclectic discography includes: El Calcetin, Corazon sangrante, Heavy Nopal, en vivo, La Cuchilla, Pecadora, and ?OH! Diosas. The most recent of these shows have inspired her newest project "Divinas Pecadoras" (Divine Sinners).
During her 25 year career, Astrid Hadad has redefined and restored the tradition of cabaret in Mexico.
Astrid Hadad, La Cuchilla (The Razor), Miercoles, 25 de Marzo, Smith Opera House, 7:30 p.m.
?Que ocurre cuando estereotipos culturales cobran vida en el escenario cabaret? Con filoso brillo de figura barroca, Astrid Hadad encarna a las mujeres amantes e insumisas, ingenuas, sonadoras o "femmes fatales," venenosas abandonadas en su estilo ranchero mexicano que integra el rock, la cumbia, la rumba etc. Empuna su Cuchilla con humor "estridente" para burlarse del machismo, de los integrismos y de los poderosos. Un espectaculo por el cual la nombraron "Museo ambulante de las culturas populares". Entonces, no se pierde la vista. Un espectaculo "quita depresiones," estimulo para los alicaidos, borrachera sin alcohol para los abstemios excitacion orgasmica para los gozosos. Animacion pura. Astrid Hadad es egresada del Centro Universitario de Teatro de la Ciudad de Mexico. Como actriz ha participado en las telenovelas: "Teresa," "Yo no creo en los hombres," "Gente bien" y diversos programas de cadenas internacionales como "HBO Ole". En cine tuvo una participacion especial en la pelicula Solo con tu pareja y en los documentales Hasta el ultimo trago corazon y el premiado Astrid Hadad: La Tequilera. Sus espectaculos la han llevado a China, Francia, Peru, Canada y Libano. Su discografia incluye El Calcetin, Corazon sangrante, Heavy Nopal en vivo, La Cuchilla, los mas recientes: Pecadora y ?OH! Diosas, siendo estos ultimos los que la motivan a realizar su ultimo espectaculo "Divinas Pecadoras".
A lo largo de su carrera de mas de 25 anos Astrid Hadad ha renovado el ambiente cabaretero nacional.
Co-sponsored with Spanish and Hispanic Studies, and Intercultural Affairs.
Jillian Burcar
April 22
Is the cyborg an everyday animation? Or does the cyborg act as our cultural cartographer, charting reanimations of current and future deepest desires, fears, hopes and dreams?
Fisher Center predoctoral fellow Jillian plumbs cyborgian histories and biographies as they have been brought to life through word and image, sight and sound, signs and symptoms. In the cyborg's theatre of creation where gender, technology and consumer culture combine as its most elemental life-giving forces, there transpires a larger exchange of identity and transformation. But Burcar asks: Is the cyborg narrative dictated by a heteronormative sex and gender system? Does the cyborg offer alternatives to normative models of reproduction? Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (a novel written in hypertext), David Mack's Kabuki (a comic book series) as well as Chobits (a Japanese manga and anime) will provide a starting point to address these questions. However, it is only by examining these stories, as well as the shape these stories take, that the most important question can be explored: what animates the cyborg's narrative and how might it continue to be reanimated?
Burcar is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Creative Writing (fiction) at the University of Southern California (USC), a hybrid program where she does critical studies while producing creative work. She will complete both the Visual Studies and Gender Studies Graduate Certificates at USC. She has also been honored with the Mildred Fox Hanson Award and Virginia Middleton Summer Award as well as many others. Recently, she has given several talks on comics-related topics across the country.
Elaine Scarry
Thinking in an Emergency
(Listen to Audio)
Do emergencies animate our thinking or send us into suspended animation? Or does our thinking animate emergencies themselves?
Walter M. Cabot, Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, Elaine Scarry examines first temptations in emergencies (whether medical, legal or civil) to over-ride our normal procedures of deliberation, consultation, and consent. She asks: What practices of thinking are active and legitimate in the three mental realms of sensation, creation, and deliberation under emergency conditions? What crucial role is played by habit in each? Described in the New York Times Magazine as a public intellectual of interpretive daring, Scarry trains literary criticism's analytic power onto matters of social, cultural, and political concern as a civic duty. Author of numerous books and articles, including the widely acclaimed The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, as well as On Beauty and Being Just, Dreaming by the Book and Who Defended the Country?, Scarry's work has long concerned itself with imagination, representation and justice - with what, in short, breathes life into life in what ways. She has been awarded Best American Essays of 2007 ("Rules of Engagement: Why Military Honor Matters") and honoured with a Guggenheim Fellowship in addition to a number of distinguished visiting faculty posts. Scarry's recent essays include "Citizenship in Emergency," "Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis," "Resisting the U.S.A. Patriot Act" and "Philosophy and Human Rights."
Colin Milburn
Everyday Nanowars
(Listen to Audio)
When is war a science fiction? How do comic books and video games animate military nanotechnologies?
Colin Milburn discusses the digitally-animated worlds of nanowar video games, focusing on how the playability of high-tech soldier avatars and "smart materials" weaponry incarnates a logic of global politics turning nanowar into an everyday concern. At the same time, Milburn observes how such worlds challenge players to navigate the "crisis mode" of the male warrior in the era of digital matter. Milburn looks at how these technologies animate one another, from writings of military scientists and technological forecasters who present the notion of nanowar less in terms of a speculative risk than as a clear-and-present danger (a prophetic scenario rendered already inevitable) through to the more than three dozen recently issued videogames animated by military nanotechnology's hyperbolic rhetoric and imagery. Holding one Ph.D. in the History of Science and a second in English, University of California, Davis, Assistant Professor of English Colin Milburn's recent works include Nanovision: Engineering the Future, a forthcoming book Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter, and articles "Science from Hell: Jack the Ripper and Victorian Vivisection," (Science Images and Popular Images of the Sciences), "Nano/Splatter: Disintegrating the Postbiological Body," (New Literary History). "Syphilis in Faerie Land: Edmund Spenser and the Syphilography of Elizabethan England,"(Criticism), and "Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida," (MLN).
Richard Move
Martha@TheFisherCenter.Dance
When impresario, curator, director, choreographer, dancer, and actor Richard Move steps onto the stage as dance legend Martha Graham, one has to ask: Who is animating whom?
Described as more Martha Graham than Martha Graham, Move's Martha@ was created in 1996 as an homage in word and dance. Reviewed as a "sophisticated, dead on, letter perfect parody. A dandy education in modern dance" and Move himself as "a perfect repository of all her glamour and camp genius," Martha@ has received two New York Dance and Performance Awards (a.k.a. "Bessie" Award), and been featured on the BBC's Bourne to Dance and Arts Express, MetroArts 13, and the PBS Television Program City Arts-The Best of Dance, which received an Emmy Award for "Outstanding Fine Arts Program." In 2005, the film Ghostlight starred Move as Martha to wide acclaim, and in the Spring of 2006, Move made his debut as 'Martha Graham' with The Martha Graham Dance Company on their 80th Anniversary Celebration. Move is the subject of a forthcoming British documentary Making Martha, and recently opened MoveOpolis!: Hostile Takeover, performance installations of collisions of sexual desire and violence, masculinity and femininity in real and imagined worlds.
David Mack
The Alchemy of the Art of Alchemy
(Listen to Audio)
Is there alchemy to making life graphic? Does making life graphic have the power to enchant and/or transform? Acclaimed graphic novelist David Mack discusses these questions and more as he reads from his latest Kabuki novel, The Alchemy, and speaks on graphic art more broadly. Reflecting on his own process as artist and writer, Mack will explore graphic art storytelling as a sequential art fused in a multi-media crucible of imagination, history, culture, personal stories, passions, desires, mythologies, and wonder about who one is and if one can "evolve into something beyond...original programming." Regarded as re-imagining comic book art and storytelling, David Mack's Kabuki series takes readers into an underworld of secret societies and government operatives as it draws on Japanese culture and history to extend the metaphor of masks and gender performance to questions of humanity and the "fragility of perceived reality." Best known for his creator-owned project, Kabuki, (published first by Image Comics and now by Marvel's ICON imprint), Mack's work has enjoyed international acclaim for its innovative storytelling, painting techniques, and page design; the series is now under screen adaptation. David Mack has also written and drawn Daredevil for Marvel Comics, authored the children's book The Shy Creatures, and is currently adapting sci-fi author Philip K Dick's books to graphic novels for Marvel.
Pagan Kennedy
Sex and Drugs and
Memory
(Listen to Audio)
One pill makes you remember and the other changes your gender? Is science the new future of autobiographical memory? Author, journalist and zine artist Pagan Kennedy will talk about how drugs developed in the 20th century forever changed the rules of remembering our lives and living in a human body.
Her talk will spring out of her two latest books. Her novel, Confessions of a Memory Eater (2006), revolves around a drug that restores autobiographical memory; the main character becomes "addicted" to his own memory. Her biography, The First Man-Made Man (2007), tells the story of the first person in the world to undergo a female-to-male sex change in 1950s Britain. Together these works tackle questions of autobiographical memory, from our own desires to relive the past through to ways we seek to obscure or rewrite autobiographical memory to bring it into line with a sex change.
Pagan Kennedy is the author of nine books and a contributor to dozens of publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, Dwell, and Details. She has won an NEA fellowship in fiction, a Smithsonian fellowship, a Barnes & Noble Discover Award, a place on the New York Times Notable Book list, and a Massachusetts Book Award Honor in Nonfiction. She is currently a columnist for The Boston Globe Ideas section.
Charmaine Royal
Genomics and Ancestry:
Implications For Social Identity and Social Justice
(Listen to Audio)
Is DNA the new personal memory bank? Is genomic ancestry testing memory's future -- a new kind of personhood? Associate Research Professor of the Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy at Duke University Charmaine Royal directs her talk to advances in human genetics and genomics as increasingly revolutionizing science, medicine, and society.
Royal is concerned with genomic ancestry's potential role in social justice, and the challenging issues that arise when social identity is traced by genomics. What happens to personal memory (memories of you and family genealogy) when genomic codes reveal ancestral lineage either coincident with or contrary to family lore? What happens to social histories of race and social identity?
In an attempt to highlight some of the emerging issues relevant to social identity and social justice, and to help provide frameworks for assessing them, Charmaine Royal's presentation will focus on the application of genetics and genomics in genomic ancestry testing and in health disparities research.
Author and co-author of numerous publications, Charmaine Royal has published most recently Race and Ethnicity in Science, Medicine, and Society, The Ethical and Social Implications of Exploring African American Genealogies, Genetic and Social Environment Interactions and Their Impact on Health Policy, and The Role of Genetic and Sociopolitical Definitions of Race in Clinical Trials.
Marianne Hirsch
The Generation of Postmemory
(Listen to Audio)
Do photographs act as testimonial objects between today and yesterday, this generation and previous ones, memory and postmemory, personal and cultural recollection, gender and generation?
Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director, Institute for Research on Women and Gender of Columbia University, Marianne Hirsch will look at postmemory and the place of photographs as a medium of transmission of memories from one generation to the next. Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their birth but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.
Focusing on the remembrance of the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch elucidates the generation of postmemory and its reliance on photography as a primary medium of trans-generational transmission of trauma. Identifying tropes that most potently mobilize the work of postmemory, she examines the role of the family as a space of transmission and the function of gender as an idiom of remembrance.
Author of the forthcoming book, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of a Czernowitz in Jewish Memory and History (with Leo Spitzer) and her book-in-progress The Generation of Postmemory: Gender, Visuality and the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch also edited Gender and Cultural Memory, Special Issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Fall 2002) and earlier the well known book Conflicts in Feminism (with Evelyn Fox Keller). This lecture is co-sponsored by Genocide Series.
Elissa Rosenberg
Walking
(Listen to Audio)
If scientists decode memory in living cells, how do architects code memory in space and time? Is putting one foot in front of the other akin to moving about history's memory?
Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia, Elissa Rosenberg will explore the geography of memory, that is, the spatiality of history and the ways in which memory is evoked and mediated through our relationship to physical place. She looks at the ways in which walking inscribes the body in place, and how our relationship to place, in turn, instigates a particular kind of remembering. She will discuss two memorials in which the encounter with place unfolds over time through the act of walking, through extremely different styles of walking and through different modes of engagement with their sites.
These are: Passages: Homage to Walter Benjamin, designed by Israeli artist Dani Karavan at Benjamin's burial site in Portbou, Spain, and Memorial to the Departed Jewish Citizens of the Bayerische Viertel, Bayerische Platz, Berlin an installation by German artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock commemorating the disappearance and murder of some 6000 Jewish neighborhood residents.
Elissa Rosenberg is the author of "Gardens, Landscape, Nature: Duisburg-Nord" in The Hand and the Soul: Ethics and Aesthetics in Architecture and Art, "The Geography of Memory: Walking as Remembrance," and "Suburban Sublime: Herman Miller Cherokee" in Between Form and Circumstance: Re-Thinking the Contemporary Landscape: The Recent Practice of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. This lecture is co-sponsored by Environmental Studies and Architectural Studies.
Cynthia Current
Making Memory: Fingerprinting to Genomics, Literature to Biocultures
(Listen to Audio)
Are new technologies - cell phones, ipods, nanotechnology - new genres of memory and life? Are stem cells, 'immortal' cell lines and genomics a new literary genre of life, gender and personhood? Fisher Center pre-doctoral fellow Cynthia Current will examine how new combinations of life, technology and culture gestate in science and literature. She is interested in how science, technology and literature do more than mediate or represent forms of life.
Memory, race and gender are created anew, she argues, in what today are being called 'biocultures' - minglings of science, technology, and literature. Cynthia Current is completing a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a certificate in Women's Studies from Duke University.
Her dissertation, "Fingerprinting to Genomics: Technologies of Race and Gender in American Literature," explores the implications of technology on identity formation in American literature from 1880 to 1910. A concluding chapter draws such concerns into recent debates on human genomics. She has a forthcoming essay, "Innovation and Stasis: Technology and Race in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson," and served as a co-editor of The North Carolina Roots of African American Literature: an Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Writing.
Alison Landsberg
Illicit Liaisons and Prosthetic Remembering in the Silent
Western
(MP3 Audio)
How does cinema become part of what one takes to be cultural or
personal memory? Associate Professor of Literature and Film at George
Mason University Alison Landsberg tackles this and related questions
as she examines how mass cultural technologies - cinema and
experiential museums - make it increasingly possible for one to
"have" memories of events through which one did not live, memories
carrying nonetheless important ramifications for one's
subjectivities, politics and ethics.
Her talk draws on how "the frontier" was represented in some silent westerns, including depictions of domestically oriented, paternal white men and powerful, agentive Indian women. Equally striking, these films presented interracial intimacy and desire between white men (called "squaw men") and Indian women, romances that would never be tolerated "indoors," in the racially divided United States of the early twentieth century.
Jackie Orr
daddy does cybernetics: Diary of a Mental
Patient
(MP3 Audio)
Is panic disorder a memory trace of the madness of an era? Are we but
memoried bodies of yesteryear's fears and anxieties?
Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University Jackie Orr's performance "daddy does cybernetics" is an historical, somewhat hysterical, story of U.S. Cold War culture caught between the threat of contagious panic and the government-sponsored imperative to "Keep Calm!"
Helen DeMichiel
The Gender Chip Project
The Fisher Center hosted filmmaker Helen DeMichiel and her "Gender
Chip Project," a work that is being hailed as an important resource
for addressing the disparity of representation of women in the
science, technology, engineering and math fields, starting at 5 p.m.
Thursday, Oct. 4 in the library's Geneva Room.
DeMichiel, director of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, interviewed several women majoring in the sciences at Ohio State University, and followed their college careers to produce this portrait of five women dedicated to making their chosen fields better.
Turtle Gals
The Only Good Indian Is...
(mp3 audio)
Turtle Gals Theatre Troupe presents a staged reading of stories, song
and laughter to crack open culture's iconic memory of "Indians on
Display." Dramatizing encounters between turn-of-the-20th-century
Aboriginal performers and their 21st-century counterparts, Turtle
Gals revisits Aboriginal performers from the 1880s in wild west shows
through silent film, burlesque, opera, vaudeville and Hollywood.
Wayne Koestenbaum
Hotel Theory
(mp3 audio)
Writer, poet, scholar and critic Wayne Koestenbaum 's new book Hotel
Theory is a work of nonfiction and fiction residing beside one
another, column-by-column, page-by-page.
Theory is the name of the hotel, a place where "certainty falls apart, or where stupor gets an airing." "Heidegger," writes Koestenbaum, "was my hotel," illuminating his nonfiction of "hotel consciousness" as an examination of "never dwelling anywhere," a philosophical meditation into history and being, where short takes - like short-term memory's limited space and practice of rehearsal or need to dwell - run alongside the fictional narrative of Hotel Women, a "dime novel" story of Lana Turner and Liberace whose real life troubles mingle with their fictional ones.
Erika Suderburg
Screenspace: Projecting a Body Politic
A filmmaker, visual artist and writer, Suderburg examines the
politics of representation and its gendered spaces by discussing her
film projects, "Somatography," a 2000 film of storytelling in
relation to queer and leftist Los Angeles; and "Decline and Fall," a
more recent look at how individual, the institutionalized collective
(military, party affiliated or affinity group) and body politic
operate within Empire's boot print.
Sudhanva Deshpande
Street As Stage
Listen (mp3)
Jana Natya Manch (People's Theatre Group) is India's pioneering
street theatre group, formed in 1973. Also known as Janam (meaning
'birth'), this group of self-trained actors has to its credit more
than 7,500 performances of about 100 street and proscenium plays in
about 140 towns and cities of India. Janam visits with performances,
workshops, a talk and a film screening.
Toshi Reagon
Songs: weapons in your pocket
Reagon, a singer, guitarist, and songwriter, has been described as "a
natural born rock goddess whose sound is a cipher of bluesy wails and
shouts, and steely guitar power chords." Her sixth album, the newly
released Have You Heard (with her band BIGLovely), "calls the
listener back to the heart of rock and roll with a voice overflowing
with raw emotion, funk-driven sound rich with lyrics about kindness,
compassion, and peace and love."
Seónagh Odhiambo
Sand and Bone
A choreographer and dancer, Odhiambo defines dance as a point of
contact through which ideas, inspiration, movement and meaning can
travel. Her pieces address how barriers of difference may generate a
sense of unfamiliarity and discomfort, weighting the body with
histories of burdensome oppressions. Breaking through these barriers,
to her, means finding ways to destabilize cultural forms of
expressive movement while bringing traditions into contact so they
can breathe new life into one another.
Ananya Chatterjea
Dancing My Politics
Listen (mp3)
Dancer, choreographer, activist and associate professor, Chatterjea
retraces her journey from a classical Indian dancer to a contemporary
choreographer to show the scope of questions dancing bodies can raise
around identity, representation and politics.
Climbing PoeTree
Art - our WEAPON, our MEDICINE, our VOICE, our VISION
Listen (mp3)
Garcia and Penniman are poets who moonlight as street artists, and
art activists who deploy their weapons of mass imagination to
co-teach poetry and political education to prisoners and young people
through the Osborne Association, East Harlem Tutorial Program, the
Youth Leadership Project of the Incarcerated Mothers Program, and the
NYC Public School system.
Susan Griffin
Ecologies of Soul: Restoring the Connection Between Self and
World, Art and Society
Listen (mp3)
Writer and poet Griffin interweaves her experience as a writer, a
woman and an activist for social justice with historical narrative to
examine how both identity and the creative process participate in
larger social ecologies.
Mark LeVine
Heavy Metal Islam: The Untold Struggle of Islam's Generation
X
Listen (mp3)
Rock musician and professor, Mark Levine is a leader of the new
generation of historians and analysts of the modern Middle East and
Islam. He argues that counters to the violence that defines global
politics are to be found in youth culture and a world music scene
that blends political dissent and virtuosity.
Jennifer L. Pozner
Broadcasting, Bombs and Babes: Women's Activism for Media
Justice
Listen (mp3)
Media critic and founder and director of Women In Media & News
(WIMN), a women's media analysis, education and advocacy
organization, Jennifer Pozner asks: Why isn't war reported as a
women's issue - and whatever happened to the Afghan women the Bush
administration supposedly waged war to "save"?And, what practical
steps can we take to improve the media landscape for women… and
for all of us?
Sharon Welch
Making Peace in an Age of War
Welch, professor of Women's and Gender Studies and chair of the
Department of Religious Studies at the University of
Missouri-Columbia, will address the ethics of peace, power and
justice from a variety of perspectives. Welch brings to her deep
thinking on social justice materials from the arts, particularly Jazz
and theater, from education, and from Christian, humanist, Buddhist
and Native American traditions. Her talk will focus on the current
challenges and opportunities facing the peace movement nationally and
internationally. The workshop will provide space for students and
community members to reflect together on ways to move the peace
agenda forward. Welch is the author of After Empire: The Art and
Ethos of Enduring Peace; Sweet Dreams in America: Making
Ethics and Spirituality Work; A Feminist Ethic of Risk:
Revised Second Edition and Communities of Resistance and
Solidarity: A Feminist Theology of Liberation. She is
currently developing workshops on global citizenship and alternatives
to war.
Clyde Wilcox
Evangelical Women and
Feminism
Professor of Government at Georgetown University Clyde Wilcox will
speak on the ways gender, religion and politics are incarnated in two
very different activist women's groups in the United States today:
Concerned Women for America and the National Organization of Women.
Wilcox writes on public opinion and electoral behavior, religion and
politics, gender politics, the politics of social issues such as
abortion, gay rights, and gun control, interest group politics,
campaign finance, and science fiction and politics. He has authored,
coauthored, edited, or co-edited more than 20 books.
Laurie Zoloth
Feminism and Abundance
Laurie Zoloth is Professor of Medical Ethics and Humanities and of
Religion at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine and
director of bioethics at the Center for Genetic Medicine. Her talk
will use Levinas's observation that we have an obligation to be
bodies for one another to develop a theory of donating. Zoloth is
past President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities
and is a member of the National Advisory Council and the Planetary
Protection Advisory Committee for NASA; the Executive Committee of
the International Society for Stem Cell Research; and is Chair of the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Bioethics Advisory Board. Dr.
Zoloth has published extensively in the areas of ethics, family,
feminist theory, religion, science, Jewish studies, and social policy
and has authored chapters in 27 books. Her book, Healthcare and
the Ethics of Encounter, was published in 1999. Her current
research projects include work on both the ethics of ordinary life,
and emerging issues in medical and research genetics.
Janet Jakobsen
Religion and Sexuality: What's War Got to Do with
It?
Director of the Center for Research on Women and Professor of Women's
Studies at Barnard College, Janet Jakobsen will consider how issues
of religion, gender, and sexuality are implicated in the current U.S.
war in Iraq. Examining the specific religious genealogy of the type
of "freedom" espoused by the Bush administration to legitimate the
war, Jakobsen shows how this freedom becomes embodied in particular
forms of violence, including that of the abuse of prisoners at Abu
Ghraib prison. Jakobsen is the author of "Working Alliances and the
Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics," co-author
(with Ann Pellegrini) of "Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the
Limits of Religious Tolerance," and co-editor (with Elizabeth
Castelli) of "Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to
Violence." She is currently working on a book project, Sex,
Secularism and Social Movements: The Value of Ethics in a Global
Economy. Previously, she was a policy analyst and lobbyist in
Washington, D.C.
Vasudha Narayanan
Re-presenting
Hindu Women: Texts, Contexts, and Realities
Professor of Religion at the University of Florida and a past
President of the American Academy of Religion (2001-2002), Vasudha
Narayanan will discuss how Hindu women have been depicted in a
variety of ways by texts, scholars, and observers. She will examine
multiple frames of reference of Hindu women, and address issues of
cultural and political contexts and agency, including the audiences
for these descriptions, both in India and the United States. As part
of her pluralist project, Narayanan studies temples across South-East
Asia and elsewhere to elaborate Hindu traditions as a global
religion. Narayanan has authored numerous books.
Lesley Dill
A Word Made Flesh
Artist Lesley Dill explores what she sees as a risky subject matter -
religion and spirituality. Her subject leads her to explore religion
and faith's compelling nature and embodiments in our hearts and
minds, our bodies and words. In her photography, printmaking,
sculpture and performance, Dill brings her visual work into
conversation with literary figures such as Emily Dickinson, Pablo
Neruda, and Franz Kafka, to illuminate the relation of words and
flesh as indeterminate, as a "moving harmony of effect." Described as
"bracing in its variety, … powerful in emotive effects, yet
fragile, almost ethereal, in its physical aspects," Dill's
interdisciplinary work is seen as a "meeting of art and poetry…
rich in texture and temporal associations," a meeting where we
re-encounter gender, language, corporeality, image and spirituality.
Dill's work has been widely exhibited and collected and can be found
in the collections of the George Adams Gallery, Albright Knox Art
Gallery, Cleveland Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of
American Art, among others.
Barbara Allen
Environmental Justice, Environmental Health: Women's Voices
from Cancer Alley
Barbara Allen, director of the science, technology and society
program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, will
explore issues of carrying out citizen-oriented environmental science
in Louisiana's petrochemical corridor, often called Cancer Alley.
This important social justice arena highlights the role of women
activists, feminist scientists and issues of public and environmental
health in a heavily polluted region. At stake in these debates is
whose knowledge gets counted as science and how those decisions
ultimately impact law and policy. The politics of doing science is
highlighted in the powerful alliance of environmental health
activists with women scientists in this poor region of the U.S.,
where regulation is lax, government often corrupt, and poverty and
illiteracy are pervasive. Allen will portray the story of science and
justice through the voices of the tenacious and visionary women of
this embattled place.
Sandra Steingraber
Contaminated
Without Consent: A Human Rights Approach to the
Environment
Ecologist, author and cancer survivor Sandra
Steingraber is an internationally recognized expert on the
environmental links between cancer and reproductive health. As a
biologist and a writer, Steingraber researches environmental
contamination and cancer by following connections between "objects we
use and the places they come from." For Steingraber, the environment
includes human bodies, with a focus on women and reproduction. Her
research and writing dovetail in her commitment to changing practices
of manufacturing and of consumption, from industry through to
agriculture. Connecting poetry and biology, research and writing, her
collected works have been described as "an intricate weaving of
scientific data, personal stories, and an intensely lyrical style."
Currently an interdisciplinary distinguished visiting scholar at
Ithaca College, Steingraber has been on faculty at Cornell
University, a fellow at the University of Illinois and at Radcliffe,
and served on President Clinton's National Action Plan on Breast
Cancer.
Co-sponsored with Writers Reading
Zdravka Todorova, Fisher Center Predoctoral
Fellow
The Myth of U.S. Social Security Crisis
and Its Importance for Women Around the
World
Feminism and
Economics
What's all the fuss about U.S. Social Security? Why should we examine
attempts to dismantle one of the U.S.'s most successful policies as
an international women's issue? Feminist economist Todorova discusses
the importance of Social Security for American women, and warns of
how framing this debate strictly in financial terms may influence
policy formulation internationally.
Co-sponsored with William Smith Dean's Office. Event in recognition
of International Women's Day.
Robert Nixon
What is a War Casualty?
Robert Nixon, the Rachel Carson professor of English at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, will explore the hidden, human costs
of so-called "smart" wars: the casualties exacted by the slow,
calamitous toxicity of the post-war environment. He argues that in an
age of "precision warfare," there is a moral imperative to overhaul
preconceptions about what a war casualty looks like and to challenge
the military body counts that consistently underestimate (in advance
and in retrospect) the true impact of waging high-tech wars. His
concern is with the inbuilt imprecision of "precision warfare"- with
the way it misfires environmentally. He asks: Who is counting the
staggered deaths that civilians suffer from depleted uranium ingested
or blown across the desert? Who is counting the deferred fatalities
from unexploded landmines or from chemical residues left behind by
bombing? These residues turn into foreign insurgents, infiltrating
rivers and poisoning the food chain. Who is counting the deaths from
genetic deterioration-the stillborn and mutilated infants whose
genetic codes have been scrambled by war's toxins? Using the legacy
of Agent Orange and the ongoing controversy over depleted uranium,
Nixon examines the centrality of gender to any examination of war's
belated, discounted dead. Author of numerous works, his forthcoming
works are "Environmentalism and postcolonialism," and "An
autobiography of touch," a study in masculinity.
Vandana Shiva
Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and
Peace
Vandana Shiva, physicist and interdisciplinary
researcher, founded The Research Foundation For Science, Technology
and Environmental policy to do participatory action-oriented
ecological research with people. Recognized internationally for her
leadership and groundbreaking research, Shiva has been a key voice in
ecofeminism, biodiversity conservation, aquaculture, sustainable
agriculture and food security. She is concerned with the impact of
Intellectual Property Rights on life as extolled by the Trade Related
Aspects of Intellectual Property under General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade. In her view, this is one of many issues put forth from the
perspective of India's rural poor, who are experiencing further
marginalization as "beneficiaries" of India's structural adjustment
program dictated by the International Money Fund and World Bank.
Working with movements against genetic engineering in Africa, Asia,
Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland and Austria, Shiva has directed
her critical efforts toward globalization. Shiva initiated an
international movement of women working for food, agriculture,
patents and biotechnology called Diverse Women for Diversity, served
as adviser to governments in India and abroad, as well as
non-governmental organizations, and is the recipient of numerous
awards. Her forthcoming book is "Earth Democracy: Justice,
Sustainability, and Peace."
Co-sponsored with Progressive Student Union
Lisa Duggan
Love American Style:
Symbolism and Citizenship in Contemporary Marriage
Politics
Associate professor of American studies, history, and gender and
sexuality studies at New York University, Lisa Duggan explores
marriage politics and its role in the 2004 U.S. election. What does
the emphasis on marriage promotion in the context of welfare reform,
same-sex marriage rights, and the role of candidates' wives reveal
about the symbolic vs. the material functions of marriage in national
politics? Drawing on national census statistics on marriage and the
pervasive publicity surrounding marital crises, Duggan inquires into
what they tell us about public and private life. In her article "Holy
Matrimony!", Duggan raises the political curtain on the real heart of
the matter - intimate freedom and political equality. In Twilight of
Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on
Democracy she calls for incisive reinvention of the connections
amongst political, economic and cultural issues informed by global
feminism for a full-scale counter to neoliberalism's furthering of
race, gender, sexual, economic and political inequalities.
Ruth Vanita
Love's Rite: Same-sex
Marriage in India
Ruth Vanita is a religious studies
scholar, poet, writer and translator who asks: Who defines marriage -
individuals, communities, the state or all three in conjunction? A
professor of liberal studies and women's studies at the University of
Montana, she demonstrates that same-sex unions have been celebrated
in several Hindu traditions and communities. Indian marriage law
allows communities to contest the definition of marriage with the
state. She argues that even if the state defines marriage so as to
deny some couples their rights, community recognition may socially
validate unions as marriages. Interested in the legal, religious and
historical dimensions of same-sex marriages and unions, Vanita
extends her study to pre-modern unions, such as that related in a
14th century text on two women having a child together with divine
blessing. She is editor of Queering India, as well as founding editor
of Manushi: A Journal about Women and Society.
Kathleen Lahey
Winning Same-sex
Marriage in Canada: Celebration and Concerns
Leading feminist legal scholar, tax scholar, expert on law and
sexuality, and professor and Queen's National Scholar of Queen's
University, Kathleen Lahey addresses the celebrations and concerns
that attend Canada extending marriage to same-sex couples in 2003.
Lahey examines the political and legal context that made this
possible, expanding on the current status of same-sex marriage in
provinces that have yet to come on board, and showing how
developments in Canada are germane to challenges in the United States
and Europe. Her examination tackles concerns raised by feminist
critics of marriage and Canadian policy responses to them, as well as
the question of whether marriage has better served gay than lesbian
couples. Founding editor of Canadian Journal of Women and the Law,
author of Are We 'Persons' Yet? Law and Sexuality in Canada,
co-author of Same-sex Marriage: The Personal and the Political,
Lahey's work has resulted in ground-breaking studies of the
discriminatory impact of taxation on women, race-based groups and
sexual minorities and landmark legal submissions.
Rev. Irene Monroe
Casting a
Suspicious Eye: Same-sex Marriage, White Queer Hegemony and Black
Ministers' Homophobia
Feminist and public theologian, Ph.D. candidate and Ford Foundation
fellow at Harvard Divinity School, the Rev. Irene Monroe directs her
attention to how African American and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender communities need to become compadres in the struggle for
liberation. Without this alliance, racism in the United States will
continue to keep these communities at odds and uphold a white queer
hegemony and black ministers' homophobia. As an African American
feminist religion columnist, Monroe highlights how religious
intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatter the goal of American
democracy, but also aid in perpetuating other forms of oppression. A
self-described public theologian, Monroe is a regular columnist for A
Globe of Witnesses, and has a biweekly column "The Religion Thang"
for Newsweekly. Monroe has received awards and honors for her writing
and speaking, including The Cambridge Peace and Justice Award and the
Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching.
Laura Flanders
Feigning Feminism,
Fuelling Backlash: Gender Politics in the Age of Bush
Journalist, author and radio host Laura Flanders tackles how the age
of George W. Bush may not only be bad for feminism and women's
rights, but also for our health. Her most recent book The W Effect:
Bush's War on Women investigates Bush's media slogan, the "W is for
Women," to reveal how W's administration far from advancing
women-friendly politics has brought about, instead, a reversal of
"the gains that women have made, not just in the last decade, but
over much of the 20th century." In the context of global trends,
Flanders argues the "Bush era is shaping up to be a crunch moment for
human equality" and that prompts us to review not only our
"relationship to women's rights, but our understanding of human
interdependence." In another recent book Bushwomen:Tales of a Cynical
Species, Flanders investigates the women in Bush's Cabinet, an
investigation hailed as "fierce, funny and intelligent."
Nechama Tec
Resilience and Courage:
Women, Men, and the Holocaust
Sociologist and
professor emerita at the University of Connecticut, Nechama Tec
speaks about the different experiences of Jewish women and men during
the Holocaust. Her work, which entails analysis of her interviews
with Holocaust survivors, has been regarded as "the best and most
comprehensive gender analysis of Jewish Holocaust survivors and
resistors to date." As survivors reflect on their experiences, Tec
charts the contours of gender relations in different ways. Her
perspective illuminates Nazi anti-Jewish gender policies and ideology
involving "special degradation and murder of Jewish men" and the
implications for Jewish women, who often stepped in to aid families
and friends. In detailing the everyday, Tec's study offers insight
into "life in extremis" and of the different gender implications and
responses under "extreme, violent and unpredictable worlds." Herself
a Holocaust survivor, Tec's recent book Resilience and Courage has
received the National Jewish Book Award, and was nominated for the
Pulitzer Prize. Co-sponsored by the Human Rights and Genocide
Forum.
Starhawk
Earth Spirit, Earth
Action
Starhawk is one of the most respected voices in
modern Goddess religion and earth-based spirituality. She travels
internationally teaching magic, the tools of ritual, and the skills
of activism. Starhawk draws on nature to explore how the Earth is our
greatest teacher and healer, whether we want to heal personal hurts,
or heal the wounds society inflicts on Earth and human beings. Seeing
connections to Earth as our deepest source of hope, renewal and
strength, Starhawk presents ways to combine the powers of earth-based
spirituality with political action. Starhawk draws on her experiences
as an organizer with Code Pink: Unreasonable Women for Peace, her
work with Jewish and Palestinian women in the West Bank and Gaza, and
her many years as an innovator in the Goddess revival and
eco-feminist movements. Her talk culminates in a ritual for the Earth
on William Smith Green. She is the author or co-author of 10
books.
Andrew Boyd
Culture Jamming 101
Grassroots publicist, activist,
and author Andrew Boyd uses guerrilla theater, media stunts, and
creative direct action to fight social and economic injustice and
inequalities. Hailed as a "master satirist" and "committed humorist,"
Boyd's creativity, wit, and energy electrify his lectures and
workshops as much as they mobilize his direct action. As Phil T.
Rich, he was one of the driving forces behind Billionaires for Bush
(or Gore), the Million Billionaire March, and now
billionairesforbush.com. His street theater and media stunts such as
100 Musical Chairs (a human bar-graph of economic inequality), and
Precision Cell Phone Drill Team (corporate executives in power suits
on military style maneuvers) derive from his intellectual approach of
"grabbing a powerful idea from culture or the academy, turning it
inside-out, putting a handle and a grin on it, and sending it back
out there." Founder and director of the arts and action program
United for a Fair Economy, he is also author of The Activist
Cookbook, a source-book for activist workshops, and, most recently,
Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the
Universe, and "Truth is a Virus: Meme Warfare and the Billionaires
for Bush (or Gore)," a chapter in Cultural Resistance. His writings
on global resistance movements and their use of the Internet have
been featured in The Nation and the Village Voice. Boyd teaches at
New York University, and his current book-in-progress is Enlightened
Machismo.
Zarqa Nawaz
Putting Fun Back into FUNdamentalism (films and talk)
Canadian Muslim filmmaker and journalist Zarqa Nawaz has created a
trilogy of films she calls "terrordies" - comedies about terrorism -
to confront stereotypes associated with Muslims. Her production
company FUNdamental Films' motto "to put fun back into
fundamentalism" supplies the title of her talk in which Nawaz will
introduce her films and discuss their development. Described as
having a "satirical bent of mind," her films deploy loads of wit to
examine stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists, wife abusers and
religious extremists. Her film BBQ Muslims was inspired by the media
flurry and finger pointing at the Muslim community for the Oklahoma
City bombing, and Death Threat by the "fatwa (decree) issued by
religious clerics against Salman Rushdie and Bangladeshi author
Taslima Nasreen for their writings" (Radhika, 2003). Nawaz has worked
as a freelance writer/broadcaster with CBC radio, and as associate
producer on a number of CBC programs, including Morningside. She has
also worked with CTV's Canada AM, and CBC's The National, and won the
Chairman's Award in Radio Production for her radio documentary, The
Changing Rituals of Death. Her films have premiered at the Toronto
International Film Festivals, and have acquired cult status. Her
current work is on a feature film, Real Terrorists Don't Belly Dance,
where she continues to break down repressive and oppressive views of
Islamic religion and of Muslim women and men.
Nelly Peñaloza Stromquist
21st Century Women: Confronting Postmodernity and
Globalization
Professor of Education at the Rossier
School of Education and affiliated scholar in the Center for Feminist
Research and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California,
Nelly Stromquist researches issues related to international
development, education and gender. Specializing in questions
concerned with gender, equity policies, educational innovations, and
adult education in developing countries, particularly Latin America
and West Africa, Stromquist is a foremost author on the question of
education and globalization, and she also writes on literacy for
women's citizenship. From her critical feminist approach, Stromquist
examines postmodernism and globalization, including their
implications for pedagogical and political practice within
institutions of higher education. Her new book focuses on how
transnational corporations directly and indirectly hold political
influence on education and culture, and on transformations in ideas
of education and of the university. Stromquist has most recently
published Education in a Globalized World: The Connectivity of
Economic Power, Technology, and Knowledge, and co-edited Distant
Alliances: Promoting Education for Girls and Women in Latin
America.
Rabab Abdulhadi
Critical Pedagogy, Cultures of Resistance, and Thought
Police: Teaching Gender and Sexuality in the Time of
War
Assistant professor in the Center for the Study of
Gender and Sexuality at New York University, Rabab Abdulhadi will
examine the place of pedagogy in oppositional cultures. Drawing on
her research in the United States, Palestine and the rest of the Arab
world, including Iraq, she will focus on the function of criticism
and critical thinking when policing mechanisms are tightened.
Abdulhadi thus inquires into oppositional cultural spaces under
current conditions of national security. Her doctoral dissertation
was a comparative study of the changed meaning of Palestinianness
before and after the creation of Palestinian self-rule areas in parts
of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Abdulhadi is currently director
of a collaborative research initiative on gender and sexuality
studies between the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at
New York University and partners in the Middle East, Central Asia,
Southern Africa, South East Asia and Latin America. Her publications
include editor of a special issue of International Journal of
Sociology on Arab sociology, articles including, "Where is Home?
Fragmented Llives, Border Crossing, and the Politics of Exile;"
"Nomadic Existence: Gender, Exile and Palestine;" and "The
Palestinian Women's Autonomous Movement: Emergence, Dynamics, and
Challenges." She is currently completing two books, Cultures of
Resistance and the Post-Colonial State, and The Limitations of
Nationalism: Gender Dynamics and the Emergent Palestinian Feminist
Discourses.
Yunxiang Gao
Cinema, Sports, Gender
and Nation State During the Anti-Japanese War, 1931 to
1945
During the Anti Japanese War (1931-1945),
"national emergency" intensified the Chinese nationalists' efforts to
control and strengthen the citizen's body through sports and physical
education for the purpose of redefining gender ideology for new
citizenry and construct a strong militant nation. The Fisher Center
predoctoral fellow, Yunxiang Gao, will give a talk on "Cinema,
Sports, Gender and Nation State During the Anti-Japanese War from
1931 to 1945" at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 4, in the Fisher Center,
Demarest 212. Refreshments will follow. Nationalistic Chinese of
every political stripe recognized the raw power of cinema and
illustrated press of the early 1930s, and harnessed these tools for
wartime nation building. Using the traditional role of public theater
in setting gendered body ideology, nationalists promoted the movie
actress Li Lili as an "athletic star" and transformed her sexualized
film image into a pure athletic body. As the model of the physically
fit woman suitable for China's wartime needs, the increasingly
popular "athletic star" in cinema served as a discourse for competing
wartime institutional powers in constructing different visions of the
strong nation. Later, from 1944 to 1946, Li Lili visited the United
States and sought to create new image for herself in a new
environment, but had to struggle against the persistent controlling
forces constraining her.
David Holbrooke '87 and Timothy "Speed"
Levitch
Live from Shiva's
Dance Floor (film and talk)
Producer David Holbrooke
presents his new short documentary, featuring tour guide, philosopher
and "revolutionary rock and roll scribe" Timothy "Speed" Levitch.
Premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, "Live from Shiva's
Dance Floor" has been described as the most "revolutionary proposal"
for the World Trade Center site, albeit one not "on the table of the
Lower Manhattan Development Corp. or the Port Authority … ." In
the documentary, Levitch ("The Cruise") takes viewers on a tour of
New York City and examines New Yorkers' "philosophy on the life,
death and rebirth of ground zero." Directed by Richard Linklater
("Slacker," "Waking Life"), the documentary has been making the
rounds at a number of film festivals. Producer Holbrooke's media
experience includes NBC Sports, CNBC, CNN and PBS, and he is founder
of the television and film production company Giraffe Partners.
Levitch writes for Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice and other
outlets, and recently published "Speedology: Speed on New York on
Speed."
Setha Low
After the Trade Center: Searching for Spaces of Security and
Hope
As professor of environmental psychology and
anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York, Setha Low focuses on cultural aspects of design and the
anthropology of space and place, including the "landscape of fear."
Since 9/11, she has turned her research to questions of imagining the
public culture of the future for learning and democracy. Using her
ethnographic research from Battery City Park, along with interviews
with and artwork of NYC schoolchildren, Low will address concerns
over public space, education and culture within a country driven to
increasing levels of surveillance. Her most recent book, "Behind the
Gates: Security and the New American Dream," offers insight into life
inside the "suburban fortresses" of gated communities, illuminating
Americans' expressed need for security and the accompanying tradeoffs
of insularity, restrictive rules and little change in safety.
Tom Tomorrow (a.k.a. Dan
Perkins)
The Modern World of Tomorrow
Offering a provocative dissection of social and political issues,
cartoonist and social/political satirist Tom Tomorrow has tackled
everything from welfare and the Presidential "sexgate" through
consumer culture and the current interminable search for weapons of
mass destruction. His work has been described as "cynical,
opinionated, sarcastic, self-aware, very funny" and "right on the
mark." Using a multimedia presentation, Perkins discusses politics
and "media double-speak" as he shows his work. Two-time winner of the
Robert F. Kennedy Journalism award for cartooning and recipient of
numerous other awards, Perkins has published five anthologies of
cartoons, including his latest book, "The Great Big Book of
Tomorrow." His comic strip, This Modern World, has been featured in
more than 100 media outlets across the country, including The New
York Times, US News and World Report, Mother Jones and Salon.com.
Marjorie Heins
Cyberspace and Censorship of Youth
Marjorie
Heins directs the Free Expression Policy Project, a think tank on
artistic and intellectual freedom. Her talk tackles censorship
arguments based on assumptions of protecting youth and children from
indecent information or corrupting influences. Deftly navigating what
is considered an "ideological minefield," Heins will take a deeper
look at cyberspace and the question of freedom of expression. A
former director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Arts
Censorship Project, Heins has served as co-counsel in a number of
Supreme Court cases, including National Endowment for the Arts v.
Finley and Reno v. ACLU (the challenge to the 1996 Communications
Decency Act). Her work over the past decade has challenged censorship
based on stereotypes about sexuality, gender, youth and
representations of violence in art and entertainment. Her most recent
book, "Not in Front of the Children," has been presented with the
American Library Association's Eli M. Oboler Award for the best
published work in the field of intellectual freedom.
Vijay Prashad
The Darker Nations: Polyculturalism and Empire
Associate professor of international studies at Trinity College in
Hartford, Conn., Vijay Prashad examines how the cultural politics of
imperialism serve to obscure cultures intertwined with one another.
In contrast is the cultural logic of polyculturalism, to make visible
the entanglements of differing cultures as alive. Prashad explores
the cultural logic of the Caribbean and West Asia, drawing on
examples of how working class people in the time of empire have
struggled against the more static notion of multiculturalism.
Prashad's work is said to revolutionize understandings of diversity,
offering original insight in an area of debate often mired in the
"conservative conceits of ethnic essentialism." Prashad has published
widely. Two of his books, "Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting" and "Karma
of Brown Folk," have been recognized by The Village Voice as among
the top 25 books of the year. He also writes frequently in South
Asian and North American periodicals, as well as for the
Web.
When the HEN crows: Music, Poetry and Puppetry as
Movements for Justice
Singer-songwriter and co-founder of HEN Foundation Jolie Rickman,
singer-songwriter Colleen Kattau, performance poet and playwright
Lenelle N. Moïse, and puppeteer Bernice Silver are part of a
"consciously diverse team of artists whose activism inspires
movements against oppression and for peace-with-justice." Critically
acclaimed musician, widely recognized activist, and music coordinator
for "Democracy Now," Rickman has recorded two albums. She also
appears with singer/songwriter of New Song and Nueva canción and
labor activist Kattau on "Sing it Down: Songs to Close the School of
the Americas." Moïse is an out Haitian-American "rallying,
manifesto-spinning" activist, and winner of the 2002 New World
Theatre Poetry Slam. Recently heralded the "queen of puppetry" by the
University of Washington for her lifelong work as a socially
conscious puppeteer, Silver is also featured in the Puppeteers of
America video The Queen of Potpourri. HEN artist-activists will
perform works directed at economic justice and peace-with-justice;
they will also run a workshop, "Calling All Artists."
Raka Ray
Grappling With Modernity: Kolkata's 'respectable classes' and the
imperatives of domestic servitude
Associate Professor
of Sociology and South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University
of California, Berkeley, Raka Ray studies how the institution of
domestic servitude has, since the late 19th century, been
constitutive of middle-classness such that even the segment of the
middle class that sees itself as the vanguard of the Indian "global
modern" cannot imagine a modern home without a servant. For Ray, the
"servant problem" can be read as a metaphor for the changes wrought
by middle class India's confrontation with a new economic and social
order. Ray's areas of scholarship also include women's movements in
the Third World. She is currently co-editing Rethinking Class and
Poverty: Social Movements in India in a Transnational Age.
Martin Summers
Diasporic Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transnational Production
of Black Middle-Class Masculinity
Historian Martin
Summers is an assistant professor at the University of Oregon.
Examining transatlantic links of Freemasons of African descent,
Summers studies fraternalism as one avenue by which middle-class and
elite African Americans, African Caribbeans, and Africans formed
collective, diasporic gender identity. His talk will address how
Freemasonry provided black men a space in which they could lay claim
to a middle-class male subjectivity in more universal terms even as
it served to construct a specifically racialized masculinity in the
African diaspora. Summers' scholarship focuses on race, class and
sexuality in the formation of masculine identity. He is currently
completing his book Manliness and Its Discontents: The Transformation
of Masculinity Among the Black Middle Class, 1900-1930.
Ursula Biemann
The Global Geography of Female Labor
In pursuit of her
ongoing investigation into the role of gender and migration in the
logic of global capitalism, film maker and lecturer at HGKZ, the
School of Contemporary Art, Zurich, Ursula Biemann has visited a
number of particularly telling sites: border areas, free trade zones,
and entertainment cities catering to military camps. Her presentation
is based on the video essay Performing the Border, set in a Mexican
border town where U.S. industries assemble high-tech equipment for
the global market. Looking at the complex ways in which artificial
border space is produced through the performance and management of
gender relations, her talk links the metaphorical meaning of the
border with the material reality of working women in the
transnational space.
H2O, Art Opening and Reception
H2O is an
art exhibition focusing on water and the human body-water contained
in our bodies and the water that contains our bodies-actual ponds,
rivers, bathtubs as well as bodies of water that populate our dreams
and imaginations. With activists deeming water the global issue of
the 21st century, H2O's composition is three parts ecology of body,
land, and mind to one part global commons. Organized by Jo Anna
Isaak, HWS professor of art, this exhibition features the work of 23
artists, including the environmental aesthetic photographs of HWS
Associate Professor of Art Mark Jones. H2O artists Bonnie Rychlak,
Carol Cole and Mark Jones will deliver opening remarks, and student
docents will illuminate works for visitors. H2O will be on display in
the Houghton House Gallery, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, March
28-April 21.
Beverly McIver
Mammy How I Love You
Painting and drawing
throughout her life, Beverly McIver has explored questions of her own
identity and of African-American women. Her clown portraits are
self-portraits, exploring both her "desire as a youngster to become a
professional clown and [her] ambivalent feelings about being black."
Her current work continues this exploration through racial
stereotypes imaged in black face and an Afro wig. In these, she has
depicted what she refers to as Aunt Jemima, the nappy-headed nigger,
and the mammy, each a part of herself. McIver's mother has been a
personal reference in this new work, as she spent her entire life
cleaning houses and raising white children to clothe and feed McIver
and her sisters. Recognized with a Creative Capital Grant and a 2001
John Guggenheim Fellowship, McIver has been traveling with her mother
to photograph and videotape domestic workers, using these to create
photographs and paintings of herself in blackface. McIver's recent
solo exhibitions include Faces in Phoenix (2001) in Phoenix, All of
Me (1999) at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and Renee
& I (1993) at Duke University. She received a 2000 Anonymous Was
a Woman fellowship, and is currently a Radcliffe Institute Fellow.
McIver is an associate professor of painting and drawing at Arizona
State University.
Cynthia Enloe
Is There a 'Post-9/11 Sneaker'?: Feminist Clues about Women Workers
and Globalized Security
As a professor of government
and the director of the women's studies department at Clark
University, Cynthia Enloe studies the impact of militarism, state
policies and politics on the lives of women throughout the world. Her
works have been incisive on the level of militarization in our lives
- from those who make fighter planes to those who are employees of
food, toy, or clothing companies and in cultural products from
camouflage-design condoms and Star Wars pasta shapes. Her talk drew
on her long-standing interest in the politics of globalization as it
shapes - and relied on - women's feminized factory work. Enloe was a
Radcliffe Fellow in 2001, and has been the recipient of a Fulbright
Research Grant, a visiting professorship at Wellesley College, and an
Honorary Professorship of Political Science at the University of
Wales. Enloe serves on several editorial boards including
Signs, and International Feminist Review of
Politics. Her most recent books include Maneuvers: The
International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives, and a new
edition of her classic Bananas, Beaches, and Bases.
Sept. 19
Saskia Sassen
Countergeographies of Globalization:Trafficking in
Women
Saskia Sassen is the Ralph Lewis Professor of
Sociology at the University of Chicago, and Centennial Visiting
Professor at the London School of Economics. Countergeographies, for
Sassen, entail shadow areas of labor economy, sometimes found
operating alongside labor migration. Her talk explored the gendered
economy of globalization by looking at women's labor and migration
within these countergeographies, as, for example, in prostitution and
in worker recruitment for foreign labor markets. Her most recent
books are Guests and Aliens and the edited book Global
Networks/Linked Cities. She is co-director of the Economy Section of
the Global Chicago Project, a Member of the National Academy of
Sciences Panel on Urban Data Sets, a Member of the Council of Foreign
Relations, and chair of the newly formed Information Technology,
International Cooperation and Global Security Committee of the SSRC.
She is currently completing her forthcoming book
Denationalization : Economy and Polity in a Global Digital
Age. Oct. 16
Mallika Dutt
New Visions for Human Rights in the New Century
Mallika Dutt is founding executive director of Breakthrough, an
international organization dedicated to promoting public awareness
and dialogue about human rights and social justice through the use of
education and popular culture. She produced the music video Mann Ke
Manjeeré (Screen Award 2001; MTV nominated best Indipop video),
a video aimed at raising issues about violence against women, women
in non-traditional occupations and women's access to public space.
Using Breakthrough's music videos and drawing on her activism for
more than two decades, Dutt discussed uses of popular culture and
media to promote human rights and women's rights globally. Dutt
received her law degree from NYU Law School, and holds a master's
degree from Columbia University. She has been program officer for
human rights and social justice at the Ford Foundation's New Delhi
office, associate director of the Center for Women's Global
Leadership, and director of the Norman Foundation. Dutt taught women
and the law at Hunter College, wrote "Claiming Human Rights: Feminism
of Difference and Alliance," and co-authored the manual Local
Action Global Change: Learning About the Human Rights of Women and
Girls. Oct. 23
Michael Kimmel
Globalization and its Mal(e)contents: Class, Race, and Gender After
9/11
As a sociologist and author at S.U.N.Y at Stony
Brook, Michael Kimmel has been at the forefront of pro-feminist
perspectives on men's lives, and has brought his perspective to our
campus on previous visits. His talk described some of the ways in
which globalization displaces traditional masculinities and explore
some forms of gendered resistance, specifically, the mobilization of
far right neo-Nazi White Supremacists in the U.S., Scandinavia, and
Britain. His extensive scholarship on the history of masculinity and
of the politics of manhood includes Manhood in America: A
Cultural History and Men's Lives (with Michael Messner). His
most recent book is The Gendered Society. Nov.
20
Chris Smith recently completed his Ph.D. in media and cultural studies, and is currently a visiting professor at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. His talk addressed hip-hop music videos, bodies, and the politics of the American dream. His research focuses on 20th century American history, innovation management, and consumer spending trends fostered by new technology. Smith's published work includes "Naming the Illuminati" (with John Fiske) in the edited volume of Music and the Racial Imagination and "Freeze Frames: Frozen Foods and Memories of the Postwar American Family" in the edited volume Kitchen Culture in America: Representations Food, Gender and Race. He has also written extensively about popular culture for publications such as Elle, Interview, The Source, XXL and Vibe. April 17
David Savran is a professor of theater at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His talk examined cultural and sexual tensions inherent in the concept of middlebrow culture in America and why it has been judged so contemptuously by most critics. Savran argues that theatre is one of the most distinctive forms of middlebrow and illustrates his argument with an analysis of the marketing of the wildly successful Tony Award-winning musical, Rent. He has written extensively on American theatre and cul ture, sexuality, and the social history of masculinity. Recent publications include the edited volume The Masculinity Studies Reader; Taking it Like a Man; The Playwright's Voice; and, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers. April 9
Terry Tempest Williams, nature writer and environmental activist, writes bravely and with deep compassion on the political, cultural and geographical ecology of the well being of our bodies and our Earth. Her writings have brought to political attention environmental issues around women's health, and have served to catalyze environmental efforts for Redrock Canyon and an environmentally sustainable world. Williams has testified before the U. S. Congress on environmental risks to women's health, has served on the President's Council for Sustainable Development, and has received the National Wildlife Federation's Conservation Award for Special Achievement. Her published books include Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; Leap; and, most recently, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. Her lecture was co-sponsored by Writers Reading. March 24
Professor Amina Wadud, of the philosophy and religious studies departments at Virginia Commonwealth University, discussed Islamic women and the Qur'an. As a scholar of Islamic studies, Wadud has investigated the intricacies of various aspects of Muslim women's lives such as reproductive health issues and educational equality throughout the world. Her knowledge provides new and critical insight into the changing dynamics of the world since September 11. Wadud is the author of Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective. March 6
Kate Rigg, A native of Toronto and graduate of Manhattan's Juilliard School, Kate Rigg is a comedian who performs character and stand-up comedy in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. Born to an Indonesian mother and Aussie father, Rigg is best known for her routine Chink-O-Rama. Her routines include dance and transformations of popular songs and carry a strong political statement as she parodies the stereotypes often imposed on people of Asian descent. Rigg performed the routine somebody's kid, which focused on individual experiences in the multicultural landscape of the new millennium. The act included Beat poetry, character comedy, and intimate monologues accompanied by a wildly adaptable and multi-textured soundscape provided by Julliard graduate and virtuoso Lyris Hung on electric violin and strings. February 13
b.h. Yael, a Toronto-based video artist, spoke about the complexity of "belonging" and will illustrate her talk with clips from Fresh Blood and her short films The Mission and December 31, 2000. Yael is an instructor at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and deals with issues of identity, authority and family structures, while at the same time addressing the fragmentary nature of these identities and memories. Yael's work most often involves non-linear and hybrid forms, including dramatized and fictional elements combined with first person narration, autobiographical, and documentary elements. November 28
Micaela di Leonardo, professor of anthropology, gender studies, and performance studies, and graduate director of gender studies at Northwestern University, spoke on the ethnography of New Haven, Conn. Her work deals with race, gender, ethnicity, and class formation in research and anthropology. She is concerned with the embeddedness of gender and race/ethnicity in anthropological history, and an effort to reorient and channel research in these domains. Di Leonardo is the author of Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity, co-editor of The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy, and editor of Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. November 7
Les Moran, a Reader in Law at the University of London, spoke on the use of 'gay space' as safe space by lesbians, gay men, and straight women, drawing empirical evidence from his work at Manchester University on homophobic violence. He focused on findings that challenge assumptions found in existing work on homophobic violence. He has written extensively on matters relating to gay issues in the law. Moran is one of a multi-disciplinary team undertaking the largest study of lesbians, gay men, violence, and safety in the United Kingdom. He is currently editing a special edition of Law and Critique which is a critical reflection on hate crime, and a volume of essays on law and film. He is completing a book provisionally titled Queer Violence. He was a research associate at the Fisher Center for fall 2001.October 24
Bonnie Spanier, a molecular biologist and associate professor of women's studies at SUNY Albany, discussed the evidence in the biological sciences of distortions that have come from societal beliefs about sex, race, and sexuality differences. Spanier investigates how science is shaped by culture. She is a consultant on the benefits of bringing feminist insights into the natural and social sciences. Her recent book, Im/Partial Science: Gender Ideology in Molecular Biology, documents how cultural beliefs about inherent difference have skewed understanding nature at the molecular and cellular levels and inadvertently supported hereditarian views.October 17
Evelynn Hammonds spoke about science and race. Hammonds is an associate professor of the history of science in Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Program in Science and Technology. Her work deals with the history of science, medicine, and public health in the U.S., and race and gender in science. Hammonds' publications include Childhood's Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930 and "Gendering the Epidemic: Feminism and the Epidemic of HIV/AIDS in the United States, 1981-1999." October 4
Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern University, discussed British explorer Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa and her letters and essays. He will focus on Victorian debates about women explorers and feminist interpretations of Kingsley's relationship to West African women. He is the author of The Ruling Passion and The Burdens of Intimacy, as well as editor of The Psychoanalysis of Race. He is currently completing a book titled Civilized Hatred: The Antisocial Life in Victorian Fiction. Lane was previously an associate professor of English and director of psychoanalytic studies at Emory University. September 26
Michelle Wright, an assistant professor of English at Macalester College, and William Jones, an assistant professor of history at Rutgers, took a look at why 400-year-old racist stereotypes still flourish. They will also examine some contemporary manifestations of racist debate. Wright is interested in discourses on race and technology, as well as queer and black feminist issues in the literature of the African Diaspora. Her current project looks at comparative black theories of subjectivity in African-American, black British, Afro-German, and black French literature and non-fiction. Jones is working on a book titled The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Men in the Industrial South. His work and published articles focus on African Americans and organized labor. September 10
Barry Grant focused on Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, using the film to illustrate links between science, technology, gender, and science fiction in the forum "2001: Space, Science, and Technology." January 31
Rebecca Goldstein discussed how her conception of science differs from the highly technologistic understanding of human evolution portrayed in the film. Grant is a professor of film studies and dramatic and visual arts at Brock University, in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Goldstein has written four books and has won two Whiting Awards. January 31
Adrienne Davis gave "Deconstructing the Plantation: The Geography of Slavery's Sexual Dynamics." She is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches property, contracts, and feminist and critical race theory. Her work demonstrates how property and contract law incorporate and influence social norms with regard to race, gender and sexuality in the 19th century. February 8
Michele Wallace discussed "The Problem of the Visual in Black Culture." As a professor of English, film studies, and women's studies at the City College of New York, and professor in the Ph.D. program at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, she lectures and writes about feminism, gender, art, and culture, and the effects of sexism and racism on black women. February 24
Jane Plitt is the author of Martha Matilda Harper and the American Dream, about Martha Matilda Harper, who created an international chain of beauty shops. Plitt' presentation focused on "Using Business for Social Change: The Harper Method." A women's rights advocate, she started the Rochester chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners, and worked to end sex-segregated restaurants and want-ads in N.Y. State. In 1979, she founded her own business consulting and labor arbitration firm. March 7
Mary Katzenstein, a professor of government at Cornell University, gave "Obeying the Law, Violating the Norm: Feminism in the Church and Military." She has been published on women's movements in India, the United States, and Europe. She has written or co-edited Beyond Zero Tolerance: Discrimination and the Culture of the U.S. Military, Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest Inside the Church and Military, India's Preferential Policies: Migrants, the Middle Classes and Ethnic Equality, and Ethnicity and Equality: The Shiv Sena Party and Preferential Policies in Bombay. March 28
James Garbarino traced the developmental pathways of criminally violent youth and focus on risk factors, including maltreatment, difficult temperaments, mishandling, and social toxicity, for his presentation "Lost Boys: Pathways from Childhood Sadness to Adolescent Violence." Garbarino is a professor of human development and co-director of the Family Life Development Center at Cornell University. He has served as consultant to the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, National Institute for Mental Health, American Medical Association, National Black Child Development Institute, and others. He has also written several books, including Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them, and Children in Danger: Coping With The Consequences of Community Violence. April 9
Congressman Barney Frank, who presented "Frankly Speaking," was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1980. He graduated in 1962 from Harvard College. He has served as the chief assistant to Mayor Kevin White of Boston, and as administrative assistant to U.S. Congressman Michael J. Harrington. In 1972 Frank was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature, where he served for eight years. In 1979 he became a member of the Massachusetts Bar. Frank has taught at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard, and Boston University. He has written numerous articles on politics and public affairs, and in 1992 his book, Speaking Frankly, was published. April 12
Jacquie Soohen, documentary film-maker, will presented several films on gender issues. A symposium, "Activism, the Arts, and the Academy, " of panelists discussed their work on behalf of individuals who suffer discrimination because of their gender or their sexual orientation. Panelists included Jacquie Soohen, documentary film-maker; Sky Gilbert, gay theater activist; and Lee Hayes, black feminist musician and member of Malaika. Sky Gilbert performed, in drag, a reading of his work in "Digressions of a Naked Party Girl, " and Malaika, an African-Canadian feminist band, performed. September 8
Leslie Heywood, an English professor from SUNY Binghamton, speak on issues relating to the female body image. Heywood has written on female athletics, women's bodybuilding, anorexia, and feminist approaches to cultural studies. She recently received the SUNY Binghamton Award for Excellence in Teaching. September 20
Judith Ortiz Cofer, a native of Puerto Rico, presented "A Casa of My Own." She has written several books, including An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio, The Latin Deli, The Line of the Sun, and Silent Dancing. She centers her lectures in bi-culturalism and the creative process on her belief in freedom of expression. October 23
Jacqui Alexander, chair of the department of Gender and Women's Studies at Connecticut College, examined how gender intersects with race, class, and sexuality in "Geographies of Dispossession and Belonging: The State, the Erotic, and the Project of Nation-Building." Originally from the Caribbean, she recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship to research Kongo spiritual practices there. November 1
Michael Ray Charles, an artist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, spoke and showed slides of his own artwork to illustrate his points about "Popular Images of Black Men." His work deals with depictions of African-Americans in American popular culture. November 15
Karen Barad, who teaches physics, philosophy, women's studies, and critical social thought at Mount Holyoke College, gave "Performing Culture/Performing Nature, or How Matter Comes to Matter." She is the author of numerous articles on physics, feminist epistemology, science philosophy and cultural studies, and feminist theory. November 29
Argentina Teran de Erdman, who grew up in Mexico, discussed "Machismo and Marianismo in Latin America." She has degrees in law and international relations, has worked as a professor of political science at various universities in the U.S .and abroad, and was for 10 years Mexican consul in Chicago. April 5
Michael Messner is associate professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. He is co-editor of two standard readers on gender, Through the Prism of Difference and Men's Lives. His own work deals with the sociology of sports. April 19
Valerie Walkerdine joined the series with "Growing Up Girl." Professor of critical psychology at the University of Western Australia, Walkerdine is well-known for the rigor and profundity of her studies of pre-adolescent working class girls. May 1
Barrie Thorne presented "Women's Studies and the Challenge of Interdisciplinarity." Professor of sociology and women's studies at Berkeley, as well as co-director of the Center for Working Families there, Thorne's best-known book is Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School, a thoughtful ethnographic study of gender relations in American elementary education. May 17
Dan Keding, a professional story-teller whose tales about growing up on the South side of Chicago are profoundly relevant to the complicated nature of growing up male. Jan. 12
Ann Cooper Albright, a performer, feminist scholar, and associate professor in the dance and theater program at Oberlin College, discussed "TechnoBodies: Muscling with Gender in Contemporary Dance." Jan. 19
George Chauncey, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, presented "The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness, and Politics from the Second World War to the Stonewall Era." Feb. 13
Judith Halberstam discussed "Millennial Masculinities." She is an associate professor of literature at the University of California at San Diego who specializes in a wide range of topics, including Victorian culture, queer theory, postmodern culture, Gothic literature and the horror film, and gender studies. Mar. 1
"Works by Women" Chorale Concert. March
4
The Colleges Chorale performed the music of famous
female artists at a concert on campus as well as in New York
City.
Feminist Theory Conference. March
9
Students in Feminist theory class hosted the forum "Pop, Porn, the
Presidency...and Yo' Mama."
Film Series, "Gender Troubles." April 7
through May 28
A Spring film festival that featured films from eight countries.
Gender and Globalization Conference. May
8
A day-long symposium that converged feminist economist
thought with current international monetary policies.
Looking Forward, Looking Black. April 30 -
May 24
An art exhibit that reflected on the black body over the past century
and looks forward to the new millennium.
The Fisher Center Lecture Series includes a variety of speakers each term who deliver an evening lecture and, the following morning, lead a discussion group within their area of expertise.