News and Events

  CCS Bard, Classroom 102  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Suki Kim (2023-24 Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism) is an investigative journalist, a novelist and the only writer ever to have lived undercover in North Korea for immersive journalism. Kim’s NY Times bestseller Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (Penguin Random House) is an unprecedented literary documentation of the world’s most secretive gulag nation during the final year of Kim Jong Il’s reign.

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  7:15 pm – 9:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Set against the backdrop of the worst European migrant crisis since WWII, It Will Be Chaos unfolds between Italy and the Balkan corridor. Five years in the making, the film features two refugee stories of human strength while capturing in real time the escalating tension between newcomers and locals. The cinema vérité documentary intertwines the harrowing journey of Aregai, an Eritrean shipwreck survivor fleeing his country’s dictatorship, with the story of Wael, embarking on a life-threatening trip to bring his Syrian wife and four kids to safety in Germany.

Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and Franco Baldasso (Italian) and Ziad Dalal (MES).

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  10:00 am – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
With the recent upsurge in migration at the southern border, the United States may be witnessing the most significant challenge to migrant rights, including the right to asylum, and to the protection of workers in decades. The goal of this conference is to make space for a sober assessment of our present moment by shedding light on the acute and systemic challenges to our current immigration system, their relevant economic dimensions, and by highlighting the role of organizations working to protect the rights of all immigrants in these challenging times.

PROGRAM

10–11 am Coffee, sign-in, and tour of student research projects (Bertelsmann Campus Center lobby)

11:00 am – 12:30 pm Panel 1: How communities respond to the needs of newly arrived migrants

Laura Garcia, New York Immigration Coalition - Strengthening immigrant rights in the Hudson Valley
Valerie Carlisle, Grannies Respond/Reunite Migrant Families - Volunteer response and mobilization
Karin Anderson Ponzer, Legal Director, Neighbors Link - Community law practice on legal services for newly arrived migrants

An estimated 180,000 migrants have arrived in NYC and across the state since the spring of 2022, and state and local governments, community organizations, and volunteer groups have mobilized to meet their immediate needs. The panelists will reflect on the direct-response work they are engaged in, how they understand community needs to be evolving, how they navigate (mis)information flows and common frustrations, and talk about their strategies for marshaling community resources to help sustain their work amidst a public climate where immigration has become a flashpoint of political debate.

1:30–3:30 pm Panel 2: Are we in an asylum crisis?

Alex Aleinikoff, Dean and University Professor, New School for Social Research, former Deputy High Commissioner, UNHCR
Shannon Lederer, Director of Immigration Policy, AFL-CIO
Lenni Benson, Distinguished Chair in Immigration and Human Rights Law, New York Law School; Founder, Safe Passage Project

The upsurge at the border has focused attention on asylum, the right to remain for those who have a well-founded fear of persecution. With fewer alternatives available, asylum has become an option of first resort for legal advocates and migrants seeking protection and the opportunity to work after fleeing their countries. The number of applicants in the system has grown exponentially over the past decade and the processing times of nearly five years are increasingly theoretical. No one disputes that asylum is ill-suited to addressing the vast and diverse flow of immigrants arriving at a time of massive labor demand. There are increasing fears—or hopes, depending on the political position—that the current situation will spell the end of asylum as we know it. The participants in this panel have decades of experience in immigration law and policy, and they will explore the place of asylum in understanding and addressing the current situation as well as what has been overlooked or obscured by that focus.

4:00 pm: Screening of Borderland | The Line Within (109 mins.)

Followed by a panel discussion featuring filmmakers Pamela Yates, Paco de Onis, activist Kaxh Mura’l, and Joe Nevins, Dept. of Geography, Vassar College.

Borderland | The Line Within exposes the profitable business of immigration and its human cost while weaving together the stories of immigrant heroines and heroes resisting and showing a way forward. 

All events are free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.

This program is supported by the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education

About the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education: In early 2016, Vassar, Bard, Bennington, and Sarah Lawrence colleges founded the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education to explore what role institutions such as ours could play in addressing this development. Since then, the New School has joined our Consortium and we have partnered with the Council for European Studies. We are grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their generous support of our goals.

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

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

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

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

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

  Hegeman 204A  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Hamas’ attack on October 7 and Israel’s invasion of Gaza have had a profound impact on Israel, Palestine, and far beyond. How might we consider these events in the context of the history of Zionism, of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and of antisemitism?  

We hope that an important part of the discussion will be questions from those attending about current events and the long, complex evolution that produced them. We will respond as best we can from our various perspectives.

Cecile E. Kuznitz, Patricia Ross Weis '52 Chair in Jewish History and Culture
Joel Perlmann, Professor, Bard College and Senior Scholar, Levy Institute
Shai Secunda, Jacob Neusner Professor of Judaism, moderator

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The Human Rights Project invites the Bard community to an open Q&A event on the war on Gaza, its broader context, and its reverberations in the United States.

Please join us on Wednesday, November 15 at 4:00 pm in RKC 103.

When we say Q&A, we mean it. The event will be centered around multiple rounds of questions from the audience, which can be asked out loud or submitted anonymously via note cards that will be distributed during the event.

The three faculty panelists Ziad Abu-Rish (Human Rights and Middle East Studies), Miriam Felton-Dansky (Theater and Performance), and Mie Inouye (Politics) will also reflect briefly on how they came to hold the views they do and the challenges of staking out an explicit stance.

  Naiima Khahaifa, Guarini Fellow
Departments of Geography and 
African and African-American Studies
Dartmouth College 
Olin 102  5:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Mass incarceration, characterized by unprecedented prison population growth in the US and a disproportionately large representation of Black men, has garnered much scholarly attention; however, a parallel increase in the proportion of Black correctional officers (COs) has not yet received the same consideration. During the early 1970s, demands made by the Prisoners’ Rights Movement led to the recruitment of thousands of Black men and women into the US correctional workforce over the following decades. Thus, focusing on New York State, I argue that as correctional workforce integration redefined the state’s prison system and broader carceral geography, the racialized process of mass incarceration came to depend on the labor of Black COs. Based on a qualitative analysis of life/occupational history interviews with Black COs in Buffalo, NY, recruited between the late 1970s and early 1990s, I find that dynamics of race, class, and gender shape relationships between Black COs and incarcerated individuals as their day-to-day encounters cultivated cooperation and consent in an otherwise volatile prison environment. Deriving from notions of community policing and fictive kinship, I developed the concept of carceral kinship, which refers to the formation of familial-like bonds that appeared the strongest between Black women COs and Black incarcerated men. This concept matters because it reveals the intricate dynamics and micro-politics of prison spaces and how carceral geographies rely on intimate, empathetic, and emotional care work that is profoundly raced and gendered.  

Reem-Kayden Center Room 103  4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join us for a talk by Mariana Katzarova, the first-ever appointed UN special rapporteur on human rights in Russia. Her talk will focus on the deteriorating human rights conditions in the country and the challenges to her fact-finding mission.

We are privileged to have Mariana Katzarova join us on campus, directly from presenting the results of her fact-finding mission at the United Nations. She is the first person to hold the position of special rapporteur on human rights in Russia, an appointment that is the latest chapter in a remarkable career in human rights advocacy, as the biography below details. This is a rare opportunity to hear firsthand from one of the world's leading authorities on human rights in Russia.

Mariana Katzarova was appointed as special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Russian Federation by the UN Human Rights Council on 4 April 2023. She officially assumed her function on 1 May 2023. Ms. Katzarova led the UN Human Rights Council mandated examination of the human rights situation in Belarus, in 2021-22. During the first 2 years of the armed conflict in Ukraine (in 2014-16), she led the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission team in Donbas as head of the regional office in Eastern Ukraine. For a decade she headed the Amnesty International investigations of human rights in Russia and the two Chechnya conflicts. With the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, she focused on the war in Bosnia and the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Ms. Katzarova founded RAW in WAR (Reach All Women in War) in 2006 after working as a journalist and human rights investigator in the war zones of Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya. At RAW, she established the annual Anna Politkovskaya Award for women human rights defenders working in war and conflict zones. She was Advisor to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on combating human trafficking, and a senior advisor at the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe).
 

Bard Center for the Study of Hate Program
Olin Humanities, Room 205  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
A discussion with Christopher McIntosh, assistant professor of political science, and Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, moderated by Rabbi Joshua Boettiger, Jewish chaplain and visiting assistant professor of the humanities.

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:15 pm – 6:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
We are very happy to welcome Nathan Thrall to Bard for a conversation between him and Abed Salama, the protagonist of Thrall's book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (Metropolitan Books). This event is sponsored by the Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies Programs. You can read and listen to an excerpt from the book here.

In his book, the struggle over Israel-Palestine is rendered at the human scale through the terrible story of a school bus accident that killed Abed’s five-year-old son Milad. Placing the personal narrative in the context of structural forces, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama elucidates the daily injustices faced by the roughly 3.2 million Palestinians living in the West Bank. Richly reported and deeply researched, the book cuts through the abstractions of 'the conflict' and 'the occupation' with a visceral and bracing account of an apparently exceptional event that reveals the painful realities of everyday life for Palestinians.

We have been planning this event for months, but it now takes on special relevance given the unfolding events in the Gaza Strip. As a recent review in the Guardian put it, "it feels hard to recommend reading material against such a backdrop, but a book such as A Day in the Life of Abed Salama brims over with just the sort of compassion and understanding that is needed at a time like this. ... Thrall looks at the Israel/Palestine conflict with unflinching clarity and quiet anger, but above all, with nuance. At a time when facts have become weapons in this seemingly endless conflict, this is a book that speaks with deep and authentic truth of ordinary lives trapped in the jaws of history."

Copies of the book will be available for purchase.

Nathan Thrall is the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (Metropolitan, 2017), and has written extensively on the region in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project. He lives in Jerusalem.

Abed Salama is a Palestinian living under Israeli rule in the enclave of Anata in greater Jerusalem. Salama’s story of losing his five-year-old son Milad in a harrowing school bus accident provides the framework for Thrall’s depiction of Israel/Palestine.

  Guest lecturers Kareem Abdulrahman and Bachtyar Ali
Hegeman 201  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Politics has at least two faces in the works of Iraqi Kurdish novelist Bachtyar Ali. While his characters are in a constant search to prove their humanity, politics often appears as a barrier in that search. In The Last Pomegranate Tree, for example, a meditation on fatherhood is intertwined with the discovery of increasing corruption in political leadership. Why does salvation seem to fall beyond politics? Given the recent history of Iraqi Kurdistan, what is the significance of politics in literature? Yet another face is the politics of literature: Kurdish language has lived on the margins of the more dominant languages in the Middle East for centuries. In this context, literary translation could be seen as an effort to put the Kurds, the largest minority group without their own nation state, on the cultural map of the world. Here the expression that the translator is a “traitor” may ring hollow when the translator appears first of all as an activist with loyalties. What then are the politics of translating Kurdish literature in the contemporary world? This event invites conversation and reflection with a novelist and his translator.

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

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

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

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

  Dr. Winter Rae Schneider ’10, Accountable History Network Cofounder
Olin 201  6:40 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This final chapter from Schneider's manuscript Debts of Independence: Rural Accounts of Sovereignty in Haiti’s Nineteenth Century locates the mutual foundation of national sovereignty and rural self-sovereignty in the practice of rural family land ownership. It argues that sitting with ancestral experience and memory in the nineteenth-century agricultural plaine des Gonaïves demands a shift in our understanding of the persistence of colonial property and its meaning over time.

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

A Human Rights Project Event
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Photography in Kashmir has emerged as a powerful witness to its troubled present. A new generation of photographers, rooted in photojournalism but escaping its limits when they can, have illuminated Kashmiri life in a period of upheaval. Over the last three decades their work has demonstrated the radical part that can be played by photographs in subverting established views of Kashmir—as a beautiful landscape without its people; as an innocent paradise; and more recently, of a paradise beset by mindless violence.

Witness brings together images by nine photographers from Kashmir, the oldest already a working professional in 1986, and the youngest not yet twenty in 2016. The images are by Meraj Uddin, Javeed Shah, Dar Yasin, Javed Dar, Altaf Qadri, Sumit Dayal, Showkat Nanda, Syed Shahriyar, and Azaan Shah. 

The text emerged from conversations with documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak, and brings out the varied relationships that each contributor has to photography and to Kashmir, in the process raising questions about the place of artistic practice in zones of conflict.

Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
During the pandemic, Forensic Architecture undertook a process of transformation. Rather than growing to meet the intensity of the challenges they faced, the agency instead decided to morph into an interlinking structure of smaller, situated, activist groups located in different parts of the world and working in solidarity with local political actors. This lecture will present some recent cases undertaken by these groups. Coincidentally, they had all to deal with doors: open when they needed to be closed, locked when they needed to be unlocked. These doors stand for the collapse of the social order which they promised to maintain, and point to systemic racism and the ghosts of our colonial past. 

Eyal Weizman is a professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and founding director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2010 he founded the research agency Forensic Architecture and has directed it ever since. Forensic Architecture is an interdisciplinary team of researchers that produce evidence for presentation in national and international courts, human rights forums, parliamentary inquiries, truth commissions, people’s tribunals, and also in art and cultural forums.

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join us for the launch of Putting the Cooker on Low, a new Digital Commission by Ama Josephine Budge. Ama was the 2020/21 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard, and we are honored to welcome her back to premiere her new video. Ama is a British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist, researcher and pleasure activist whose intradisciplinary praxis works to hold together Blackness, pleasure, art and ecology towards queerly climate changing futures.

Putting the Cooker on Low explores the daily rituals that allow Black women, femmes, and nonbinary folk to keep creating in the midst of spiritual, emotional, familial, societal, and ecological crises. Putting the Cooker on Low intimates that which happens in the simmer and bubble, on the back burner and the top oven, in the side eye and the hot pot. Thinking with an ancestry of Black feminist petitions for self-preservation, this visual essay works to make visible and then unsettle the ways in which Black womxn artists internalize value-(as)-labor-(as)-capital. The cracks, crevasses, and slippages these antierotic modes of survival engender—as felt by both human and nonhuman ecologies—remain forced from view until they become black holes, into which we are swallowed and disappear. Often without a trace. It is with the cooker on low, that resistance might reduce into potency. It is with the cooker on low that we never run out of gas.

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

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

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
12 PM New York l 6 PM PM Vienna

The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts presents  the world premiere of a CHRA digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Brian Lobel and writer Season Butler, moderated by Jack Ferver (Bard College).

Two friends and food makers share their recipes for healing, their personal histories and food journeys, and wider reflections on medicine versus the medicinal, knowledge versus expertise, the homegrown and the home-y, the wholesome and the holy-cow-get-that-away-from-me.

Brian Lobel is a performer, teacher and curator who is interested in creating work about bodies and how they are watched, policed, poked, prodded and loved by others. His performance work has been shown internationally in a range of contexts from Harvard Medical School, to Sydney Opera House, to the National Theatre (London) and Lagos Theatre Festival, blending provocative humour with insightful reflection. Books include Theatre & Cancer, Purge and BALL & Other Funny Stories About Cancer. Brian has received commissions and grants from the Wellcome Trust, Complicite, and Arts Council England, among others. Brian is a Professor of Theatre & Performance at Rose Bruford College, a Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellow and the co-founder of The Sick of the Fringe.

Season Butler is a writer, artist, dramaturg and lecturer in Performance Studies and Creative Writing. She thinks a lot about youth and old age; solitude and community; negotiations with hope and what it means to look forward to an increasingly wily future. Season’s current work-in-progress explores bodies and identities in constant motion, crossing borders, heading from crash to crash. Her recent artwork has appeared in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Tate Exchange, the Latvian National Museum (Riga) and Hotel Maria Kapel (Netherlands). Her debut novel, Cygnet, was published in spring 2019 and won the Writers’ Guild 2020 Award for Best First Novel. She lives and works between London and Berlin.

This is an online event.  Join via Zoom.

A panel discussion on the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
COVID-19 has killed nearly five million people worldwide, so far. Like most novel microbes, the virus that causes it—known as SARS-CoV-2-- was at first assumed to have come from nature. A person, perhaps a trapper or butcher, was infected by an animal that carried the virus. But early in the epidemic, members of the Trump administration began speculating openly that the virus could have leaked from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the Chinese city where the disease was first detected. Since then, prominent scientists have argued fiercely over the natural transfer vs lab leak theories, and the Biden administration has also weighed in on the issue. Knowing how this pandemic started will help prevent future ones, but the search for answers is politically fraught. In this panel discussion, Bard biology professors Felicia Keesing and Brooke Jude will explain the science of what we do and do not know about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, and what the data so far tells us about what is and isn't possible. 

Panelists:
Felicia Keesing, an ecologist specializing in emerging infectious diseases teaches biology at Bard 
Brooke Jude, a molecular microbiologist specializing in bacteria and viruses teaches biology at Bard
Helen Epstein (moderator) a writer and researcher specializing in public health

A Virtual Panel and Discussion with Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Kathleen Blee
Online Event  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Although white supremacist movements have received renewed public attention since the 2017 violence in Charlottesville and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, they need to be placed in deeper historical context if they are to be understood and combated. In particular, the rise of these movements must be linked to the global war on terror after 9/11, which blinded counterextremism authorities to the increasing threat they posed. In this panel, two prominent sociologists, Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Kathleen Blee, trace the growth of white supremacist extremism and its expanding reach into cultural and commercial spaces in the U.S. and beyond. They also examine these movements from the perspective of their members’ lived experience. How are people recruited into white supremacist extremism? How do they make sense of their active involvement? And how, in some instances, do they seek to leave? The answers to these questions, Miller-Idriss and Blee suggest, are shaped in part by the gendered and generational relationships that define these movements.
 Cynthia Miller-Idriss is Professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, where she directs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL).  
Kathleen Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.  If you would like to attend, please register here.  Zoom link and code will be emailed the day of the event. 

 

Online Event  3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Since its defeat in WWII Japan has continuously been a close political ally of the United States, with local corporate media serving as a primary main tool for directing public opinion and silencing dissent. Despite media blackouts on the occupation of Palestine through the late 1990s, information on the Palestinian cause trickled in. A solidarity movement was created through individual-level communication and activism, and evolved from marginalized intellectual circles in the 1960s, to underground student activism and armed struggle in the 1970s and 80s. The long journey of solidarity from the Far East has yet to celebrate justice for Palestine, but where does it stand today?

Mei Shigenobu is a journalist, writer, and media specialist focusing on Middle Eastern issues. She holds a PhD in media studies from Doshisha University in Japan and an MA in international relations from the American University of Beirut. She is the author (in Japanese)  of Unveiling the "Arab Spring"; Democratic Revolutions Orchestrated by the West and the Media (2012), From the Ghettos of the Middle East (2003), and Secrets — From Palestine to the Country of Cherry Trees, 28 years with My Mother (2002). She has worked as a live TV host for Asahi Newstar in Tokyo and currently works as a media consultant and producer of programs and documentaries for Japanese and Middle Eastern TV channels. She is the daughter of Japanese Red Army founder Fusako Shigenobu and has been featured in films such as Children of the Revolution, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Adachi Masao and 27 years Without Images,and others.

Zoom Link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/88504383921?pwd=TCtmQjZEdkM2Y0VwWXgxRlpMbjBIdz09
Meeting ID: 885 0438 3921
Passcode: 752368

  Online Event  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Panelists include: 

Cynthia Conti-Cook ’03 - Attorney 
Kwame Holmes - Scholar in Residence, Human Rights 
Peter Rosenblum - Professor of International Law & Human Rights

ID Number: 899 7973 0035 
Passcode: 932913

White Nationalism, White Supremacy, and the Environmental Movement
Online Event  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
National experts Eric Ward, Scot Nakagawa, and Lindsay Schubiner will lead the Bard community, regional community leaders, and Hudson Valley NGOs in exploring connections between white supremacy, the growth of white nationalism, and the environmental movement over the past 30 years.

Eric K. Ward is a nationally-recognized expert on the relationship between authoritarian movements, hate violence, and preserving inclusive democracy. In his 30+ year civil rights career, he has worked with community groups, government and business leaders, human rights advocates, and philanthropy as an organizer, director, program officer, consultant, and board member. The recipient of the Peabody-Facebook Futures Media Award, Eric’s widely quoted writings and speeches are credited with key narrative shifts. He currently serves as Executive Director of Western States Center, Senior Fellow with Southern Poverty Law Center and Race Forward, and Co-Chair for The Proteus Fund.

Scot Nakagawa is senior partner of ChangeLab, a national racial equity think/act lab addressing issues of demographic change and the transformation of racial identity and meaning in the United States in context of globalization, including the rise of white nationalism and of right wing nationalist movements in communities of color.

Lindsay Schubiner directs Western States Center’s program to counter the dangerous ascension of white nationalism and hate violence across the country. She previously led advocacy efforts against anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim bigotry at the Center for New Community. Lindsay has served as a congressional staffer handling housing, health, and immigration policy, and managed advocacy for sexual health and rights at American Jewish World Service.

https://bard.zoom.us/j/6091568866

6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture is sponsored by the Photography Program, the Human Rights Project, and the Office of the Dean of Inclusive Excellence at Bard College. In preparation for the lecture, please watch Krinsky and Ross' film, Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) which can be found on Amazon Prime. The lecture will be discussing the film, so it is very highly recommended that you watch the film if you wish to attend the lecture. Please find the Zoom link to the lecture below.
 ZOOM LINK FOR LECTURE:

ARTIST LECTURE: RaMell Ross, Maya Krinsky '04 (03/15)
Time: Mar 22, 2021 06:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://bard.zoom.us/j/81574150462?pwd=R3p3Y0h6eHlRdDJBVkRQeXk5bGw4dz09

Meeting ID: 815 7415 0462
Passcode: HaleCounty
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FILM DESCRIPTION: Hale County This Morning, This Evening
"Composed of intimate and unencumbered moments of people in a community, this film is constructed in a form that allows the viewer an emotive impression of the Historic South - trumpeting the beauty of life and consequences of the social construction of race, while simultaneously a testament to dreaming."

ARTIST INFORMATION:

Maya Krinsky:
Maya Krinsky is a visual artist, photographer, and multilingual learning specialist based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her recent projects include the photographic series “Ideal Abyss,” published in Camera Austria International in 2018. Her video work "Spanish Lessons," made in collaboration with nibia pastrana santiago, screened at Hidranteee in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2019. Krinsky co-wrote the Academy Award-nominated experimental documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (dir. by RaMell Ross) which received a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at its premiere in the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. She has taught studio and seminar courses at Brown University, UMass Dartmouth, and Rhode Island School of Design and has years of experience teaching languages in various contexts. Krinsky was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2015 - 2016 and is a graduate of RISD and Bard College.

RaMell Ross:
RaMell Ross is a visual artist, filmmaker, writer, and liberated documentarian. His work has appeared in places like Aperture; Hammer Museum; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art; and Walker Art Center. He has been awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship and is a 2020 USA Artist Fellow. His feature experimental documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and 2020 Peabody Award. It was nominated for an Oscar at the 91st Academy Awards and an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Film. RaMell holds degrees in Sociology and English from Georgetown University and is faculty in Brown University’s Visual Art Department. His work is in various public and private collections.
 

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
OSUN's Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College invites you to its inaugural public event, an online lecture by Faustin Linyekula entitled "Of Ruins and Responsibility." 

According to Linyekula, "This lecture will be (again) a dialogue with the ruins I inherited from my fathers, guided by the poet’s voice."

Linyekula is a multi-award-winning dancer, choreographer, and director living in Kisangani, DRC. He is the founder of Studios Kabako, a community-based space dedicated to dance, visual theater, music, and film, providing training programs, and supporting research and creation in the Lubunga district. His work is site-specific, politically driven, and multidisciplinary. It mixes movements, texts, video, and music.

This event is part of an eight-part international lecture series produced by CHRA.

This is an online event.
Join via Zoom.

 

Online Event  10:30 am – 12:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Human Rights Project and Russian/Eurasian Studies Program present a panel discussion on "Fighting for Freedom 2020: Protest Across Asia."

Moderator: Thomas Keenan, Bard College
Thomas Keenan teaches human rights, media theory, and literature, and directs the Human Rights Project as well as Bard’s degree program in Human Rights. He has served on the boards of a number of human rights organizations and journals, including WITNESS, Scholars at Risk, The Crimes of War Project, The Journal of Human Rights, and Humanity. He is the author of Fables of Responsibility, 1997; and with Eyal Weizman, Mengele’s Skull, 2012. He is co-editor, with Wendy Chun, of New Media, Old Media, 2006, 2nd ed. 2015; with Tirdad Zolghadr, of The Human Snapshot, 2013. The Flood of Rights, co-edited with Suhail Malik and Tirdad Zolghadr, appeared in 2017.

Maksimas Milta on Belarus, European Humanities University
Maksimas Milta leads the Communication and Development Unit and is a part-time faculty member in the Department of Humanities and Arts at the European Humanities University, a Belarusian University-in-Exile. Starting from the outbreak of the revolt in Belarus, Maksimas has been a frequent commentator to Lithuanian, regional and international media (including BBC, Times Higher Education etc.), providing daily reports on the dynamics of the protest and analysis of the political movement in the country. Maksimas holds a Master's degree in Eastern European and Russian Studies from Vilnius University.

Alesia Rudnik on Belarus, Karlstad University
Lesia Rudnik is a Research Fellow at the Center for New Ideas, PhD Fellow at Karlstad University (Sweden). Lesia Rudnik is also involved in consulting ongoing projects of the Belarusian opposition. She is based in Sweden where she also chairs an organization of Belarusian diaspora. Alesia has published her analyses for media and analytical editions based in Belarus, Sweden, Poland, Germany, UK, the USA. Lesia holds the following degrees: MA pol sci (Stockholm University), MA Journalism (Sodertorn University), BA pol sci and European research (European Humanities University). Her academic research is digitalization of politics, protest mobilization via social media.

Medet Tiulegenov on Kyrgyzstan, America University of Central Asia
Medet Tiulegenov teaches political science at the Department of International and Comparative Politics of American University of Central Asia. His teaching and research interests include normative diffusion, civil society in transition countries, contentious politics, politics of identity and political participation.

This is an online event. Join via Zoom.

For more information, contact Olga Voronina at [email protected] or Danielle Riou at [email protected].

 

Online Event  11:00 am – 12:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In conjunction with Day With(out) Art 2020, CCS Bard will host a discussion with artist, filmmaker, and activist George Stanley Nsamba. Day With(out) Art is an international day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis. Register in advance here.

Believing in the power of art to tell people’s stories, Nsamba has directed a number of films throughout his career that touch upon the lives of those living with HIV and AIDS. In his newly commissioned work Finding Purpose (2020) the artist offers reflections on the experience of producing a film about teens born HIV positive in Uganda and the pervasive and discriminatory stigmas that cling to that status. This film builds upon the artist’s distinctive commitment to intergenerational and youth-centered storytelling. Nsamba is also a devoted mentor, and in 2013 he founded The Ghetto Film Project in the slums of Naguru, as a way to train and empower youth in socially engaged film production. 

In this student-focused discussion between the filmmaker, members of Bard College, and the wider community, Nsamba will lead a conversation around his practice, the role of the artist in society, and the difficult yet important work of bringing personal narratives of HIV and AIDS to the fore.  

This conversation is free and open to the public. Registration is required in advance here.  Prior to the event, participants are invited to learn more about Nsamba’s practice through materials made available here. Questions for the artist can be submitted in advance via this Google Form. 

George Stanley Nsamba is a filmmaker, spoken word artist, and human rights activist. In 2013, he founded The Ghetto Film Project to mentor and train youth in socially engaged film production. Nsamba's films Time Irreversible (2017), The Dummy Team (2016), Silent Depression (2015), and Crafts: The Value of Life (2015) have screened throughout Africa and the United States.

Learn more about Day With(out) Art 2020 at visualaids.org.

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

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

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

Online Event  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Photography Program and the Human Rights Project are pleased to announce a lecture by Lyle Ashton Harris:

"Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. Harris has been widely exhibited internationally and is represented in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London, UK, among many others. Harris is a Professor of Art at New York University and lives in New York."

Join us via Zoom.

**The Zoom link and password will be sent out campus-wide the day of the lecture. Please check your emails/spam folder.

Online Event  1:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This workshop is designed to introduce Al-Madaq and provide a walk-through of the platform’s capabilities. Al-Madaq is a digital history website that presents historical research to a broad audience and features an open access cartographic archive containing some of Cairo’s most significant historical maps, from the French Expedition (1798–1801) to the year 1920. The workshop will 1) introduce the research questions and the motivations behind the project, 2) go over the digital map collection and the control tools, and 3) discuss the use of maps as sources for historical research.
Workshop attendance is limited to 15 students. Registration via email is required ([email protected]) by Sunday, October 11. Students should familiarize themselves with the website beforehand. https://www.almadaq.net/en/
 Shehab Fakhry Ismail is a historian of the modern Middle East who specializes in the history of technology and urban history. His research examines engineering sanitary infrastructures in Cairo during the British colonial period (1882–1922). In March 20202, he launched the digital history project Al-Madaq: A Virtual Tour of Cairo’s History. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin, Germany).
 This event is cosponsored by the Historical Studies and EUS programs and the Human Rights Project. 

  4:30 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join us on Monday, March 30 at 4:30 p.m. for a virtual panel discussion with:Erin Cannan, Vice President for Student Affairs, Bard College;
Angela Cavanna, Physician;
Malia DuMont, Chief of Staff, Bard College;
Helen Epstein, Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Global Public
Health, Bard College;
Pavlina Tcherneva, Associate Professor of Economics, Bard College;
Tamara Telberg, Director of Counseling Services, Bard College;

Moderated by Felicia Keesing, Professor of BiologyJoin via ZoomFor those unable to join, we will share a recording of the session afterwards.

A photography project made by the refugee children forced into the Greek hot spot of Samos
Campus Center, Lobby  Opening on Wednesday, December 11, from 6pm to 7pm.

This lecture is presented by the Photography Program and the Human Rights Project.
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Walid Raad: “In part, an artist and a Professor of Art in (the still-charging-tuition, and the school should stop doing so now before yet more debt burdens more students, who are not the ones who mismanaged the school’s finances—its Board of Trustees and administrators did so for decades [check out the lawsuit against the Board]) The Cooper Union. The list of exhibitions (good, bad, and mediocre ones), awards and grants (merited, not merited, grateful for, rejected and/or returned), education (some of it thought-provoking; some of it less so), and publications (I am fond of some of my books, but more so of the books of Jalal Toufic. You can find his here: jalaltoufic.com) can be found somewhere online.”

This lecture is free and open to the public.

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

A screening of contemporary short films made in Mexico and the United States
Preston  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5

The latest heinous acts of domestic terrorism and white supremacy put these incidents in the middle of the ongoing debate about immigration, border security, and national identity. In times of crisis, we need to know who the victims are, their challenges, and their dreams.

Please join us on Thursday, November 14, 2019, from 7pm to 9pm, at Preston Theater for the screening of The Wall: The Effects of Its Imposing Presence on Migrant Families, a firsthand look at the reality of the Hispanic population in the United States and the current undocumented immigration crisis, touching on topics such as the U.S.-Mexico border wall, the effects of family separation at the border, deportation, and DACA. Films to be shown include: Landfall by Stephanie Schiavenato (USA, 10 min., 2018); Erasing the Border by Laura Herrero Garvín  (Mexico and USA, 12 min., 2018);  What Would You Pack? by Sara Gozalo (USA, 3 min., 2018);  Returned by Meredith Hoffman and Sarah Kuck  (USA , 17 min., 2017); What Happens to a Dream Deferred by Scott Boehm and Peter Johnston (USA, 12 min., 2018).

In Spanish with English subtitles. Open to all.

Cosponsored by the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program, the Spanish Studies Program, and the Human Rights Project. Presented in association with Live Arts Bard’s festival about borders, “Where No Wall Remains.”

  Lana Tatour
Columbia University, Center for Palestine Studies
Olin Humanities, Room 202  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In this talk, Lana Tatour of Columbia University will trace the making of the Israeli citizenship regime, focusing on the period between 1948 and 1952. During these formative years, the 1950 Law of Return, which governs Jewish entitlement to citizenship, and the 1952 Citizenship Law, which governs the status of ’48 Palestinians, were enacted. Situating the Israeli case within the broader history of citizenship-making in Anglophone settler colonial sites and drawing on analogies with Australia, the United States, and Canada, she is interested in what this formative period, in which the constitutional cornerstones of Israel’s citizenship regime came into being, can tell us about Palestinian citizenship in Israel and about the institution of citizenship in settler-colonial contexts more broadly. Drawing on original archival material, this talk argues that in Israel, as in other settler polities, citizenship has figured as an institution of domination, functioning as a mechanism of elimination, a site of subjectivation, and an instrument of race making. Racial subjects, space, and citizenship were constituted in relation to each other in intimate ways. Citizenship transformed space from Arab/Palestinian to Jewish, rendered settlers indigenous, and produced Palestinian natives as alien. Israel’s citizenship regime was predicated on the racial demarcation between Palestinians, whose citizenship was governed by the logic of naturalization, and Jewish settlers, viewed as natural and authentic subjects of citizenship. Presented in association with Live Arts Bard’s festival about borders, Where No Wall Remains.

Lana Tatour is Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. She is currently working on her book manuscript, Ambivalent Resistance: Palestinians in Israel and the Liberal Politics of Settler Colonialism and Human Rights. Tatour completed her Ph.D. in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom in 2017. Her doctoral research was awarded the Leigh Douglas Memorial runner-up prize for best Ph.D. dissertation on a Middle Eastern topic in the Social Sciences or Humanities by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (2018). She was previously a fellow at the University of New South Wales(UNSW) Faculty of Law, UNSW School of Social Sciences, the Australian Human Rights Centre, and the Palestinian American Research Center. 

A book talk with Lee Bycel
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Refugees in America (Rutgers UP, 2019) chronicles the personal journeys of people who arrived to the US under the refugee resettlement program. Given the current administration's policy to drastically curtail refugee resettlement here in the US, which is now in turn decimating existing resettlement infrastructure across the country, this talk will connect the stories to national debates and policies about the resettlement program.

  Yinon Cohen, Columbia University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In this talk, Yinon Cohen demonstrates that the strategies Israel has deployed to dispossess Palestinian land and settle Jews in the West Bank have been uncannily similar to those used in Israel proper. After briefly analyzing the Judaization of space from the Jordan Valley to the Mediterranean Sea, he focuses on territorial and demographic processes in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem) since 1967.  He Shows how the settler population has flourished demographically and socioeconomically, thereby enhancing Israel’s colonial project in the West Bank.

Yinon Cohen is Yosef H. Yerushalmi Professor of Israeli and Jewish Studies in the department of sociology at Columbia University.  Before moving to Columbia in 2007, he was a professor of sociology and labor studies at Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on labor markets, social demography, ethnic inequality, and immigration. His most recent publications are on Israel’s territorial and demographic politics (Public Culture, 2018), Ashkenazi-Mizrahi education gap among third-generation Israelis (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2018), and rising inequality in fringe benefits in the US (Sociological Science 2018).
 

Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
TLTP has developed a methodology using affordable and effective visual tools that are linked to the national educationa curriculum in Tanzania. TLTP is an integral part of the humanities curriculum at the University of Dodoma, and works in partnership with the Center for Civic Engagement here at Bard.

Please come and learn more about this important work, and to learn about opportunities for student invovlement both with the TLTP and with the University of Dodoma. 

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

Connect, learn, and help chart a path forward for solutions-based climate change education and action in your school or community.
Preston  9:00 am – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Conference Program
9:00–10:10 a.m. From Anxiety to Action: Psychology for Climate Work with Renee Lertzman, PhD. Overview & Updates on the Drawdown Research with Chad Frischmann

10:30–11:20 a.m. Unpacking the Green New Deal: The Critical Importance of Equity
Description: The Green New Deal outlines the most ambitious and transformative national goals since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original New Deal and the World War II economic mobilizations. A national mobilization of this size and scale presents an unprecedented opportunity not only to combat the climate crisis, but also to eliminate poverty in the United States and to make wealth, prosperity, and security available to every person who participates in the transition. In this session, discover how equity across all sectors must be at the center of, and integrated with, all our climate work. Gain a deep understanding of the strategies and tools that ensure climate solutions benefit all—because the only way forward is to leave no one behind. 

Rhiana Gunn-Wright, policy lead, Green New Deal
Andrew Revkin, journalist & founding director of the new Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University's Earth Institute.

11:35 a.m. – 12:25 p.m. The Paris Agreement and You: The Critical Role of Education and Public Engagement
Description: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) international environmental treaty of 1992 has the goal to "stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. A crucial part of the treaty includes the role of education and public engagement. The UNFCCC Charter and the 2015 Paris Agreement recognized six elements of this work, now collectively referred to as Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE). In this session, explore how ACE is and could further support the implementation of subnational, national, and global climate education strategy and strengthening of the Paris Agreement.

What does this mean for our work on a local level?  What is a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement, and why is it critical that we learn about this? What role can students and teachers play?  This session is especially aimed at those working or interested in a field related to ACE, and to anyone who would like to incorporate Drawdown into climate change education, engagement, and/or outreach.

1:45–2:35 p.m. Cultivating Drawdown Scholars: An Overview of Penn State’s Landmark Program with Project Drawdown
Description: Penn State partnered with Project Drawdown to hold the inaugural Drawdown Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) and the first International Science Conference on Drawdown. During the eight-week REU program this summer, 55 undergraduate students from across the United States were mentored by Penn State faculty and Project Drawdown's research team to study the Drawdown models and examine the feasibility of scaling them down locally as well as communicating findings. The students also developed curricular models and teaching tools for drawdown under the mentorship of Penn State faculty and Drawdown Education Fellows of the National Council for Science and the Environment. Students, faculty, and staff created materials that they shared at the end of the experience and were featured at the first Drawdown Scientific Conference at Penn State University Park in mid-September. During the conference, "Research to Action: The Science of Drawdown," Project Drawdown's research team and scientific experts and researchers from around the world met and had critical discussions about advancing and communicating the science of Drawdown. A platform for community engagement was also created through a theatrical performance involving the arts and sciences. In this session, discover how the programs were put together, accomplishments, and implications and explore some of the teaching tools, curricula concepts, and other resources.

3:05–3:55 p.m. Climate Learning at Scale: Washington State’s Story Applied to Your Reality
Description: Washington State is coherently building solutions-oriented climate science literacy across its preK–12 school system. It is doing so with a commitment to changing structures and partnering with tribal educators in a way that demonstrates climate literacy and action that is place-based and equitable. The ClimeTime initiative supports science teacher training linking Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and climate science. In addition to teacher professional development, the project supports the development of instructional materials, design-related assessment tasks and evaluation strategies, and facilitated student events. In one of these projects, educators from the Spokane and Karuk tribes and others set out to design “locally relevant, three-dimensional solutions oriented learning storylines (SOLS)” in order to strengthen teachers’ climate science education instruction. To date, 100 percent of teachers who have participated report they are more prepared to make learning experiences inclusive for Native American students and have increased their ability to implement research-based instructional practices. Session participants will learn from project leaders and researchers about what was learned in the program’s first year. Participants will have a chance to engage with speakers for application to their own work. Additionally, participants will be introduced to the resource portal for the entire ClimeTime initiative and have the opportunity to consider use of the open source materials for their own purposes, including teacher trainings, curriculum, formative assessment resources and STEM Teaching Tools.

4:25–5:15 p.m. Crowd-Sourced Learning and Action: How a GIS-Powered Tool Can Activate Community Climate Solutions
Description: What would happen if a critical mass of people across the planet could learn and act on the range of truly impactful climate solutions and resiliency measures that they could take individually and/or together with others?  Leaders of this session have conceptually designed the tool to support this outcome and have begun prototyping the first elements with students and educators in Olympia, Washington, and Toronto, Canada. Join this session to advance this crowd-sourced, digital, and social technology that builds awareness, appreciation, community building, and action at the local to planetary scales.

Connect, learn, and help chart a path forward for solutions-based climate change education and action in your school or community.
Olin Humanities, Room 101  7:00 pm – 10:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Ceremonial Open with Schaghicoke First Nations, Penobscot, Tlingit, and Taino Peoples

Remarks by Naomi Hollard, Sunrise Movement – The Nexus of Climate, Gender Equality, and Women’s Leadership with Katharine Wilkinson, Project Drawdown VP of Communications & Engagement Healing and Transformation: A Conversation with Katharine Wilkinson and Sherri Mitchell Panel: Women Advancing Climate Policy Solutions with Rhiana Gunn-Wright (Green New Deal policy lead), Jen Metzger (NY senator), and Didi Barrett (NY assemblywoman) moderated by Carla Goldstein (Omega president and cofounder of the Omega Women’s Leadership Center).

3rd floor of the Watts dePeyster Hall, Village of Tivoli  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
In honor of the legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt, the Human Rights Project at Bard College and the Village of Tivoli invite you to join us for a roundtable discussion about the current state of human rights.

In connection with the commemoration of her childhood home in Tivoli, this public event revisits Eleanor Roosevelt's famous answer to the question “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?” For Eleanor Roosevelt, it was clear that “Without concerted citizen action to uphold” human rights “close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.” In that spirit, the event connects the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the increasingly dire challenges to human rights faced in the United States. How has the political discourse around human rights changed in the United States, and what are its implications? What does the term human rights mean in public culture today and how does it strengthen or limit the struggles around climate change, criminal justice, immigration, and racial, social and economic inequality? This event will take the form of a public conversation involving global and local activists, introduced by Peter Rosenblum, Professor of International Law and Human Rights, and moderated by Larry Cox, former Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, in which we all grapple together with these questions (and others) "in small places, close to home."

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Photography Program and the Human Rights Project are pleased to announce that Alec Soth will be giving a lecture at Weis Cinema on Monday, September 16. The lecture will begin at 6pm and is free and open to the public.

Alec Soth is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2008, Soth created Little Brown Mushroom, a multimedia enterprise focused on visual storytelling. Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, and Loock Galerie in Berlin, and is a member of Magnum Photos.

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This presentation narrates and analyzes the struggle for women’s suffrage in Lebanon between political independence in 1943 and the first parliamentary elections in which women participated in 1953. In doing so, it takes into account the views expressed and strategies pursued by different women’s organizations. Of particular interest is the 1950 formation of the Executive Committee of Women’s Organizations in Lebanon, which served as the key node around which Lebanese women sought to secure their suffrage rights, including issuing statements, organizing demonstrations, and building alliances with politicians, political parties, and select constituencies. A key concern of the analysis presented is the changes and continuities between the 1943–53 mobilizations for women’s suffrage and women’s activism in the colonial period. It therefore accounts for the contexts and contingencies that revived mobilizations for women’s suffrage in 1943 (after years of dormancy) and secured it in 1953. Rather than an inevitable consequence of independence, women’s suffrage emerges as the product of women’s agency and strategic decision-making within a complex set of contexts and contingencies involving postcolonial state building, intra-elite rivalries, and shifting norms of development, governance, and citizenship.

Rebecca L. Stein
Duke University Department of Anthropology
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This paper studies the impact of new photographic technologies and image-sharing
platforms on the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories. Taking its cue
from Trumpian political discourse, I focus on the right-wing Jewish Israeli reckoning with
the growing visual archive of Palestinian injury at Israeli state or settler hands – a
reckoning that occurs through the discourse of “fake news,” or the charge that such images
are fraudulent or manipulated in some regard to produce the damning portrait of Israel. I
will trace the long colonial history of repudiation in the Israeli context, its modification in
the digital age, and consider the ways it has become an increasingly standard right-wing
response to images of state violence believed to damage Israel’s global standing. I will
argue that the fraudulence charge is marshalled as a solution to the viral visibility of Israeli
state violence -- a charge that works to bring these damning images back in line with
dominant Israeli ideology by shifting the narrative from Palestinian injury to Israeli
victimhood. The story of the “fake” image of Palestinian injury endeavors to strip the visual
field of its Israeli perpetrators and Palestinian victims, thereby exonerating the state. Or
such is the fantasy.

A panel discussion about the border wall featuring panelists Jeff Jurgens, Bruce Robertson, Martha Tepepa, and Krista Schlyer.
Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  6:00 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

A photo exhibit exploring the fragile US-México border area
Campus Center, Gallery  “The topic of the border wall between the United States and Mexico continues to be broadly and hotly debated: on national news media, by local and state governments, and even in coffee shops and over the dinner table. By now, broad segments of the population have heard widely varying opinions about the wall’s effect on illegal immigration, international politics, and the drug war. But what about the wall’s effect on the Sonoran pronghorn antelope herds and the kit fox? On the Mexican gray wolf, the ocelot, the jaguar, and the bighorn sheep? In unforgettable images and evocative text, Continental Divide: Wildlife, People, and the Border Wall shows us what’s at stake.” — Krista Schlyer

Joshua Kopin '12
PhD Candidate, The University of Texas at Austin
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Part of a larger dissertation project, this talk makes a connection between the subjects of early comics, which often included immigrants and their children, like the Irish-American Yellow Kid; and political cartoons about immigration and American imperialism from the periods of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Spanish-American War. Drawing on his long-established connection to yellow journalism and noting that, while explicitly Irish, the Yellow Kid is drawn in the visual idiom of anti-Chinese caricature, this talk posits that caricature is a technology of empire and inclusion that, through ideas about immigrants and expansionism that were often clothed in metaphors of childhood, served to differentiate acceptable, if unruly, white citizen subjects from imperial others. 

  A Talk with Jamil Dakwar, ACLU Human Rights Program Director
Olin Humanities, Room 101  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Jamil Dakwar (@jdakwar) is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program (HRP), which is dedicated to holding the U.S. government accountable to its international human rights obligations and commitments. He leads a team of lawyers and advocates who use a human rights framework to complement existing ACLU legal and legislative advocacy primarily in the areas of counterterrorism, racial justice, immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, and criminal and juvenile justice. HRP conducts human rights research, documentation, and public education, as well as engages in litigation and advocacy before U.S. courts and international human rights bodies.

Film and discussion with Charlene Teters and Jay Rosenstein
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Charlene Teters was a graduate art student at the University of Illinois when she started a campaign to retire the school’s racist team mascot and was met with death threats. Emmy and Peabody Award–winning filmmaker Jay Rosenstein—professor of media and cinema studies at the University of Illinois—made In Whose Honor? to chronicle the controversy. It was aired in 1997 on PBS. Rosenstein is still receiving threats over the film.

The screening of In Whose Honor? (48 minutes) will be followed by a conversation with Teters and Rosenstein moderated by Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate.

Free and Open to the Public
Questions: Danielle Riou at [email protected]
Trailer: Watch Now

Sponsored by the Bard Center for the Study of Hate. Cosponsored by the American Studies Program, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Difference and Media Project, Human Rights Program, and Human Rights Project.
 

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

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The Human Rights Project and the Hannah Arendt Center invite you to join us for a screening of No Human Is Illegal (2018, 61 mins.) Followed by Q&A and discussion with filmmaker Richard Ledes and Bard senior and Samos Volunteers member Eric Raimondi.

Richard Ledes is the director and producer of the new film, NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL. It is a documentary about refugees currently detained on the Greek island of Lesvos. They are indefinitely awaiting a decision from the European Union as to whether they will be allowed to stay in Europe or deported back to Turkey. Take a moment to search using Google “refugees on Lesvos” and you’ll see why this island has a particular importance at this time. The birthplace of Sappho is also home to Camp Moria, a migrant camp the BBC has called the worst in the world.

NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL is structured around interviews with refugees, residents of the island and international volunteers that Ledes conducted on Lesvos in the various refugee camps and other locations where refugees reside. NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL explores the history of Lesvos as a centuries-old destination for refugees, and gives the refugees–mainly from both Arab and Kurdish-speaking Syria, as well as other countries–an opportunity to share their motivations for leaving their homes, what their voyage has been like, and their goals for the future. The film is full of powerful moments and personal stories.  A link to the NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL trailer is here: https://goo.gl/2eQMM3

This event is part of our public programming for the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education, generously supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.

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

  Jacqueline Abad
Olin Language Center, Room 115  11:50 am – 1:10 pm EDT/GMT-4
Social worker Jacqueline Abad has worked for different NGOs, including the Red Cross in Almeria, Spain, helping African immigrants who try to get to Europe through the Mediterranean. On Thursday, October 25, Jacqueline will share with Bard students her experience. She will also provide information on volunteering opportunities that involve working with the African immigrant community in Spain. Please note that this event will be in Spanish.

  Meet Jacqueline Abad
Olin Language Center, Room 115  11:50 am – 1:10 pm EDT/GMT-4
Social worker Jacqueline Abad has worked for different NGOs, including the Red Cross in Almería, Spain, helping African immigrants who try to get to Europe through the Mediterranean. On Thursday, October 25, Jacqueline will share with Bard students her experience. She will also provide information on volunteering opportunities that involve working with the African immigrant community in Spain. Please note that this event will be in Spanish. Open to the Bard community.


 

Patricia Alvarez, Brandeis University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
In Peru, garments bring together bodies, fabrics, and symbols in a textured weave that has everything to do with power and the power of representation. The expansion of “ethical fashion” - akin to fair trade commodities - has opened a space of dialogue across an intractable racial divide. In this talk, Patricia will trace how fashion designers attempt to create a new post-conflict, inclusive, indigenous-oriented, multicultural “look” for Peru. At stake in her analysis are the ethical claims of design practices in ethical capitalist fashion supply chains.

Patricia's film Entretejido will also be presented. Entretejido weaves together the different sites and communities involved in the making of alpaca wool fashions, from animal to runway. The film is a sensorial immersion into the textures that compose this supply chain, bringing viewers into contact with the ways objects we wear are entangled in national racial politics.

Actors for Human Rights Germany
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Between 2000 and 2007, a far-right terrorist group known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU) murdered 10 people in Germany, nine of them of immigrant backgrounds. The group’s racist and neofascist ideology echoed the belief systems of other right-wing organizations, including the white supremacist Blood and Honour. In 2011, after a failed bank robbery, two members of the NSU committed suicide while the third member, Beate Zschäpe, turned herself in. In the ensuing trial, which ended in July, it became clear that German intelligence agencies had known of and even colluded with the NSU. The failures of the security authorities to stop the group’s crimes highlights the persistence of structural racism in Germany.
 
Written and performed as documentary theater, The NSU Monologues features the words of three relatives of the NSU’s victims: Elif Kubaşık, Adile Şimşek, and İsmail Yozgat. The stories of Elif, Adile, and İsmail testify to the survivors’ courage and determination. Whether they marched at the head of a funeral procession, organized demonstrations, or demanded that a street be renamed in the victims’ memory, their small acts defied the narrow “official” accounts of German authorities. With their testimonies, they reclaim a space for a historically accountable and antiracist mode of remembrance.
 
This performance will feature the work of Bard German Studies students, who have translated the original German-language script into English.

For more on AHRG, go to youtube.com/watch?v=Avkn8XGcIw0&t=55s. A trailer of the play (with English subtitles) is available at youtube.com/watch?v=5wANSSDgAJs.

Sponsored by the Center for Civic Engagement, the Hannah Arendt Center, and the Human Rights Project 
Reem-Kayden Center, Room 103  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In honor of Constitution Day, and in light of the recent (and heated) nomination hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, join us for a discussion with Bard Faculty on the significance of the Kavanaugh appointment for law and politics in the United States. Q&A to follow.

Date: Monday, September 17
Time: 7:30 pm (NOTE: time changed from 7:00 pm to 7:30 pm)
Location: Bito Auditorium (room 103), Reem-Kayden Center

BARD FACULTY PANELISTS 
Roger Berkowitz will talk about the epochal importance of the Kavanaugh appointment for the future of the way our democracy operates through administrative regulation or congressional governance.  

Laura Ford will discuss the opening remarks by Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) at the Kavanaugh nomination hearings, in which he offered a diagnosis of what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how this has led to the current hysteria over judicial nominations.

Simon Gilhooley, will talk briefly about the political process of appointing justices to the Supreme Court and how changes in that area beginning in the 1980s have brought us to this point.

Allison McKim will briefly outline Judge Kavanaugh's on-the-record positions on topics such as criminal justice, reproductive rights, and the role of the courts.

Peter Rosenblum will discuss the ideologies of the justices, and their significance, particularly in relation to money, corporations and race. He will also moderate the discussion.

This event is free and open to the public.

Join us beforehand for Constitution costumes, cookies, and karaoke at Kline Commons from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.

  Finberg Library  1:00 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

Ebony Coletu
Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies, Penn State
“Chief Sam and the Undocumented Origins of African American Migration to Ghana” Carina Ray
Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies, Brandeis University
“Africa as a Refuge” Abosede George
Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies, Barnard College
“Death of a Building: Unearthing the Politics of Modernity and Migration Histories in Architectural Conservation Projects in Lagos”

Please join us for the workshop and lunch. Due to limited space, RSVP is required. RSVP to [email protected].
 

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

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

Refreshments will be served.

 

Human Rights in Africa: 

Personal Reflections on 20 Years of Engagement

Olin Humanities, Room 205  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

in conversation with

Peter Rosenblum
Professor of International Law and Human Rights, Bard College

Chris Mburu is a Kenyan lawyer and human rights professional who has worked on human rights issues across the African continent, beginning in his native Kenya and continuing with field work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Uganda, South Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea and, now Rwanda, where he heads the UN human rights office. 

He is the subject of the Emmy-nominated documentary, “A Small Act” that builds on the story of his childhood to feature his work on education for poor children in Kenya. His research and advocacy have been featured in news and features around the world (as has his penchant for playing golf in conflict zones.) 

Chris will share an insider's perspective and respond to questions on events across the continent.

  Marc Silverman
Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Janusz Korczak (1878, Warsaw; 1942, Treblinka) is known for the heroic stand of non-violent opposition he took in response to the Nazis’ decision to liquidate the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw (July-August, 1942) and to deport everybody there, including all children, to the death camp of Treblinka. Korczak refused numerous offers to escape into safety from the ghetto. He stayed with the children (over a hundred) and staff of the Jewish orphanage he had long headed, accompanying them through to death.

However, the exclusive focus on Korczak’s dramatic end is a disservice. He was one of the twentieth century's outstanding moral educators. This talk focuses on his child-centered humanism as well as his identification with Poles and Jews in the expression of this humanism.
 
American born and raised,  Marc Silverman received his BA, MA and doctorate at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and served for over 30 years as Senior Lecturer in the Hebrew University School of Education.  He has published in the fields of educational philosophy and Jewish culture and education.   He is the author of A Pedagogy of Humanist Moral Education: The Educational Thought of Janusz Korczak (2017), published by Palgrave Macmillan Press.    

Laurence Ralph, Ph.D.
John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences Harvard University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
My talk details the manhunt, arrest, and torture of a convicted cop killer named Andrew Wilson. Wilson was one of approximately 125 Black men who, between 1972 and 1991, were tortured by various means at Chicago’s Area Two police precinct. Beyond these specific dates and outside of this particular location, journalists place the total number of torture survivors at roughly 200.

Given the history of police torture in Chicago, this talk explores the twinned meanings of both the object and concept referred to as the Black Box. Doing so will reveal how the mysterious interworkings of a police torture operation somehow became accepted. Throughout this talk, the Black Box will reference the name of a torture device used to send electronic currents through a person’s body for the purpose of coercing a confession; and it will also refer to the label I give for the conventional agreement, among a group of police officers, to stop trying to understand how and why torture is taking place in their very own precinct. That is to say, during Wilson’s ordeal, the Black Box served as an implicit agreement between police officers that their activity should remain concealed. That is, in attempting to hide the grisly details of their torture operation, these officers designed for themselves a conceptual Black Box. Contained in this box were sweeping, unexamined stereotypes about good and evil, about where and how the evil people live, about the color of the skin of those evil people, and about what it is permissible to do to protect against them.

  followed by a panel discussion
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
A Brilliant Genocide is a powerful documentary exposing the true story behind the rise of the brutal warlord, Joseph Kony, and the Ugandan government's campaign against the Acholi people. This one-hour film will be followed by a panel discussion featuring:

Helen C. Epstein—author of Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror and instructor in the Human Rights program at Bard College

Lawrence Kiwanuka Nsereko—Ugandan journalist and instructor at Dutchess County Community College

Zachariah Mampilly—Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana and International Studies at Vassar College, author of Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life During War and co-author of Africa Uprising! Popular Politics and Unarmed Resistance

John Ryle—writer, anthropologist, and specialist in Eastern Africa, Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology at Bard College, and co-founder of the Rift Valley Institute, a Kenya-based organization working in Eastern Africa to bring local knowledge to bear on development

Pizza and drinks will be served.
 

  Dror Ladin, ACLU Staff Attorney
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Intelligence agencies often claim that their work must be conducted in secret for the sake of national security. But with secrecy comes a lack of oversight, enabling grave abuses of those targeted by intelligence agencies and significant danger to the democratic process. One of the most extreme examples of this dynamic is the CIA's construction and operation of a network of secret prisons called "black sites," where prisoners were tortured. For years, the CIA fought to keep the program secret. Over years, however, sustained efforts by civil rights lawyers, government leakers, intrepid reporters, and Senate overseers forced the grim details of the CIA program into the light.


The CIA's torture program was designed and implemented by two psychologists working as independent contractors. The CIA paid the company they formed 81 million dollars to design, implement, and oversee the agency's program of “enhanced interrogation."  The psychologists' methods include exposure to extreme temperatures, starvation, stuffing in boxes, and infliction of various kinds of water torture. 


Although every previous attempt at seeking justice for CIA torture had failed, three survivors and victims of CIA torture sued the psychologists in federal court in 2015. The ACLU represented Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and the family of Gul Rahman in their fight for accountability. After prevailing over numerous obstacles, they secured the first-ever settlement at the end of the summer.   


A lead ACLU attorney on the case, DROR LADIN will reflect on its significance and his own impressions of the process and protagonists.   Ladin is a staff attorney at the ACLU National Security Project, and was previously a Skadden Fellow at the ACLU Immigrants' Rights project.   Earlier, he clerked for a U.S. Court of Appeals judge.

Kline, Faculty Dining Room  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Come celebrate the end of the year with fellow MESers. Meet faculty, hear about exciting new courses, study abroad programs, senior projects, and a number of incredible iniatives MES students are working on. Snacks will be served. All are welcome.

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

and

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

part of

Global Action for Academic Freedom

Hanan Toukan 
Brown University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This talk is about the relationship between contemporary art, dissent, cultural diplomacy and cultural politics in the Arab Middle East. Since the start of the Arab revolutionary process and the violence that has accompanied it, the culture and arts domain has come to play an ever more crucial role as mobilizer, witness, and archivist of historical events. As a result the domain has enjoyed an exponential growth in the technical and financial support it receives from US and EU funding bodies. This growth has provoked intense debates within policy circles and a plethora of academic literature on what the role of visual and cultural practices are and should be in violent warfare, political change, and the study of politics and culture in the region.

This talk will historicize and contextualize this phenomenon as its focus predates 2011 and grapples with it from its first appearance in the 1990s and until its consolidation in the aftermath of 9/11. Specifically the talk examines the ways in which transnational circuits of visual cultural production are related to how society makes, sees and experiences the political in art and its relevance to the wider publics in Jordan, Lebanon and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I address prevalent debates about the nature of the political in art as well as the role of art and the intellectual in political change. It shows that both are part and parcel of shifting structural dynamics in local and international politics that directly impact the production of culture and how different generations practice them, perceive them and process them. Hence this talk is not is not so much about “art”, as much as it is about the “artworld” from a local perspective, and how culture in it is produced in a global world. It is equally about some of the centers of power that fund and disseminate visual knowledge about the Middle East.

Hanan Toukan is Visiting Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Middle East Studies at Brown University.


This event is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Project and the Art History program

 

  Shareah Taleghani, Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies & Arabic
Queens College-CUNY
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Liwaa Yazji's debut film Haunted (Maskoon, 2014) documents the process through which a number of Syrians in the midst of armed conflict make the agonizing decision to leave their homes, join thousands of their fellow displaced citizens, and face an unknown future. Shaded with loss and ambivalence, the literal and figural border zones constructed in the film force the audience to contemplate the continually shifting meaning of home and exile, not just for the film’s participants, but for themselves.

This event is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Project

dir. Liwaa Yazji, Syria/Germany, 2014
112 mins, Arabic with English subtitles
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In her first feature documentary film, Haunted (Maskoon), Syrian director Liwaa Yazji explores what it means to flee a war. Yazji meets friends and people previously unknown to her at their homes. Domiciles where they live now, or where they are yet to live. Spaces that have turned into a sought-after commodity. When the bombs arrive, their first instinct is to run away. Later, they remember that they didn’t turn back to capture their last memories of what they were leaving behind. They did not bid farewell to their homes, memories, photographs and identity of a life passed. Haunted is about the Syrian people’s relationship with their homes during the war. What is a home – in a physical and in a metaphorical sense? And how, if one dare ask, do they feel when they are forced to leave?

This event is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Project and the Center for Civic Engagement

Salim Abu Jabal, Palestine, 2014, 70mins
Arabic subtitled in English
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Since 1956, 80-year-old Yousef has lived in a shack in Roshmia Valley with his wife Amna. Life is quiet until the municipality of Haifa endorses a new road project across the valley which will result the demolition the shack. Aouni, who looks after the couple, acts as a middleman between them and the municipality; negotiations lead to tension among the three characters.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the director.

This event is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Project and Film and Electronic Arts Program.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow (NYU)
Olin Humanities 102  6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4


This talk examines a history of the world’s largest designated set of settlements for refugees through its constructed environment and archival record, interrogating an ephemeral territorial form and the paradoxical heritage it proposes. If architecture and infrastructure have entrenched a quarter century of humanitarian intervention by the United Nations at Dadaab, Kenya, the site has been depicted instead as precarious. Occluded at once through aesthetic codings and archival silences, its permanence has been veiled in fragile architectures of an international humanitarian aid operation and in pastoral landscapes of a contested desert borderland traditionally inhabited by nomadic Somalis. Rather than a provisional artifact of the 1991 crisis that occasioned humanitarian operations in northeast Kenya, I posit that this territory unfolded as exceptional and emergent over the course of a century: knowable through visual, historical, and ethnographic study of architecture and territory. My research recuperates a figuration and construction of humanitarian territory in missionary settlements for freed slaves in the nineteenth century, imperial and postcolonial systems of land tenure in the twentieth, and forced sedentarization of pastoralists in the twenty-first. Through this analysis, I interrogate a problematic humanitarian heritage of furtive architectures, which at once liberate and coerce, resist as well as assert colonial and national borders, and make claims upon abject suffering as well as its salvation. These confront and index our representations and constructions of emancipation, emergency, city, Africa, the native, and the precariousness of ephemerality itself.

  Anjuli Raza Kolb, Williams College
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This talk posits zombi as an immanent theory of labor, consumption, and the material itinerary of what we call taste. Beginning with an account of Marx’s special commodity, Professor Raza Kolb will explore how production and consumption crystallize into a set of signs pointing beyond allegories of monstrosity, and beyond a West Indian aesthetics bounded by capital in the age of empire and today.

with Edgar Barens, University of Illinois, Chicago
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Barens’ film portrays the final months of a terminally ill incarcerated man and the work of the hospice volunteers, themselves incarcerated men, who care for him. Prison Terminal draws on footage that Barens shot over a six-month period at the Iowa State Penitentiary in Ft. Madison. With its careful attention to the dynamics of aging and dying in a maximum-security prison, the film offers a revealing look into little-known aspects of American incarceration. Prison Terminal was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject Documentary in 2014.

After screening the film, which is about 40 minutes long, we will have commentary from both Edgar Barens and Allison McKim, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bard.

Edgar Barens received his BFA in Film and Photography and MFA in Cinematography from Southern Illinois University. He is currently Social Documentary Developer in the Jane Addams School of Social Work at the University of Illinois, Chicago. 

 

  Anjali Kamat
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Non-citizen Asian and African migrants constitute a significant portion of the working classes in many parts of the Middle East, particularly in the countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council as well as Jordan and Lebanon. Primarily from South Asia, they fill low-wage temporary contract jobs in the construction, garment, and service sectors, including domestic labor in people’s homes. They are the labor behind the gravity-defying towers and the endless malls, luxury hotels, museums, university campuses, football stadiums, and other monuments to late capitalism that dot the oil-rich cities of the Arabian peninsula. As the Persian Gulf became the fulcrum of American military power in the region, a section of this migrant population also found service jobs in the rapidly expanding war economy, particularly on military bases—first in Iraq and Afghanistan, and soon across the wide expanse of the United States Central Command. Despite their significant contributions, the voices of migrant workers are all but absent from discussions about the Middle East —except, in recent years, as hapless victims of trafficking and abuse.

Anjali Kamat will discuss her research on this vast underclass of migrant workers and the challenges of reporting on their lives and struggles to organize for basic rights and live with a measure of dignity. She will screen the Emmy-nominated documentary she co-produced for Fault Lines: "America's War Workers"

Anjali Kamat is an award-winning journalist based in New York. A former correspondent and producer for Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera's current affairs documentary series Fault Lines, she has covered US foreign policy, corporate accountability, the Arab uprisings, and struggles for racial, economic, gender, and environmental justice in the United States and beyond. She is now writing a nonfiction book about South Asian migrant labor in the Middle East. Anjali is on the editorial committee of MERIP and has an MA in Near Eastern Studies from NYU and a post-graduate diploma in journalism from the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai, India.
This event is co-sponsored by Human Rights Project at Bard College and Center for Civic Engagement.

  Shehriar Fazli 
Olin Humanities, Room 201  5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
While extremism in South Asia has been a major focus of debate since the 9/11 attacks, in media, academic, and policymaking circles, there remain common misdiagnoses and weak or incomplete explanations about the key drivers of recruitment, radicalization, and violence. This has in turn yielded inadequate policy responses. Fazli will draw from his experiences covering extremism and politics in South Asia for over a decade, to discuss causes and trends of extremist violence in the region, and examine the successes and failures of both state and civil society efforts to address it.

Shehryar Fazli is a Pakistan-based political analyst and author. He is Senior Analyst and Regional Editor, South Asia at The International Crisis Group, and the author of the novel Invitation (2011), which was the runner-up for the 2011 Edinburgh International Festival's first book award.

April 7-8, 2016 at Bard College
a two day symposium exploring the place of sound in the arts, sciences, and humanities
Blum  9:00 am EDT/GMT-4
Friday, April 8 @Blum

9am Prelude
Georgian Polyphony Workshop with Carl Linich

10am  Aurality
A panel discussion with Tomie Hahn (RPI), Brian Hochman (Georgetown University), Julianne Swartz (Bard College), & Amanda Weidman (Bryn Mawr College)
Chaired by Alex Benson (Bard College0

11:30am  Interlude
Physics of Sound with Matthew Deady
Soundwalk with Todd Shalom

1:00pm  Transmission
A panal discussion with Masha Godovannaya (Smolny College), Tom Porcello (Vassar College), Drew Thompson (Bard College0, and Olga Touloumi (Bard College0
Chaired by Danielle Riou (Bard College)

2:30pm Interlude
Oral History Workshop with Suzanne Snider
Soundwalk with Todd Shalom

3:30pm  Resonance
A panel discussion with Marie Abe (Boston University), Emilio Distretti (Al-Quds), Erica Robles-Anderson (NYU), Maria Sonevytsky (Bard College), & David Suisman (University of Delaware)
Chaired by Laura Kunreuther

5:00pm  Deep Listening Workshop
with Pauline Oliveros

6:00pm  Closing Remarks
 **This event is free and open to the public. 
Registration is required for all interludes**

 

  April 7-8, 2016 at Bard College
a two day symposium exploring the place of sound in the arts, sciences, and humanities
Bitó Conservatory Building  2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Thursday, April 7 @Bito

2:30pm Opening Lecture
Emily Thompson (Princeton University)
Sound Theory as Sound Practice

4pm  Exhinition Opening
Featuring work by Lesley Flanigan, Tristan Perich, Natalia Fedorova, and Bard College faculty and students

5:30pm Keynote Lecture
Jonathan Sterne
Professor and James McGill Chair in
Culture & Technology, McGill University
Audile Scarification:
Notes on the Normalization of Hearing Damage
 **This event is free and open to the public. 
Registration is required for all interludes**

 

  Professor Brian Boyd is Lecturer in the Discipline of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
Much discussion on historical memory in Palestine-Israel has focused on the political appropriation of archaeological material in the creation of narratives relating to nationalist interests and colonial settlement. The appropriation of archaeology has been traced by foundational texts such as Whitelam (1996), Abu El-Haj (2001), and Finkelstein & Silberman (2001), which in turn have informed often-polarized debates within and outside the discipline. This work has established the political capital in harnessing archaeological narratives in Palestine-Israel, in particular their role in the construction of claims to land and to history over the course of the 20th century. However, in the post-9/11, post-Bush, post-Second Intifada worlds, archaeology finds itself in a very different political, academic - and physical - landscape. The reality on the ground has changed. What kinds of archaeologies have emerged from the changed historical conditions of the last fifteen years? How does archaeology now inhabit those changed conditions?

This seminar discusses a joint Columbia University-Birzeit University Museum Anthropology project in the West Bank town of Shuqba, in the Wadi en-Natuf. The Wadi en-Natuf is currently undergoing a process of destructive landscape alteration, partly through Israeli settlement and road construction, and partly through the large scale dumping and burning of (possibly toxic) industrial and municipal wastes by Israeli and Palestinian agencies. In the face of all this, the local community and archaeologists (faculty and students) are making archaeology work: landscape survey, oral histories/memory maps, and museum/heritage initiatives.

  Preston  Thursday, March 31
5pm   Reading by Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad
6:30pm  Speed Sisters
dir. Amber Fares, 2015, 78 minutes

Friday, April 1
5pm  Sling-Shot Hip-Hop
dir. Jackie Salloum, 2008, 100 minutes
7pm  Arna's Children
dirs. Juliano Mer-Khamis and Daniel Danniel, 2005, 85 minutes

Saturday, April 2
1pm  Divine Intervention
dir. Elia Suleiman, 2003, 100 minutes
3pm  The Time That Remains
dir. Elia Suleiman, 2011, 119 minutes
5pm  The Wanted 18
dirs. Amer Shomali and Paul Cowen, 2014, 75 minutes
 


Download: Palestinian Film Festival Poster.pdf

Ilana Feldman,
Associate Professor of Anthropology, History,
and International Affairs at George Washington University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk explores the dynamics of policing and security in the Gaza Strip during the period of Egyptian Administration (1948-67). Drawing on a rich and detailed archive, it tracks a range of police encounters. Many such encounters were mundane, including investigation of petty crime. Many were evidently repressive, including the surveillance of political activity and speech. All were part of a broad security milieu that helped to define governance, political action, and life possibilities in Gaza in the years after the loss of Palestine. The analytic lens of “security society” illuminates how policing both operated as a mechanism of governance and control and provided opportunities for action and effect. Criminality, politics, and propriety were all matters of concern for the police and the Gazan public. 

  The Human Rights Project presents a public lecture by Mark Danner
Reem-Kayden Center Lynda and Stewart Resnick Science Laboratories  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Join us December 1 at 6:00 PM in the RKC Room 103 for a public lecture by Mark Danner.Mark Danner is a writer, journalist and professor who has written for three decades on foreign affairs and international conflict. He has covered Central America, Haiti, Balkans, Iraq and the greater Middle East, among many other stories, and has written extensively about the development of American foreign policy during the late Cold War and afterward, with a focus on human rights violations during that time.  Danner is Chancellor's Professor of English and Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College.



Press Release: View

  Glenna Gordon
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5

The screening will be followed by a
discussion with Amer Shomali
Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Director Amer Shomali will be joining us for a screening and discussion of his animated documentary “The Wanted 18.” Through a clever mix of stop motion animation and interviews, The Wanted 18 recreates an astonishing true story: the Israeli army’s pursuit of 18 cows, whose independent milk production on a Palestinian collective farm was declared “a threat to the national security of the state of Israel.” In response to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, a group of people from the town of Beit Sahour decide to buy 18 cows and produce their own milk as a co-operative. Their venture is so successful that the collective farm becomes a landmark, and the cows local celebrities—until the Israeli army takes note and declares that the farm is an illegal security threat. Consequently, the dairy is forced to go underground, the cows continuing to produce their “Intifada milk” with the Israeli army in relentless pursuit. Recreating the story of the “wanted 18” from the perspectives of the Beit Sahour activists, Israeli military officials, and the cows, Palestinian artist Amer Shomali and veteran Canadian director Paul Cowan create an enchanting, inspirational tribute to the ingenuity and power of grassroots activism.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlKZ8daLtOo
co-sponsored by:
The Human Rights Project
and Film Program

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  5:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Corto Circuito was formed eleven years ago in to showcase short films made by filmmakers from Latin America, Spain and the United States in Spanish and Portuguese. Since then, it has grown exponentially, becoming a reference in the film festival scene of New York City and the country at large. Each year, their selections have included animated and fictional short films, as well as documentaries and experimental works, many of which were United States and New York premieres.The Best of Corto Circuito: A Mini Festival of Short Films will consist of a screening of selected short films from the festival, with an emphasis on human rights and immigration. To complement the film program of The Best of Corto Circuito, there will be a Q&A with a surprise filmmaker guest, and a panel discussion with Diana Vargas and Laura Turégano, Co-founders of Cortocircuito.

This event is a collaboration between Bard College and the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University. Organized by Prof. López-Gay, Spanish Studies. All films are in Spanish with English subtitles. Free and open to the public.

Heidegger’s Handiwork of Thinking: An Exploration of Unknown Papers from His Archive
Olin Humanities, Room 102  Martin Heidegger saw the oral form of thinking as original and exemplary. After all, Socrates, whom he distinguished as “the purest thinker of the west”, operated exclusively through oral conversation but “wrote nothing.” But as much as Heidegger may have valued the spoken word, his papers, which are preserved in the German Literary Archiv Marbach, show that he also required paper to think. He thought in writing; he would jot down ideas in the earliest stages of their development and prepared oral lectures and speeches first at his desk, word for word with pen in hand. Dr. von Bülow, head of Marbach’s Archive Department, discusses by means of concrete examples and unknown archival documents Heidegger’s ways of thinking and writing.Dr. von Bülow has published books and articles on German writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, Peter Handke, Franz Fühmann, Tankred Dorst, and W. G. Sebald. Among the books he’s edited are volumes by Rainer Maria Rilke, Erich Kästner, Karl Löwith, and Martin Heidegger. His most recently publication is a book on Hannah Arendt in Marbach.Von Bülow is currently a guest scholar with the German Studies Progam and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College for the month of September 2015.

Acts of Political Uncertainty: Towards a Daily Practice of Resistance
Bitó Conservatory Building  Jeanne van Heeswijk will demonstrate how active forms of citizenship can engage constituencies and communities in critical public issues. Van Heeswijk will describe how the complexities of our cities can be employed as the performative basis for the production of new forms of sociability, collective ownership, and self-organization.

The Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism is made possible through a five year-grant from the Keith Haring Foundation. The Keith Haring Fellowship is a cross-disciplinary, annual, visiting Fellowship for a scholar, activist, or artist to teach and conduct research at both the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights Project at Bard College. The Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism was established to allow a distinguished leader in the field to investigate the role of art as a catalyst for social change, linking the two programs and presenting original research in an annual lecture.

Olin Humanities, Room 102  Zanele Muholi is shortlisted for the 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, for her publication Faces and Phases (Steidl/The Walther Collection). Muholi's work is currently featured in the Wellcome Collection's exhibition, The Institute of Sexology, in London (until September 2015), and in Paris the Pompidou Centre's recent acquisition of her work is on display within their permanent collection exhibition (until September 2015). She participated in Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship, a group show at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in February 2015, and between 21 February to 29 March 2015 her solo exhibition The Art of Activism, shows at Akershus Kunstsenter, Norway.

At New Art Exchange, UK, Muholi will participate in Residual: traces of the black body, running from 13 March to 7 April 2015. On 24 March Muholi launched her publication Faces and Phases 2006-14, at the Centre for African Studies Gallery, University of Cape Town, and she will participate in The Lesbian Spring festival, Toulouse, France and her exhbition Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence opens at Brooklyn Museum on 1 May and runs until November 2015.

(Provided by Stevenson http://www.stevenson.info/artists/muholi.html)

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  Talking Books for blind readers spurred the commercialization of mainstream audiobooks after World War II, but the two formats soon diverged in terms of reading strategies. This talk will discuss the cultural imperative for aural speed reading that drove early time-stretching innovations in the magnetic tape era, allowing playback rate to be changed without affecting pitch.

  Marissa Moorman, Associate Professor
Indiana University-Bloomington
Olin Humanities, Room 102 

Patti Langton
Olin Humanities, Room 102  Patti Langton, a British anthropologist and documentary film-maker, lived in Sudan 1979-1980 with the Larim (or Boya) people, cattle pastoralists whose homeland lies near South Sudan’s borders with Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia.

Her remarkable photographic and sound archive has recently been acquired by the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford, where she is a Research Associate. The photographs document the lives of a remote people on the eve of war, the prolonged period of national conflict that has since engulfed the Larim and other communities in South Sudan.

Patti Langton will discuss the fate of these images form creation to curation, from the moment of taking the photograph to its afterlife in a museum.

The Bard Human Rights Lecture series
Dr. Denis Skopin, Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences



Olin Humanities, Room 102  The aim of this lecture is to analyze from the political and aesthetic perspective the phenomenon of the elimination of the “public enemies” from group photos in Russia during the Stalin era. The analysis has as its empirical starting point photographs we have discovered in the course of research in the archives of several Russian cities. All these photos bear traces of editing, whether that be various marks such as blacking out, excisions or inscriptions left by the Stalin’s police.

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

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

Panelists include:

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

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

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

  Fisher Studio Arts Building  Human Rights Project, Bard’s Fine Arts Department, and the Department of Africana Studies invite you to the screening of Anne Makepeace’s, "Rain in a Dry Land" followed by a discussion with Anne Makepeace.

ANNE MAKEPEACE has written, produced and directed many award-winning independent films, including “We Still Live Here,” (PBS Independent Lens 2011, Telluride Moving Mountains Award); “Rain in a Dry Land,” (P.O.V. 2007, Emmy nomination); “Robert Capa in Love and War,” (Sundance, American Masters 2003, National Prime Time Emmy award); “Coming to Light,” (Sundance, American Masters 2001, Oscar Short List); “Baby It’s You.” (Sundance, P.O.V. 1998, Whitney Biennial) and others. Her films have aired on the BBC, Channel Four, ZDF, ARTE, NHK, ABC Australia, France 5, CBC, HBO, Showtime, PBS et al. She has won numerous awards and is now working on a documentary about tribal courts in California. For more information see http://www.makepeaceproductions.com/

Rain in a Dry Land is a 2006 documentary film directed by Anne Makepeace and filmed by Joan Churchill & Barney Broomfield that chronicles the experiences of two Bantu as they are transported by relief organizations from Kenyan refugee camps to Atlanta, Georgia and then Springfield, Massachusetts.

  The Human Rights Project at Bard College presents a public conversation between Nuruddin Farah and Mark Danner to discuss Farah’s new critically acclaimed novel Hiding in Plain Sight.
Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  The Human Rights Project at Bard College presents a public conversation between Nuruddin Farah and Mark Danner to discuss Farah’s new critically acclaimed novel Hiding in Plain Sight. Farah, who just won a Lifetime Achievement Literary Award from the South African Literary Awards, has been hailed as “the most important African novelist to emerge in the past twenty-five years” by The New York Review of Books. This event will take place on Monday, November 17, from 6 pm to 7:30 pm in the Multipurpose Room of the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College.

Hiding in Plain Sight is a profound exploration of the tensions between freedom and obligation, the ways gender and sexual preference define us, and the unexpected paths by which the political disrupts the personal. BBC.com says, “Farah’s powerful story of a shattered family makes vivid the human repercussions of political chaos and violence.” The Washington Post writes, “A rich exploration of political and social crises . . . [and] a sensitive story about living in the shadow of grief, learning to forgive and trying to answer the question, ‘What does it mean to be Somali in this day and age?’”

Nuruddin Farah is the author of 11 previous novels, including From a Crooked Rib, Links, and his Blood in the Sun trilogy: Maps, Gifts, and Secrets. His novels have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, “widely regarded as the most prestigious international literary award after the Nobel” (New York Times). Born in Baidoa, Somalia, he lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he is Distinguished Professor of Literature at Bard College.

Mark Danner is a writer and reporter who for 25 years has written about politics and foreign affairs, focusing on war and conflict. He has covered, among many other stories, wars and political turmoil in Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the Middle East, and, most recently, the story of torture during the War on Terror. Among his books are Torture and the Forever War (forthcoming, 2014), Stripping Bare the Body (2009), The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History (2006), Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (2004), The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter’s Travels through the 2000 Florida Vote Recount (2004), and The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (1994). Danner is James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College and Chancellor’s Professor of Journalism and English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Yasmin El-Rifae
RKC 115  Yasmin El-Rifae has worked in journalism and human rights, mostly in Egypt. She is currently writing, and living between Cairo and New York. For the past two years, she has also helped organize the Palestine Festival of Literature. An annual traveling literary festival, PalFest aims to break the siege imposed by the Israeli military occupation on cultural life in Palestine.

Cosponsored by the Literature Program, Human Rights Project and The Translation Initiative

Followed by a conversation with literary scholar Sarah Nuttall
Bard Hall 

Deborah A. Thomas
Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania


Olin Humanities, Room 102  Much has been written about the effects of extreme violence – and particularly state violence – on individuals and communities throughout the world. Attention has tended to focus on the forms of marginalization and exclusion generated by and through violence, on the “bare life” and “exceptionality” that has been theorized by a range of European political philosophers. My interest in this presentation is to think sovereignty, in both its conventional registers, outside the state by highlighting instead its everyday practice. Drawing from narratives generated through two collaborative projects geared toward visually archiving state violence in Jamaica – the Coral Gardens “Incident” in Western Jamaica in 1963, and the May 2010 state of emergency in West Kingston – I will show that thinking about what sovereignty feels like means being committed and attuned to the non-monumental, unspectacular world of the everyday and the dynamic structuring categories through which it is lived. On one hand, these narratives show us something about the conditions of violence that both define the parameters of legitimate citizenship and lay the foundation for the periodic eruptions of exceptional violence. On the other hand, they provide a sense of the extent to which people are able to imagine, or imagine themselves enacting, alternative political futures. It is this latter dimension that gives us a sense of the affective dimensions of sovereignty. Exploring what sovereignty feels like, therefore, illuminates not only the ways alternative projects circulate in and through social communities even if the material movements that produce them “fail,” but also the entanglements across time and space that both produce and attempt to destroy them. *Childcare available*

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

Panelists:

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

Moderated by Shari Stiell-Quashie '16


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

Photo by David Broome, UPI.

  Q&A with cinematographer Jay Gillespie '08 following the screening
Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center  Kids for Cash is a riveting look behind the notorious scandal that rocked the nation when it first came to light in 2009. Beginning in the wake of the shootings at Columbine, a small town in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania elected a charismatic judge who was hell-bent on keeping kids in line. Under his reign, over 3,000 children were ripped from their families and imprisoned for years for crimes as petty as creating a fake MySpace page. When one parent dared to question this harsh brand of justice, it was revealed that the judge had received millions of dollars in payments from the privately-owned juvenile detention centers where the kids—most of them only in their early teens—were incarcerated.

Olin Humanities, Room 102  Join us for a panel about the growing health crisis in West Africa.

What does it mean to the countries affected and what are the broader implications for the world?

Bard faculty panelists Helen Epstein, Diana Brown, Peter Rosenblum and guest speaker Barbara Han.

Moderated by Bard senior Sophie Lazar.

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

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

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

¡El Barrio No Se Vende! ¡Se Ama y Se Defiende!
National Speaking Tour – Fall 2012
Olin Humanities, Room 202  “BEST POWER TO THE PEOPLE MOVEMENT IN NYC” - VILLAGE VOICE

“IT IS REAL GRASS-ROOTS DEMOCRACY, AND IT IS BEING PRACTICED BY THE IMMIGRANTS WHO LIVE IN EAST HARLEM” - NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Movement for Justice in El Barrio was founded in 2004 by immigrants and low-income people of color of East Harlem to fight for dignity and against neoliberal displacement. A majority- women of color organization, Movement operates on a commitment to self-determination, autonomy, and participatory democracy.

Driven by multi-national corporations and profit-seeking landlords, and facilitated by city officials, gentrification has swept through New York City, causing the wholesale displacement of low-income people of color and immigrants from their communities. East Harlem is experiencing a wave of harassment, abuse, and intimidation as greedy landlords attempt to evict community members from their homes in order to raise rents and increase profits. With over 850 members, Movement has gone building-to-building to organize with their fellow neighbors to build a neighborhood-wide movement for dignity and justice—from below and to the left.

Please encourage your students to come!

  An info session on Ukraine ft Human Rights Watch
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Do you find yourself wondering what has happened/is happening/will continue to happen in Ukraine? The news has consistently been flooded with stories of the Ukrainian revolution and the president (? impeached? maybe? no.... viktor?) of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich.
This is a lovely opportunity provided to you by the Russian Club and Student Government, an opportunity for you to ask questions like:
What was the political background of Ukraine before this revolution?
How was it kickstarted?
What the heck is happening with Viktor Yanukovich???
And other questions, as entry level or advanced as you'd like to ask. 

We have a lovely panel consisting of:
RACHEL DENBER- Deputy Director, Europe and Central Asia Division, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
http://www.hrw.org/bios/rachel-denber

OLEG MININ- Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian 

GENNADY SHKLIAREVSKY- Professor of (Russian and Soviet) History 

We are also awaiting confirmation from a member of our Human Rights faculty. 

ASK WHATEVER YOU'D LIKE ABOUT UKRAINE
EDUCATE YOURSELVES ON THESE CURRENT EVENTS
IT WILL BE FUN
BARD COLLEGE
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
FUN



Download: ViktorYanukovichPoster.pdf

Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  Professor Wilder’s most recent book is Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). He is also the author of In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2001/2004); and A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000/2001). His recent articles include, “‘Driven . . . from the School of the Prophets’: The Colonizationist Ascendance at General Theological Seminary,” which was the inaugural essay in the fully digital journal New York History. 

Professor Wilder is a senior fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative, where he has served as a guest lecturer, commencement speaker, academic advisor, and visiting professor. For more than a decade, this innovative program has given hundreds of men and women the opportunity to acquire a college education during their incarcerations in the New York State prison system. 

He has advised and appeared in numerous historical documentaries, including the celebrated Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon film, The Central Park Five; Kelly Anderson’s highly praised exploration of gentrification, My Brooklyn; the History Channel’s F.D.R.: A Presidency Revealed; and Ric Burn’s award-winning PBS series, New York: A Documentary History.

Professor Wilder has directed or advised exhibits at regional and national museums, including the Brooklyn Historical Society, the New-York Historical Society, the Chicago History Museum, the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s BLDG 92, the New York State Museum, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and the Weeksville Heritage Center. He was one of the original historians for the Museum of Sex in New York City, and he maintains an active public history program.

(from MIT's History Department webpage)

***Brought to you by The Difference & Media Project, with co-sponsorship from The Arendt Center, The Human Rights Project, Africana Studies, and Historical Studies at Bard College.

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

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

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  A roundtable discussion with:

Bruce Rich, author of Foreclosing the Future: The World Bank and the Politics of Environmental Destruction (2013), is a lawyer and writer, who has played a critical role in civil society’s engagement with international development institutions over a period of decades. He has testified in numerous Congressional hearings concerning U.S. participation in international organizations, and is also the author of To Uphold the World, with a Foreword by Amartya Sen and an Afterword by H.H. The Dalai Lama (2010), and Mortgaging the Earth (1994).

Jenik Radon, Adjunct Professor, Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, is a lawyer engaged in advising developing countries and civil society organizations on investment projects. He was adviser to the Government of Georgia on the multinational “BTC” oil pipeline, one of the formative projects in contemporary large scale infrastructure investment. He now advises the Government of Afghanistan on the proposed multi-billion dollar TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas project.

Peter Rosenblum, Professor of International Law and Human Rights, has been actively involved in research and advocacy related to investment and human rights. His past work focused on oil and mining investment; he has just completed a study of World Bank funded tea plantations in India.

Background:

The new World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim, has announced a strategy for the Bank that relies on big risks for big rewards, notwithstanding the risk of big failure. For civil society activists, the President’s language recalls the worst of the World Bank’s past behavior and ignores decades of efforts to implement reforms intended to protect rights and preserve the environment, in other words, leveraging the money and influence of the Bank for the ‘right kind of development.’ Interestingly, the World Bank’s new strategy comes after a decade of booming investment in the developing world, that has been met with expanding demands for transparency, accountability and equity. This panel will discuss the progress that has been made in achieving those goals, generally, and the role of the World Bank. Peter Rosenblum will moderate.


*Childcare provided for this event.

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

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

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

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

Arles, France 2013

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

Read more about the conference at:

Flood of Rights Webpage

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Claudia Sobral, a Bard Alum of the Class of 1989, is a Brazilian-born Angeleno, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. She traveled to Berlin to watch a soccer tournament with her family several years ago and found herself obsessed with the Germans around her. Who was once a Nazi? Who committed crimes and got away with it? How does the younger generation, her contemporaries, deal with the legacy? All these thoughts raced through her mind then, and she has attempted to answer those questions through her new documentary, “The Ghosts of the Third Reich.”

Sobral’s film focuses on three descendants of Nazis, all of whom, though born after the end of the war and without any complicity in its horrors, have borne the guilt and shame of the Nazis by association.

In 2009 she began research on the life experiences of descendants of the Nazis, the results of her research and several interviews provided her with materials to produce and co-direct her first documentary titled “The Ghosts of the Third Reich”. The documentary has been broadcasted on History Channel and National Geographic worldwide. Also, several screenings in Los Angeles, including Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles Holocaust Museum, and at the Breed Street Shul. In Brasil, at the Sao Paulo Jewish Film Festival, Monaco, Beijing and Israel.

Each of these descendants’ bloodlines haunt them — and their painful attempts to describe their own disgust with their Nazi heritage is juxtaposed in the film with horrific images of the concentration camps and contrasted with loving family pictures. If the juxtaposition of humanity and its antithesis is chilling to us watching the film, how must it feel to be born into this history?

There will be a Q&A with the filmmaker as well as two of the film's protagonists (via Skype) following the documentary.

This event is sponsored by the Human Rights Project, Jewish Studies, Historical Studies, and the Department of Alumni/ae Affairs.

Trauma, Human Rights and Displacement

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

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

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  Tom Porteous is the deputy program director at Human Rights Watch and is based in Washington DC. He joined Human Rights Watch in 2006 as the London director responsible for communications and advocacy in the United Kingdom. Porteous has a background in journalism, diplomacy, and UN peacekeeping. In the 1980s and early 1990s he was a freelance correspondent for the Guardian newspaper, the BBC, and other media, first in Cairo and later in Berlin, Algeria, and Morocco. He worked in UN peacekeeping operations in Somalia and Liberia. He also served as conflict management adviser for Africa in the UK's Foreign Office from 2001 to 2003. Porteous studied classics at Oxford University.

He will be discussing the work of Human Rights Watch in the Middle East and North Africa in the run up to and during the uprisings and revolutions of the past two years, the role of human rights discourse in framing protesters’ demands and influencing political transitions, and the relationship between human rights, democracy and sectarian/religious politics. He will also talk about what human rights organizations can/should do in the face of the brutality of Syria’s civil war.

The talk is co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department.

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

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

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

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

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

  A Talk by Professor Peter Rosenblum
Olin Humanities, Room 102  Peter Rosenblum has recently come to Bard after 10 years at Columbia Law School and 7 years at Harvard. He has been working in and with human rights for the past twenty years -- as an advocate, an academic and, sometimes, (like everyone else) just some guy reacting to the world around him.  

"Driving in India" is a reflective monologue about those roles combined in what is, among other things, an investigation of fairtrade tea plantations in India.  It is a work in progress that aspires to be entertaining while conveying something about tea, India and doing human rights in the 21st century.

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  Robin Blackburn is a Leverhulme research fellow at the University of Essex in the UK. Between 2001 and 2010 he was Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research in NYC. He is the author, most recently of "American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights", and of "The Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln". He is a former editor and frequent contributor to New Left Review.

  A Panel Discussion with the Representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to the Americas
Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  In 2012, there was an intensification of protests and a sharp increase in the number of self-immolations by Tibetans, a response to the continued annexation of their homeland by the People’s Republic of China. Tibet observers and analysts cite six decades of human rights violations and cultural and religious repression as some of the main causes. The panel will discuss human rights, the possibility for Tibetan autonomy or independence, and ways the world community can help Tibet to shape its future. Robert Barnett, moderator.

The Honorable Lobsang Nyandak, Representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to the Americas
Tendor, Executive Director, Students for a Free Tibet
Robert Thurman, Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Columbia University
Robert Barnett, Director, Weatherhead East Asia Institute, Modern Tibet Studies Program, Columbia University
Ming Xia, Professor of Political Science, City University of New York

Reception to follow. Suggested donation $20. Net proceeds to support The Tibetan Center’s programs. Reservations encouraged. Please email [email protected] or call (845) 383-1774 for details or reservations.

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  Avi Mugrabi is  considered one of Israel’s most important documentarist, as well as a committed eyewitness of the Middle East conflict, an experimentalist, and avid reformist of cinematic language. As a political filmmaker he is also actively involved in „Breaking the Silence“, an organization of ex-soldiers dedicated to collecting testimonies about their service. 

His films have appeared at festivals worldwide. Z32 (2008) received the Excellence Award at Yamagata Film Festival. Avenge But One of My Blue Eyes(2005) was screened at the Cannes Film Festival and received the Amnesty Award as well as special mention at the Rotterdam Film Festival.

His films are often experimental in form and are highly critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people. His latest film is Once I Entered a Garden. 

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  In her book Loser Sons: Politics and Authority, Ronell writes: Something that still holds us hostage, authority has for all intents and purposes disappeared: it has even eaten away at [Hannah Arendt's] title, "What is Authority?" "In order to avoid misunderstanding," she begins her famous essay, "it might have been wiser to ask in the title: What was--and not what is--authority? For it is my contention that we are tempted and entitled to raise this question because authority has vanished from the modern world." For me, the disappearance of authority functions as a figure for democracy in crisis--a way of describing the panic that prevails within the powerful motifs of sociality, alterity, relation. Authority's disappearance in itself calls for a speculative forensics, particularly since the presumed eclipse of authority is not complete but haunts and hounds human relations, holding things together by nothing more substantial than vague historical memory starts. 

Avital Ronell is University Professor of the Humanities and a professor of German, English, and comparative literature at New York University, where she co-directs the Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Studies program. She is also Jacques Derrida Professor of Media and Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She is the author of Dictations: On Haunted Writing; The Telephone Book; Crack Wars; Finitude's Score; Stupidity; The Test Drive; and Fighting Theory.

  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Composer and theater-maker Merlijn Twaalfhoven discusses challenges and strategies in creating Al Quds Underground, a secret festival in the living rooms of families from different cultures in the Old City of Jerusalem. Twaalfhoven will explore the tensions between diplomacy, activism, and artistic quality, and suggest ways that students might become involved in future editions of the festival.

Merlijn Twaalfhoven is a Dutch composer and theater-maker.  With his non-profit organization La Vie Sur Terre he produces large-scale projects with local artists and musicians, using music to transcend political and ethnic boundaries, most recently in Cyprus, Japan, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories, and Syria.  He has received awards from UNESCO for creating intercultural dialogue between the Arab and Western worlds, and several leading European prizes for composers and performers. He has collaborated with Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the Holland Festival, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, the Dutch National Ballet, and the Springdance Festival, among many others.  He graduated from the Amsterdam Conservatory in 2003.

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  This talk explores what the ordinary people (in the Middle East) do to get around and resist the severe constraints the authoritarian polity, neo-liberal economics, and moral authorities on their civil and economic rights. Bayat will discuss the diverse ways in which the subaltern groups--men, women, and the young—resort to ‘non-movements’ to affect the contours of change in their societies, by refusing to exit from the social and political stage controlled by authoritarian regimes, and by discovering or generating spaces within which they can assert their rights and enhance their life chances. He conceptualizes these everyday and dispersed practices in terms of social 'non-movements', and discuss how these ‘non-movements’, by establishing alternative norms in society, become the matrix of broader social change in society, and how they may or may not evolve into larger societal movements.

Asef Bayat, the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, teaches Sociology and Middle East at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Illinois, he taught at the American University in Cairo for many years, and served as the director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) holding the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. His research areas range from social movements and social change, to religion-politics-everyday life, Islam and the modern world, and urban space and politics. His recent books include Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford University Press, 2007); (with Linda Herrera) Being Young and Muslim: Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (Oxford University Press, 2010); and Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2010). The revised and extended edition of Life as Politics will be published in May 2013, and so will Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (Oxford University Press).

This event is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Project, the Center for Civic Engagement and the Sociology Program.

Violence Against Women as an International Issue
Olin Humanities, Room 102  A recent gang rape of a young woman traveling in a bus in New Delhi has garnered media attention worldwide for the sheer brutality of the attack. But is the treatment of women in India really so different from the violence women around the world face, including in the United States? Even a cursory reading of the ongoing gang-rape trial  in Steubenville, Ohio would strongly suggest otherwise. The discussion will be based on how violence against women as an issue is framed and its many implications. 

This talk will address violence against women as a global human rights issue through a panel of Bard professors and academics with extensive knowledge in gender studies and particularly gender rights. Panelists will include professors Allison McKim, Ann Seaton, Maria Cecire, and NYU's Poulami Roychowdhury, whose research examines responses to violence against women in India, and whose  op-ed piece on the New Delhi rape case, titled Stop Demonizing Indian Culture, has been widely circulated and read. 

Olin Humanities, Room 102  Event co-sponsored by the Anthropology Program at Bard

Miriam Ticktin is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New School. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Before coming to the New School, Miriam was an Assistant Professor in Women's Studies and Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and also held a postdoctoral position in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University.

Professor Ticktin works on the intersections of the anthropology of medicine and science, law, and transnational and postcolonial feminist theory. Her research has focused in the broadest sense on what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity: she has been interested in what these claims tell us about universalisms and difference, about who can be a political subject, on what basis people are included and excluded from communities, and how inequalities get instituted or perpetuated in this process.

Her recent work can be found on her New School page.

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Wednesday, November 14, 2012 7:30pm until 9:30pm

RKC 103 (Bito Auditorium)

Renowned journalist Glenn Greenwald is coming to Bard to speak on Palestine and America's involvement in the conflict.

Greenwald has written as a blogger on political and legal issues for Salon, and currently holds a position at The Guardian. He has written four books including "How Would a Patriot Act?" which was a New York Times Bestseller in 2006.

He has appeared on NPR, ABC, C-SPAN, Democracy Now!, PRI, MSNBC, the Colbert Report, CBS, and yes, even Fox News.

Organized by Bard International Solidarity Movement is a chapter of the wider International Solidarity Movement. We are a nonviolent direct-action network that provides activists who work on the ground with Palestinians to engage in peaceful resistance and to serve as witnesses to the injustices of the IDF occupation.

Co-sponsored by The Human Rights Project 

Suggested Reading: 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/glenn-greenwald
http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/glenn_greenwald

Olin Language Center  Media professionals at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication in collaboration with history and cultural scholars, have produced a 60-minute film to bring awareness to the world about the repercussions from the Dirty War and its on-going cultural, social, political, ethical, human rights, and economic effects.
This project is grounded in the search for identity and the "moral of the story" is that the right to identity is a fundamental human right. It will focus on the development of a 60-minute documentary film about the educational movement headed by Las Abuelas. The film presents historical and cultural facts, and features interviews with Las Abuelas and the 'found' grandchildren. The main question we hope to answer: "is the right to identity a basic human right?"

Visit the film's website for complete details:http://www.searchforidentitydocumentary.com/

UNESCO and the origins of world heritage
Olin Humanities, Room 102 
Due to huricane Sandy, this lecture has been cancelled. 





What does the protection of monuments have to do with the protection of human lives? Today human rights and cultural objects are treated as separate concerns by international organizations, but in the 1930s a broad movement of intellectuals, architects and lawyers worked to combine them into a new regulatory system, which they called “the humanization of war.” This talk will address the work they did for UNESCO’s precursor, the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), in order to examine how monuments rose to the top of the international cultural agenda, where they still remain today.

 

Lucia Allais is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Princeton University; she specializes in the intellectual and political history of architecture since 1900 with particular focus on international networks and global institutions. She received her Ph.D from MIT, her M.Arch from Harvard, and her B.S.E from Princeton, and has worked in design firms in Europe and America. Her recent writings address the aesthetics of post-conflict reconstruction ("International Style Heritage," Volume 20, 2009); transnational mobility in postwar architecture (“Global Agoraphobia,” Global Design History, 2011); the movement of monuments in 1960s Egypt (“The Design of the Nubian Desert,” Governing By Design, 2012); and Superstudio’s 1972 project “Salvages of Italian City Centers” (“Disaster as Experiment,” Log 22, 2011). She is at work on a book, Designs of Destruction, on the rise of a new political aesthetics in mid-20th-century international agencies that were charged with protecting monuments worldwide from the combined destructive effects of war, modernism and modernization.

Olin Humanities, Room 102  Michel Agier is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Centre for African Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He has written extensively on the conditions and sites of exile, including the books Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government (Polity Press, 2011) and Onthe Margins of the World: The Refugee Experience Today (Polity Press, 2008).

Reviewed in the January 2012 issue of Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, Stephanie Nawyn writes:

"Michel Agier’s Managing the Undesirables is one of several texts that addresses the complex and proliferating humanitarian infrastructure that is increasingly prevalent in regions of the world besieged by violence and displacement, but his work stands out as particularly important and innovative. Agier addresses some of the central questions facing our world today: belonging, personhood, and the ability of those most cut off from political power to speak for
themselves and shape their own lives, and he does so in a way that combines passion and keen observation. In doing so, his work should be of interest to a broad range of sociologists who study social inequality and the structures (even those built from the best of intentions) that perpetuate it."

Co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department at Bard

Suggested Reading: 
http://www.opendemocracy.net/michel-agier/undesirables-of-world-and-how-universality-changed-camp
http://www.peacestudiesjournal.org.uk/dl/Iss%2017%20Book%20Review%201.pdf
http://jrs.oxfordjournals.org/content/22/2/245.extract

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Screening of The Invisible War with conversation following with film’s producer, Amy Ziering. Weis Theater: 7PM, Monday October 15th
 About ‘The Invisible War’:From Oscar®- and Emmy®-nominated filmmaker Kirby Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated; Twist of Faith) comes The Invisible War, a groundbreaking investigative documentary about one of America's most shameful and best kept secrets: the epidemic of rape within the U.S. military. The film paints a startling picture of the extent of the problem - today, a female soldier in combat zones is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. The Department of Defense estimates there were a staggering 19,000 violent sex crimes in the military in 2010. The Invisible War exposes the epidemic, breaking open one of the most under-reported stories of our generation, to the nation and the world. Details about the film and trailer here: http://invisiblewarmovie.com/Amy Ziering is an Emmy nominated and award-winning Los Angeles producer and director. Her most recent film, OUTRAGE, was produced and distributed by Magnolia Pictures and had its television premiere on HBO. Ziering's previous release, THE MEMORY THIEF, which she produced, stars Mark Webber and Jerry Adler and is a thought provoking examination of the relationship between empathy, narcissism, and trauma. It was NYTIMES critics pick and won several festival awards.Ziering also co-directed and produced DERRIDA, a documentary about the world-renowned French philosopher and the philosophical movement known as deconstruction. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, won the Golden Gate award at the San Francisco Film Festival, and was released theatrically by Zeitgeist Films. Ziering also produced Richard Cohen's critically acclaimed TAYLOR'S CAMPAIGN, a documentary about Ron Taylor, a homeless person who ran for a seat on the Santa Monica City Council. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Ziering taught literature and film at Yale University and Bennington College.Event co-sponsored by The Difference and Media Project, Gender and Sexuality Studies, BRAVE, and Center for Civic Engagement.

Olin Humanities, Room 102  Professor Teachout is a professor of law at Fordham University. Her background is in laws governing political behavior domestically and abroad. She is a specialist on corruption and its constitutional history. She received her BA from Yale, her MA from Duke in political science and her JD, summa cum laude, from Duke Law School. Before working as a professor at Fordham, she worked at Duke University and University of Vermont. She was the national director of the Sunlight Foundation an organization working to make government more transparent through Internet resources. Professor Teachout also co-founded the Fair Trial Initiative, which provides resources to attorneys working on death penalty cases. She has worked as a political consultant to nonprofits, political campaigns and citizen journalism organizations. For Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, she directed Internet organizing. More recently she worked at America Coming Together, Current TV and was a fellow at the Berkman Center and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke Law School.

Reading: 
The Anti-Corruption Principle, 94 CORNELL L. REV. 341 (2009).

Zephyr Teachout speaks about Supreme Court case 'Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission' and cooperate personhood with Monica Youn on Bill Moyer’s Journal

Interview with Christopher Lydon

Recent Media:
"There's More Secret Money In Politics; Justice Kennedy Might Be Surprised"
"Certain N.Y. ZIP codes key to locking up political funds"

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Panel discussion with Moustafa Bayoumi (Brooklyn College) and Charles Anderson (Bard College)

Tuesday October 2nd, Weis, 5pm

In early September, the release of an amateurish video produced in the United States set off a torrent of protests in the Arab and Muslim worlds. The film, "Innocence of Muslims," castigates and mocks the prophet Muhammad and the Islamic faith. As demonstrations and attacks on U.S. embassies or installations spread to no less than 29 cities in 18 or more countries stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, intellectuals, politicians, and the media in the U.S. highlighted the absence of respect for free speech in the Muslim world and suggested that Islamic cultures and Arab societies are susceptible to intolerance and fanaticism.

Why did the wave of protests occur and spread so quickly? What do they tell us about U.S. relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds?  Join us as we explore alternative views of the crisis, investigate its relationship to Islam and Islamophobia, and assess the paradoxical role of the United States in generating anti-Americanism.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Civil Engagement and Middle Eastern Studies

Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  Event co-sponsored by J Street U

Breaking the Silence is an organization of veteran combatants who have served in the Israeli military since the beginning of the Second Intifada and who have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories. Breaking the Silence endeavors to stimulate public debate about the price paid for a reality in which young soldiers face a civilian population on a daily basis, and are engaged in the control of that population’s everyday life.

Avichai Sharon, Yehuda Shaul and Noam Chayut, a group of soldiers who had served in Hebron, founded the organization in March of 2004. The organization began with a photo exhibit accompanied by written testimonies from soldiers. Since it's establishment it has acquired a unique role in expressing the voices of soldiers to the Israeli media and public. The organization has collected more than 700 testimonies from soldiers who represent a wide range of Israeli society and cover nearly all units that operate in the territories. They additionally lead trips for the Israeli public to Hebron one of the most active and contested areas of settlements.

Check out some of the testimonies, videos or other resources on their website: http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/

Olin Humanities, Room 102  Sven Augustijnen will talk about his film Spectres, as well as the exhibition and book.

Spectres, HD video, color, 16:9, stereo sound, French spoken, English subtitled, 104 min, 2011

On Monday, September 24th, at 5pm CCS (https://www.bard.edu/ccs/) will be screening the work of Sven Augustijnen.

Patrice Lumumba played a decisive role in the liberation of the Congo from the colonial yoke. Shortly afterwards, he was betrayed by those close to him, overthrown and summarily executed in Katanga on the January 17, 1961. Even though we know about many of those who orchestrated his death, there remain many unanswered questions. Where exactly did this massacre take place? Who was present? On whose orders? Who is to blame? Sven Augustijnen takes these shady questions that haunt Belgium as much as the Congo as the starting point of his enquiries: using facts, their contemporary echoes and what has been brushed over as “historical fact”. His guide is an elusive character of noble birth – Jacques Brassinne de La Buissière, who was working in the Congo as a high-ranking civil servant at the time. Author of a biography of Lumumba, this man spent many years carrying out research into the history of this period. The film-maker goes with him to meet witnesses and protagonists. Between factual truth, the strength of conviction in the words of some and the possible duplicity of others, between Belgium and the Congo, the camera opens up a wide angle. It scrutinizes the surroundings, observes the gestures and glances, diving into the uncertain layers of truth, revealing the minutiae of the witness accounts. Paced with extracts from Jean-Sebastian Bach’s Passion, powerful elegiac breaths of fresh air that recall the Congolese martyr. Spectres invents new form of investigation which assumes the right to question not just History – both its living players and phantom witnesses – but also how it is recorded, restoring to all both their bodies and their terrible night to the point of opacity.
Nicolas Feodoroff

Spectres won the Public Libraries Prize and GNCR Prize and received a special mention from the jury of the International Competition at FID Marseille (FR). At Filmer à Tout Prix (BE) it won the Prize of the Flemish Community.

Sven Augustijnen (°1970 in Mechelen) studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the Hoger Sint-Lukas Instituut in Brussels, and at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. His work concentrates mainly on the tradition of portraiture and the porous boundaries between fiction and reality, using a hybrid of genres and techniques to disorienting effect. His films have been included in exhibitions and festivals in Athens, Basel, Fribourg, San Sebastián, Siegen, Rotterdam, Tunis, Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Vilnius, among others. In 2007 he participated in the documenta 12 magazine project, in collaboration with A Prior Magazine. In 2011 he received the Evens Prize for Visual Arts. He lives and works in Brussels.

The Human Rights Project and the Center for Curatorial Studies Program this year inaugurate a joint series of lectures and presentations which seek to explore the increasingly profound and manifest intersections between the discourses of contemporary arts and human rights, both affirmative and critical. Nowhere are the orthodoxies of the human rights movement, its wishful universalism and its proximity to power, challenged with such rigor, creativity, and severity than in the realm of culture. And when the most imaginative, forceful, and far-reaching claims for rights are made today, on the other hand, they are expressed in a language, visual and otherwise, that owes everything to the arts. In a sense, the arts (in the broadest sense) has become the leading edge of human rights work and research, the best currently available lab for redefining, critiquing, rebuilding, and reimagining what human rights might be.

To watch the film - http://vimeo.com/32632458
To read more about the publication - http://www.augusteorts.be/projects/project/58

Still and photographs from films and exhibitions available at:
http://www.janmot.com/sven_augustijnen/index.php

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Join us for a panel discussion with five Bard students whose time studying abroad in the Middle East and Cen- tral Asia inspired them to ask new questions, enabled them to conduct original research, and helped hone their academic goals and interests.


Download: panel flyer.pdf

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  Hertz: Afterword to “Pastoral in Palestine” (February, 2012) As for the nomad Arabs, camel and sheep herds, dwellers in black booths and curtains of hair cloth, we may see in them that desert life, which was followed by their ancestors in the Biblical tents of Kedar.  While the like phrases of their near-allied and not less ancient speech are sounding in our ears, and their                         customs, come down from antiquity, are continued before our eyes, we almost feel ourselves carried back to the days of the Hebrew Patriarchs.  Charles Montagu Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)             “Near-allied and not less ancient”: Doughty is talking of the kinship of Arabic and Hebrew speech, but the phrase could well apply to the two peoples contending for land and water in this narrow strip of Asia Minor between a river and a sea.  And Doughty reminds us that, unlike many such contentions, this one is characterized by the likeness of the contesting parties.  Suppose that a Jewish homeland had indeed been established in East Africa—a proposal brought to the Zionist conference at Basel in 1903 by the British government—or in Madagascar, an early solution to the “Jewish Problem” considered by Hitler in 1938.  European Jews would then certainly have found themselves, as colonists, in conflict with the indigenous peoples, whom they might well have stigmatized as  “irrational” and “tribal,” but they would not have had to deal with the embarrassing possibility of recognizing themselves in their antagonists, prompting the “paradoxes and contradictions” that Eyal Weizman described in his discussion of vernacular architecture, or the puzzle of who is historically entitled to worship at the Cave of the Patriarchs.             That is what gives the struggle in Palestine its particular “pastoral” inflection.  It is true that a quite calculated (“rational”) appropriation of Palestinian land and water has been successfully conducted over the years and under various administrations by the State of Israel.  This has been and continues to be, as the phrase goes, a land-grab, but the motivations behind it are not exhausted by calling it that.   On both sides of the frontier, a spectrum of imaginary investments, ranging from theological zeal down through the various intensities of nationalist sentiment, to the more ordinary complacencies of people who just want to live their lives untroubled, has shaped the course of this conflict in ways that have made it seem intractable.  Certainly no one I spoke with in either Israel or Palestine expressed much hope for a solution.  It is The Situation.  One lives with it.  I’ve tried to set down, in these pages, what “living with it” looked like, last winter and spring.    

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  Human Rights Project Presents:

"Further Projects Decolonizing Architecture," a talk by Alessandro Petti

ALESSANDRO PETTI
Alessandro Petti is an Architect and Researcher in Urbanism, chair of the newly established Urban Studies and Spatial Practices program at Al-Quds/Bard College Palestine (www.alqudsbard.org ) and director of Campus in Camps, an experimental educational program centered in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem (www.campusincamps.ps). Petti is founding member and director of DAAR, an architectural office and an artistic residency program that combines conceptual speculations and architectural interventions. DAAR was awarded the Price Claus Prize for Architecture, received the Art initiative Grant, shortlisted for the Chrnikov Prize and showed in various museums and biennales around the world.
Petti has written on the emerging spatial order dictated by the paradigm of security and control (Asymmetries: the road network in Israel/Palestine, in “State of exception and Resistance in the Arab World”, Arab Unity Studies 2010; Dubai Offshore Urbanism in Heterotopia and the City, Routledge 2008; Archipelagos and enclaves, Bruno Mondadori, Milan 2007) and published several articles centered around DAAR artistic practice (Return to Nature in “Ecological Urbanism”, Lars Muller Publishers, May 2010; Decolonizing Palestine, Abitare 504, July 2010; Future Archaeology, Afterall, February 2009,).
He co-curated different research projects on the contemporary urban condition such as Borderdevices (2002-2007), Uncertain States of Europe (2001-2003) with multiplicity and Stateless Nation with Sandi Hilal (2002-2007).
His projects have been published in national and international newspapers and magazines: the New York Times, Il Manifesto, Al Ayyam, Al- Quds, Art Forum and Archis. He has been invited to lectures in several institutions and universities among others: Tate modern London, Columbia University, University of Exeter, American University of Beirut, University of London, Global Art Forum Dubai, Prefix Gallery Toronto, Festival della Filosofia di Roma, Bard College University New York, Henry Moore Institute, Festival Architettura Parma.

For more information on Decolonizing Architecture can be found at the following website: http://www.decolonizing.ps/site/

  Olin Hall 

Avery Art Center  Two Cabins (2011, 30:00 min.)Screening and artist talk by James BenningTime: 7:00 pmLocation: Avery – Integrated Arts Room (next door to the main theater)
This whole project will keep evolving as I get a better handle on what it says politically. I want to understand solitude, and relating to nature, as both of these men wrote about it. -James Benning as told to Brian SholisBetween 2007 and 2008, independent film-maker James Benning built replicas of two cabins in a remote part of the High Sierras: Henry David Thoreau’s from Walden Pond and Theodore J. Kaczynski’s (aka the ‘Unabomber’) one-room plywood construction in rural Montana from which he conducted his 16-year pipe-bombing campaign. Two Cabins is an installation for cinema in which the artist simply presents two scenes depicting the visual traces of these particular and seemingly divergent American figures. Without narrative or dialogue to guide particular meaning, the viewer is invited to inhabit these environments and consider her or his relationship to them as replicas that refer to specific epochs of American history as well as a recurring structure associated with philosophical inquiry. This presentation is part of: Damnatio Memoriae: Danh Vo with Julie Ault and James Benning, a project curated by Amy Zion as partial fulfillment of the Masters of Arts Degree in Curatorial Studies at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.Damnatio Memoriae is a tradition that dates back to the Roman Republic, based on older biblical practices, in which unfavorable rulers were systematically erased from historical record and public discourse. From Latin, the phrase literally means “condemnation of memory.” This project does not seek to valorize or explore iconoclasm per se, or Futurist ideas of destroying the past, but rather how national icons and historical events become resignified, specifically through strategies of doubling and deconstruction (versus destruction). While damnatio memoriae, as a practice, sought to completely erase unfavorable tryrants from historical record in the vein of Stalin’s Socialist Encyclopedia, to condemn memory does not necessarily call for destruction. Rather, condemnation of the past is a crucial element of historical revisionism. That is, for an idea or monument to take on a new meaning, its past function must be condemned or actively forgotten—at least in part.  

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  Richard Slotkin is Olin Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies, Wesleyan University, and author of an award-winning trilogy on the myth of the frontier in America.

  Hegeman 308  A journey to the warzone of Southern Sudan during the 1983-2005 civil war. Documentary by John Ryle and Bapiny Tim Chol.

  Hegemon 308  Moolaadé (Protection) (2004)

A woman sheltering a group of girls from undergoing circumcision starts a conflict that tears her village apart. Feature by Senegalese novelist and filmmaker Sembene Ousmane.

A Day I Will Never Forget (2002)

Documentary on Female Genital Cutting in Kenya

Razor's Edge: The Conteroversy of Female Genital Mutilation (2008)

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  NEW CONFLICTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOUTH SUDANJehanne Henry, Senior Researcher at Human Rights Watch, will be speaking at the Human Rights Program Tuesday seminar on 6 March at 7 PM in Olin 102 about the current situation in the two Sudans – where continuing war in Darfur and the north-south border zone and internal conflict in the new country of South Sudan have been accompanied by new constraints on rights in both countries.
She will also be speaking about her career as a human rights researcher and advocate in John Ryle's class Anth/HR 233 on Wednesday 7 March at 10.10 AM in Olin 202. Other students are welcome to attend this class (please write to [email protected]).
Jehanne Henry was born in Egypt to academic parents and lived in a succession of academic towns in Europe, the Middle East and the United States, before studying philosophy at Columbia University. At law school in Austin, Texas, she helped defend death row inmates and asylum seekers. She subsequently spent six months in The Hague at the Office of the Prosecutor for the War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She has worked with a number of international organizations on human rights, human rights training and rule of law projects – in Mexico, Ecuador, Kosovo, Cambodia, Morocco, Botswana, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, and South Sudan.
Below is her HRW bio, followed by a recent HRW press release on Sudan, and links to HRW reports on Sudan written by Jehanne over the past four years. 

Jehanne HenrySenior Researcher, Africa Division

Jehanne Henry has been Human Rights Watch's Sudan researcher since November 2007. Prior to joining the organization, she was a human rights officer with the United Nations Mission in Sudan based in North Darfur. In addition to her experience in Darfur, Henry has worked on human rights and rule of law issues with USAID in Cambodia, as a legal adviser with the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, and as a legal aid project manager with the American Refugee Committee in Kosovo. She has also worked with the office of the prosecutor in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, and clerked for a US federal judge in New York. She holds a law degree from the University of Texas, a bachelor's from Columbia University in New York, and is admitted to practice law in New York state. She is fluent in French and has working knowledge of Arabic and Spanish.

Articles:  In Sudan, peace remains elusive Los Angeles Times OCTOBER 25, 2011 As Sudan Referendum Nears, Northerners Brace for Backlash JANUARY 08, 2011 Free Campaigning Needed in Sudan Referendum GlobalPost OCTOBER 01, 2010


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRaxusOX6wk&feature=player_embedded

  Preston  The background to genocide in Darfur and the plight of the Darfuri people presented by George Clooney (93 minutes).

See the following link for more information:

www.sandandsorrrow.org

Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  The Center for Curatorial Studies’ Graduate Program in collaboration with the Bard College Art History and Human Rights Programs invite you to a lecture by Kazys Varnelis, Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The lecture is presented as part of the CCS Bard class, Intellectual Property in an Open Source Culture.

  Reem-Kayden Center  A one day conference on new technologies and strategies in critical geography and GIS. Sponsored by the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, the Human Rights Program, and the Science, Technology and Society Program.

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  "Chechnya 2007: Stress, Normalization, and Glimmers of Hope," a discussion on the current situation in Chechnya by Czech human rights activist Jana Hrdilkova.

  Olin Hall  Postponed until September 2008. Date, location, and details to be announced.

  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. – On Sunday, April 15, at 7 p.m., the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) will be featured on the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes. The show will be screened at 7 p.m. Sunday in Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

  To be announced  "Wielding the Double Edged Sword—Practicum." First of a two-weekend conference presented jointly by the Human Rights Project and the Science, Technology, and Society Program. This weekend is student centered and consists of a series of workshops that teach and share technical skills that aid in deploying new technologies for social change.

  Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater  Bard College to Host Free Performance and Film Screening by Internationally Acclaimed Ugandan-American Artist Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine on March 15 and 16

On March 16, at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Ntare Will Perform Biro, His Solo Multimedia Performance Piece
Chronicling The Life of an HIV Positive African’s Epic Journey




Press Release: View

  Chapel of the Holy Innocents  "In Art We Trust (Since We Can't Explain It): The Gospel According to Alex." Russian conceptual artist Alex Melamid, known for his irony and irreverence, will bring his latest project "Art Ministry" to Bard.

  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Canticle of Stones (Michael Khalefi, 1989). Organized by students, Palestine Awarness Week features a series of free events focused on raising awareness about Palestinian life, history, and culture.

  Robbins Lounge  Two International Solidarity Movement activists will show and discuss a traveling exhibition created by and about residents of Balata refugee camp in Nablus.Organized by students, Palestine Awarness Week features a series of free events focused on raising awareness about Palestinian life, history, and culture.

  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Bard professor and author Joel Kovel will show a short film about the history of the conflict followed by a brief lecture and Question-and-answer period. Organized by students, Palestine Awarness Week features a series of free events focused on raising awareness about Palestinian life, history, and culture.

  Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  Reservations. Featuring a scale model of the wall currently under construction in the West Bank, the exhibition also includes photos and slides of the actual wall and fence; an illustrated story board; and projected video. A gray sheet will partition the room into two sides. Organized by students, Palestine Awarness Week features a series of free events focused on raising awareness about Palestinian life, history, and culture. The exhibition opening will be at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday; on Thursday and Friday the exhibition will be open from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.

  Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  "The Persistence of the Palestine Question." Lecture by Columbia professor Joseph Massad. Organized by students, Palestine Awarness Week features a series of free events focused on raising awareness about Palestinian life, history, and culture.

  New York City  A two-day conference focusing on the "global" protests of February 15, 2003, and the movement against the war in Iraq. Location and time to be announced. Visit our website for complete details or to register for the conference.



Press Release: View

  Olin Hall  The Ghanaian Osagyefo Theatre Company, in residence at Bard College from March 17–20, will offer two performances. On Friday, March 19, the company will perform "Dances of Life," a
series of contemporary and traditional African dances; and on Saturday, March 20, they will present the play Verdict of the Cobra, written by Mohammed Ben Abdallah. Both programs are free to the Bard and Vassar communities; an $8 donation is requested from the general public.

  Bard College Campus  "From the National to the Global and Back? The Role of the United Nations as a Supranational Institution." Second Annual Bard/Humboldt Student Symposium.

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  "'It Is as It Was'; What's at Stake in Mel Gibson's Passion." James Shapiro, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, will speak about the controversy surrounding Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ.

  Olin Language Center  A workshop in preparation for the “One Year Later” conference on March 27 and 28 in New York City. The March conference will present critical discussion of the "global" protests of February 15, 2003 and the movement against the war in Iraq. Visit our website for complete details or to register for the paper workshop.

  Olin Hall  “From Kant to Kosovo: Does Enlightenment Still Work?” Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project, Bard College. Presented by the First-Year Seminar.

  Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  On September 10, 2002 Bard College will present two panels to mark the events of September 11, 2001. Panel One: "The War on Terrorism" (4:30-6:00 p.m.), featuring: Thomas Keenan (moderator), Director, Bard Human Rights Project; Mark Lytle, Professor of History, Bard College; and James Miller, Deputy Director, Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program. Panel Two: "What's Next- War or Peace?" (7:30-9:00 p.m.), featuring: Jonathan Becker (moderator), Dean of International Studies; Caleb Carr, Author, "The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians"; Barbara Crossette, contributing writer, "The New York Times"; James Chace, Paul W. Williams Professor of Government, Bard College; and Sanjib Baruah, Professor of Politics, Bard College.

The panels will be on September 10, 2002 in the Multipurpose Room of the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College. The panels are free and no reservations are required.

Sponsored by: Dean of International Studies, Dean of the College, the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, the Human Rights Project and the Bard-St. Stephen's Alumni/ae Association.

  Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  "The World Since September 11th,"
Panel 1, "The War on Terrorism at Home," 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. Panelists include Mark Lytle, professor of history at Bard, and James Miller, deputy director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program. The panel will be moderated by Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project at Bard.
Panel 2, "What's Next-War or Peace?," 7:30 to 9:00 p.m. Panelists include Sanjib Baruah, professor of political studies at Bard; Caleb Carr, author of The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians; Barbara Crossette, contributing writer to the New York Times; and James Chace, , Paul W. Williams Professor of Government and Public Law and Administration at Bard and director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program. The panel will be moderated by Jonathan Becker, dean of International Studies at Bard College.

  Campus Center, Red Room 203  Renee Bergan will give an introductory lecture on Middle Eastern music. She will discuss its scale system and introduce percussive rhythms, song, and dance. The lecture will include video and audio examples, culminating with a brief dance by Bergan.

  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Renee Bergan will discuss her recent trip to Afghanistan and the current conditions there, with an emphasis on how they affect women. She will show an excerpt from her upcoming documentary, Sadaie Zan: Women's Voices from Afghanistan. Bergan spent one week in Afghanistan and one week in Pakistan visiting various United Nations and NGO (nongovernmental organization) aid groups. She visited various women's groups, particularly the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, as well as refugee camps, schools, and victims of U.S. bombings.

  Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  A panel discussion on the topic of "Islam, the Media, and Human Rights" will take place at Bard College. Panelists include Jonathan Brockopp, assistant professor of religion; Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project and visiting associate professor of comparative literature at Bard; and Salahuddin Muhammad, the Muslim chaplain at Bard. The program, cosponsored by the Office of the Dean of the College and the Muslim Students Organization, will be held in the multipurpose room of the Bertelsmann Campus Center on the Bard College Campus and is free and open to the public. 7:00 p.m.