Tuesday, November 28, 2023
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 |
Wednesday, November 15, 2023 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. |
Wednesday, November 8, 2023
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. |
Thursday, November 2, 2023 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). |
Thursday, October 26, 2023 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. |
Tuesday, October 24, 2023
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. |
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
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. |
Tuesday, April 4, 2023 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 |
Thursday, March 16, 2023 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 |
Wednesday, February 22, 2023 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. |
Thursday, November 17, 2022
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. |
Monday, November 14, 2022 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. |
Tuesday, October 4, 2022 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. |
Tuesday, September 13, 2022 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. |
Friday, May 6, 2022 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. Learn More Register Now |
Thursday, February 24, 2022
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. |
Wednesday, November 10, 2021 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. |
Monday, October 18, 2021 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. |
Tuesday, October 5, 2021 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 |
Tuesday, September 14, 2021 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. |
Friday, May 7, 2021 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 |
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
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 |
Thursday, April 22, 2021 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 |
Monday, March 22, 2021 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 One tap mobile +16465588656,,81574150462# US (New York) +13017158592,,81574150462# US (Washington DC) 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. |
Friday, March 12, 2021 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. |
Wednesday, March 10, 2021 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]. |
Friday, December 4, 2020 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. |
Tuesday, November 17, 2020 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 |
Monday, November 9, 2020 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. |
Friday, October 16, 2020 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. |
Monday, March 30, 2020
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. |
Wednesday, December 11, 2019 – Friday, December 20, 2019 Campus Center, Lobby Opening on Wednesday, December 11, from 6pm to 7pm. |
Monday, December 9, 2019 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. |
Monday, December 9, 2019 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! |
Thursday, November 14, 2019 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.” |
Monday, November 11, 2019
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. |
Monday, November 11, 2019 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. |
Thursday, November 7, 2019
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). |
Thursday, October 31, 2019 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. |
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
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. |
Saturday, October 19, 2019 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. |
Friday, October 18, 2019 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). |
Thursday, October 10, 2019 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." |
Monday, September 16, 2019 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. |
Tuesday, May 7, 2019
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. |
Thursday, April 18, 2019 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. |
Thursday, March 14, 2019 Campus Center, Multipurpose Room 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
Sunday, March 10, 2019 – Wednesday, April 10, 2019 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 |
Monday, March 4, 2019 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. |
Thursday, February 21, 2019
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. |
Tuesday, February 12, 2019 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. |
Friday, February 1, 2019 – Friday, March 1, 2019 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. |
Thursday, December 6, 2018 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. |
Monday, October 29, 2018
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. |
Thursday, October 25, 2018
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. |
Thursday, October 25, 2018
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. |
Monday, October 15, 2018 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. |
Monday, October 1, 2018 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. |
Monday, September 17, 2018 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. |
Friday, March 2, 2018
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]. |
Monday, December 4, 2017 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. |
Thursday, November 9, 2017 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. |
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
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. |
Tuesday, November 7, 2017 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. |
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
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. |
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
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. |
Wednesday, May 17, 2017 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. |
Monday, April 17, 2017 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 |
Monday, April 3, 2017 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 |
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
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 |
Wednesday, March 1, 2017 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 |
Thursday, November 3, 2016 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. |
Tuesday, November 1, 2016 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. |
Thursday, October 20, 2016
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. |
Thursday, October 6, 2016 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. |
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
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. |
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
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. |
Friday, April 8, 2016 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** |
Thursday, April 7, 2016
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** |
Tuesday, April 5, 2016
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. |
Thursday, March 31, 2016 – Saturday, April 2, 2016
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 |
Tuesday, February 16, 2016 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. |
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
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 |
Monday, November 16, 2015
Glenna Gordon
Olin Humanities, Room 102 4:45 pm EST/GMT-5 |
Wednesday, October 28, 2015 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 |
Tuesday, September 29, 2015 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. |
Tuesday, September 15, 2015 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. |
Tuesday, September 8, 2015 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. |
Monday, April 20, 2015 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) |
Friday, April 3, 2015
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.
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Monday, March 23, 2015
Marissa Moorman, Associate Professor
Indiana University-Bloomington Olin Humanities, Room 102 |
Tuesday, February 10, 2015 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. |
Tuesday, February 3, 2015 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. |
Tuesday, December 9, 2014 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. |
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
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. |
Monday, November 17, 2014
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. |
Monday, November 17, 2014 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 |
Monday, November 10, 2014 Bard Hall |
Monday, October 27, 2014 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* |
Monday, October 6, 2014 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. |
Saturday, September 27, 2014
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. |
Wednesday, September 24, 2014 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. |
Tuesday, September 23, 2014 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 |
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 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. |
Tuesday, March 11, 2014 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! |
Thursday, March 6, 2014
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 |
Thursday, February 27, 2014 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. |
Sunday, February 16, 2014 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 |
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
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. |
Thursday, November 14, 2013
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. |
Monday, November 4, 2013 Amherst College Assistant Professor of Law, Jourisprudence, and Social Thought |
Thursday, September 19, 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 |
Monday, April 29, 2013
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. |
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 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. |
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
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. |
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
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. |
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
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. |
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
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.
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Saturday, February 23, 2013
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. |
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
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. |
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
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. |
Friday, February 8, 2013
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. |
Thursday, February 7, 2013
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. |
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 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. |
Tuesday, December 4, 2012 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. |
Wednesday, November 14, 2012 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 |
Monday, November 5, 2012 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/ |
Tuesday, October 30, 2012 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. |
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 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 |
Monday, October 15, 2012 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. |
Tuesday, October 2, 2012 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" |
Tuesday, October 2, 2012 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 |
Monday, October 1, 2012 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/ |
Tuesday, September 25, 2012 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 |
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
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 |
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
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.
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Tuesday, April 17, 2012
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/ |
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Olin Hall
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Tuesday, April 10, 2012 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. |
Thursday, March 22, 2012
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.
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Monday, March 19, 2012
Hegeman 308 A journey to the warzone of Southern Sudan during the 1983-2005 civil war. Documentary by John Ryle and Bapiny Tim Chol.
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Monday, March 12, 2012
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) |
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
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 |
Monday, March 5, 2012
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 |
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 |
Saturday, May 10, 2008
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.
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008
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.
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Saturday, March 15, 2008
Olin Hall Postponed until September 2008. Date, location, and details to be announced.
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Sunday, April 15, 2007
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.
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Friday, April 14, 2006
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.
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Thursday, March 16, 2006
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 |
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
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.
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Saturday, April 17, 2004
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.
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Thursday, April 15, 2004
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.
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Wednesday, April 14, 2004
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.
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Wednesday, April 14, 2004
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.
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Monday, April 12, 2004
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.
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Saturday, March 27, 2004
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 |
Friday, March 19, 2004
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. |
Friday, March 12, 2004
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.
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Thursday, March 4, 2004
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.
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Sunday, February 15, 2004
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.
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Monday, September 8, 2003
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.
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Tuesday, September 10, 2002
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. |
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
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. |
Tuesday, May 14, 2002
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.
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Monday, May 13, 2002
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.
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Wednesday, September 19, 2001
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.
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Bard Early College to Offer Virtual Courses for Florida High School Students
Starting this month, Bard Early College will offer three tuition-free virtual college courses to high school students in Florida. Participating students who complete the program will receive three transferable college credits from Bard for each course, as well as a Bard College transcript. “These virtual courses, offered exclusively to students in Florida, cover educational topics that are under threat or actively blocked in the state, and Bard Early College aims to make these subjects available to the students who wish to study them,” said Dumaine Williams ’03, vice president for Early College at Bard.
Investigative Journalist and Author Suki Kim Named 2023–24 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and Bard College’s Human Rights Project named author Suki Kim as the 2023–24 recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Established in 2014, the fellowship supports an annual faculty position that brings a prominent scholar, activist, or practicing artist to teach and conduct research within the CCS Bard graduate program and the undergraduate Human Rights Program.Angéla Kóczé Receives 2023 Beth Rickey Award from the Bard Center for the Study of Hate
The Bard Center for the Study of Hate is proud to announce that Angéla Kóczé, assistant professor of Romani Studies, chair of Romani Studies Program, and academic director of the Roma Graduate Preparation Program at Central European University, Budapest, is the winner of the 2023 Beth Rickey Award. The award is given to a member of the Bard/OSUN Network community who has “taken sustained and effective action against hate [and whose] achievements can either be in scholarship, adding to our understanding of how hatred works, or actions, such as political organizing or media work.”Human Rights Events
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