Documentary filmmaker and anthropology major Joelle Powe from Jamaica talks about how abundant opportunities at Bard have supported her academic, cultural, and artistic vision.
Joelle Powe
Support from Bard to jumpstart her cultural and artistic vision has led Joelle Powe to places she never imagined possible. The anthropology major from Jamaica directed a documentary on Jamaican dancehall that has toured the United States, Jamaica, and elsewhere, creating a buzz around the budding filmmaker who calls herself a “visual anthropologist.”
Out There Without Fear details the Jamaican popular dance form as a social, political, and cultural phenomenon, with lively depictions of the music and moves of the genre that has ignited passion as far away as Russia and Japan. The subjects interviewed also reflect on the impact of classism and sexism on dancehall in the Caribbean island nation.
“Abundant opportunities at Bard have supported my academic interest in Jamaica,” Powe says. A Community Action Award from Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement, support from the Trustee Leader Scholar program, and the Naomi Bellinson Feldman ’53 Internship Award (for student internships in music or the social sciences—in this case, both) gave her partial funding for the film, which she directed with producer Adtelligent, a social media company in Jamaica.
Powe says her time at Bard has been “a truly amazing journey,” one that began when she was on a global voyage during Semester at Sea, a four-month study abroad program for United World College students on a ship that takes them to four continents. She was aboard when she learned she had been accepted to the College.
She was an anthropology major because she is “very excited about local opportunities for anthropological study in Jamaica, a wellspring of culture.” Her Senior Project was a study of a Jamaican family’s participation in the national response to COVID-19, for which she received grants from the Anthropology Program and the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard. Continuing interest in Out There Without Fear, the ideas for which were published in the Jamaica Journal in 2021, has Powe curating discussions on dancehall with Jamaican academics and dancers through universities and cultural centers around the world. She is working on her second documentary, Beverley Manley Uncensored, which follows the ex-wife of former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley and explores her reflections on the 1970s in Jamaica, a significant decade in Jamaican political history. The first episode of the documentary series premiered on Adtelligent TV in July 2022.
Powe notes the value of the Language and Thinking Program in setting her up to appreciate wrestling with big ideas. “L&T teaches you to read and write. I loved being exposed to great thinkers from around the world in the readings. My mind has been stretched by exposure in my classes across the disciplines—from Cuban documentaries, constitutional laws in Myanmar, Caribbean poetry, and Iranian art, to Spanish short stories. As an anthropology major, I need cultural literacy across diverse mediums.” Also, she says, “I appreciate that I was exposed to international cinema through screenings here. I didn’t know I would get that.”
In addition to being a peer counselor—which taught her about “being responsible for people my age and for their ideas about what to expect from their community”—she also decided to join the swim team. “I was stretched beyond my imagination of what was possible, and learned about patience and determination, showing up for practice, getting better over time. The discipline I learned in swimming enhanced my time management skills and focus.”
Bard has enriched Powe’s life “in three very significant ways.” The support she received to pursue academic interests outside the College—through independent study, grants, and student-led initiatives, supported by Bard’s energetic professors—“sped up where I want to be in my career.” She was exposed to “the spirit of internationalism in the College, the community, and academia as a whole,” which led to lifelong friendships; and she found “the freedom to try new things.” Oh, and another thing: “being allowed to make mistakes and try again.”
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, associate professor of anthropology, was interviewed by Melanie Ford Lemus for American Ethnologist. Discussing concepts outlined in her book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, Stamatopoulou-Robbins explained the usage of “siege” as a conceptual framework. “The word siege suggests overlap with occupation, partly conceptually but also in showing how there are overlapping, not always perfectly, challenges to Palestinian life that are also siege-like and made possible by occupation but that cannot be reduced to it,” Stamatopoulou-Robbins says.
Professor Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins Spoke with American Ethnologist about Her Book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, associate professor of anthropology, was interviewed by Melanie Ford Lemus for American Ethnologist on “the spatial politics and practices of occupation, infrastructure as performative assemblages, shared environments, and their public constitutions.” Discussing concepts outlined in her book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, Stamatopoulou-Robbins explained the usage of “siege” as a conceptual framework. “The word siege suggests overlap with occupation, partly conceptually but also in showing how there are overlapping, not always perfectly, challenges to Palestinian life that are also siege-like and made possible by occupation but that cannot be reduced to it,” Stamatopoulou-Robbins says. “I was interested in the way that, through infrastructure, [engineers] were on the one hand aiming to build the future, to make the future now, by building the state that is not yet here,” she continues, “and on the other hand deferring the future that they might want.”
Five Bard College students have won Fulbright Awards for individually designed research projects, graduate study, and English teaching assistantships. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Bard College is a Fulbright top producing institution.
Five Bard College Students Win Fulbright Awards
Five Bard College students have won Fulbright Awards for individually designed research projects, graduate study, and English teaching assistantships. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Bard College is a Fulbright top producing institution.
Mercer Greenwald ’22, a German Studies major from Williamstown, MA, has won a Fulbright Research and Teaching Assistantship Award in Austria for the 2022–23 academic year. As a Combined Research and Teaching Fulbright Scholar, Greenwald will spend the year immersed in the cultural life of the city of Vienna, where she will teach English and write an independent research project on the topic of “concomitant being” in the work of Austrian writer and thinker Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920–1977). Greenwald will begin doctoral study in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in the fall of 2023.
Maya Frieden ’22 (they/them), an art history and visual culture major, has won a Fulbright Study/Research Award to support graduate study in the Netherlands for the 2022–23 academic year. Frieden will spend the year in the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Master’s program, Art & Culture: Design Cultures. “I have often questioned the sustainability of the current pace at which the design industry is progressing. Embedded within every designed element--from object design to urban design--are intentions that can be sensed, even subtly, by those encountering them, and they frequently symbolize and materialize exclusionary or prohibitive ideologies,” says Frieden. “The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Master’s program, Art & Culture: Design Cultures, understands the significance of historical, sociological and environmental research within the field of design, training students with the skills to interpret, discuss and interact with the discipline, so that we will be equipped to contribute in quickening the pace. By studying in this Master’s program, I will develop additional strategies for noticing the presence or absence of sensitivity within design, while also improving my capabilities for communicating such analyses, and working with those in positions that influence how our world is designed.”
Paola Luchsinger ’20, a Spanish major from Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, has won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Greece for the 2022–23 academic year. She will spend the year in Athens teaching English elementary through secondary students at Athens College–Hellenic American Educational Foundation. “As an English Teaching Assistant in Greece, I hope to gain an idea of Greek perceptions of American culture while also representing a positive image of the United States. I have chosen Greece as my destination because a year in Greece will give me the opportunity to become fluent in Greek through immersion and improve my knowledge of modern Greek society,” says Luchsinger.
Lance Sum ’21 (BHSEC Manhattan ’19), an anthropology major from Brooklyn, NY, won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Taiwan for the 2022–23 academic year. He intended to teach English and participate in intensive outdoor adventures, explore large influential cultural institutions in the major cities of Taiwan, host peer review writing and poetry sessions, and educate his Taiwanese community members about his experience in growing up in New York City. “I think Taiwan could offer me a more magnified perspective of a community who has preserved their own culture through much political and colonial pressure, an experience that would help me develop my cultural understanding for others,” says Sum.
Jordan Donohue ’22, a historical studies major, won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Brazil for the 2022–23 academic year. She will spend in the year teaching English and deepening her knowledge around music and farming. Continuing her past work with Indigenous groups internationally, she plans to engage with and learn from the Indigenous populations of Brazil. Additionally, Jordan has studied Portuguese for seven years and will utilize her time as a Fulbright scholar to advance her fluency and prepare for further academic research on the language and culture of Brazil.
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. Fulbright creates connections in a complex and changing world. In partnership with more than 140 countries worldwide, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers unparalleled opportunities in all academic disciplines to passionate and accomplished graduating college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals from all backgrounds. Program participants pursue graduate study, conduct research, or teach English abroad. us.fulbrightonline.org.
Wassim Ghantous Online Event5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Over the last two decades, the Israeli regime of colonization and control in Palestine has multiplied significantly. In its expansion, public, hybrid, and civilian actors and institutions come to form an overall settler colonial assemblage. This talk aims to shed light on how such a diffuse regime of colonization operates today in rural areas of the West Bank by attending to Palestinians’ everyday encounters with the Israeli army, settler vigilante groups and organizations, and privatized security bodies and agents. In particular, the talk will highlight the modes of violence produced by the colonial assemblage, the ways in which they affect Palestinians’ everyday life, as well as Palestinians’ manoeuvring efforts to evade them as means to remain steadfast in their homeland.
Wassim Ghantous is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University, New York. His academic research cuts across the fields of political geography and international relations, and the sub-fields of critical security studies, surveillance studies, settler colonial studies, and Palestine studies. Previous to his academic career, he worked in several Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, most notably at the BADIL Resource Center and B’Tselem.
This lecture will be delivered virtually via Zoom. Please join via the link below.