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Tuesday, November 19, 2024 Hegeman 204 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 In Russian, the word for “world” (mir) has a double valence – it also means “peace.” Amid the devastation unleashed by the collapse of the USSR, a revanchist fantasy of a boundless “Russian world” (Russkiy mir) has gradually, but steadily, infiltrated the political and ideological mainstream. Russkiy mir denotes something like pax russica – an earthly realm which has been (or is yet to be) pacified by Russia by means of war. Today, this fantasy is steadily turning into material reality. This talk interrogates the forms and structures of Russkyi mir-in-the-making through the lens of “reconstruction” projects carried out by Russian (state and private) actors in places that the armies of the Russian Federation have laid to waste. Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and cities. He is Associate Professor of Critical Area Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He is the author of Only to Hell: Architecture, Nature and Violence in Re-colonial Russia (MIT Press 2026, forthcoming); A Form of Friendship: The Museum on the Square (Museum of Modern Art Warsaw/Chicago UP, 2024); and The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed (Indiana UP, 2019). |
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Thursday, November 14, 2024 Ottaway Film Center 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Galina Yarmanova will present the short film "Щасливі роки" ("The Wonderful Years," 9 min.) alongside their research project on sexuality in late Soviet Ukraine. The film, created in collaboration with film director Svitlana Shymko, explores how the generation of their mothers coped with the mundane societal pressures to get married and raise children. "The Wonderful Years" draws on data from several research projects on sexuality and uses official Soviet reels alongside home videos from the Lviv Center for Urban History collection. After the screening, Yarmanova and Masha Shpolberg invite you to a discussion about film as a tool for activism and research, and how the feminist decolonial lens brings challenges to archival work. Galina Yarmanova is a Fellow at Bard College Berlin. They teach queer theory in Kyiv and Berlin and work with the community-driven project on activist history with the queer feminist collective samozvanky. |
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Saturday, September 21, 2024 The Pavilion at Bard Montgomery Place Campus 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 In my talk, I will highlight how foregrounding the names and stories of those enslaved by the Livingston Family uncovered a largely untapped social landscape that is, with every passing day, changing for the better. The importance of such stories remains relevant in a region dominated by the tales and tangible legacies of wealthy landholding families. I will explore the techniques used to pursue their lives as well as how it remains a work in progress to highlight the lives of the still largely uncredited builders, planters, sowers, millworkers, shepherds, and others who constructed and maintained the built environment attributed to wealthy elites in the Hudson Valley. Dr. Nicole S. Maskiell is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College, and the author of Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry (2022). She has appeared on CSPAN, the podcast Ben Franklin’s World, and in a Historic Hudson Valley documentary film about the life and legacy of Margaret Hardenbroeck Philipse, an early female trader and enslaver. She is series editor for the upcoming book series Black New England from the University of Massachusetts Press, which highlights innovative research on the history of African-descended people in New England from the colonial period through the present day. Schedule of Events 2:00 pm "The Shifting Tides of New York Foodways in the early 19 th century" Lavada Nahon, Culinary Historian 3:00 pm "Interlude" Teatime 3:30 pm "Brought up at Ancram:" Tracing Diverse Stories in Livingston Valley" Nicole S. Maskiell, Dartmouth College 4:45 pm Guided Walk on the Grounds |
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Saturday, September 21, 2024 The Pavilion at Bard Montgomery Place Campus 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Layfette’s return visit in 1824 came at a time when dining in New York’s elite households was slowly shifting towards a more French approach to what was served. These changes impacted not just what was on the tables, but the equipment found in their kitchens, and the skills required of their cooks. Beginning with what was there before the Rev War, this overview of changing foodways will explore the who, what and when of things, and end with looking at what could have comprised the “rich and sumptuous” ball supper held in Layfette’s honor at Clermont. |
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Thursday, May 9, 2024 Weis Cinema 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Join us for the semester's final film in the South Asia Film Series! Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge is a sweeping romantic drama, the quintessential Bollywood love story. It follows Raj and Simran, whose love blossoms on a European vacation despite the constraints imposed by their families. Known for its memorable music and iconic scenes, the film has not only achieved critical and commercial success, but has become a cultural phenomenon, drawing viewers decades after its initial release in 1995. Run time 189 minutes Discussant: Professor Sucharita Kanjilal |
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Thursday, April 11, 2024 Olin 205 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Chairman Amin, a leader in a water-locked village in rural Bangladesh, enforces a ban on all images, condemning even imagination as sinful. As the clash between tradition and modernity intensifies, it impacts the lives of villagers, entwining them in a semi-triangle love story involving Chairman Amin's son, a village girl, and their connected employee.Discussant: Prof. Fahmidul Haq Please note this film location is different from the past films in this series. It will take place in Olin 205, not Weis Cinema. |
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Thursday, March 28, 2024 Weis Cinema 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Set in the lush fishing village of Kumbalangi in Kerala, India, this feminist film follows a working-class family of four brothers and the different ways they negotiate non-normative kinship, masculinity, mental health, love, and heartbreak. Considered a paradigm-shifting film in Malayalam cinema, it stars some of the industry’s most beloved actors, Fahadh Faasil and Soubin Shahir. Discussant: Professor Andrew Bush |
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Thursday, March 7, 2024 Weis Cinema 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 This award-winning documentary delves into the violent campaign to build a Ram temple by the right-wing Hindu nationalist organization Vishva Hindu Parishad at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, India. An incisive examination of religious fervor, politics, and communal tension, this film is particularly relevant today as the temple was consecrated amidst widespread communal violence in January this year. This screening will be preceded by a discussion on religious nationalism—from India to Turkey—led by Professors Nabanjan Maitra and Karen Barkey. |
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Thursday, February 29, 2024 Weis Cinema 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Directed by Mira Nair Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury star in this cult classic love story about a Ugandan-Indian woman and an African-American man. A complex portrayal of migration, diaspora, race, sexuality and postcolonial belonging, this film entered the Criterion Collection in 2022. Run time: 1h 58 min |
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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. |
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Sunday, October 1, 2023 Montgomery Place Estate 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Long before there was online shopping, there were print catalogs; before the internet there were journals; before social media there were social circles; and before podcasts there were dinner parties. Meet some of the visitors and residents who made significant contributions to life at Montgomery Place while also shaping a wider worldview of their special field of interest. Highlighted personalities will include: A. J. Downing, landscape designer and founding journalist; A. J. Davis, architect and A-list invitee; Alexander Gilson, descendent of slaves, businessman, and groundbreaking gardener; Violetta White Delafield, scientist, pioneering mycologist, and outdoor wellness advocate. Walk will be postponed until October 8 only if heavy rain is forecast. Wear comfortable walking shoes and long pants. Difficulty: Moderate. Not suitable for children under age 7. |
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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. |
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Sunday, September 17, 2023 Montgomery Place Estate 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 From farmland to pleasure ground, from national historic site to college campus, much has changed at Montgomery Place over its most recent 220 year history. We’ll walk the trails, meander through the meadows, and stroll the gardens while observing modernization’s impact on the land and water, and learning about the diverse peoples whose history here really goes back thousands of years. Enjoy a ramble through the remnants of a once romantic morning walk. Take in spectacular views of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains while exploring the wilderness trails in the ravine formed by the Sawkill Creek. Historical highlights include cascading waterfalls and the hydropower station, the allée of the arboretum through the east lawn, the coach house, and the rough and formal gardens. Walk will be postponed until September 24 only if heavy rain is forecast. |
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Wednesday, May 17, 2023 The students of AS 315 and Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck present a two-part letter writing night in solidarity with Indigenous political prisoners Maddesyn George and Leonard Peltier: 5/15 - Community letter writing night at Blackbird Infoshop, 587 Abeel Street, Kingston, NY. 5/17 - Olin Languages Center 208; Information and letter writing night with virtual talk by Hupa abolitionist scholar Stephanie Lumsden, Gender Studies, UCLA; Maddesyn George Defense Committee. Stephanie Lumsden (Hupa) is a scholar and teacher. She received her B.A. in Women's Studies from Portland State University in 2011 and her M.A. in Native American Studies from the University of California, Davis in 2014. She earned her second M.A. in Gender Studies from UCLA in 2018. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA . Stephanie is a 2021-2022 Ford Fellow and a recipient of the University of California President's Postdoctoral fellowship Maddesyn George (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a survivor of domestic and sexual violence who has been incarcerated since July 2020 for defending herself against a white man who raped and threatened her. Facing a murder charge and decades in prison, Maddesyn accepted a plea deal from federal prosecutors after being incarcerated and separated from her infant daughter for more than a year. She was sentenced in the Eastern District of Washington Federal Court on November 17, 2021 to serve 6.5 years in prison. This website is organized by Maddesyn George’s defense committee, a grassroots coalition of members of Maddesyn’s family; members of the Colville Confederated Tribes and Spokane nation; survivors of gender violence; and advocates, organizers, and scholars who work on issues of colonial, sexual, and domestic violence; policing and incarceration; and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples. Read the defense committee’s statement on Maddesyn’s sentencing Leonard Peltier is a citizen of the Anishinabe and Dakota/Lakota nations who has been imprisoned for 48 years. . Leonard Peltier was wrongly convicted in the 1970s for his organizing with the American Indian Movement in defense of Pine Ridge traditionalists, and is now the longest-held indigenous political prisoner in the United States. “The United States of America has kept me locked up because I am American Indian,” said the ailing Indigenous rights activist who Biden could free, but hasn’t. For more info, see the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. |
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Wednesday, May 3, 2023 Hegeman 106 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Despite their centrality to Mauritius’s plantation economy, merchants from Gujarat (western India) remain in the shadows of histories of slavery and indentured labor migration on the island. This talk takes stock of these erased histories by retelling the story of one plantation, Bel Ombre, which was variously owned by French planters and Gujarati merchants in the nineteenth century. Moving between the space of Bel Ombre today, records in the Mauritius National Archives, and old ports in Gujarat, I analyze the archival processes through which Gujarati mercantile intimacies were recorded and obscured. I argue that the archival segregation of records about plantation property ownership and indentured labor was central to the erasure of Gujarati merchants from histories of racial capitalism on the island. I show that the colonial state enacted gendered violence on indentured women whose sexuality was policed and pathologized while Gujarati merchants were able to marry across racial lines through sanctioned property and marriage arrangements. These silences were amplified by Indian anticolonial nationalists who arrived on Mauritius in the twentieth century to take up the cause of Indian indentured workers but who, ironically, papered over racial capitalism in favor of a pan-Indian identity. In old ports in Gujarat, merchant families built and maintained houses (havelis) which were scrubbed clean of these messy intimacies across the ocean. Reaching across the ocean from Gujarat to Mauritius and back, this talk suggests that these are haunted houses and histories. Ketaki Pant is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on South Asia and the Indian Ocean arena from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Her current projects examine interlinked histories of racial capitalism, gendered belonging, minoritization, and displacement centered on Gujarat. Recent publications include an article in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Asian Transnationalism. |
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Monday, April 24, 2023 Olin 102 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Women are the fastest growing segment of virtually all sectors of the carceral system (jail, prison, parole, and probation). This is also the case at the back end of the system, among those serving extreme sentences of 50 years in prison or more. People serving these sentences refer to their experience as "death by incarceration" given that sentence length and statutory limitations and exclusions from parole eligibility guarantee that they will die in prison. The number of women serving these sentences has exponentially increased in recent decades. The vast majority are survivors of gender violence. Their criminal convictions are often directly or indirectly tied to their encounters with violence and abuse. In this talk, I'll discuss why and how this is happening and what we can and should be doing about it. https://www.jillmccorkel.com/ Philadelphia Justice Project for Women and Girls |
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Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Weis Cinema 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Why did Indigenous peasants support but ultimately resist the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla group in highland Peruvian Quechua communities? The different ways rebels and government security forces interacted in each Andean community explain the diverse peasant responses. At first, the politics of pursuing social justice mobilized a large part of the rural population, especially the youths, who often sympathized with the Maoist revolution. The motivating factors in engaging with the insurgency in rural communities include local experiences of state neglect, social inequality, power relation, and fear and intimidation. Shining Path’s mounting authoritarianism, most notably their brutal killing of community authorities and demand that peasants withdraw from the market economy, explains the root of violent peasant uprisings against the rebels. The Indigenous struggle involved making the anti-guerrilla and pro-state coalition called the Pacto de Alianza entre Pueblos. It brought internal security and order, allowing Indigenous peasants to maintain daily life and protect their local affairs in wartime violence. The Pacto de Alianza was not limited to the counterinsurgency goals; its functions extended to the local governance, social cohesion, and post-conflict reconstruction. |
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Friday, April 7, 2023 Olin Humanities, Room 203 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 This teach-in will not only uncover some histories of Russian oppression and colonial domination within Ukrainian context, but will also include a panel discussion where students from other post-soviet countries will share their experience with Russification and how it affects their daily life. Since the event is during lunch time, a free meal and drinks will be provided. Looking forward to seeing you on Friday, April 7 in Olin 203! RSVP |
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Wednesday, March 29, 2023
Dr. Noriko Kanahara '04, Waseda University-Tokyo
Olin 102 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 This talk explores how in the 1920s through the early 1940s, Japanese state officials determined whether or not to accept Turkic Muslim refugees from the former Russian Empire. Though at most 1000 in number, the refugees left a significant impact not only on how Japanese state officials understood Islam and the power of Muslim networks in global politics, but also on how these officials formed national consciousness in contradistinction to them. Analysis of the journals of the Japanese intelligence police reveals that although the police considered the refugees' religion as an important marker, the refugees’ political interests were most significant in determining whether or not to accept them in Japan. This talk demonstrates that religion and ideology, particularly Islam and Communism, impacted how the refugees established transnational relationships and how Japanese state officials demarcated the nation during the interwar and wartime periods following the Russian Revolution and throughout the Second World War. More specifically, religious and ideological ties—precisely because they were considered powerful tools of transnational mobilization—served as grounds for the Japanese state’s ambivalent reception of refugees. Bio: Noriko Kanahara graduated from Bard College in 2004 with a BA in Anthropology. She has a PhD in History from the University of Chicago, an M.Phil. in Migration Studies from Oxford University, and an MA in Area Studies from Tokyo University. She has held postdoctoral research fellowships at Tohoku University and Waseda University in Japan. She is currently a research fellow at the Ryusaku Tsunoda Center of Japanese Culture at Waseda University. This event has received generous support from the Anthropology, Asian Studies, and Global & International Studies programs. |
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Friday, November 18, 2022
Campus Center, Multipurpose Room 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Stop by to see a presentation about Uyghur Scholar Rahile Dawut who has been imprisoned by the Chinese Government and learn how you can help free her. Free Food. Create signs for an advocacy march in December. Write letters to authorities! Download: activitymore-149DB489-E7C6-4973-A072-B681ED47F526. |
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Tuesday, November 15, 2022 Olin 102 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 This talk examines the relationships between labor, social life and capitalism through an ethnographic account of the emerging “creator economy” in India. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in Mumbai, Pune, Indore and Singapore, I follow an unlikely group of digital creators — middle-aged housewives who produce recipes and home cooking content on YouTube and Instagram — as they become enchanted with technological futurity and navigate Hindu nationalist food politics in contemporary India. How might our understandings of culture, technology and global capitalism change if we take the Indian housewife creator as a key figure of contemporary labor? Heralded as a paradigmatic shift in the “future of work”, the creator economy is a $100-billion global industry of over 50 million content creators as well as the digital infrastructures through which creators earn a living by monetizing digital content. In popular and scholarly accounts, the creator economy is treated as primarily a technological shift towards ‘digital labor’, rooted in the promise that individuals, especially women of color in the Global South, can now earn livelihoods and even amass fortunes with just a smartphone and an internet connection. This provocative and homogenizing claim distills both the affective appeal and the analytical limits of the creator economy as a singular, digital-first, global enterprise composed of hyper-productive individuals. In this talk, I critically evaluate this promise about the future of work, using ethnography to investigate, not the content of creators’ pages, but the material conditions, social relationships and embodied practices out of which their digital labors emerge. I situate the creators’ work in the cultural and political milieu of rapidly digitizing contemporary India and its diasporas, where the resurgence of Hindu nationalist politics plays a daily and deadly role, and food is pivotal to the performance and reproduction of caste, religious, ethnic and national identifications. Consequently, I argue that the global creator economy accumulates profits because it relies on not a futuristic transformation of individualized labor, but the resurgence of an older set of production relations – the household industry. Specifically, I enumerate how households, themselves reproduced by existing inequalities of gender, class, caste, nation and postcolonial racial geographies, are digitally re-mediated as a start-up entities. Through such an analysis, I provide a timely exploration of the situated labors, desires and subjectivities through which a vast and lucrative global capitalist project is being produced, animated and emplaced. Bio: Sucharita Kanjilal is a doctoral candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a former journalist from Mumbai, India. Her doctoral research combines anthropological perspectives on digital media, labor and capitalism, anti-caste and postcolonial feminisms, theories of affect, and critical food studies. Her work has appeared in Gastronomica, the Routledge volume Caste in/and Film (forthcoming) Quartz.com, Scroll.in, Hindustan Times and the Heritage Radio Network. |
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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. |
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Thursday, November 3, 2022 Olin 102 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 For decades, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been a significant component of China’s medical interventions in Africa. China is also asserting itself through TCM in post-conflict South Sudan. In this talk, I focus on the transmission of TCM to South Sudan and track the unexpected transnational connections of medicine between China and Africa. I pay special attention to pain, which lies at the heart of clinical practice and social life in post-conflict South Sudan. In South Sudanese conceptions, pain is a composite of body and mind, clinical and existential, speakable and unspeakable, social and religious, while also defying linguistic categorization. Despite the multiple non-somatic modalities that define pain and illness for South Sudanese, they are nevertheless drawn to TCM (acupuncture in particular) as a quick fix – a fast-track method for coping with pain. In this process, different agents participate in the production of desires, values, and symbols related to TCM. The employment of TCM as miracle cures, painkillers, and new sources for innovation in South Sudan opens a window into the often uneven social life of medicine. The discourse and practice of TCM create a multi-layered site for negotiation, transfiguration, and knowledge production. It is portrayed and practiced as an assemblage of meanings, socialities, and actions; as both miraculous and rapid, biomedical and alternative, traditional and innovative. I will explore these contradictions and reflect on the nature of ties between China and Africa today. Bio: Yidong Gong is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International & Area Studies, and a core faculty member of the interdisciplinary program Health, Culture and Societies, at New College of Florida (NCF), the State University System of Florida’s designated honors college. He is also an inaugural fellow of the Nielsen Center for the Liberal Arts at Eckerd College. His teaching and research interests include medical anthropology, global health, mental health, critical humanitarianism, South Sudan, East Africa, and China. He received his PhD from Duke University in Fall 2019 and was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in AY 2019-2020. He had previously worked as a bilingual feature writer covering science, technology and medicine, as well as a Pyongyang-based foreign correspondent. His research focuses on the intertwined relationship between medical expertise and biopolitics in transnational healthcare, particularly their convergence and friction in Africa. His current book project examines China’s long-standing medical programs in South Sudan, which offer an alternative to the widely accepted logic and values of medical humanitarianism in places marked by “crisis” or “conflict”. His scholarly and journalistic publications have appeared in The China Quarterly, Somatosphere, Science, SciDev.Net, among others. |
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Tuesday, November 1, 2022 Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 This talk explores the double binds that are created when debilitating chronic symptoms remain unverifiable in Western biomedicine. Chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis or ME/CFS) is a disabling condition that has no treatments. Its unrelentingness means suicide is the leading cause of death. Drawing on four years of online and in-person fieldwork with American ME/CFS activists, I show how vital social groupings bind patients together despite the significant isolation ME/CFS causes. Yet at the same time, the bureaucratic and biomedical systems they aim to navigate are inherently exhausting and repeatedly exclude them, creating double-binds for patients with already-limited energy: the systems they rely on are also the systems that wear them out. Debility blocks the very means through which debility might end. ME/CFS patient activists “believe in science.” They take pains to note the treatments they want are biomedical in nature, and they emphasize that a definitive biological marker is needed for their disease to be taken seriously. While medical anthropologists have long critiqued such narrow ways of seeing the world, this talk departs from the model of the “dupe.” Instead, it argues for the central importance of the psychic, phenomenological, and material aspects of investments in biomedicine, in what I term “attachments to science.” I look at how—in a context with a deficit of hope—science’s futurity animates a way of inhabiting a present without prognosis, as they must live on despite the often-devastating loss that comes from living in immense and unending pain. This project insists these losses are both psychic and material: they create a need for hope, and they also make it difficult to eke out a livelihood when biomedicine is the arbiter of legitimacy for disability insurance, paid sick leave, and Social Security in the context of a gutted American social safety net and cultural imaginaries of the disability fraud. Patient activists who appeal to such institutions did not choose to do so. Like a family, biomedicine is something their lives are dependent upon yet ones they cannot pick. In the last portion of the talk, however, I suggest queer studies has something to add about interdependencies and forms of care that might untie the knot of biomedicine’s binds—and the material limits of such alternative imaginaries as people with ME/CFS have little choice but to persist in an exhausting present. Emily Lim Rogers is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Disability Studies at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Department of American Studies at Brown University. Her work has been published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly and appears in the forthcoming anthology Crip Authorship (NYU Press, 2023), among others. Her current book project is Biomedicine’s Binds: ME/CFS, Patient Activism, and the Work of Debility. The project examines how American ME/CFS patients create vital social groupings through their debility, yet debility blocks the means through which debility might end, as they navigate societal disbelief and exhausting institutions that limit the the success of activist movements. |
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Tuesday, February 22, 2022 Online Event 5:30 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. Join Zoom Meeting: https://bard.zoom.us/j/81354083579 Meeting ID: 813 5408 3579 |
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Friday, December 17, 2021 Ludlow 301 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5 This presentation explores the dynamic mode in which landscape, ritual and narrative co-create and shape each other in Hindu traditions. Considering several examples of pilgrimage in India, this paper delves into the way that narratives are experienced through rituals that shape and are shaped by sacred landscapes. I end with an example from my dissertation about an 18th century devotional poet, Vengamamba, who was deeply embedded in, and in turn shaped the ritual landscape of, the south Indian pilgrimage site that she inhabited. Aalekhya Malladi is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. Her dissertation, “Devotee, Yogini, Goddess: Tarigonda Vengamamba and her Transformations,” explores the texts and the life histories of devotional poet Vengamamba (1735–1817), and conceives of a distinct female perspective on devotion and detachment. This project also examines her hagiographies and the rituals performed at her shrine, which illuminate the way that her at-times transgressive compositions and life histories have been tamed and curtailed by a hagiographical tradition that shapes her life into that of an “ideal female devotee.” She held the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship in 2019-2020. Prior to her doctoral studies, Aalekhya received an MA from Columbia University and a BA from Rutgers University, New Brunswick. |
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Wednesday, December 15, 2021 Ludlow 301 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5 My talk will comprise two parts. In the first part, I will introduce the audience to the interrelated issues of divinization and individuation in Hinduism. As is well known, the Hindu pantheon is composed of an innumerable number of deities but what does it mean to say that these deities are distinct or separate from each other? Are they really all that different? We may even ask a prior question, what does investing an entity with the properties of a divine being entail? The first part will guide the audience to some of the key issues that arise in the consideration of these questions. The second part will briefly explore the possibilities and limits of this idea of divinization as they emerge in the fraught, but also illuminating, context of the deification of the custom of widow burning or sati in contemporary India. Swayam Bagaria is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the College Fellows Program at the University of Virginia. He received his PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2020. His current book project is on the relation between popular Hinduism and ethnoreligious nationalism in India. |
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Friday, December 10, 2021 Ludlow, 3rd Floor Conference Room 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EST/GMT-5 The word guru comes close to what we might call an empty signifier: a word that is used so variably and in such a diverse array of contexts that it loses all meaning. And yet, to their followers, students and devotees, gurus can signify “life, the universe and everything.” In this talk, I will present an historic case of misapprehension of the figure of the guru in order to reflect upon the guru as a sovereign figure. In examining a colonial-era court case, I will hope to reveal the lineaments of a forgotten history of monastic power in India. The figure of the guru, properly historicized, is a productive site for the understanding of an alternative vision of normative power, wielded by the monastery, that operated through the ethical self-formation of its subjects. In this historical case, we see how the medieval monastery articulated a vision of totalizing religious power that was misapprehended by the colonial state, and indeed continues to be misapprehended to this day. I argue that this misapprehension prevents us from recognizing the monastery as an enduring institution of unparalleled power, and the guru as a particular paradigm of sovereignty. Nabanjan Maitra is Assistant Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas, Austin, where he teaches courses on the Religions of South Asia and Sanskrit. He holds a PhD in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago with a focus on Hinduism. His book project, The Rebirth of Homo Vedicus, examines the formulation and implementation of a novel form of monastic power in a medieval south India monastery. The study explains the underlying logic of ethical self-formation as the driver of the totalizing vision of power that the monastery, with the guru as its sovereign head, administered. It shows the primacy of this mode of governance in the emergence of Hinduism in the colonial period. His research and teaching attempt to situate and explicate Hinduism of the present—the local and the global—in longer histories of texts, institutions and conduct. |
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Monday, November 29, 2021 Christopher Lindner, Director, Bard Archeology Field School, and Archeologist in ResidenceJoin Bard College's resident archaeologist for a video presentation about the College's Native American archaeological site: The Enchanted Forest. Conducted by students from the Fall 2020 semester, the video explores some of the artifacts uncovered and techniques replicated that help us understand Bard's Indigenous history and how our present and future relationships with those communities should be understood. Please visit the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion website for a full list of events marking National Native American Heritage Month at Bard College. |
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Thursday, November 18, 2021 Peace is the goal for every country, community, and, hey, family. (See, we're funny here at BGIA.) In general, peace is the absence of war and violence. Through its work on the Global Peace Index and the Positive Peace Framework, the Institute for Economics and Peace takes peace and peace building further. It focuses on strengths not deficits and individual action on creating and sustaining positive societies. Join us on Thursday, November 18 at 12pm for an hour long Positive Peace Workshop. In this workshop, participants will learn how to better think about actions and approaches to creating peaceful societies. It will focus on policy, strategy, and implementation. If you're interested in conflict resolution, policymaking, and peace building, don't miss this virtual event. RSVP required. |
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Saturday, October 16, 2021 Online Event 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 What we know as Santeria is a rich, ancestral form of spirituality that has been around for centuries and brought by the enslaved people of Africa to the Caribbean. In this panel, we will break the stigma of Santeria and learn together about this ancient faith! |
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Wednesday, October 6, 2021
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Come enjoy CIDER DONUTS and CONVERSATION with students and faculty from the Anthropology Program. * Anthropology majors, feel free to bring friends who have been asking you what Anthropology is all about! * |
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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. |
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Wednesday, April 28, 2021 Please join us to recognize this remarkable achievement. Zoom Link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/86439563616 |
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Thursday, April 8, 2021 Online Event 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 In this joint presentation, an anthropologist-writer and an artist-anthropologist reflect on aspects of their extraordinary collaboration in the making of Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning, a graphic novel rooted in nonfiction comprised of fictionalized encounters with writers, philosophers, activists and anthropologists. The collaboration and its published book are unique in bringing together serious scholarship and contemporary aesthetics, elevating the graphic genre by presenting complex philosophical and political themes in a mixed media format. In this presentation, the artist and the author describe the process of their artistic creation, an exceptional experiment in art, aesthetics and anthropology. Designed to reach multiple audiences, the book conveys the drama of the world in dark times and difficult circumstances even as it reveals spaces of excitement and hope. The reflections on the production process in this presentation provide insight into innovative ways of demonstrating the relevance of scholarship to real-world concerns, and how to take advantage of multimodal formats to produce, disseminate and receive knowledge in the interest of a more just, ethical world. Alisse Waterston is Presidential Scholar and Professor, City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and author or editor of seven books. A Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS) in the Programmes in Transnational Processes, Structural Violence, and Inequality (2020-2022), she served as President of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2015-17. In addition, Waterston serves as Editor of the book series, Intimate Ethnography (Berghahn Books) and Advisor for Otherwise Magazine. Her most recent article is “Imagining World Solidarities for a Livable Future,” kritisk etnografi – Swedish Journal of Anthropology (2020). Charlotte Corden is an illustrator and fine artist whose work centers around what it is to be human. She is fascinated with how the power of hand-drawn images can reveal and describe complex truths. As anthropologist and illustrator she has worked with Stripe Partners, the British Cabinet Office, and the National Health Service, UK. As a fine artist, she has studied drawing and painting at the London Fine Art Studios and the Arts Student’s League in New York City. Join via Zoom Meeting ID: 839 1812 6364 / Passcode: 822601 |
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Monday, March 29, 2021 Bodies and clothing are in exchange and influence each other. Guyanese Hindus describe this interrelationship of clothing and bodies by highlighting that during acts of consuming clothing—when it is worn or gifted—substances and energies are transferred between bodies and dress, creating mutual touch. This touch is facilitated through for example body fluids, which transform used or ‘touched’ clothing into a person’s material likeness. Clothes and other material objects are thus dwelling structures for substances and energies, which have a special capacity to ‘take on’ former consumers. Used clothes are frequently exchanged within Guyanese Hindu families, a practice that remains relevant in the context of migration and is facilitated by the sending of ‘barrels.’ Gifts of used clothing become a means of recreating transnational families and religious communities. Additionally, gifts of clothing are not only relevant with regard to human social actors, but they furthermore materialize and visualize the relationships between people and deities, as clothes are frequently offered to deities during Hindu pujas (ritual veneration). In this talk I discuss the notions of touch and contact in the context of Guyanese transnational migration: I argue that in transnational networks, gifts of used clothing facilitate a means to literally stay in touch. Sinah Kloß holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Heidelberg University, Germany. Since February 2020 she is leader of the research group “Marking Power: Embodied Dependencies, Haptic Regimes and Body Modification” at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), University of Bonn, Germany. Her current research project discusses the sensory history of touch and body modification and the interrelation of permanence, tactility, religion and servitude in Hindu communities of Suriname, Trinidad and Guyana. Her most recent books include the edited volume “Tattoo Histories: Transcultural Perspectives on the Narratives, Practices, and Representations of Tattooing” (Routledge, 2020) and the monograph “Fabrics of Indianness: The Exchange and Consumption of Clothing in Transnational Guyanese Hindu Communities” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).Join via Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/82737596363?pwd=ZUpKOUNhYlpjQmwxNHFSS3llY2xkQT09 Meeting ID: 827 3759 6363 Passcode: 614305 |
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Tuesday, March 23, 2021 Environmental and infrastructural transformations in Turkey’s expansive swamps and marshes have unfolded against the backdrop of tightening authoritarian rule and the rise of wetland conservation. Drawing on fieldwork with farmers, scientists, and bureaucrats in two Turkish agrarian deltas, this talk explores how relationships between water, sediment, infrastructure, plants, and animals matter in contemporary Turkey, and what these relationships reveal about the intersection of moral and ecological concerns in the current moment. The “wetland” emerged as a globally significant scientific category over the course of the 20th century, becoming a key concept within Turkish state-making projects built on attempts to manipulate swampy nature. As transnational science and environmentalism cast the wetland in a starring role, Turkish farmers, scientists, and bureaucrats also drew on wetlands (sulakalanlar) as a novel idiom for claiming divergent ecological futures. I analyze these transformations between humans, non-humans, and their unstable surroundings in Turkey through the concept of moral ecologies—contrasting notions of just relations among people, land, water, infrastructure, animals, and plants. Divergent moral claims about ecology, infrastructure, and the livelihood of nonhuman animals have become central to a Turkish politics of livability. This approach to the wetlands of contemporary Turkey demonstrates how the valuation and governance of non-human creatures and elemental assemblages are not only entangled with human politics: they constitute it. Caterina Scaramelli is an anthropologist of the environment and science. After completing her PhD at MIT's History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society Program, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Humanistic Inquiry and in the Anthropology Department at Amherst College, and an Agrarian Studies postdoctoral associate at Yale. Currently, she is research assistant professor in the departments of Anthropology and of Earth and Environment at Boston University. Scaramelli's research addresses practices and politics of environmental expertise and the political ecology of conservation. Her fieldwork in Turkey has focused on the making and unmaking of watery places—rivers, wetlands, marshes, urban waters, and agricultural irrigation—and now she is studying the cultivation and contested meanings of "local" agricultural seeds. Her first book, How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey, was published in March 2021 with Stanford University Press. Join Zoom Meeting https://bard.zoom.us/j/88142814000?pwd=S2ZqRVZoQVVnMTFQekdwc3RWbG5zdz09 Meeting ID: 881 4281 4000 Passcode: 337474 |
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Saturday, February 20, 2021 The Caribbean Students Association invites the Bard community to join a virtual live screening and panel discussion of the newest Jamaican Dancehall documentary, Out There Without Fear, by Bard student Joelle Powe. This is a multidisciplinary cross-cultural experience expanding into gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, theater, film, anthropology, sociology, music, Africana studies, history, preservation, and religion through the study of dance. Day 1: Panel Discussion – February 19 from 1 pm to 3 pm EST Meet with the filmmaker and panelists calling in from Kingston, Jamaica. Musicologist Herbie Miller, iconic dancer Kool Kid, and internationally renowned choreographer Latonya Style want to answer your questions! The panel will be moderated by the documentarian, Joelle Powe. Day 2: Dance Workshop – February 20 from 3 pm to 4 pm EST Dance with two award-winning Dancehall celebrities, Kool Kid and Latonya Style. Join Zoom here: https://bard.zoom.us/j/86881698188?pwd=R1FSVEtIRndaRFNMY202bzlMQzl1dz09 Meeting ID: 868 8169 8188 Passcode: 178132 Art . . . Dance . . . Classism . . . Violence . . . Sexuality . . . Homophobia . . . The Church . . . The Empowerment of Women . . . Blackness |
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Friday, February 19, 2021 The Caribbean Students Association invites the Bard community to join a virtual live screening and panel discussion of the newest Jamaican Dancehall documentary, Out There Without Fear, by Bard student Joelle Powe. This is a multidisciplinary cross-cultural experience expanding into gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, theater, film, anthropology, sociology, music, Africana studies, history, preservation, and religion through the study of dance. Day 1: Panel Discussion – February 19 from 1 pm to 3 pm EST Meet with the filmmaker and panelists calling in from Kingston, Jamaica. Musicologist Herbie Miller, iconic dancer Kool Kid, and internationally renowned choreographer Latonya Style want to answer your questions! The panel will be moderated by the documentarian, Joelle Powe. Day 2: Dance Workshop – February 20 from 3 pm to 4 pm EST Dance with two award-winning Dancehall celebrities, Kool Kid and Latonya Style. Join Zoom here: https://bard.zoom.us/j/86881698188?pwd=R1FSVEtIRndaRFNMY202bzlMQzl1dz09 Meeting ID: 868 8169 8188 Passcode: 178132 Art . . . Dance . . . Classism . . . Violence . . . Sexuality . . . Homophobia . . . The Church . . . The Empowerment of Women . . . Blackness |
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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 |
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Wednesday, November 11, 2020 Online Event 4:45 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 In the final panel conversation around the texts and ideas of First-Year Seminar, first-year students and faculty will speak with anthropologist and activist Gregory Duff Morton, whose teaching and research focus on migrant labor, economics, and social movement organizing in rural Latin America. Using Lėon-Portilla’s The Broken Spears as our touchstone text, this student/faculty panel will discuss the scholarly work required to reclaim indigenous narratives of history in the Western hemisphere, and the political stakes of such an effort. More broadly, the conversation will interrogate the challenges of bringing together academic research and civic engagement through the perspective of an anthropologist. About our panelist: Gregory Duff Morton is assistant professor of anthropology at Bard College. A graduate of the University of Chicago and formerly a postdoctoral fellow in international and public affairs at Brown University’s Watson Institute, his academic work has appeared in Social Service Review, American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Providence Journal, Journal of Recreational Mathematics, and World Development, among other publications. At Bard, he teaches courses such as Doing Ethnography, The Stranger in Latin America, as well as the Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences course The Anthropology of the Institution: Making Change through Social Service and Community Organizing. He also regularly teaches First-Year Seminar. |
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Thursday, May 21, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Wednesday, May 20, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Tuesday, May 19, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Monday, May 18, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Sunday, May 17, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Saturday, May 16, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Friday, May 15, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Thursday, May 14, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Wednesday, May 13, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Tuesday, May 12, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Monday, May 11, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Sunday, May 10, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Saturday, May 9, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Friday, May 8, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Thursday, May 7, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Wednesday, May 6, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Tuesday, May 5, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Monday, May 4, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Sunday, May 3, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Saturday, May 2, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Friday, May 1, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Thursday, April 30, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Wednesday, April 29, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Tuesday, April 28, 2020 Online Contact us to set up one-on-one online peer tutoring sessions. |
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Thursday, April 2, 2020
Manor House Dining Room 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join Experimental Humanities Food Lab and the Human Rights Program for an interactive dinner workshop with Viven Sansour, a Palestinian writer and conservationist dedicated to preserving seed heritage and bringing it to the table in order to “eat our history rather than store it away as a relic of the past.” Sansour uses images, sketches, film, seeds, and soil to tell old stories with a contemporary twist. RSVPs required. Free for students; $10 for faculty and staff. annandaleonline.org/eatinghistoriesdinner |
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Thursday, April 2, 2020
Manor House Dining Room 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join Experimental Humanities, Food Lab, and the Human Rights Program for a free lecture and panel discussion between Vivien Sansour, founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library and the Traveling Kitchen, and Ken Greene, founder of the Hudson Valley Seed Company and Seedshed, a local nonprofit dedicated to seed stewardship literacy that promotes social justice solutions. Free lecture, 4:00–5:30 pm. Ticketed dinner workshop, 6:00–8:00 pm. RSVPs required. annandaleonline.org/eatinghistoriesdinner |
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Monday, March 9, 2020 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Meet with BGIA Director Elmira Bayrasli and Associate Dean of Civic Engagement and Director of Strategic Partnerships Brian Mateo for an overview about the program based in NYC, including: - BGIA faculty and course offerings - Internships and student projects - Our dorms in NYC - How to apply to BGIA - Q&A |
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Friday, March 6, 2020
Please join us for a roundtable featuring anthropologists Bridget Guarasci (Franklin and Marshall College) and Gökçe Günel (Rice University), moderated by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins.
Short presentations by Professors Guarasci and Günel will be followed by discussion with the audience. Olin Humanities, Room 102 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Drawing on her ethnographic book project on the Iraqi-exile led, U.S. supported project to restore Iraq’s marshes, Professor Guarasci's paper will think about Iraq's marshes with Muzaffar al-Nawab, one of Iraq’s most beloved revolutionary poets. In the mid-twentieth century al-Nawab lived in the southern marshes of Iraq where he conducted educational outreach for a faction of the communist party. Al-Nawab’s poems feature meditations on nature, particularly on Iraq’s wetlands expanse and riverine ecology, its genealogical connection to civilizations past, and the relationship of this swampy environs to political movements in Iraq. Al-Nawab is sometimes called a “guerrilla” poet: his poems critique the corruption of authoritarian regimes and were banned in almost every Arab country. Her paper will show how his work insists on the connection between nature and revolution. In 2016 UNESCO declared Iraq’s marshes a World Heritage Site. Once drained by Saddam Hussein, Iraqi exiles in partnership with the US government subsequently re-flooded and conserved the marshes during the occupation. She will argue that twenty-first century environmental reformers insist on the apolitical nature of their work. Al-Nawab helps us see otherwise. Drawing on her recently published book Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019), Professor Günel's paper will discuss how, in 2006 Abu Dhabi launched an ambitious project to construct the world’s first zero-carbon city: Masdar City. In Spaceship in the Desert Gökçe Günel examines the development and construction of Masdar City's renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures, providing an illuminating portrait of an international group of engineers, designers, and students who attempted to build a post-oil future in Abu Dhabi. While many of Masdar's initiatives—such as developing a new energy currency and a driverless rapid transit network—have stalled or not met expectations, Günel analyzes how these initiatives contributed to rendering the future a thinly disguised version of the fossil-fueled present. Spaceship in the Desert tells the story of Masdar, at once a “utopia” sponsored by the Emirati government, and a well-resourced company involving different actors who participated in the project, each with their own agendas and desires. |
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Thursday, February 27, 2020
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Charlene Teters, who received death threats for trying to retire racist sports team mascots at the University of Illinois, will speak following the showing of the award-winning PBS documentary about her—In Whose Honor? |
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Thursday, February 13, 2020 Join us for a lecture from anthropologist Robin Nagle, author of Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. Nagle has been anthropologist in residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation since 2006. She is a clinical associate professor of anthropology and urban studies at New York University, where she also directs the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought. This event is open to the public. |
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Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Frances Negron-Muntaner, Columbia University
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 In 2019, scholar, writer and artist Frances Negrón-Muntaner conceived the award-winning art installation Valor y Cambio to explore what people in Puerto Rico valued and to introduce the concept of a community currency. The project exceeded all expectations by attracting thousands of participants and inspiring the creation of community currencies in Puerto Rico and the United States. In this talk, Negrón-Muntaner reflects on the origins and impact of the project, and introduces a new concept arising from it: decolonial joy. This is a specific form of joy that arises when participants envision and experience a time where neither colonialism nor coloniality rule their lives. |
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Tuesday, October 8, 2019
Dr. Geoff Bil, Visiting Assistant Professor History, University of Delaware
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 From the Enlightenment era forward, the Pacific has served as a crucial touchstone for European speculation on differences between indigenous and Western cultures. My paper examines the role played by botanists in these considerations, with particular reference to social factors that shaped observations by European naturalists in Tahiti. Following a preliminary discussion of European-Tahitian botanical interactions over the course of James Cook’s Endeavour voyage (1768–71), I proceed to examine the heightened attention to epistemological contrasts between Tahitian and European environmental worldviews given in published accounts authored by Johann (1729–1798) and Georg Forster (1754–1794), who served aboard James Cook’s HMS Resolution (1772–75). I attribute this shift to the Forsters’ relative lack of acquaintance with Tahitian cultures and te reo Tahiti (the Tahitian language), owing largely to the more itinerant nature of the Resolution voyage. The second part of this presentation turns to HMS Bounty expedition’s (1787-1790) unprecedented length of stay at Tahiti to collect breadfruit trees en route to the Caribbean, which encouraged cross-cultural intimacies palpably—even dangerously—at odds with Forsterian dichotomizing. In bringing these case studies together, I reflect on a paradox: namely, that while some grasp of indigenous knowledge was fundamental to global botanical endeavors, it could also prove their ruination. Dr. Bil received his PhD in history from the University of British Columbia in 2018. He was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humanities Institute, LuEsther T. Mertz Library, New York Botanical Garden from 2018 to 2019. He has published most recently in the British Journal for the History of Science, and his manuscript. Indexing the Indigenous: Plants, Peoples and Empire is under contract with John Hopkins University Press. |
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Wednesday, September 18, 2019 and a discussion in the Stevenson Library, first floor, 4-5pm Campus Center and Stevenson Library What does justice look like in a curriculum? In an effort to recognize more than a century's worth of writing by people who were not white or male and whose work is important for general anthropological knowledge, the Anthropology Program is featuring some of these authors in a campus-wide book fair. Join faculty from Anthropology as we hold a book fair in the Campus Center (9am-3pm) to read excerpts and informally discuss some of the classic readings. We would like to feature some of these readings in our introductory courses in efforts to decolonize our syllabi, and we welcome student responses. Help us think more deeply about the texts and the introductory curriculum through a discussion in the library, first floor, 4-5pm. |
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Thursday, April 25, 2019
The Man Who Would Be King
Directed by John Huston, 1975 Preston Theater 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Based on Rudyard Kipling’s story of the same name, this film follows two rogue ex-soldiers, former non-commissioned officers in the British Army, who set off from late 19th-century British India in search of adventure and end up in faraway Kafiristan, where one is taken for a god and made their king. |
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Wednesday, April 24, 2019 Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:00 pm – 7:15 pm EDT/GMT-4 In the 1990s, the well-known tactic of "broken-windows policing" targeted homeless people by removing them from core areas of New York City and other global mega-cities. Yet today, with a progressive administration and softer policing in place, homeless New Yorkers still find themselves unable to exist comfortably in public space. How should we understand this shift? In this presentation, I argue that the regime of anti-homelessness in New York has shifted to what I call "ecological development," and present evidence from an ethnographic study to show how green spaces, linear parks, and urban plaza areas have taken up the mantle of anti-homelessness, and how homeless activists resist these nefarious tools of urban planning and development. |
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Wednesday, April 24, 2019 Olin Humanities, Room 102 4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 In the US and Brazil alike, the housing crisis sweeps millions into its grasp each year, producing homelessness, destroying public space, and forcing people to migrate long distances. But homeless activists have powerfully resisted this trend through community organizing, collective action, and legislative change. Landless activists have occupied plantations, successfully resettling hundreds of thousands of people on land that used to be controlled by big agriculture. Come hear from housing organizers in New York City and landless organizers in Brazil. Learn more about how we can create new models of land and public space so that all have a right to a home. |
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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. |
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Thursday, April 11, 2019
1947:Earth
Directed by Deepa Mehta, 1999 Preston Theater 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Earth is set in Lahore (now the capital of Pakistani Punjab) in the time period directly before and during the partition of India in 1947 at the time of Indian independence. A young girl with polio, Lenny (Maia Sethna), narrates the story through the voice of her adult self (Shabana Azmi). She is from a wealthy Parsi family who hope to remain neutral to the rising tensions between Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims in the area. She is adored and protected by her parents, Bunty (Kitu Gidwani) and Rustom (Arif Zakaria), and cared for by her Ayah, a beautiful Hindu woman named Shanta (Nandita Das). Both Dil Navaz, the Ice-Candy Man (Aamir Khan), and Hassan, the Masseur (Rahul Khanna) are Muslim and in love with Shanta. Shanta, Dil, and Hassan are part of a small group of friends from different faiths (some of whom work for Lenny's family) who spend their days together in the park. With partition, however, this once unified group of friends becomes divided and tragedy ensues. |
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Thursday, March 28, 2019
Ghare Baire The Home and the World
Directed Satyajit Ray, 1984 Hegeman 102 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 In 1907, Nikhil—a wealthy yet enlightened and charitable Bengali landowner—encourages his wife Bimala to emerge from the traditional female seclusion of purdah and introduces her to his old friend Sandip, a radical leader in the Swadeshi movement. Bimala is deeply affected by Sandip's revolutionary fervor and experiences a profound political awakening that draws her out of her home and into the tumultuous world of Indian nationalism. Based on the novel by Rabindranath Tagore. |
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Thursday, March 7, 2019
Charulata
Directed by Satyajit Ray, 1964 Preston Theater 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Satyajit Ray’s exquisite story of a woman’s artistic and romantic yearning takes place in 1870s India, in the gracious home of a liberal-minded, workaholic newspaper editor and his lonely wife, Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee). When her husband’s poet cousin (Soumitra Chatterjee) comes to stay with them, Charulata finds herself both creatively inspired and dangerously drawn to him. Based on a novella by the great Rabindranath Tagore, Charulata is a work of subtle textures, a delicate tale of a marriage in jeopardy and a woman taking the first steps toward establishing her own voice. |
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Thursday, February 28, 2019 Campus Center, Weis Cinema 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 A panel discussion will be held in connection with the Maré de Dentro exhibition Life in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas, currently on view in the Campus Center. A reception follows. |
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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. |
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Tuesday, October 30, 2018 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Richard Freund leads an international team using noninvasive archeological and geoscience techniques to explore Jewish sites in Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania), including the remains of the Great Synagogue and the locale of mass killings during the Holocaust. In this talk he will describe his work and future plans for the sites, as well as show film clips from episodes of Nova featuring his discoveries. Prof. Cecile Kuznitz will also provide historical background on the Jewish landscape of Vilna. Richard Freund is the director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies and Greenberg Professor of Jewish History at the University of Hartford. He has directed six archeological projects in Israel and three projects in Europe. Prof. Freund is the author of six books on archeology, two books on Jewish ethics, and more than one hundred scholarly articles, and has appeared in 15 television documentaries. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Thursday, April 19, 2018 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4 Barbara Chamberlain & Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’30 Professor of Anthropology Barnard College If animal death is a frequent, and inevitable, consequence of much experimentation in laboratory science, how do human personnel understand the morality of their work? How, in turn, might anthropological understandings of death, mourning, and sacrifice facilitate our efforts to answer this question? This talk draws on data derived from long-term ethnographic research on human-animal encounters in experimental science, with a special interest in the consequences of the invisibility of animals, of human labor, and of associated lab-based practices. Whereas a focus on ethical regulations may help one root out adherence to mandated welfare practices, heeding serendipitous and innovative behaviors opens up a rich terrain where one may encounter the obscured dimensions of everyday morality and the meaning of care. |
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Thursday, April 19, 2018 Barbara Chamberlain & Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’30 Professor of Anthropology Barnard College Senior Research Scientist in Sociomedical Sciences Mailman School of Public Health Columbia University Fellow, Center for Animals and Public Policy Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine Tufts University Campus Center, George Ball Lounge 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Come join us to find out more about the fields of Medical Anthropology and Global Public Health in an informal discussion with Lesley Sharp. A medical anthropologist by training, Professor Sharp is most concerned with critical analyses of the symbolics of the human body, where her research sites range from cosmopolitan medical centers and research laboratories within the United States and other Anglophone countries to urban centers in sub-Saharan Africa. Professor Sharp’s early research (1986-1995) addressed the power of spirit mediumship to mediate the suffering, displacement, and economic struggles of migrants and locals within a booming plantation economy in northwest Madagascar. Since the early 1990s, her research has addressed the ethical and moral consequences of innovative medicine and science, where investigative domains include the ideological and embodied consequences of organ transplantation, procurement, and donation as transformative experiences among involved parties in the United States; the imaginative and temporal dimensions of innovative and highly experimental transplant technologies, with specific reference to xenotransplantation and mechanical heart design in various Anglophone countries; and, most recently, the ethical, alongside everyday moral, consequences of human-animal encounters in experimental laboratory research. Professor Sharp is the recipient of numerous external grants and four teaching awards. Her book Strange Harvest won the 2008 New Millennium Book Award of the Society for Medical Anthropology. |
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Wednesday, April 11, 2018 What is Anthropology? What is it like to major in Anthropology? What is fieldwork? Can I major in Anthropology and study abroad? Can I joint major? What courses are being offered in 2018-2019? Come enjoy free food and great, informative conversation with students and professors in the Anthropology Program! |
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Friday, April 6, 2018 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 10:00 am – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Speakers include: Kevin Duong (Bard) David Kettler (Bard) Zak Rawle (Bard) Jane Glaubman (Cornell) Joseph Sheehan (Bard) Simon deBevoise (Bard) Zeke Perkins (SEIU) Ed Quish (Cornell) Maggie Dickinson (CUNY) Joy Al-Nemri (Bard) Ella McLeod (Bard) Laura Ford (Bard) Holger Droessler (Bard) |
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Monday, March 5, 2018 Associate Professor of Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 This paper pursues an ethnographic account of intra-Indigenous relations and jurisdictional contest in urban northern Australia. Its narrative explores the relationship between Aboriginal community policing and emergent forms and figures of urban mobility and morbidity in Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. While Darwin’s Indigenous patrols have no police powers, and its officers disavow any authority as ‘‘police,’’ they do have a certain status vested in them by the traditional owners of the country on which they patrol. Their Aboriginal-directed efforts thus entail both an assertion of Indigenous jurisdiction and an accompanying reflexivity about the substance and limits of its reach—limits informed by settler colonial oversight, by the diversity of Indigenous claims to urban space, and by poetic figures and mediatized narratives that trope the volatility of Aboriginal dispersal and displacement. The paper explores the ways patrols negotiate their authority and reckon its limits, extending a local poetics jurisdiction and movement to illuminate the new urban worlds they traverse. |
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Monday, November 27, 2017 Associate Professor of Anthropology & Associate Adjunct Professor of American Studies, Indiana University Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Americans know their dominant national story centers on ideals of freedom, social mobility, and progress. But those ideals are constantly shadowed by the counter-figures of captivity and immobility. This talk is going to muse on different ways we talk about hard-to-articulate feelings of captivity and containment, from the inner subjective states of neurodivergence, to stories of uncanny captivity in UFO abduction. I will think about how idiosyncratic individual experiences and public narratives of captivity resonate with each other. How do these narratives move from the margins to the center of political discourse – and to what effect? This talk will touch on neurodiversity forums on tumblr, the medicalized idea of the monster, and UFO abduction stories. In the second half of the talk, I will invite members of the audience to tell their own stories of captivity, in both uncanny or ordinary registers. Come with a story to tell! |
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Tuesday, November 21, 2017 Kali Rubaii is Charlotte Newcomb Fellow at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation, Counterinsurgency and the Ethical Life of Material Things in Anbar Iraq, documents the impacts of the Global War on Terror on farming families in Iraq. In 2014 and 2015, at the height of militia struggles among ISIS and other subnational militias over Anbar province, Kali lived and travelled with farming families as they traversed war-pocked landscapes to access their crops and livestock; sought alternative methods of conceiving children, fertilizing date trees, and supplementing soil; and interacted with militias, drones, and toxic military waste. She later conducted fieldwork with counterinsurgency operatives in the United States, Jordan, Denmark, and Kurdistan, who work frequently in Iraq. In approaching the Global War on Terror as a concerted effort to preempt organized armed resistance by making Anbar’s social and physical landscapes docile, Kali’s ethnographic methods highlight the turmoil underlying a study of violence and harm. When we begin to examine a concept like war or counterterrorism, where do we find ourselves looking for answers? What does participant observation mean in a study of harm: to what degree does an ethnographer participate in harming and being harmed? What kind of conversation happens when we speak to people who kill the people we love? What is the role of fear in limiting our capacities to know things? And what are our obligations to distant or even unknown others over a lifetime? The workshop will be informal, so students, faculty and staff interested are welcome to come (and bring your lunch!) for any amount of time they can. See you there! |
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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. |
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Thursday, October 19, 2017 Professor of Geography & Asian Studies Simon's Rock College Campus Center, Weis Cinema 4:40 pm EDT/GMT-4 Animism and vitalism have captured the imagination of post-structural theorists, ontologically-inclined ethnographers, and several cultural geographers. This presentation draws on works by scholars who have explored the divide, or dialectic, between sacred and secular space (Lefebvre, Foucault, Viveiros de Castro, and others) to explore the contemporary political ecology of Tibetan sacred mountains (gzhi bdag) and Han sacred forests (fengshuilin) as China strives to build a post-industrial Ecological Civilization (Shengtai Wenming). |
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Tuesday, October 17, 2017 Professor of Anthropology, Reed College Preston 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 In this talk, we travel upriver from the famous Tibetan Buddhist town of Rebgong in southeastern Qinghai province, China to the small and marginalized Tibetan community of Langmo. Here we explore the stakes and consequences of village history-making as a dialogic process in the context of increasing state-led pressures on rural land use. I had met Langmo elders back in 2005 when I was first looking for highland communities to research. Langmo elders, it turned out, had their own goals for our collaboration. Their counter-development plans for the village meant "capturing" foreign donors and converting them to village patrons. Thus my naive offer in 2008 to help fund Langmo's primary school roof repair drew me into deepening relationships with villagers I had never anticipated. And that meant taking a role as a key listener and medium for elders' oppositional accounts of Langmo history. In the face of resettlement pressures, elders insisted that Langmo's Buddhist history grounded the community's sovereign right to their former lands. |
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Thursday, September 28, 2017
Brent Kovalchik
Architect and Deputy Mayor of Red Hook, NY Olin Humanities, Room 102 4:40 pm EDT/GMT-4 The Village of Red Hook’s Municipal Sewer Project has been developing for over seventy years. Countless planning documents, initiatives, two failed referendums and the path to final completion will be explored. The project addresses the Village’s economic development future and protection of drinking water supplies for residents and institutions that rely on the Saw Kill Watershed’s aquifer, tributaries and streams for their own needs. Through the example of a municipal infrastructure project, we will discuss the work involved with gathering and documenting the research, finding the necessary funding, advocating for its necessity, and navigating the bureaucratic and regulatory paperwork required to realize this most important project. |
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Thursday, September 28, 2017 Janet Gyatso Associate Dean of Faculty & Academic Affairs Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies, Harvard Divinity School Hegeman 102 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 This talk will present the speaker’s perceptions and experiences at the recent nuns ordination ceremony, held at the Bodhgaya Mahabodhi Temple in India in March 2017, under the direction of the current H. H. Gyalwa Karmapa. It will contextualize this exciting event in light of the larger female ordination movement in contemporary Buddhism. |
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Thursday, September 14, 2017
Howard Kunreuther
James D. Dinan Professor of Decision Sciences and Policy Co-Director of Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center Wharton School University of Pennsylvania Campus Center, Weis Cinema 4:40 pm EDT/GMT-4 We face challenges in dealing with potentially catastrophic events associated with climate change. Most individuals do not think about investing in energy efficient measures to reduce global warming or undertaking protective actions to reduce damage to their homes from future floods or hurricanes until after a disaster occurs. I will use concepts from behavioral economics and psychology to highlight why we ignore these risks and recommend public-private sector partnerships that provide economic incentives for taking steps now rather than waiting until it is too late. |
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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. |
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Wednesday, April 26, 2017 I. New Connections: The Talmud and the Contemporary Humanities - a Workshop Location: The Yellow Room in the Campus Center (1:15-4:45pm) Featuring leading scholars of Jewish studies in dialogue with Bard students and faculty. II. "Make it New": Classical Jewish Texts and Artistic Imagination Location: RKC 103 (4:45-6:15pm) Nicole Krass: Novelist, author of The History of Love (2005) and Great House (2010) Adam Kirsh: Poet and critic Galit-Hasan-Rokem: Scholar, poet, and translator. III. Jewish Studies and the Liberal Arts: Institutional Possibilities Location: RKC 103 (6:30-7:30pm) Featuring President Leon Botstein, Bruce Chilton, and Alan Avery-Peck. |
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Monday, April 24, 2017 Katie Detwiler and Anna Niedermeyer Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 The Atacama Desert in northern Chile contains nearly two-thirds of the world’s infrastructure for astronomical data production. In 2012, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), was under construction. Documenting the extraordinary process of building a radio telescope composed of sixty-six 100-ton antennae, spread out across eighteen kilometers at 16,500 feet in altitude on a plateau in the Chilean Andes-- an anthropologist, a designer, and a camera man spent three weeks filming at ALMA. We will discuss the challenges that emerged in filming and in the subsequent experiments with the collected footage: around the interdisciplinary crafting of narrative; about the limits and possibilities of a range of ethnographic tools; and about the aesthetics of anthropology. |
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Thursday, April 20, 2017 Visiting Scholar, Anthropology at New York University Olin Humanities, Room 202 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 A decade ago, social media—that is, social network sites like MySpace and Facebook—were taking off among teens and fan communities. News consumption in the US was shifting as well, as cable news outstripped network shows and print circulation declined. Only a few years later, Facebook and Twitter became widespread, perhaps losing their cool among young people. As social media coalesce into a new mass medium, these platforms integrate news stories into spaces previously envisioned for leisure and friendship. Planned changes to the Facebook News Feed algorithm cultivated this process further. By 2015, breaking events like the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris unfolded online in a new way, sparking the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag and public memorials across Europe hours later. Reading news websites was already part of daily practice among young people I studied in Berlin in the late 2000s, but by 2015, social media became the place to encounter and experience news stories. This shift is reshaping how the news circulates, facilitating viral “fake” news and disinformation regimes. Social media contribute to reconfiguring the meaning of public and private, but what is at stake when social media are the news? |
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Monday, April 10, 2017
Katie Detwiler and Anna Niedemeyer
TBD 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Speakers for Anthropology 220: Doing Ethnography. |
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Thursday, March 30, 2017
Campus Center, Weis Cinema 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Tanya Erzen Associate Professor, University of Puget Sound Director, Freedom Education Project Puget Sound In prisons throughout the United States, punitive incarceration and religious revitalization are occurring simultaneously. Faith-based prison ministries operate under the logic that religious conversion and redemption will transform prisoners into new human beings. Why are Christian prison ministries on the rise amidst an increasingly punitive system of mass incarceration? How do people in prison practice religion in a space of coercion and discipline? What are theimplications of the state's promotion of Christianity over other religious traditions in some prisons? And, why have conservative Christians, particularly, embraced criminal justice reform? |
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Thursday, December 8, 2016
Julienne Obadia
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 A new affective regime is seeping into the workplace through the mandate to “do what you love,” a formulation that encourages workers to approach their job, like their love life, as a passionate pursuit. Based on ethnographic fieldwork exploring living organ donation, polyamory, and intentional community, I argue that this iconic late liberal discourse is returning, full circle, to the home, where people are drawing on the tools of the workplace and market to navigate new kinds of domestic and intimate arrangements that cultivate various forms of love, affection – and labor. This work on home, relationships, and self is ubiquitously characterized by my interlocutors as “exhausting, but worth it.” This talk will examine how – rather than turning the home into the cold, calculating world of markets – the mobilization of transparency, verbal communication, and contracts in practices such as polyamory is put to use in the service of carving out new spaces of care, love, and empathy. With this late liberal toolkit for working from home, these new domestic configurations are reproducing as they disorder the household theorized by classical liberalism and intensifying the centrality of liberal individualism in surprising ways. |
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Monday, December 5, 2016
Tami Navarro
Associate Director Barnard Center for Research on Women Olin Humanities, Room 201 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 This talk explores the impact of the Economic Development Commission (EDC) program in the US Virgin Islands and asks, “How do contemporary circulations of capital and people alternately build upon and complicate long-present hierarchies?” This lecture provides an engagement with the EDC, a tax holiday program that has attracted a number of primarily American bankers to the island of St. Croix, as a space in which struggles over quasi-offshore capital produces tensions rooted in race, class, color, gender, and generation. These clashes surrounding ‘appropriate’ financial and social investment have both integrated St. Croix into the global financial services market and produced a great deal of tension between the EDC community and residents of St. Croix. Moreover, the presence of this program has generated new categories of personhood that in turn have sparked new debates about what it means to ‘belong’ in a territory administered by the United States. These new categories of personhood are particularly gendered and alternately destabilize and shore up long-standing hierarchies of generation, gender, and place. |
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Thursday, December 1, 2016
Gregory Duff Morton
Postdoctoral Fellow, Watson Institute, Brown University Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 The poorest 10% of Brazil's population doubled their incomes between 2001 and 2011. During this time of raging economic growth, a group of small farmers declared that they themselves would not save any money at all. Saving money, they argued, was a vice. While the farmers were refusing to save, Brazil's government was busy borrowing money to construct Bosla Família, the world's largest national cash welfare program. These seemingly-unrelated events intersected. Together, they changed the way that rural Brazilians handle money, a change that became real with every bill that passed into and out of a farmer's hands. What does it mean to turn away from saving? This paper considers the saving question as a point of encounter between anthropological exchange theory (Weiner 1992, Levi-Strauss 1949) and classical political economy (Marx 1844)-- and as a sign of the urgent dilemmas of growth today (Li 2014, Tsing 2005, Gens Collective 2015). Not saving money is an everyday habit that turns into a risky, noisy form of critique. It can register one's disagreement with the channels through which money flows, and it can mark out the path that a new channel might follow. |
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Thursday, October 27, 2016
Rachel Heiman,
The New School Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 There has been much speculation about the future of the suburban American dream as volatile economic conditions, energy concerns, and climate change make the low-density landscape of single-family homes increasingly unviable. There has been a growing literature on architecture, planning, and policy efforts to reimagine automobile suburbs for a more sustainable future, yet here has been little ethnographic research that explores the transformation of sedimented ideals and ways of being as people’s everyday routines and familiar spaces shift amid efforts to retrofit the material and social landscape of suburbia. Drawing on fieldwork in South Jordan, Utah—one of the fastest growing suburbs in the United States due to the ongoing construction of Daybreak, a massive, master-planned, environmentally friendly, mixed-use transit-oriented community built on reclaimed land once used for mining activities—this talk asks: is a nascent “new normal” emerging out of the environmental limitations, “cruel optimism,” and segregationist design of the postwar American dream? Given that Daybreak was designed and first developed by a land development subsidiary of one of the largest mining companies in the world, this talk sheds light on the formation of new subjectivies and new regimes of governance at the intersection of sustainable urbanism, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and social justice concerns. |
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Thursday, October 13, 2016
Director Kamar Ahmad Simon. Bangladesh, 2012, 90 minutes.
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 3:10 pm – 4:40 pm EDT/GMT-4 An award-winning documentary film revealing the effects of climate change on the coastal village of Sutarkhali, Bangladesh in the wake of a cyclone induced tidal surge. The film's world premier was as the 'Curtain Opener' for the 55th DOK festival in Leipzig Germany in 2012. Screening is for ANTH/EUS 223 Conservation Anthropology. |
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Thursday, September 29, 2016 How does anthropological thinking help us make sense of the recent Black Lives Matter movement? How have anthropologists spoken about this movement as part of their research or as engaged citizens? What kinds of new questions does BLM raise about the politics of race and protest movements in on and offline worlds? In this panel, both faculty and students from the anthropology program will speak briefly about their interpretations and questions that relate to the Black Lives Matter movement to generate a broader conversation in dialogue with anthropological perspectives. |
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Monday, September 26, 2016 Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 In this paper I examine the documentary trail of legal agreements, memoranda, correspondence, and contracts that mark the history of the “Laura Boulton Collection’s” acquisition by Columbia University as intellectual property, and the subsequent distribution and management of the associated rights by Columbia, Indiana University, and the Library of Congress. My argument is that this hidden "archive of the archive” provides the necessary context for understanding what “the archive” is. While the ostensible motivation for this construction was scientific and scholarly, I show that every actor in the story had a covert economic interest in the fiction that the collection was a unitary object that could be owned, sold, or transferred in the name of science. |
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Tuesday, September 20, 2016 – Friday, September 23, 2016
Fisher Center 7:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
From September 20 to 23, Bard College will host a series of events on the theme of spectatorship in an age of surveillance. Artist Trevor Paglen will give a public artist talk on the evening of Tuesday, September 20. This will be followed by a two-day public symposium on the evening of Thursday, September 22 and throughout the day on Friday, September 23, in which invited artists and scholars, as well as artists and scholars from the Bard community, will present work-in-progress and current research as part of a shared inquiry into the nature of spectatorship, privacy, and identity in the context of surveillance culture. |
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Thursday, May 5, 2016
student curated short-film screenings inspired by PEEP cinema
Preston 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Students Grace Calderly and Lian Ladia curate a selection of short films focused on "the insider looking or in" and the return of the gaze in the idea of peep cinema. This film program is the students final project for Curating Cinema at CCS Bard. |
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Tuesday, April 26, 2016 Olin Humanities, Room 102 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 David Rieff is the author of many books, including Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, and, most recently, The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the 21st Century. He lives in New York City.In his Book "In Praise of Forgetting", He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, “inoculate” the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds—whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces—neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option—sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget.Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times—the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11—Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy.We Hope to see you there!! |
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Monday, April 18, 2016 Olin Humanities, Room 201 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Peter is a scholar, social commentator and public intellectual with an unusual range of research experience. Born in England and educated at Cambridge University, his career has taken him to Southern Africa and to Brazil, where he has lived and taught for forty years. He is one of Brazil’s most distinguished anthropologists, a former Vice-President of the Brazilian Association of Anthropologists, and editor of the leading anthropological journal Vibrant. |
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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** |
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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** |
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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. |
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Thursday, March 10, 2016
Diego Arispe-Bazán '05
PhD Candidate, University of Pennsylvania Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Negotiations of an individual’s racial positioning, consisting of evaluations of co-occurring emblems such as occupation and descent, for example, in addition to skin color, have been a mainstay feature of colonial and post-colonial societies. Such negotiations, through events of performance and decoding of sign-markers, serve to (re)produce racial categories and to solidify the valence of emblematic racial types over time, even when the perceivable emblems themselves have changed. Tracking shifts and continuities in Peruvian racial ideologies from the colonial period to the present, this survey will move chronologically through a series of case studies, considering their impact on identity formation across Peruvian history, grounding them in contemporary examples. |
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Thursday, March 3, 2016 Ottaway Theater (Avery) 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 In 1914, American photographer Edward S. Curtis released the first feature-length, silent, fiction film to star an entirely indigenous cast. In the Land of the Head Hunters—an epic melodrama of love, war, sorcery and ritual—was made with the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) people on location in British Columbia, and its premiers in Seattle and New York were accompanied by a live rendition of the original musical score written for the film by John J. Braham, best known for his work arranging Gilbert and Sullivan in the US. Though partially restored in the early 1970s (and released as In the Land of the War Canoes), the original has been completely inaccessible and overlooked by film history. Join Aaron Glass for a special screening and discussion of the newly restored film, which has returned the film’s original title, inter-title cards, long-missing footage, color tinting, initial publicity graphics, and musical score—now thought to be the earliest extant original feature-length film score in American history. |
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Monday, February 29, 2016
Perry Sherouse, Princeton University
Olin LC 120 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5 In 2011, a law was implemented in Georgia that required all foreign films to be shown with Georgian state language dubbing or subtitling. At the time, Russian was the default language of film showings. The largest movie theater in Tbilisi was fined a year later for showing Russian films, but this had little effect on film showing practices. In this talk, I describe how media language politics involved collaboration among social actors in the Georgian Ministry of Culture, the movie theater industry, and the film dubbing industry. I develop the concept of dormant law to describe how an unenforced, aspirational law can exist as a form of latent, activatable politics. In political and popular discourse at the time, social actors framed Russian as an infrastructurally embedded and potentially hazardous symbolic resource, whereas they framed English as either harmless or enriching to Georgianness. In film language debates, citizens and politicians reflected on the meanings of “international” languages, in contrast with Georgian. The Film Law manifested a hierarchy of social value in which English and Russian were competing codes, iconic of possible future Georgian modernities. |
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Thursday, February 25, 2016 We will screen the Black in Latin America film about the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Dinner and discussion will be part of the event. Co-hosted by Spanish Studies Program, BEOP Club, LASO, BSO and La Voz |
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Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Joseph Jay Sosa
Olin LC 120 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Recently, the Brazilian public has been inundated with images of mass protest crowds, presenting demands across the political spectrum. These images have come to symbolize Brazilians' uncertainties around a slowing economy, dissatisfaction with elected politicians, and cultural polarization around reproductive and sexual rights. This presentation considers a number of high-profile protests in the city of São Paulo that took place between 2011 and 2013. The talk draws on sustained ethnographic fieldwork within overlapping networks of LGBT activists that mobilized for federal anti-discrimination protections, where I analyzed anti-homophobia and anti-transphobia discourses that circulated between street protests, government reports, and journalists' accounts. During this time, LGBT activists held their own events and joined in protest marches led by organizers for marijuana decriminalization, free public transit, against police violence, and political corruption. Examining protests as sites of oppositional public address as well as experimental spaces for alternative social relations, I focus on rhetorical, aesthetic and affective registers of protest actions. Analyzing palavras de ordem (protest chants), the block colors of the crowd, and interactions with the built environment, I demonstrate how protests make social movements recognizable across multiple contexts. |
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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. |
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Thursday, February 4, 2016
Ali Feser,'05
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 This paper explores the afterlives of analog photography in Rochester, New York, where Eastman-Kodak has been based for over a century. While there is still some film being made in Rochester, Kodak no longer fuels the regional economy or produces the bulk of the nation’s photographs. Business journals often cite digital imaging as the reason for Kodak’s decline, but this paper will consider the obsolescence of chemical photography through the matter of chemistry itself. As historians of science have argued and the case of Kodak suggests, obsolescence is always intertwined with industrial chemistry because the later is premised on the substitution of synthetic materials for natural resources. Just as roll film replaced the glass plates used to make photographs in the 19th century, Kodak scientists continuously devised ever cheaper and more light-sensitive films, obsolescing earlier products in the process. How might thinking with chemistry reframe ideas of obsolescence and the contradictions between linear narratives of progress, repetitive loops of boom and bust, and the long-term, accretive side effects of industrial production? I draw on archival and ethnographic research to explore the ethical worlds and styles of capitalism that emerged around chemical photography and that made film possible. I attend to the durative qualities and physical properties of chemicals and images to theorize how the affective, ecological, and aesthetic traces chemical photography continue to shape Rochester today. In 2005, Ali Feser graduated from Bard College, where she wrote her senior project on digital media and political affect in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago and is halfway through two years of fieldwork on the history and afterlives of chemical photography in Rochester, New York. |
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Thursday, January 14, 2016
'Child Well-Being in Northern Canada'
Olin LC 118 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Measuring poverty and inequality in northern Canada and The Well-Being of Adolescents in Northern Canada |
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Monday, January 11, 2016
Olin LC 118 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Early childhood stunting has been known to be an indicator of cognitive developmental stunting. What is the relationship between early childhood stunting and later educational outcomes? To answer this question, I examine matched pairs of siblings who differ in their third trimester in-utero exposure to the Tanzania hunger season. Using multiple placebo groups, I create falsification tests to show that congenital stunting is driving the effects on educational outcome. Additionally, I test for possible impacts of household heterogeneity, selective mortality, and sibling investment spillovers. My results find that a standard deviation increase in under-five stunting decreases years of education completed by approximately one grade level. |
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Thursday, December 3, 2015
Kerry Chance, '02
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 This paper approaches climate change as a long-standing political struggle from below, rather than a new crisis to be solved by scientific expertise, corporate accountability, or governmental efficiency from above. I examine how the urban poor in South Africa manage air pollution that is at once chemical, spiritual, and technological. I focus on a tension between breathing and being unable to breathe, a characteristic state in historically segregated townships and shack settlements. A key practice mediating these states is what residents refer to as “coughing out” (ukubhodla in isiZulu). Ukubhodla is when you clear your lungs to breathe – whether to sing, pray, or speak to ancestors – in effervescent collective space. The local and global networks produced, in spite of their fleeting and ephemeral qualities, give substance to public solidarity between residents. Broadly, I argue that breathing, the most taken-for-granted of human activities, is a highly differentiated practice. As the first and the last gesture of politics, breathing embodies innovative challenges by the urban poor to climate change consensus. |
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Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Olin Humanities, Room 102 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This paper focuses on the labor of interpreters hired by the UN and UN High Commission of Human Rights (OCHR) after the Maoist war in Nepal, and the politics of voice inherent in their work. Such interpreters are key figures of global citizenship and embody the international ideals espoused by the UN, OCHR, and other similar human rights and humanitarian organizations. They are hired to reproduce the speech of others guided by an ideology of transparency and machine-like fidelity. The victims of human rights abuses with whom they are paired are often described as voiceless subjects, and the interpreter's task is to access testimonies and eye-witness accounts for use as evidence in human rights cases and policy, a process sometimes described as "giving victims a voice." Sound is central to the experience that results, as interpreters describe the labor of intense listening that is the basis of the testimonies they are hired to produce. In this talk, I consider how UN human rights interpreters help constitute a global citizenship in which the sounds and voices that convey extreme experience becomes portable in the form of texts to a wider public. Their work, based on what they "selflessly" hear and transmit rather than on what they themselves have seen, heard, or felt, is part of a broader production of the myth of transparency. Please join us for a reception prior to the event beginning at 6:30 p.m. in the Olin Atrium |
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Thursday, November 19, 2015
Arendt Center 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Monthly meeting of faculty interested in the practice or critical analysis of sound, sound technologies, soundscapes, listening. |
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Thursday, November 5, 2015
Nick Shapiro, '08
Open Air Fellow, Public Lab + Matter, Materials and Culture Fellow, Chemical Heritage Foundation Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 The formaldehyde-based resins of pressed woods are an overlooked, yet foundational, agent in the homemaking and technological dreamworlds of mid-20th century America and continue to undergird much of the comfort, security, and affordability of the modern home. I ethnographically track formaldehyde from the shale pores from which its precursor is siphoned, a mile below the earth’s surface, to abandoned homes decomposing into the rural landscape—its formaldehyde stores almost entirely sublimated into the atmosphere. This paper asks, what does the good life look like in an engineered world that subsidizes our standard of living while ever-so-slowly smothering us. |
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Thursday, October 1, 2015
Elyse Singer, '10
Doctoral candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium Abortion clinics in Mexico City’s new public abortion program do more than provide medical care: they function as venues for the production of ethical subjects of the modern Mexican state. My dissertation examines how a central yet unexposed dimension of public abortion care involves “responsibilization”, a governing technique deployed increasingly in advanced neoliberal democracies (Rose 2000). Within the public program, begun in 2007, abortion is treated as the result of careless sexual decision-making; clinicians regularly enjoin patients to be more responsible. Invocations of individual responsibility detach abortion from social and structural context such that it emerges as a moral problem of individuals needing ethical reconstitution. Responsibilization is indicative of broader transformations in “reproductive governance” unfolding throughout Latin America alongside the incorporation of neoliberal economic policies and logics that emphasize self-sufficiency (Morgan and Roberts 2012). These changes have important consequences for citizenship. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research in Mexico City abortion clinics, including interviews with patients and staff, I argue that the program produces sexually (ir)responsible subjects instead of the empowered citizens that feminists and policy-makers had imagined with abortion reform. This moralizing context prevents the internalization of abortion rights, an element I conceptualize as central to reproductive citizenship. |
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Monday, September 28, 2015 If we look at refugee camps through the lens of architectural preservation, how might our understanding of camps change?Refugee camps are considered temporary spaces to be quickly dismantled. But how are we to understand the Palestinian refugee camps that are now almost 70 years old? Can we consider them cultural sites to be preserved?For many, being asked to look at refugee camps from this perspective may be a disturbing proposition. But this is the reality that is in front of our eyes, and therefore one that we cannot negate. One of the urgent questions becomes: do Palestinian refugee camps have history? And how might this history be mobilized for the right of return, instead of being perceived as a threat? And at the same time how does the concept of architectural heritage change when applied to refugee camps? For the workshop we would like to examine these questions and explore the political implications of challenging existing categories of nation, camp, and heritage. In collaboration with the Riwaq Center for Architectural Conservation and in the framework of the Riwaq Biennial, we have just started work on the documentation that will support the inscription of a group of buildings in refugee camps as World Heritage Sites under the protection of UNESCO.Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti are both architects and artists. Together they direct Campus in Camps, an experimental educational program based in Dheisheh refugee camp in Palestine. They are also co-founders, along with Eyal Weizman, of the Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency in Bethlehem. |
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Friday, September 4, 2015
Olin 102 Interested in applying for a Fulbright Scholarship, a Watson fellowship, or another postgraduate scholarship or fellowship? This information session will cover application procedures, deadlines, and suggestions for crafting a successful application. Applications will be due later this month, so be sure to attend one of the two information sessions!
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Thursday, September 3, 2015
RKC 103 Interested in applying for a Fulbright Grant, a Watson Fellowship, or another postgraduate scholarship or fellowship? This information session will cover application procedures, deadlines, and suggestions for crafting a successful application. Applications will be due later this month, so be sure to attend one of these two sessions!
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Monday, May 4, 2015
Emily Brissette, PhD
SUNY Oneonta RKC 102B The movement against the Vietnam War began modestly, but grew in both size and intensity as the years and the war dragged on. The movement against the Iraq War, in contrast, came together quickly and massively in the space of months and then largely receded from public view. Although the presence (and then absence) of the draft is often invoked as an explanation for the different trajectories of these movements, military recruitment practices are not the most important thing to have changed since the Vietnam era. Drawing on original archival work, this talk will trace how basic understandings of the nature of the state and citizenship (what I call “state imaginaries”) have also changed, and argue that this had profound consequences for antiwar activism in each moment by shaping how and where activists located responsibility for war. |
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Monday, April 20, 2015 Preston Antarctic Edge: 70° South is a thrilling journey to the bottom of the Earth alongside a team of dedicated scientists. In the wake of devastating climate events like Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Katrina, oceanographer Oscar Schofield teams up with a group of world-class researchers in a race to understand climate change in the fastest winter-warming place on earth: the West Antarctic Peninsula. For more than 20 years, these scientists have dedicated their lives to studying the Peninsula's rapid change as part of the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research Project. Filmed in the world's most perilous environment, Antarctic Edge brings to us the stunning landscapes and seascapes of Earth's southern polar region, revealing the harsh conditions and substantial challenges that scientists must endure for months at a time. While navigating through 60-foot waves and dangerous icebergs, the film follows them as they voyage south to the rugged, inhospitable Charcot Island, where they plan to study the fragile and rapidly declining Adelie Penguin. For Schofield and his crew, these birds are the greatest indicator of climate change and a harbinger of what is to come. Antarctic Edge: 70° South was made in a collaboration between the Rutgers University Film Bureau and the Rutgers Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences. A unique inter-disciplinary educational project bridging art, science and storytelling, Antarctic Edge was funded in part by the National Science Foundation. Followed by a short reception 630-7 and a lecture at 7 PM: Bridging Humanities, Art and Science Through Digital Filmmaking |
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Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Olin 304 Beginning mid-nineteenth century, first French and Ottoman officials, and later British officials set aside significant tracts of land for environmental conservation in the Arab world. The convention was continued under subsequent Jordanian administration of the West Bank. In fact, nature areas remain one of the largest classifications of land in the Palestinian West Bank today, covering more than 30 official reserves, or about 5 percent of the land area. This little-known legacy reveals the enduring and contested status of protected conservation areas in Historic Palestine. Recent scholarship on the topic has elucidated the establishment of forest and nature reserves in Palestine and connections with other British colonial sites. However, little is known about the relationship between conservation programs and affected Palestinians. This paper explores the contested status of protected areas through the articulation of official conservation programs and Palestinian cultivation practice in the West Bank.
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Thursday, April 9, 2015
with Seema Golestaneh
Olin Humanities, Room 101 As the Iranian authorities continue to frown upon public gatherings, Sufi Orders have sought alternative methods of convening while still complying with city regulations. One informal Sufi group in the city of Isfahan does so by meeting in private homes and rotating locations each week. Rather than circulate the specific address of a meeting place, however, the mystics instead instruct the others to meet at a nearby intersection, and then broadcast music from a courtyard or house to alert the members to the exact location. This in turn allows them to locate the site by listening for and ultimately “following” the sounds. It is in this way that the Sufis utilize the practice of intentional listening (sama) and mystical ideals of wandering to navigate the politics of Iranian urban space. This talk will hence examine the utilization of mystical epistemologies to lead to the emergence of an alternative Islamic space in post-revolutionary Iran. |
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Tuesday, March 3, 2015 Associate Professor Department of Anthropology Columbia University RKC 115 This paper will explore the two careers of rickshaw puller and policeman through the lens of clothing since the rickshaw pullers were often spectacularly dressed in “costumes” that echoed “Zulu” aesthetics while the policeman was stripped of such excess and given a suit and various other articles of clothing made of worsted wool. As photographic subjects, the rickshaw and the policeman seem to be polar opposites and yet many men seem to have cycled through both careers. The paper will also explore how the very notion of a “career” was established specifically for Zulu men and how forms of work as diverse as child caring and laundering were all tied together by assumptions that were made about the expendability of Zulu bodies. Needless to say, even the term “Zulu” is used advisedly since there was as much wishful thinking and fantasy on the part of photographers as there was a tangible reality that can be termed “Zuluness”. |
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Thursday, February 26, 2015
Ernst Karel
Anthropologist/sound artist, Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab Avery Art Center |
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Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Internships and workshops focused around architecture, urban planning, sustainable living and agriculture!
Olin Humanities, Room 201 We are set for another great semester of internships, guest lectures and workshops. We will hold our first bi-weekly group meeting this Wednesday at 7pm on the second floor of Olin–specific room TBA. We will give a brief introduction to the three divisions of BardBuilds, as well as the expectations we have for members. Then figure out what internship or workshops you will be interested in! |
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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. |
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Thursday, February 5, 2015
Avery Art Center A film shot in Nepal, produced through Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab.
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Tuesday, December 2, 2014 |
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Wednesday, November 12, 2014 Assistant Professor of Music, Tulane University Olin Humanities, Room 102 In New Orleans, the instruments of the brass band are sound technologies utilized to communicate particular messages to a community of listeners. In the local tradition of the jazz funeral, musicians determine the emotional register of the procession: mournful hymns regulate the slow march to the gravesite and upbeat popular songs signal the transition to celebratory dancing after burial. The musicians not only organize the memorial by changing tempo and repertoire, they communicate to the living and the dead through the material sound of their instruments. Black New Orleanians occupying public spaces where lynchings, race riots, segregation, and gentrification have taken place “give voice” to these submerged histories by marching and dancing to the beat of the brass band. And the most recent generation of musicians has drawn upon hip-hop, integrating the direct language of rap into a polyphony of voices that includes horns, drums, and group singing. In this case study of the brass bands of New Orleans, a holistic approach to sonic materiality integrates the spoken, the sung, and instrumental sound in a densely layered soundscape that creates meaning and value for racialized subjects of power. *Childcare available* Contact Laura Kunreuther for more information [email protected] |
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Monday, November 10, 2014 Bard Hall |
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Wednesday, October 29, 2014 Campus Center, Weis Cinema Come learn about one of the oldest forms of American music, shapenote singing, which is still practiced in many parts of the United States and abroad. This documentary features interviews with longtime singers in this tradition, as well as many minutes of sound and footage of the songs themselves. The screening will be followed by a brief Q & A period. Sponsored by Bard Ethnomusicology |
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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* |
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Thursday, October 9, 2014
Ryan Dohoney
Assistant Professor of Musicology, Northwestern University Olin Humanities, Room 102 In this talk I query the recent turn to ontology in anthropology and in the humanities more broadly. I investigate how both sound and affect figure in this ontological turn and how conceptions of both have been grounded in the thought of Gilles Deleuze. While Deleuze and others have drawn upon Alfred North Whitehead to conceptualize affect and its political promise, I argue that Whitehead has been misread and that he offers a more compositional way of thinking sound and affect through his philosophy. While Deleuze and his interlocutors find affect politically valuable precisely to the degree to which it exceeds subjectivity and engenders processes of “deterritorialization,” I argue that Whitehead offers a way to think of emotion as that which holds us together in fragile yet necessary bonds, with musical experience serving as a primary example of such collectivity. |
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Tuesday, September 30, 2014 Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Haverford College Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium There is a curiously intimate relationship between parody and identity in the era of digital circulation. Parody has shaped popular music in ways that reflect neoliberal sensibilities and how lives are lived through social media. For youth around the world, mobile popular culture and selfie-portraiture provide structures to imagine themselves as agents of change, as economically successful, as cosmopolitan. Digital music makes youth loud, literally and metaphorically, while also creating intimate channels of connection among social media users. Popular musical parodies are not simply humorous but take on authority gleaned from reference to more sincere forms of speaking and acting. In contemporary contexts, parody works by blurring the line between satire and sincerity and obscuring artistic intent. This paper examines an irreverent international Ghanaian hip-hop duo, the FOKN Bois who have built their fame through the potential and power of musical parody. They make outrageous songs that incite both fans and critics to respond with outrage, pleasure, or both. Their track “Thank God We’re Not a Nigerians” mocks the long-standing intimate ambivalence between Ghanaian and Nigerian nationhoods. While it explicitly pokes fun at Nigerian styles and moralities, it implicitly mocks how Ghanaians scrutinize and moralize about Nigerians. For young Ghanaian artists and audiences, shared language-use in multimodal digital popular music indexes membership in a pan-West African mobile community that refuses simple identities and mocks nationalism by blurring and moving between familiar register, speech practices, and ideas of moral value. |
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Wednesday, September 24, 2014
"Two Cheers for Corporate Social Responsibility"
A Talk in the Social Studies Divisional Colloquium Olin Humanities, Room 102 As “corporate social responsibility” enters the mainstream, itsinitials "CSR" have become a dirty word for a broad segment of the engaged public. The voluntariness, vagueness, and uncertainty of enforcement – not to mention blatant propaganda by companies – overwhelm any positive value, they argue. At the other end of the spectrum, CSR enthusiasts insist that it is leading to a new paradigm, even challenging traditional forms of corporate governance. Oft overlooked in the debate over CSR is the way in which public campaigns have driven change and, even more importantly, shaped the mechanisms that emerge. CSR continues to be as much the story of savvy activists leveraging global networks as it is the monitoring mechanisms and codes of conduct -- maybe more so. Peter Rosenblum will explore the current debate, drawing on his recently completed research on Indian Tea plantations and a soon-to-published chapter addressing advocates and critics of CSR. |
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Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Interested in a sociology class?
Kline, President's Room Come and meet current and returning faculty to learn about courses in the Sociology Program this fall. All are welcome—whether you are considering majoring or interested in a particular class. Refreshments will be served. |
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Wednesday, April 16, 2014 Campus Center, Multipurpose Room |
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Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Olin Humanities, Room 202 Infrastructure has recently emerged as core site for innovative research in anthropology, and within the social sciences in general. Much of this work has sought to analyze infrastructures from a technopolitical perspective, whereby there is no a priori distinction to be made between technological artifacts and political projects, with both seen as being inscribed in the other from the very beginning. This talk considers the interpretive possibilities that arise when a technopolitical account is given of pre-modern infrastructure, drawing on the archaeological case of Inka highways in the pre-colonial Andes. It also considers the pitfalls in seeking to translate such analytical frames across modern and non-modern worlds, arguing that in the end, a technopolitical approach must always rely on modernist categories to some degree, even as it seeks to critique them.
Darryl Wilkinson is an archaeological anthropologist whose research addresses the themes of materiality, power and indigenous ontologies in the ancient Andes. He received his PhD from Columbia in 2013, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Cultural Analysis and a member of the 'Objects and Environments' research seminar at Rutgers University. His research has been published in the journals World Archaeology and the Cambridge Archaeological Journal. |
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Thursday, April 10, 2014
James Ferguson
Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium This paper develops an argument that new kinds of welfare states in the global South are opening up possibilities for new sorts of politics. Against an analysis of the limitations of traditional ideas of nationalization in Africa, it seeks to show that new forms of social assistance are allowing the question of national ownership of wealth to be reimagined in new ways -- ways that may allow the idea of a ”rightful share” to take on a quite different significance than it does in traditional discussions of nationalization of natural resources. Taking recent campaigns for a “Basic Income Grant” (BIG) in South Africa and Namibia as a window onto these new political possibilities, it argues that a new politics of distribution is emerging, in which citizenship-based claims to a share of national wealth are beginning to be recognizable as an alternative to both the paradigm of the market (where goods are received in exchange for labor) and that of “the gift” (where social transfers to those excluded from wage labor have been conceived as aid, charity, or assistance). Beyond the binary of market and gift, the idea of “a rightful share”, it is suggested, opens possibilities for radical political claims that could go far beyond the limited, technocratic aim of ameliorating poverty that dominates existing cash transfer programs. James Ferguson is the Susan S. and William H. Hindle Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. His research has focused on southern Africa (especially Lesotho, Zambia, South Africa, and Namibia), and has engaged a broad range of theoretical and ethnographic issues. His works include The Anti-Politics Machine: 'Development,' Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho; Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt; and Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. |
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Tuesday, March 11, 2014 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium The unraveling of the epidemic of kuru, a neurodegenerative disease, in a remote area of New Guinea, led to two Nobel Prizes in science and a classic ethnography, Kuru Sorcery, by anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum, who uncovered the role of endocannibalism in this disease's transmission. The revised and updated second edition of Kuru Sorcery provides an opportunity for a conversation about the place of anthropology in an interdisciplinary research project. Rayna Rapp will consider how kuru helped to define the emergence of medical anthropology in the context of multi-disciplinary research. Shirley Lindenbaum will reflect on how the kuru story has been elaborated in popular literature. |
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Thursday, February 27, 2014 Professor of Anthopology, Rutgers University Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium Experts who describe solar energy as an “alternative” – that contributes only a small fraction to our oil-driven economy – are measuring the wrong thing. Every day, the sun gives us thousands of times the wattage we consume in oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power. Bizarrely, the entire conventional calculus of energy omits the overwhelming bulk of it, the elephant in a small room. This paper examines an instance of such forgetting: the transition from solar energy to something like oil in the Orinoco Basin of colonial South America. In the 1740s, the Jesuit missionary and geographer, Josef Gumilla marveled in the God-given fertility of the tropics. Solar rays and Spanish settlers, he hoped, would turn the Orinoco into a breadbasket for cacao. Forty years later, the governor of Trinidad, Josef María Chacón proposed a second plan for colonization. On this island of the Orinoco delta, he identified tropical fertility with disease and overly dense vegetation. Instead of solar rays, Chacón’s promotion of sugar required enslaved Africans, and lots of them. The governor calculated employment rates per land area, death rates, and replacement rates through imports. In so doing, he helped create the modern, narrow concept of energy: a transportable, storable commodity unrelated to either the landscape or to God. One could almost squeeze exploited labor into barrels and sell it by the gallon. When geologists discovered oil – on Trinidad, in fact, in 1859 – the energy experts were ready for it. In cultural terms, slaves served as the bridge fuel from solar energy to petroleum. Remembering this history adds a span to the bridge back in the other direction. |
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Thursday, February 20, 2014 Olin Hall A contemplation and contemporary contextualization of processes and impact of selection in music as revealed in the moral dilemma of contemporary African-American commercial music. ANTHONY M. KELLEY BIOGRAPHYAnthony Kelley joined the Duke University music faculty in 2000 after serving as Composer-in-Residence with the Richmond Symphony for three years under a grant from Meet the Composer. His recent work (like his soundtracks for the H. Lee Waters/Tom Whiteside film "Conjuring Bearden" [2006] Dante James's film, "The Doll" [2007], Josh Gibson's "Kudzu Vine" [2011]) explores music as linked with other media, arts, and sociological phenomena. In 2011, Kelley was the winner of Duke's Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. He has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies in Duke's Department of Music since his appointment to the post in Fall, 2012. |
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Monday, February 17, 2014
David Novak
(UC Santa Barbara) Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium This talk considers the recent mix of "sound demos,” art installations and antinuclear music festivals in contexts of political protest in Japan since the tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi on March 11, 2011. I focus on a performance festival called Project Fukushima! organized by experimental musician Ôtomo Yoshihide, poet Wago Ryoichi and punk rock legend Endô Michirô to provoke public discourse about nuclear power and the future of the partly-evacuated city (the name of his hometown, Ôtomo said, should not become a generalized reference to nuclear accident -- “another Chernobyl”). Only a few months after the meltdown in 2011 and again in August 2012, this group of underground performers brought audiences in the thousands back to Fukushima. Bands performed on stages, in the streets, and on local trains; the audience sat on a gigantic furoshiki cloth tapestry conceived to protect them from the irradiated ground. In addition to his role as primary organizer and performer in Project Fukushima! Ôtomo has written powerfully on the role of arts and culture in the response to the Fukushima Disaster, and gives regular public talks about cultural activism, as well as authoring widely circulated blogposts and tweets about the antinuclear movement. Through my ethnographic research in Tokyo, Osaka, and Fukushima in 2012 and 2013, I contextualize Project Fukushima! as part of an ongoing series of public actions of music and noise making and “reclaim-the-streets” performance tactics that galvanized public response to the nuclear restart and the future of energy policy in Japan. David Novak is an Associate Professor of Music and Ethnomusicology at UC Santa Barbara. |
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Friday, December 13, 2013
Olin Humanities, Room 102 The Belo Monte hydroelectric facility, located in the Brazilian Amazon, will be the world’s third largest dam when completed in 2019. This energy project is touted as a sustainable development initiative, but its construction is bringing rapid social and environmental changes to the urban centers closest to the construction site, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities through displacement, rising prices, and inadequate government services. In this context, I examine the factors that enable and constrain dam-affected people as they make demands for their rights, highlighting the importance of collective imaginations of the future. I argue that effective translation, or the reframing of these imagined futures into language and demands that can be understood and acted upon by others, is a necessary step in addressing the needs of the most marginalized.
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Sunday, November 10, 2013
Campus Center, Multipurpose Room Dan Archer creates non-fictional, journalistic comics to offer a new perspective on US foreign and domestic policy and give voice to stories that wouldn’t otherwise be heard. His topics include human trafficking in Nepal, the International Criminal Court, the Honduran Coup, Occupy Oakland, Bhutan refugees and more.
This event is part of the series "What You Need to Know about Journalism Now," with events taking place November 10–13. Events in this series: Comics in Real Life: The Graphic Journalism of Dan Archer 7 p.m. Sunday, November 10 in the MPR Privacy and Freedom of Information in the Age of Digital Journalism: A Panel with Azmat Khan, Noorain Khan, and Nabiha Syed 6 p.m. Monday, November 11 in Olin 102 Resignation, Layoffs, and the State of Journalism Now: With Francesca Shanks, Adam Shanks, Tom Casey, Billy Shannon 5 p.m. Tuesday, November 12 in Preston HallBeing Ambitious and Being Yourself: A Talk by Professor Walter Russell Mead 7 p.m. Wednesday, November 13 in the MPR |
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Monday, October 21, 2013
RKC 103 Richmond Virginia, erstwhile capital of the Confederacy, is a city that memorialized in its built landscape the ideology of the “Lost Cause.” This lecture will provide a preliminary sketch for the ways that local history and art museums with national stature have responded and continue to respond to this troubling heritage as they try to create a more salutary urban imagined community. These museums are leaders in a wider movement among US cities of a certain size to explicitly link cultural development to urban renewal. As such they must attract a national audience while not alienating local communities which, for their part, are often polarized along all too familiar racial and ideological lines.
Eric Gable is a professor of anthropology at the University of Mary Washington. He is a managing editor for the journal Museum and Society and the associate editor for book reviews for American Ethnologist. |
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Thursday, September 26, 2013 |
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Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Bard Hall François Demange
In conversation with Abou Farman (Department of Anthropology)François Demange (MA Anthropology) has been training with indigenous medicine people and practicing their healing methods since 1996 in both the Peruvian Amazon and in North America. He is considered one of the most experienced Westerners in the practice of the traditional Amazonian medicine called Vegetalismo, which is defined as the plant spirit medicine practice of that region. François is also a follower of the Red Path; he is a pipe carrier, a Sundancer, and has been adopted by the Dakota Nation. He uses a combination of spiritual and energetic methods to read, diagnose and address the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual imbalance in his patients. He is a Reiki Master and Co-Founder of Sacred Medicine Foundation. |
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Monday, April 22, 2013
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium Tejaswini Ganti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and its Program in Culture & Media at New York University. A visual anthropologist specializing in South Asia, her research interests include Indian cinema, anthropology of media, production cultures, visual culture, cultural policy, nationalism, neoliberalism, capitalism, ideologies of development and theories of globalization. She has been conducting ethnographic research about the social world and filmmaking practices of the Hindi film industry since 1996 and is the author of Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Duke University Press 2012) and Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2004; 2nd edition, 2013).
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Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Robbins Join the AUCA-Bard staff for an evening of Central Asian culture and cooking! Learn to make Eurasian favorites like plov and manti or just enjoy the food and company.
Held in Robbins House kitchens and common room. Download: Central Asian Cooking Nights.pdf |
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Friday, April 12, 2013 Olin Humanities, Room 102 This day-long workshop brings together Bard faculty and students to explore a range of questions on teaching and learning about cities in an academic context. We will ask: How do the reading of texts, the building of cultural monuments, and the creation of artistic works transform our understandings of the city? Is it possible to read the city as a text or view it as a cultural monument? Are there cities better preserved in cultural memory than physical space? How are identities and ideas of cities formed through literature, film, and other media? In what ways can these different strategies of representation transform the urban experience and the city itself? Students will present their work on cities at a panel, to be followed by a roundtable for faculty on teaching methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and principles of canon formation to consider when discussing cities and urban space in the classroom. |
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Thursday, April 11, 2013 László Z. Bitó ’60 Conservatory Building |
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Friday, April 5, 2013
Campus Center MPR Enjoy of the dance, food, and Latin music of the Latin week at Bard.
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Thursday, April 4, 2013
RKC Room 103 A panel discussion with Bard students, staff, and faculty.
Panelist: Katherine Del Santo '13, Rosemary Ferreira '14, Marial Hoz '14, Julieth Nuñez '14, Melanie Mignucci '16, Adolfo Coyotel '16. |
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Thursday, April 4, 2013 László Z. Bitó ’60 Conservatory Building |
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Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Olin Humanities, Room 102 Mayanthi Fernando
University of California & Wesleyan UniversityHow does the public/private distinction so central to secular-liberal democracy inflect the secular state's regulation of sex and religion? Focusing on contemporary France, this talk analyzes how political and legal practices aimed at securing secularity by rendering both sex and religion private paradoxically compel Muslim women to reveal in public the innermost details of their sexual and religious lives. That dual incitement to hide and to exhibit, and the grim consequences of exhibiting that which must be hidden, constitute "the cunning of secular power." Mayanthi Fernando is Assistant Professor Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently a visiting professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University for Spring 2013. Her first book is Asymmetries of the Republic: Islam, Secularism, and the Future of France, forthcoming from Duke University Press. |
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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. |
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Tuesday, April 2, 2013 Talk Rescheduled for Original Date of April 2nd László Z. Bitó ’60 Conservatory Building This is a talk based upon doctoral research in the Ukraine among the Sunni Muslim indigenous group of Crimea. |
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Monday, April 1, 2013
¿Hablalo? Hear'em Out
Olin Hall Enjoy the reading of poetry in Spanish and English by students at Bard, right after Junot Diaz reading. |
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Thursday, March 7, 2013 Tewksbury Hall Join the AUCA-Bard staff for an evening of Central Asian culture and cooking! Learn to make Eurasian favorites like plov and manti or just enjoy the food and company. Held in Tewksbury Hall kitchens and common roomJoin the AUCA-Bard staff for an evening of Central Asian culture and cooking! Learn to make Eurasian favorites like and or just enjoy the food and company.Held in the Tewksbury Hall Kitchen and common room |
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Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Hunting Ham and Sieving Spam: The Relation between Meaning, Math, and Meat
RKC 103 Paul Kockelman is an Associate Professor at Barnard College and Columbia University. He is a linguistic anthropologist who is broadly interested in the relation between meaning, value, and information. He is the author of Language, Culture, and Mind: Natural Constructions and Social Kinds (Cambridge University Press 2009), as well as numerous articles. His scholarship has focused on a broad set of interrelated topics concerning language, culture and mind. Methodologically, he draws on his empirical research to analyze relations among grammatical categories, discourse patterns, social relations, and cultural values as they unfold in both face-to-face and more mediated forms of interaction. His research has been sustained by extensive linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork, primarily among speakers of Q’eqchi’-Maya living in the cloud forests of highland Guatemala, and now more and more among scientists and engineers working on and with a variety of information technologies. Sponsored by Anthropology and Mind, Brain & Behavior. |
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Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Miriam Ticktin, The New School
Olin 102 |
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Thursday, November 15, 2012 Preston The fourth and final installment of a semester-long film series sponsored by the Anthropology Department, Sari Soldiers comes from director Julie Bridgham. Filmed over the course of three years, The Sari Soldiers chronicles the lives of six Nepalese women following Nepal’s recent civil war. From the dedicated commander of a Maoist battalion to the student leader of the pro-democracy movement in Katmandu, these women are carving out revolutionary spaces in the midst of a complex and violent conflict. When one woman’s daughter goes missing, the six women’s stories swirl around the search to bring her home, capturing the many sides of opposition in Nepal, and illustrating with grace and eloquence the changing attitudes towards women’s involvement in the country. |
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Friday, November 9, 2012 Preston The third installment of a semester-long film series sponsored by the Anthropology Department, Devi comes from director Satyajit Ray. The film is set in 1860 at Chandipur, in rural Bengal, India. Devi focuses on a young woman, who is deemed a goddess when her father-in-law, a rich feudal landlord, envisions her as the Goddess Kali. Ray's feeling for the intoxicating beauty within the disintegrating way of life of the 19th century landowning class makes this one of the rare, honest films about decadence. - Pauline Kael |
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Thursday, November 8, 2012 RKC 103 What, when, and where is the real China? According to a growing group of young people in cities across the country, the real China is not to be found in the reality of the present. Instead of skyscrapers, mega-events, new fashion, and globalization, the groups discussed in this talk envision courtyard homes, ancient rituals, organic foods, traditional robes, and sociocultural homogeneity as embodying the proper essence of China, an eternal land of rites and etiquette (liyi zhi bang). Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted with members of the Han Clothing Movement and rapidly growing Confucian and traditionalist educational associations, this talk examines the rise of social movements dedicated to a fundamentally conservative vision of China within a rapidly urbanizing, globalizing, and increasingly complex society. What are these movements’ main ideals, objectives, and practices? Why have they emerged at this moment? Who joins these movements, and what benefits do they derive from their involvement? Yet most importantly, is their “real China” of the past any more real than the present? And what are the repercussions of these tensions between reality and imagining, or between actuality and ideals, in the national experience in general? |
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Monday, November 5, 2012
Everyday Aspects of Anthropological Research in the Middle East and North Africa, with Dave Crawford and J. Zerrin Holle
Olin Humanities, Room 102 Dave Crawford is Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology and Anthropology at Fairfield University in Connecticut. His anthropological fieldwork has focused on Berber speakers in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, particularly regarding issues of globalization, the transition to wage labor, gender and household dynamics, and social inequality. He won the Julian Steward Award for his first book, Moroccan Households in the World Economy, and he has a coedited volume coming out this spring, Encountering Morocco: Fieldwork and Cultural Experience. J. Zerrin Holle is a student in the Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies Departments at Bard. Her ongoing fieldwork involves working with Kurdish communities that are internally displaced throughout Turkey, specifically in Istanbul. Her research focuses on issues of forced migration and resettlement. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Civic Engagement and MES. |
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Tuesday, October 30, 2012 Preston The second installment of a semester-long film series sponsored by the Anthropology Department, The Home and the World comes from director Satyajit Ray. "The Home and the World is based on a novel of the same name by the Hindu writer Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel Prize winner. Satyajit Ray, the greatest Indian director, was a young man when he first wrote a screenplay based on the novel, but it has taken him thirty-five years to film it. It is a contemplative movie -- quiet, slow, a series of conversations punctuated by sudden bursts of activity. The suspense in the movie and the drama all form around the changing character of Bimala, the wife. We see her move from total seclusion to the ability to act recklessly and with courage. Together, [the characters] form a small group of ideas and emotions, growing and shifting, mirroring in their secluded chambers the violent changes in India. -Roger Ebert |
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Tuesday, October 23, 2012
TBA
Olin 102 |
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Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Avery Art Center "Tahimik made a triumphant entrance onto the world cinema stage in the
late 70s/early 80s with the appearance of his feature films PERFUMED NIGHTMARE and TURUMBA, which remain two of the most uncategorizable, formally audacious, profoundly entertaining, deeply whimsical, yet politically incisive films in post-colonial cinema. Since then, Tahimik’s work has had very little exposure in North America, even as he has been busier than ever, focusing his boundless energy on a series of adventures, projects, and films ranging from the epic to the compact to the fragmentary. Kidlat who involves himself in every single step of filmmaking, from script-writing through shooting, editing, acting, and producing to directing. By doing this, he has made a great contribution to global filmmaking culture, and has won international acclaim for his unique style of presenting a distinctively Filipino combination of third-world self-consciousness and pride, wrapping this up in his own individual sense of humour." |
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Wednesday, September 26, 2012 Preston The first installment of a semester-long film series sponsored by the Anthropology Department, Pather Panchali comes from director Satyajit Ray. "The first film by the masterly Satyajit Ray - possibly the most unembarrassed and natural of directors - is a quiet reverie about the life of an impoverished Brahman family in a Bengali village. Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love, it brought a new vision of India to the screen." - Pauline Kael |
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Tuesday, April 24, 2012
RKC 101 Aaron GlassBard Graduate Center
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Thursday, March 22, 2012
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium John Collins
Department of Anthropology, CUNY |
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
RKC 101 Aaron Glass
Bard Graduate Center |
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
RKC 101 Aaron Glass
Bard Graduate Center |
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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. |
Art Newspaper Spoke with James Fuentes ’98 About His Gallery’s Move to Tribeca
“James Fuentes Gallery, long a forward-looking presence in the contemporary art scene on New York’s Lower East Side, is the latest space to decamp to Tribeca,” writes Jillian Billard for the Art Newspaper. The eponymous gallery of alumnus James Fuentes ’98, who will be awarded the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters at this year’s Bard College Awards, has long championed “artists with practices outside the commercial conventions of the contemporary art market.”
Art Newspaper Spoke with James Fuentes ’98 About His Gallery’s Move to Tribeca
Post Date: 03-26-2024
Bard College Named a Top Producer of Fulbright Students for 2023–24
Bard College is proud to be included on the list of US colleges and universities that produced the most 2023–24 Fulbright students and scholars. Each year, the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs announces the top producing institutions for the Fulbright Program, the US government’s flagship international educational exchange program.Bard College Named a Top Producer of Fulbright Students for 2023–24
Seven graduates from Bard received Fulbright awards for academic year 2023–24. Getzamany “Many” Correa ’21, a Global and International Studies major, and Elias Ephron ’23, a joint major in Political Studies and Spanish Studies, will live in Spain as Fulbright English Teaching Assistants (ETAs). Biology major Macy Jenks ’23 will be an ETA in Taiwan. Eleanor Tappen ’23, a Spanish Studies major, will be an ETA in Mexico. Juliana Maitenaz ’22, who graduated with a BA in Global and International Studies and a BM in Classical Percussion Performance, was selected for an independent study–research Fulbright scholarship to Brazil. Bard Conservatory alumna Avery Morris ’18, who graduated with a BA in Mathematics and a BM in Violin Performance, won a Fulbright Study Research Award to Poland. Evan Tims ’19, who was a joint major in Written Arts and Human Rights with a focus on anthropology at Bard, received a Fulbright-Nehru independent study–research scholarship to India. Additionally, Adela Foo ’18 won a Fulbright Study Research Award to Turkey through Yale University, where she is a PhD candidate in art history.
“As an institution, Bard College is proud and honored to be included in the list of Top Producing Fulbright Institutions for 2023-2024,” said Molly J. Freitas, Ph.D., associate dean of studies and Fulbright advisor at Bard. “We believe that Fulbright's mission to promote and facilitate cross-cultural exchange and understanding through teaching and research is in perfect alignment with Bard's own institutional identity and goals. We wish to extend our congratulations to our newest Fulbright awardees and reiterate our gratitude to the faculty, staff, and community members who have supported these students during the Fulbright application process and throughout their time as Bard students.”
“Fulbright’s Top Producing Institutions represent the diversity of America’s higher education community. Dedicated administrators support students and scholars at these institutions to fulfill their potential and rise to address tomorrow’s global challenges. We congratulate them, and all the Fulbrighters who are making an impact the world over,” said Lee Satterfield, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Fulbright is a program of the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. Government. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program.
Fulbright alumni work to make a positive impact on their communities, sectors, and the world and have included 41 heads of state or government, 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 80 MacArthur Fellows, and countless leaders and changemakers who build mutual understanding between the people of the United State and the people of other countries.
Post Date: 02-13-2024
Six Bard College Students Win Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad
Six Bard College juniors—Lyra Cauley, David Taylor-Demeter, Lisbet Jackson, Yadriel Lagunes, Angel Ramirez, and Jennifer Woo—have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the US Department of State. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs.Six Bard College Students Win Gilman International Scholarships to Study Abroad
Biology major Yadriel Lagunes ’25, from Clifton, New Jersey, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador via tuition exchange for spring 2024. At Bard, he serves as a Residential Life Peer Counselor and a supervisor on the Bard EMT Squad. “This scholarship has made studying abroad a possibility for me,” says Lagunes. “I want to center global public health in my future career as a healthcare worker and researcher. Through travel, I hope foster cultural sensitivity and communication skills that are desperately needed in my field. I am so grateful for Gilman scholarship for this opportunity.”
French and Anthropology double major Lyra Cauley ’25, from Blue Hill, Maine, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study at the Center for University Programs Abroad (CUPA) in Paris, France via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “I would like to thank the Gilman scholarship for giving me financial security and freedom abroad. This scholarship allows me to fully embrace the experience of learning and living abroad with financial worry or strain,” says Cauley.
Biology major Angel Ramirez ’25, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $3,000 Gilman scholarship to study at University College Roosevelt in Middelburg, The Netherlands via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “I’m very grateful to be a recipient of the Gilman scholarship,” says Ramirez. “It’s a huge opportunity to be able to pursue my goals within biology for my future in STEM. I’m excited to learn a new language abroad in the Netherlands and experience new cultures without a financial barrier. I proudly come from a family of Mexican immigrants; therefore, I feel empowered that people like me are able to partake in a change as great as this one.”
Spanish and Written Arts joint major Lisbet Jackson ’25, from Colorado Springs, Colorado, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “I am incredibly grateful to the Gilman Scholarship for supporting my semester in Ecuador and ensuring I can commit to developing my Spanish, studying literature, and immersing myself in Ecuadorian culture. Thanks to the Gilman Scholarship I will also be more prepared to pursue a career in multilingual and global education,” says Jackson.
Sociology major Jennifer Woo ’25, from Brooklyn, New York, has been awarded a $3,500 Gilman scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin in Germany for spring 2024. “To be awarded this scholarship means to fully explore and pursue my dream of studying abroad with the freedom of having the financial support I hoped for,” says Woo. “My dad is an artist who has always pushed me to travel and search for culture, the arts, and new experiences, so being able to fulfill this dream while having the resources of education means the world to me.”
German Studies major David Taylor-Demeter ’25, from Budapest, Hungary, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman scholarship to study at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany via tuition exchange for spring 2024. “To combine my studies of German language and literature with a day-to-day experience of Berlin is an invaluable opportunity,” says Taylor-Demeter.
Since the program’s inception in 2001, more than 41,000 Gilman Scholars from all US states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other US territories have studied or interned in more than 160 countries around the globe. The Department of State awarded more than 3,600 Gilman scholarships during the 2022-2023 academic year.
The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”
The Gilman Program is sponsored by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org.
Post Date: 12-15-2023
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Monday, March 29, 2021 |
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Tuesday, March 23, 2021 |
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Saturday, February 20, 2021 |
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Friday, February 19, 2021 |
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Tuesday, November 17, 2020 |
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Wednesday, November 11, 2020 |
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Thursday, May 21, 2020 |
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Wednesday, May 20, 2020 |
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Tuesday, May 19, 2020 |
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Monday, May 18, 2020 |
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Sunday, May 17, 2020 |
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Saturday, May 16, 2020 |
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Friday, May 15, 2020 |
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Thursday, May 14, 2020 |
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Wednesday, May 13, 2020 |
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Tuesday, May 12, 2020 |
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Monday, May 11, 2020 |
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Sunday, May 10, 2020 |
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Saturday, May 9, 2020 |
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Friday, May 8, 2020 |
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Thursday, May 7, 2020 |
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Wednesday, May 6, 2020 |
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Tuesday, May 5, 2020 |
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Monday, May 4, 2020 |
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Sunday, May 3, 2020 |
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Saturday, May 2, 2020 |
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Friday, May 1, 2020 |
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Thursday, April 30, 2020 |
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Wednesday, April 29, 2020 |
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Tuesday, April 28, 2020 |
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Thursday, April 2, 2020 |
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Thursday, April 2, 2020 |
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Monday, March 9, 2020 |
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Friday, March 6, 2020 |
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Thursday, February 27, 2020 |
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Thursday, February 13, 2020 |
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Tuesday, November 5, 2019 |
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Tuesday, October 8, 2019 |
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Wednesday, September 18, 2019 |
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Thursday, April 25, 2019 |
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Wednesday, April 24, 2019 |
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Wednesday, April 24, 2019 |
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Thursday, April 18, 2019 |
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Thursday, April 11, 2019 |
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Thursday, March 28, 2019 |
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Thursday, March 7, 2019 |
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Thursday, February 28, 2019 |
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Friday, February 1, 2019 – Friday, March 1, 2019 |
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Tuesday, October 30, 2018 |
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Monday, October 15, 2018 |
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Monday, October 1, 2018 |
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Thursday, April 19, 2018 |
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Thursday, April 19, 2018 |
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Wednesday, April 11, 2018 |
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Friday, April 6, 2018 |
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Monday, March 5, 2018 |
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Monday, November 27, 2017 |
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Tuesday, November 21, 2017 |
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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 |
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Thursday, October 19, 2017 |
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Tuesday, October 17, 2017 |
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Thursday, September 28, 2017 |
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Thursday, September 28, 2017 |
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Thursday, September 14, 2017 |
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Wednesday, May 17, 2017 |
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Wednesday, April 26, 2017 |
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Monday, April 24, 2017 |
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Thursday, April 20, 2017 |
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Monday, April 10, 2017 |
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Thursday, March 30, 2017 |
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Thursday, December 8, 2016 |
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Monday, December 5, 2016 |
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Thursday, December 1, 2016 |
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Thursday, October 27, 2016 |
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Thursday, October 13, 2016 |
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Thursday, September 29, 2016 |
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Monday, September 26, 2016 |
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Tuesday, September 20, 2016 – Friday, September 23, 2016 |
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Thursday, May 5, 2016 |
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Tuesday, April 26, 2016 |
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Monday, April 18, 2016 |
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Friday, April 8, 2016 |
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Thursday, April 7, 2016 |
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Tuesday, April 5, 2016 |
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Thursday, March 10, 2016 |
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Thursday, March 3, 2016 |
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Monday, February 29, 2016 |
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Thursday, February 25, 2016 |
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Tuesday, February 23, 2016 |
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Tuesday, February 16, 2016 |
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Thursday, February 4, 2016 |
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Thursday, January 14, 2016 |
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Monday, January 11, 2016 |
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Thursday, December 3, 2015 |
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Wednesday, December 2, 2015 |
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Thursday, November 19, 2015 |
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Thursday, November 5, 2015 |
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Thursday, October 1, 2015 |
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Monday, September 28, 2015 |
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Friday, September 4, 2015 |
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Thursday, September 3, 2015 |
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Monday, May 4, 2015 |
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Monday, April 20, 2015 |
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Tuesday, April 14, 2015 |
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Thursday, April 9, 2015 |
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Tuesday, March 3, 2015 |
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Thursday, February 26, 2015 |
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Wednesday, February 18, 2015 |
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Tuesday, February 10, 2015 |
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Thursday, February 5, 2015 |
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Tuesday, December 2, 2014 |
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Wednesday, November 12, 2014 |
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Monday, November 10, 2014 |
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Wednesday, October 29, 2014 |
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Monday, October 27, 2014 |
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Thursday, October 9, 2014 |
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Tuesday, September 30, 2014 |
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Wednesday, September 24, 2014 |
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Wednesday, May 7, 2014 |
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Wednesday, April 16, 2014 |
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Tuesday, April 15, 2014 |
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Thursday, April 10, 2014 |
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Tuesday, March 11, 2014 |
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Thursday, February 27, 2014 |
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Thursday, February 20, 2014 |
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Monday, February 17, 2014 |
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Friday, December 13, 2013 |
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Sunday, November 10, 2013 |
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Monday, October 21, 2013 |
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Thursday, September 26, 2013 |
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Tuesday, May 7, 2013 |
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Monday, April 22, 2013 |
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Tuesday, April 16, 2013 |
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Friday, April 12, 2013 |
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Thursday, April 11, 2013 |
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Friday, April 5, 2013 |
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Thursday, April 4, 2013 |
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Thursday, April 4, 2013 |
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Wednesday, April 3, 2013 |
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Tuesday, April 2, 2013 |
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Tuesday, April 2, 2013 |
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Monday, April 1, 2013 |
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Thursday, March 7, 2013 |
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Tuesday, February 26, 2013 |
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Tuesday, December 4, 2012 |
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Thursday, November 15, 2012 |
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Friday, November 9, 2012 |
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Thursday, November 8, 2012 |
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Monday, November 5, 2012 |
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Tuesday, October 30, 2012 |
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Tuesday, October 23, 2012 |
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Wednesday, October 17, 2012 |
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Wednesday, September 26, 2012 |
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Tuesday, April 24, 2012 |
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Thursday, March 22, 2012 |
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012 |
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012 |
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Friday, March 19, 2004 |