12/04: Tamás Gerőcs: Building National Capital Through the State in Hungary

12/04: Tamás Gerőcs: Building National Capital Through the State in Hungary

12/04: Tamás Gerőcs: Building National Capital Through the State in Hungary

12/04/2018
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
CUNY Graduate Center

Building National Capital Through the State in Hungary:
Repositioning of inter-capitalist class alliances in the context of geopolitical reconfiguration and semi-peripheral dependent development

 

Tuesday December 4th

6:30-8:30 pm

Room 6112 (Sociology Lounge)

 Hungary’s political reorientation since 2010 has been often interpreted in a post-Cold War narrative, as a radical shift from the liberal West towards the illiberal East. Contrary to this narrative, we propose a socio-historical analysis of the current Hungarian accumulation regime under the conduct of Viktor Orbán: we will focus on the political attempts of the rising political oligarchy which has been forming as a class fed by state and EU subsidies since the world economic crises but which group has also been using the semi-peripheral state for repositioning itself into a newly forming regional network of various inter-capitalist class alliances in the Eurasian and Transatlantic geopolitical space.

Credit: Leonhard Foeger/Reuters.

The analysis departs from the dismantling of the hegemonic Transatlantic project of the European integration in which former liberal elites in Eastern Europe used to feel eager to participate. We claim that state-class formation under the post-crisis accumulation regime in the semi-periphery can be interpreted in terms of a reconfiguration of asymmetric class alliances both in their external relations within the geopolitical space but also in the internal intra-capitalist class struggles. In the Hungarian semi-periphery the prolonged and deep structural crisis led to the total collapse of the former hegemonic block lead by liberal elites. The crisis provided the opportunity for the rising political oligarchy to capitalize and use the state for consolidating a national bourgeois class position vis-á-vis dominant comprador elites. The state is representing this interest not only in the form of consolidating class antagonism, but also in its attempt to revoke power relations as a junior partner of emerging capitalist alliances in the Eurasian and Transatlantic space.

The presentation points at linkages between the external forces of capitalist class alliances and the internal dynamics of the new Hungarian accumulation regime. While in competitive sectors that produce for export, the Hungarian state strongly subsidizes FDI, and subordinates labour to investors’ interests, on the other hand the oligarchy uses the state to renationalize formerly privatized public assets, such as utilities, energy, retail and banking companies in those areas in which semi-peripheral state possesses capacity to regulate for the benefit of the national bourgeoisie. While international political commentaries focus on the regime’s anti-Western and anti-EU symbolic statements, the regime is structurally not able to develop a fully antagonistic relationship to the dominant European industrial and financial classes, given Hungary’s dependence on external capital which also circumscribes the space where semi-peripheral state has the capacity to regulate. We interpret the regime’s attempts towards engagements with Russian and Chinese capital as following from this structural situation and from the inherent contradictions of the new oligarchy’s class project in the state. For assessing future trajectory we will put emphasis not only on the internal dynamics of the accumulation regime, let alone the will of prominent figures in the political oligarchy, but also on those global forces of reconfiguration that constrain the possibilities of the national bourgeois project in the post-crisis semi-peripheral state.

Tamás Gerőcs is a political economist who is currently a visiting scholar at Indiana University, Bloomington, Sociology Department. Gerőcs is a research fellow at the Institute of World Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Graduated from the Corvinus University of Budapest (BUC) in 2008 with the MA degree of International Relations. Gerőcs is currently working on his Phd at BUC. His research field of interest is Eastern European semi-peripheries with a special regard for economic transformation in Hungary and in other post-socialist countries, theoretical questions in semi-peripheral dependent development with respect to external financial dependencies and asymmetric vertical specialization in the German automotive value chain. Gerőcs is also a member of the Budapest-based Working Group for Public Sociology “Helyzet”.

This event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by The Center for Place, Culture and Politics and LeftEast.

12/04: Era O Hotel Cambridge (The Cambridge Squatter): Film Screening and Discussion

12/04: Era O Hotel Cambridge (The Cambridge Squatter): Film Screening and Discussion

12/04: Era O Hotel Cambridge (The Cambridge Squatter): Film Screening and Discussion

12/04/2018
6:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre

Era O Hotel Cambridge (The Cambridge Squatter):

Film Screening and Discussion

December 4th

6:30 PM

Segal Theater,

The Graduate Center

365 5th Ave, NY, NY 10016

Discussion and Q and A with Director Eliane Caffe (via Skype,) Prof. John Collins, and Prof. Amy Chazkel will follow the screening.

More info at: https://www.facebook.com/events/194055778182292/

This event is free and open to the public. It is co-sponsored by The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, MEMEAC and LAILAC.

11/30: Blood in the Streets: the Battle of Sur: Film Screening and Discussion

11/30: Blood in the Streets: the Battle of Sur: Film Screening and Discussion

11/30: Blood in the Streets: the Battle of Sur: Film Screening and Discussion

11/30/2018
6:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre

Blood in the Streets: the Battle of Sur

Film Screening and Discussion

with Ozlem Goner and Meredith Tax

November 30, 2018

6:30 – 9pm

Segal Theater 

CUNY Graduate Center

In the fall of 2015, Turkey declared war on its own citizens, bombing their homes, stationing snipers on rooftops, and destroying the ancient Kurdish district of Sur, a UNESCO historic site within the city of Diyarbakir.

What was the Turkish government so afraid of?

Based on news footage and live interviews, this is the untold story of how radical Kurds built a system they call “democratic autonomy” in Sur and other cities of northeast Turkey—a system based on pluralism, local control, and full citizenship for women. The Erdogan government found this level of democracy so threatening it responded by destroying the city, killing or jailing many of its activists, and dismantling the structures they had put in place for women’s liberation.

The film will be followed by discussion with Ozlem Goner and Meredith Tax.

Ozlem Goner is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. She earned degrees in Political Science and Sociology from Bogazici University, Turkey and her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her work on memory and historicity; political economy and environment; and outsider identities has been published in academic journals and edited volumes. Her book entitled, Turkish National Identity and its Outsiders: Memories of State Violence in Dersim, was published by Routledge in 2017.

Meredith Tax has been a writer and feminist organizer since the late Sixties. Her most recent book is A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State. She was active in Bread and Roses, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union and CARASA, and was founding president of Women’s WORLD, a global free speech network of feminist writers, and cofounder of the International PEN Women Writers’ Committee. She is on the steering committee of the Emergency Committee for Rojava. She blogs athttps://meredithtax.org/ [meredithtax.org]

Filmmakers:

Hicran Urun, born in Istanbul, is former editor of the pro-Kurdish newspapers Özgür Gündem and Özgürlükçü Demokrasi. She has been in detention since April, 2018 on charges “of being a member of a [terrorist] organization” for her work as a journalist.

Zana Kibar is a PhD student at Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul, doing research on the destruction of cities and city cultures on the example of Cizre. He participated in projects “Forced Disappearances in Custody” by Truth, Justice and Memory Studies Association; “Forced Displacement” by Göç-Der Association; “Oral History” by Dut Ağacı Derneği; “Women’s Migration Stories” by Savaşın Tanıkları Anlatıyor [Witnesses of War] and others. He also worked as a correspondent and editor for Özgür Gündem.

Cosponsored by Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Emergency Committee for Rojava. This event is free and open to the public.

11/06: The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism: with Catherine Rottenberg

11/06: The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism: with Catherine Rottenberg

11/06/2018
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Room 9206 and 9207, CUNY Graduate Center

The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism:

with Catherine Rottenberg

Tuesday, November 6th

6:30-8:00pm

Room 9207

CUNY Graduate Center

Catherine Rottenberg, discussing her new book, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, which offers a new framework for understanding the kind of cultural work neoliberal feminism carries out. Rottenberg argues that neoliberalism needs this new variant of feminism to colonize more domains, and examines the high-powered women and celebrities who are embracing this new variant of feminism.

Catherine Rottenberg is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics and the Gender Studies Program at Ben-Gurion University. She is the author of Performing Americanness: Race, Class and Gender in Modern African- and Jewish- American Literature and Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side.

This event is free and open to the public. It is co-sponsored by ARC (Advanced Research Collaborative, the CUNY GC PhD Program in Political Science, and PhD Program in Critical Social/Personality Psychology, The Center for the Study of Women and Society, and The Center for Place, Culture and Politics.

10/26 & 10/27: PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION IN AFRICANA TRADITIONS FROM MASS INCARCERATION TO UNIVERSAL EDUCATION: UNLOCKING THE SYSTEM

10/26 & 10/27: PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION IN AFRICANA TRADITIONS FROM MASS INCARCERATION TO UNIVERSAL EDUCATION: UNLOCKING THE SYSTEM

10/26 & 10/27: PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION IN AFRICANA TRADITIONS FROM MASS INCARCERATION TO UNIVERSAL EDUCATION: UNLOCKING THE SYSTEM

10/26/2018 - 10/27/2018
10:00 am - 6:00 pm
Room 9204

5th Annual Conference

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION IN AFRICANA TRADITIONS

FROM MASS INCARCERATION TO UNIVERSAL EDUCATION:

UNLOCKING THE SYSTEM

 

Friday, October 26,

10:00 am to 6:00 pm

Rooms 9204/9205

CUNY Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY 10016

 

Saturday, October 27,

10:00 am to 6:00 pm

May Day Space

176 Saint Nicholas Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

Mass incarceration in the United States has become a dehumanizing force that is destroying the very fabric of society.  Many young lives have wilted and many more are languishing in the penitentiaries for minor offenses and too often for no offense whatsoever.  The racialization of the criminal injustice system has resulted in the separation and impoverishment of families and the decimation of neighborhoods.  

In many communities one of the greatest barriers to a decent education is the depraved influence of the prison-industrial complex.  For human beings to flourish, it is essential that they receive a “universal” form of education capable of nurturing the emotional, psychological, physical and intellectual growth of the whole person.  To bring about a humane society, we need to change the trajectory currently leading to mass incarceration, redirecting it toward universal education and potentially recasting the social, political, and economic structures of the country.  For such transformative education to take hold, we must eliminate pedagogies of oppression and repression and free intellectual inquiry from established forms of monopoly control.

Consequently, at the conference we will seek to move beyond policies to effective practice, by exploring such difficult questions as the following:

—  Can universal education unlock an entrenched system of unjust laws?  Can universal education serve as an essential instrument both in reversing criminalization of the poor and in eradicating the prison-industrial complex?

—  Can education be emancipated from cultural imperialism?  Can effective resistance

     be mobilized against harmful institutional models, such as zero tolerance policies

     and high-stakes testing requirements?  

— Are we suffering from a poverty of imagination among many educational “reformers?”

    Can awareness of available “best practices” encourage more innovative thinking?

— To what extent can socio-economic relationships, political systems and cultural

    productions be redirected toward empathy, community, cooperation, and human

    dignity?   Can we truly succeed in building a just and humane society?

 

Philosophy and Religion in Africana Traditions 2018

From Mass Incarceration to Universal Education: Unlocking the System

Friday October 26, 2018

10:00 AM-6:00 PM

Center for Place, Culture and Politics

The Graduate Center of The City University of New York

Rooms 9204/9205

365 Fifth Avenue

New York, New York 10016

MORNING SESSION:

10: 00 am- 1: 00 pm

10:00 am- 10:20 am

Greetings and opening statement: J. Everet Green – Mercy College

Greetings: Mary Taylor – CUNY The Graduate Center

10:30-am – 11:30am

“Du Bois’ Anticipation of Mass Incarceration in ‘The Conservation of Races’”

Speaker: Kimberly Ann Harris, Ph.D. -Marquette University

Chair: Brittany O’Neal, Ph.D.- Lehman College City university of New York

11:40 am – 12:40 pm

“Poetic Pedagogy in the age of Mass Incarceration”

Speaker: John Gavin White– Ma’at Shule Homeschool Co – Operative

Chair: Jameliah Shorter-Bourhanou Ph.D.- Georgia College and Holy Cross, MA

12:45 pm-2:00 pm

LUNCH

AFTERNOON SESSION

2:15 PM – 6:00 PM

2:00pm -2:-15 pm Greetings and Introduction: J. Everet Green

2:20PM- 3:20 PM “Nightmares Beneath the American Dream: Why is it so Hard to Wake Up?”

“The American Dream,” as an aspirational concept, evokes a sunny, happy existence in a land of freedom and opportunity. Millions of people have yearned to share in these blessings, and many have succeeded. But to what extent does this cheerful picture match the full reality of American life? Beneath “the American Dream” lie dreadful nightmares of death and destruction, of suffering and injustice, that as a nation we have yet to fully acknowledge. Will we be able to wake up and honestly face the dark side of American existence, or will we continue to repress the truth about ourselves?

Speaker: Enid Bloch, Ph. D Chair: Kimberly Ann Harrison

3:30PM-4:30 PM

Understanding Black Music: a Theory of Resilience

Speaker : Althea SullyCole- Columbia University Chair: Blanche Curry , Ph.D., Fayetteville State University

4:40 pm-5:40 pm “Education and Spiritual Activism: Towards a Future Centering on Human Dignity” Speaker: Vicki Mokuria, Texas A& M

“A Necessary Step: My Time Teaching In Prison and It’s Revolutionary Potential”

Speaker: Devon R. Johnson, Ph. D. -Temple University

Chair: Zay D. Green

Saturday October 27, 2018

10 AM -6:00 PM

MayDay Community Space

176 Saint Nicholas Street

Brooklyn NY 11237

MORNING SESSION

10:30AM- 1: 15 PM

10:30AM -11:30 AM “You Can Jail a Revolutionary, But You Can’t Jail the Rrevolution”: Politics of State Violence and Mass Incarceration in the Black Community” Speaker: Brittany O’Neal, Ph.D. Adjunct Professor, Lehman College City university of New York

Chair: Chair: Jameliah Shorter-Bourhanou Ph.D.- Georgia College and Holy Cross, MA

11: -30AM- 1:15 PM

“Not Whether Education is Transformation, But How” W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke and John Dewey on social Transformation Speaker: Blanche Curry Ph.D. – Fayetteville State University

Chair: Althea SullyCole -Columbia University

1:15-2:00 pm

LUNCH

AFTERNOON SESSION

2: 00PM-6:00 PM

2:00-PM -3: 00 PM

Speaker: Cachinnate Yourself about Mental Slavery: A Freudian Approach to the Horrific Humor in Get Out

Speaker: Damion Kareem Scott – City College of City University of New York.

Chair: Blanche Radford-Curry

3:00PM – 4: 00 PM

Student Panel

Chair: Brittany O’Neal

4:00PM -5:45 PM

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION IN AFRICANA TRADITIONS FROM MASS INCARCERATION TO UNIVERSAL EDUCATION: UNLOCKING THE SYSTEM Discussion:

Zay D. Green

J. Everet Green

Aileen Mokuria

Brittany O’Neal

Sincere gratitude to Mary Taylor at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics for her support over the past five years in making this annual event possible and also to Munayem Mayenin of London ever steadfast in his support

Members of the PRAT Committee

J. Everet Green/Brittany O’Neil – Co-Directors

Aminata Cisse, Pascale Flessel, Zay D. Green, Bok-Keem Nyerere, Julie Siestreem

Books Recognition

A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass. Editor, Neil Roberts. University Press of Kentucky: Jun 13, 2018.

Clinical Trials and the African Person: A Quest to Re-conceptualize Responsibility. Ike Valentine Iyioke. Brill Publishers.

Contact: J. Everet Green at everet@verizon.net for further information.

This event is free and open to the public. It it co-sponsored by The Center for Place, Culture and Politics and HUMANITAS: The Africana Ethical and Cultural Society.

10/18: Eros and Revolution A Critical Dialogue on Love, Struggle, and Psychoanalysis

10/18: Eros and Revolution A Critical Dialogue on Love, Struggle, and Psychoanalysis

10/18: Eros and Revolution A Critical Dialogue on Love, Struggle, and Psychoanalysis

10/18/2018
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Room 6112

The Center of Place, Culture and Politics invites you to:

Eros and Revolution

A Critical Dialogue on Love, Struggle, and Psychoanalysis

Featuring Jamieson Webster and AK Thompson

October 18, 2018

7pm-9pm

Room 6112

CUNY Graduate Center

365 5th ave, NY, NY 10016

 

To those concerned with the dynamics of the human struggle for liberation, the period of political polarization through which we are now living has underscored the value of psychoanalytic concepts. But how should these concepts be interpreted and applied? Drawing on the work of Herbert Marcuse and George Katsiaficas while focusing on the erotic dimensions of global revolt, AK Thompson’s new co-edited collection Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution (SUNY Press, 2018) provides one compelling answer. In this critical dialogue, Thompson joins radical psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster to explore the character and political implications of the erotic as they relate to other social and psychological factors.

 

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst based in New York. She has written for Artforum, ApologyCabinet, the GuardianPlayboySpike Art Quarterly, and the New York Times. She is the author of Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2018); Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine, with Simon Critchley (Pantheon, 2013); and The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011). With Marcus Coelen, she is currently working on The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan.

 

AK Thompson got kicked out of high school for publishing an underground newspaper called The Agitator and has been an activist, writer, and social theorist ever since. Along with Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution (SUNY Press 2018), he has authored or edited numerous books, including Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle (2016), Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent (2010), Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements/Social Research (2006), and Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt, which is scheduled to be released this December. He is currently Visiting Professor of Social Movements and Social Change at Ithaca College.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

IT IS SPONSORED BY THE CENTER FOR PLACE, CULTURE AND POLITICS.

10/04: Fail States: Dispossession and the Grounds of Relationality with Jodi Byrd

10/04: Fail States: Dispossession and the Grounds of Relationality with Jodi Byrd

10/04/2018
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Skylight Conference Room, 9th Floor

The Center for Place, Culture and Politics invites you to:

Fail States: Dispossession and the Grounds of Relationality

A lecture by Jodi Byrd

Thursday Oct. 4th, 2018

6-8PM

Skylight Room

The Graduate Center, CUNY

365 5th Ave., NY, NY 10016

 

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

IT IS CO-SPONSORED BY THE CENTER FOR PLACE, CULTURE AND POLITICS, THE AMERICAN STUDIES CERTIFICATE PROGRAM AND THE PHD PROGRAM IN ENGLISH.