10/01: Power, Collective Struggle, and the Poetic Imagination

10/01: Power, Collective Struggle, and the Poetic Imagination

10/01: Power, Collective Struggle, and the Poetic Imagination

10/01/2018
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Skylight Conference Room, 9th Floor

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

Power, Collective Struggle, and the Poetic Imagination

Reading & Conversation

Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM
The Skylight Room (9100)

The Graduate Center,

365 5th ave, NY, NY 10016

Join us for the launch of three timely books, Building Power From Below: Chilean Workers Take on Walmart by Carolina Bank MuñozCurated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling by Sujatha Fernandes, and Landia by Celina Su, that look at the joy and poetry of collective struggles. Panning through the voices of Chilean Walmart workers, Afghan women writers, West Indian domestic workers in New York, and Burmese refugee children in northwestern Thailand, these books explore what it means to tell one’s story, the value and peril of symbolic power, and the poetry at the heart of social struggles in the contemporary world. Authors will discuss themes from their books, followed by a Q & A with the audience.

 

 

Sujatha Fernandes is a Professor of Political Economy and Sociology at the University of Sydney. Her work explores social movements, storytelling, and cultural politics in the Americas and globally. Her books include Cuba Represent! (2006), Who Can Stop the Drums? (2010), and most recently Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling (2017). Her literary work includes a memoir on global hip hop, Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (2011), as well as essays and short stories published and forthcoming in the New York TimesThe NationThe Maine ReviewAster(ix), and elsewhere. Fernandes has also worked as a faculty co-leader in the Narrating Change, Changing Narratives research group of the 2014-2016 Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Carolina Bank Muñoz is currently Tow Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is an activist-scholar whose work focuses on immigration, globalization, labor, work, and Latin America. Her most recent books include Building Power from Below: Chilean Workers Take on Walmart with Cornell University Press and Walmart in the Global South (with Bridget Kenny and Antonio Stecher) with the University of Texas Press. Her previous book,Transnational Tortillas: Race, Gender and Shop Floor Politics in Mexico and the United States, was the winner of the Terry Book Award. She is currently working on A Peoples Guide to New York City with Penny Lewis and Emily Molina (University of California Press 2019).

Celina Su is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and an Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York. Her publications include Streetwise for Book Smarts: Grassroots Organizing and Education Reform in the Bronx (Cornell University Press) and essays in Harper’s, n+1, and elsewhere. She has received several distinguished fellowships, including a Berlin Prize and a Whiting Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her first book of poetry, Landia, was published by Belladonna* in 2018.

Co-sponsored by Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC); the Center for Place, Culture and Politics; the PhD Program in Sociology; and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

05/02: Karl Marx turns 200! Sven-Eric Liedman and Michael Denning

05/02: Karl Marx turns 200! Sven-Eric Liedman and Michael Denning

05/02: Karl Marx turns 200! Sven-Eric Liedman and Michael Denning

05/02/2018
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
The Graduate Center, CUNY

The Center for Place, Culture and Politics and Verso Books invite you to:

Karl Marx turns 200! Sven-Eric Liedman and Michael Denning

Wednesday, May 2nd

6-8PM

CUNY Graduate Center
Sociology lounge (Room 6112)
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016

Join Sven-Eric Liedman, author of the new biography A World to Win, and Michael Denning in conversation on Karl Marx’s life and legacy, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth on May 5th.

Conversation and Q&A followed by book signing and wine reception.

“A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx,” follows Marx through childhood and student days, a difficult and sometimes tragic family life, his far-sighted journalism, and his enduring friendship and intellectual partnership with Friedrich Engels. Building on the work of previous biographers, Liedman employs a commanding knowledge of the nineteenth century to create a definitive portrait of Marx and his vast contribution to the way the world understands itself. He shines a light on Marx’s influences, explains his political and intellectual interventions, and builds on the legacy of his thought. Liedman shows how Marx’s masterpiece, Capital, illuminates the essential logic of a system that drives dizzying wealth, grinding poverty, and awesome technological innovation to this day.

Sven-Eric Liedman, Professor Emeritus of the History of Ideas at the University of Gothenburg, has been reading and writing about Karl Marx for over fifty years. His textbook on political ideologies, From Plato to the War Against Terrorism, has been through fourteen editions.

Michael Denning is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and the co-director of Yale’s Initiative on Labor and Culture. He is the author of Culture in the Age of Three Worlds; The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century; Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America; Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller; and Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution. He coordinates the Working Group on Globalization and Culture, whose collective work includes “Going into Debt,” published online in Social Text’s Periscope, and “Spaces and Times of Occupation,” published in Transforming Anthropology. In 2014, he received the Bode-Pearson lifetime achievement award from the American Studies Association.

Facebook event here.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

It is co-sponsored by The Center for Place, Culture and Politics and Verso Books.

04/27:  “Las Patronas’ Kitchen”: Film screening and discussion 

04/27:  “Las Patronas’ Kitchen”: Film screening and discussion 

04/27:  “Las Patronas’ Kitchen”: Film screening and discussion 

04/27/2018
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre

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

 “Las Patronas’ Kitchen”:

Women defending migrants’ rights in Mexico: 

Film screening and discussion with director Javier Garcia, and Norma Romero, speaker of the group “Las Patronas.” 

 

Friday, April 27th

7-9PM

The Segal Theater,

CUNY Graduate Center,

365 5th Ave, NY, NY 10016

“Las Patronas’ Kitchen” tells the story of a group of farmer women who 23 years ago realized that people where “free riding” on the top of the train that crosses their community, La Patrona, Veracruz, Mexico. They did not know who they were or even why they where traveling like that.

One day the daughters of Ms. Leo, head of the family, went to buy milk and bread. On their way back home the train was passing by and one of the guys on the train shouted: “Mother, feed me, I am hungry.” They gave them all what they had just bought, and returned home fearing that their mother was going to get mad. Instead Ms. Leo told them: “When people are hungry, you have to give.” Since then, many women of La Patrona cook for Central American migrants traveling on top of the train. 

Step by step, this kitchen has become a political space as well. The Patronas have learned how to talk about Mexico’s problems, poverty in the countryside, human rights, indifference towards migrants, and about their own rights as women.

Taking the main ideas exposed by the film as a starting point, a discussion will take place between the audience, the director Javier Garcia, and Norma Romero, speaker of the group “Las Patronas.” 

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

THE EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

4/25: Book Event: The Revolt of the Provinces with author Kristóf Szombati

4/25: Book Event: The Revolt of the Provinces with author Kristóf Szombati

4/25: Book Event: The Revolt of the Provinces with author Kristóf Szombati

04/25/2018
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Room C198, CUNY Graduate Center

The Center for Place, Culture and Politics invites you:

Book Event: The Revolt of the Provinces with author Kristóf Szombati,

in discussion with Andrew Arato and Mary N. Taylor, moderated by Ida Susser

Wednesday April 25th,

6:30p – 8:30p 

Room C198

CUNY Graduate Center,

365 5th Ave, NY, NY 10016

© Photo by Polina Georgescu

The Revolt of the Provinces (forthcoming May 2018 Berghahn) is the first in-depth ethnographic monograph on the New Right in Central and Eastern Europe, The Revolt of the Provinces explores the making of right-wing hegemony in Hungary over the last decade. It explains the spread of racist sensibilities in depressed rural areas, shows how activists, intellectuals and politicians took advantage of popular racism to empower right-wing agendas and examines the new ruling party’s success in stabilizing an ‘illiberal regime’. To illuminate these important dynamics, the author proposes an innovative multi-scalar and relational framework, focusing on interaction between social antagonisms emerging on the local level and struggles waged within the political public sphere.


Kristóf Szombati is Istvan Deak Visiting Professor at Columbia University. He has a background in both politics and academia. He co-founded the green LMP party and was an elected member of its Steering Committee until 2010 when he left party politics to pursue a PhD at Central European University (CEU). He completed the latter in 2016 and received CEU’s Best Dissertation award for his work. Besides writing the book, he has also published articles on radical right-wing politics in Hungary and on the intersection of politics, ethnicity and ‘race’.

 

Andrew Arato (PhD 1975, University of Chicago) is the Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor in Political and Social Theory at the New School for Social Research in New York. He has taught at L’École des hautes études and Sciences Po in Paris, as well as at the Central European University in Budapest. He had a Fulbright teaching grant to Montevideo in 1991, and was Distinguished Fulbright Professor at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/M,Germany. Professor Arato has served as a consultant for the Hungarian Parliament on constitutional issues (1996-1997), and as U.S. State Department Democracy Lecturer and Consultant (on Constitutional issues) on Nepal (2007). He was re-appointed by the State Department in the same capacity for Zimbabwe (November of 2010), where he had discussions with civil society activists and political leaders in charge of the constitution-making process. He was invited Professor at the College de France (Spring 2012).

Professor Arato’s scholarly research is widely recognized, and conferences and sessions have been organized around his work at University of Glasgow Law School (Spring 2009) and Koc University, Istanbul (December 2009), as well as at the Faculty of Law, Witwaterstrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa (August 2010). Arato was appointed Honorary Professor and Bram Fischer Visiting Scholar at the School of Law, University of Witwatersrand Johannesburg (June 2010-June 2011). Among his publications are Adventures of the Constituent Power (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Post Sovereign Constitution Making: Learning and Legitimacy(Oxford University Press, 2016); Critical Theory and Democracy (A Festschrift for Arato) (Routledge, 2013); Constitution Making Under Occupation: The Politics of Imposed Revolution Iraq (Columbia, 2009); Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Habermas on Law, Democracy, and Legitimacy: Critical Exchanges, co-editor with Michael Rosenfield (University of California, 1998); From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory: Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-Type Societies (Routledge, 1994); Civil Society and Political Theory, co-author with Jean L. Cohen (MIT, 1992). 

Mary N. Taylor is Assistant Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  Her research focuses on sites, techniques and politics of civic cultivation, social movement, and cultural management; the relationship of ethics and aesthetics to nationalism and cultural differentiation, and people’s movements in interwar, socialist and postsocialist Hungary, East Europe, and the Balkans. She is a member of the editorial collective of LeftEast, co-organizer of an annual roving summer school on ‘neoliberalizing postsocialism’, and co-founder of the Brooklyn Laundry Social Club. Her writing has been published in an array of fora, including Focaal–European Journal of Anthropology, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Journal of Hungarian Studies, The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, Bajo el Volcan, and LeftEast. She edited Critical Perspectives on the Persistence of ‘Culture Talk’ in the Making of Europe (2009 Focaal–European Journal of Anthropology 55); and co-edited (with Charlotte Huddleston, Abby Cunnane, and Sakiko Sugawa Co-Revolutionary Praxis; Accompaniment as a Strategy for Working Together (2015:  Auckland NZ: ST PAUL St. Gallery Publishing). She is currently completing her book Movement of the People: Folk Dance, Populism and Citizenship in Hungary.

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

04/10: Brazil, Colombia, Haiti: Resistance and Solidarity in Times of Repression

04/10: Brazil, Colombia, Haiti: Resistance and Solidarity in Times of Repression

04/10: Brazil, Colombia, Haiti: Resistance and Solidarity in Times of Repression

04/10/2018
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
CUNY GRADUATE CENTER, Room 5409

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

Brazil, Colombia, Haiti: Resistance and Solidarity in Times of Repression

Tuesday, April 10th

6:30-8:30 PM

Room 5409, CUNY Graduate Center

365 5th Ave, NY, NY 10016

THIS EVENT IS CO-SPONSORED BY THE CENTER FOR PLACE, CULTURE AND POLITICS; THE DOCTORAL STUDENTS COUNCIL (DSC); CSG; THE MOVEMENT FOR PEACE IN COLOMBIA (MPC); AND DEFEND DEMOCRACY IN BRAZIL.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

03/28: Antifa and The Battle for the Real Film Screening

03/28: Antifa and The Battle for the Real Film Screening

03/28: Antifa and The Battle for the Real Film Screening

03/28/2018
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Room C198, CUNY Graduate Center
 The Center for Place, Culture and Politics invites you to:

Antifa and The Battle for the Real Film Screening

Wednesday March 28, 2018
6:30-8:30 PM
CUNY Graduate Center
Room C198

365 5th Ave, NY, NY 10016

More about the films:

ANTIFA by Global Uprisings

Since the election of Donald Trump, acts of racist violence have proliferated across the United States. Racists and misogynists feel emboldened to express and act on their views. White nationalist groups and resurgent traditional white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan have used Trumps victory to gain new recruits. All that stands in their way are the groups of anarchists and anti-fascists who have taken it upon themselves to prevent them from becoming a powerful political force in the United States. This film tells the story of what “Antifa” is and why people are using these tactics to confront racism and fascism in the US today.

Who are the anti-fascists? What motivates them to risk their lives to fight the far right? What is the history of militant anti-fascism and why is it relevant again today? How is anti-fascism connected to a larger political vision that can stop the rise of fascism and offer us visions of a future worth fighting for? Through interviews with anti-fascist organizers, historians, and political theorists in the US and Germany, we explore the broader meaning of this political moment while taking the viewer to the scene of street battles from Washington to Berkeley and Charlottesville.

THE BATTLE FOR THE REAL by Paper Tiger Television

The landscape of new media has become a battleground over ideas. Claims of information being true or fake have shaped the nature of reality itself. This episode explores how both activists and fascists have used media tools, and calls for an ethical use of platforms.

 

The link to the series the film is part of: http://weinterruptthisprogram.org/
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
THIS EVENT IS SPONSORED BY THE CENTER FOR PLACE, CULTURE AND POLITICS.