click here to visit www.davidharvey.org now!

MONDAY, MAY 7, 2012 | 4:00-5:30 PM
The Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College
47-49 East 65th Street (btwn. Park and Madison Aves.)

In this provocative book, Siva Vaidhyanathan examines the ways we have used and embraced Google—and the growing resistance to its expansion across the globe. He exposes the dark side of our Google fantasies, raising red flags about issues of intellectual property and the much-touted Google Book Search. He assesses Google’s global impact, particularly in China, and explains the insidious effect of Googlization on the way we think. Finally, Vaidhyanathan proposes the construction of an Internet ecosystem designed to benefit the whole world and keep one brilliant and powerful company from falling into the “evil” it pledged to avoid.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a cultural historian and media scholar, and is currently the Robertson Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia. From 1999 through the summer of 2007 he worked in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University. Vaidhyanathan is a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including the Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and Salon.com, and he maintains a blog,www.googlizationofeverything.com. He is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio and to MSNBC.COM and has appeared in a segment of “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. Vaidhyanathan is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book. In 2011 he was appointed chair of UVA’s Department of Media Studies. In March 2002, Library Journal cited Vaidhyanathan among its “Movers & Shakers” in the library field. In the feature story, Vaidhyanathan lauded librarians for being “on the front lines of copyright battles” and for being “the custodians of our information and cultural commons.” In November 2004 the Chronicle of Higher Education called Vaidhyanathan “one of academe’s best-known scholars of intellectual property and its role in contemporary culture.” He has testified as an expert before the U.S. Copyright Office on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation and a fellow of The Nation Institute, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, where he writes and edits the “Think Again” column, a senior fellow (since 1985) at the World Policy Institute. Alterman is also a regular columnist for Moment magazine and a regular contributor to The Daily Beast. He is the author of seven books, including the national bestsellers, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (2003, 2004), and The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America (2004). The others include: When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and its Consequences, (2004, 2005); His Sound & Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy (1992, 2000), which won the 1992 George Orwell Award; It Ain’t No Sin to be Glad You’re Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen (1999, 2001), which won the 1999 Stephen Crane Literary Award and Who Speaks for America? Why Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy, (1998). His most recent book is Why We’re Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America’s Most Important Ideals (2008, 2009). Termed “the most honest and incisive media critic writing today” in the National Catholic Reporter, and author of “the smartest and funniest political journal out there,” in the San Francisco Chronicle, Alterman is frequent lecturer and contributor to numerous publications in the US, Europe and Latin America. In recent years, he has also been a columnist for: MSNBC.com, Worth, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and the SundayExpress (London), a history consultant to HBO films and a senior fellow at Media Matters for America. A former Adjunct Professor of Journalism at NYU and Columbia, Alterman received his B.A. in History and Government from Cornell, his M.A. in International Relations from Yale, and his Ph.D. in US History from Stanford. He lives with his family in Manhattan.

RECEPTION TO FOLLOW | TO RSVP, CALL 212-650-3174

The Production of Living Knowledge:

The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor

in Europe and North America

Join author Gigi Roggero with respondent Stanley Aronowitz for a discussion of the book.

Thursday, May 3^rd,  6:00pm
The Sociology Lounge, 6th Floor Room 6112
The Graduate Center, CUNY 365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016

New student struggles in the U.S. and across the world have revealed a simple truth about the university system: It is a key site of production, but also of conflict and transformation, within “cognitive capitalism”—a regime in which knowledge has become increasingly central to processes of global capitalist expansion. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out through the activist method of conricerca, or “co-research,” wherein both knowledge and political subjects are produced in common, Roggero’s book situates the crisis of the university and the changing composition of its labor force against the backdrop of the global economic crisis. Roggero produces a distinctly transnational and methodologically innovative critique of the global university from the perspective of what he calls “living knowledge.”

Design by Josh Macphee

Gigi Roggero is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Politics, Institutions, and History at the University of Bologna. He was involved in the journal ‘Posse’, and ‘Precarity Webring’, and he is a regular contributor to Il Manifesto. Currently, he is a member of the editorial board of WorkingUSA, and the collectives Edu-factory, the militant research network Uninomade, and the Knowledge Liberation Front.

Stanley Aronowitz is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center, and Director of The Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work. He is author or editor of twenty-five books including: Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters (2008); How Class Works (2003); The Jobless Future (1994, with William DiFazio); and False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (1973, 1992).

For more information and additional links, see the This Is Forever website.

The Furious Force of Rhymes

Tuesday, May 8th | 6:30pm to 9pm

Segal Theatre | CUNY Graduate Center

Screening of The Furious Force of Rhymes

followed by Q&A with director Joshua Atesh Litle

“…one is again and again challenged by the uncompromising radically and need for expression of the artists encountered; seduced by their inventiveness, struck by their lucidity, conquered by their pacifism… Ultimately, this series of stories is as much a geopolitical treatise, a compendium of suffering and anger expressed in the name of art. Hip-Hop emerges full-grown.” – La Croix

Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions and State Repression Teach-In

Wednesday, May 16 | 7pm to 9 pm

Segal Theatre | CUNY Graduate Center

Photo by Lauriel [from the Portland Occupier]

Havaar (which means “cry of emergency”) is a coalition of Iranians, Iranian-Americans, and allies formed in response to the U.S. government’s escalating attacks on Iran and to the Iranian government’s ongoing repression of grassroots movements.

At a time when crippling sanctions and threats of war bear down on people in Iran, there is an urgent need for people in the United States to organize against these policies advanced in our name. As global solidarity between people in the United States and other parts of the world gains new momentum, how can we support grassroots struggles in Iran that oppose both outside intervention and domestic authoritarianism?

Join us for a discussion about how to rebuild an anti-war movement that is centered around people-to-people solidarity. Plus video testimonies from activists in Iran and around the world.

Speakers:

Arang Keshavarzian is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is currently on the editorial board of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and was on the editorial committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project (www.merip.org) from 2005 to 2011. His book, Bazaar and State in Iran: Politics of the Tehran Marketplace, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007.

Bitta Mostofi is a nonprofit, immigrant rights attorney. She has also worked as a civil rights attorney and served on the board of directors of the Council on American Islamic Relations. Bitta has participated in anti-war and anti-sanctions campaigns, and was a co-coordinator for the Voices in the Wilderness; Iraq Peace Team from 2002-2003. In recent years Bitta has co-founded and worked with Where is my Vote, New York, which formed in the after math of the highly disputed 2009 Iranian presidential elections. WIMV-NY strives to raise the level of international solidarity with the citizens of Iran in their movement towards social justice and democratic change and to speak out against the Iranian state’s human rights violations.

Ali A. is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Yale University. He was engaged in the student movement and women’s rights movement in Iran for five years, and participated in post-2009 presidential election protests in Iran. The Iranian democratic movement, globally known as the Green Movement, has informed his activism since then.

Manijeh Nasrabadi is an American Studies Ph.D. student in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her essays and articles have appeared inComparative Studies of the South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Social Text online, About Face (Seal Press, 2008), Hyphen Magazine, Tehran Bureau, Callaloo and vidaweb.org. She is a founding member of Raha: Iranian Feminist Collective in New York City.

Moderator:

Maia Ramnath organizes with Adalah-NY, South Asia Solidarity Initiative, and the Occupy Wall Street-Global Justice working group.
She is on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies and is the author of two recent books: Haj to Utopia and Decolonizing Anarchism. She is currently an adjunct history instructor at NYU.

Saturday, April 14th, 2012 from 11.30 – 2 pm

Alwan for the Arts, 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor

co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the South Asia Solidarity Initiative

The Arab upheaval ignited in Tunisia in December 2010 is now well into its
second year. It has overthrown three Arab rulers, in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya,
and forced another to hand over power in Yemen. However, uprisings in Bahrain
and Syria have been violently repressed, the latter at the cost of ten thousand
lives already. This is while the future of the revolutionary process is
uncertain in the four countries where initial victories have been achieved, with
electoral processes proving unable to quench the upheaval’s fundamentally social
dynamics.

About the Speakers

Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon,
and is currently Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
of the University of London. His books include The Clash of Barbarisms: The
Making of the New World Disorder, published in 13 languages, Perilous Power: The
Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, co-authored with Noam Chomsky, and most
recently The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of
Narratives.

Samah Selim was born in Egypt and has lived in the UK, Libya,
France and Germany. She received her BA in English Literature from Barnard
College in 1986 and her PhD from the Department of Middle East and Asian
Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 1997. She has previously taught
at Columbia University, Princeton University and the University of
Aix-en-Provence, and she directs the literature module of the Berlin-based
postdoctoral research program, Europe in the Middle East; the Middle East in
Europe. Her book, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, explores the
relationship between the rise of the novel genre, the politics of nationalist
representation and the peasant question over the course of the 20th century in
Egypt. Dr. Selim, who is also a practicing literary translator, is currently at
work on a book about translation, modernity and popular fiction in early 20th
century Egypt.

A discussion with Hamid Dabashi

Monday, April 16, 2012  at 7.30 pm

The Proshansky Auditorium

CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue

Free and open to the public

In this landmark book, Hamid Dabashi argues that the revolutionary uprisings that have engulfed multiple countries and political climes from Morocco to Iran and from Syria to Yemen, were driven by a ‘Delayed Defiance’ – a point of rebellion against domestic tyranny and globalized disempowerment alike that signifies no less than the end of Postcolonialism. Sketching a new geography of liberation, Dabashi shows how the Arab Spring has altered the geopolitics of the region so radically that we must begin re-imagining the moral map of ‘the Middle East’ afresh.

HAMID DABASHI is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include Authority in Islam (1989); Theology of Discontent (1993); Truth and Narrative (1999); Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (2001); Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (2000); Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (2007); Iran: A People Interrupted (2007); and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (2006). His most recent works are Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (Routledge, 2008) and Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (Transaction Publishers, 2009).

Discussants:

DAVID HARVEY, Director, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics

ANTHONY ALESSANDRINI, Editor at Jadaliyya.com and Associate Professor of English at Kinsborough Community College. In 2012-2013 he will be a faculty fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics.

Earlier on this evening at 6.30 in the James Gallery, Alessandro Petti will explore new forms of political action and association – collective protests —  in the Middle East and around the world. Details here.