Thursday, April 25, 2013 from 6.30 – 8.30 pm in the Recital Hall

The Graduate Center, CUNY. Free and open to the public.

How can urban social movements cohere with existing institutions of power, from unions to local government? As importantly, how can movements collaborate with each other to achieve broader, systemic changes? Can these movements and political projects realistically be anti-capitalist? Activists and leaders Bill Fletcher, Jon Liss, and Gihan Perera will discuss these issues in an open forum.

BILL FLETCHER, JR. is the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941″; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice“; and the author of “‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web. www.billfletcherjr.com

JON LISS has organized for racial and social justice in Virginia for the last 30 years. Between 1979-1981, he organized for the creation of an African American Studies department as a student at the University of Virginia. He graduated with a B.A. in History in 1981, and continued his organizing for US divestment in the South African Apartheid regime. From 1983-1984, he served as an elected leader of a taxi drivers association. In 1986, Jon co-founded Tenants and Workers United (TWU), a low-income racial and gender justice organization based in the Arlandria-Chirilagua neighborhood. Jon served as the Executive Director of TWU until 2011. In 2007 he co-founded Virginia New Majority and currently serves as both a board member and as the organization’s Executive Director.

GIHAN PERERA is co-founder and former Executive Director of the Miami Workers Center, a community organizing institution for low-income Black and Latino communities in South Florida. His decade-plus leadership of the center helped turn it into a national peer anchor to a number of strategic initiatives including the US Social Forum, the Right to the City Alliance, and a number of other efforts to build the theory, practice and capacity of work happening at the intersection of race, gender, the economy and the environment. He is currently the Executive Director of the Florida New Majority, a statewide civil rights and civic engagement organization that is working to connect and empower Florida’s diverse communities.

Moderated by David Harvey, Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics.

A public talk by Priyanka Borpujari

2012 Neuffer Fellow, International Women’s Media Foundation

Monday, April 22, 2013 at 7 pm in Room 5414 at the CUNY Graduate Center

 RSVP: events@aidnyc.org

While India is perceived as an emerging market, the stories of the plundering of natural resources and the systematic annihilation of the indigenous people go unheard. In this race to make India a superpower, and a growing media industry that champions this idea, social inequality has reached its zenith, and easily gets pushed aside. What, then, is the future of the people who grow food with their hands; who have long been guarding forests and rivers – even before climate change could touch them? Why does the media shy away from reporting about the majority of its populace, even while they silently die from landmines and malaria alike? Reporting on the ‘hidden civil war in India,’ Priyanka Borpujari, an independent journalist based in Mumbai, reports and photographs from those territories of mineral-rich India which are only silenced.

About Priyanka Borpujari:

Priyanka Borpujari is an independent journalist based in Mumbai, India. She has been documenting human rights abuses in her country, on account of the plundering of natural resources towards the goal of making India an emerging market. Her work takes her to dark territories of a mineral-rich India, which is rife with violence and disease. While she has been writing for various publications in India, she has also been reporting through her blog posts about India’s mad race for development and the adverse effects it has had on the indigenous populace. In 2011, she was awarded the ‘Young Independent Journalist Fellowship’ by the New York-based SINGH Foundation. Most recently, she was selected as the 2012 International Women’s Media Foundation Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow and is currently based at MIT. Along with Adharshila Learning Centre – a unique school in western India for indigenous children and based on the principle of ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ – she has been bringing out a magazine to amplify the indigenous voices. Her blog is www.priyanka-borpujari.blogspot.com.

Co-Sponsors:

South Asian Journalists’ Association

South Asian Bar Association of New York

Association for India’s Development NYC

official website : www.aidnyc.org Discussion forum: www.aidnycforum.org

Lecture and discussion with Costis Hadjimichalis

Tuesday, April 16th, 2013 from 6.30 – 8.30 pm

Room 5307, CUNY Graduate Center

Free and open to the public

This presentation will discuss long-forgotten conditions of uneven geographical development in the context of the current financial and debt crisis in the Eurozone. The dominant explanations of the crisis are mainly macro-economic and financial but, Professor Hadjimichalis will argue for its geographical components/foundations. After a short descriptive comment about the current debt crisis in the Eurozone and particularly in Southern Europe as part of the wider global crisis, an alternative interpretation is provided based on uneven geographical/regional development among Euro-regions especially after the introduction of the euro. He will also discuss radical alternatives to euro since 2009 with the rise of many grassroots initiatives at different scales in Southern Europe and Greece in particular.

Costis Hadjimichalis is professor Emeritus of Economic Geography and Regional Development at the Department of Geography, Harokopio University Athens. He had previous post at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and was visiting professor at Roskilde University (Denmark), UCLA, Berkely (USA), Oslo (Norway), NIRSA (Ireland) and Macquire University (Australia). His research concerns uneven geographical development and socio-spatial justice in the Eurozone, the social and spatial effects of economic crisis in Southern Europe, the role of small firms in local development and a radical interpretation of landscapes as part of everyday life. He is section editor for Regional Development in the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Elsevier), managing editor of Geographies (a Greek journal) and member of editorial board in several other international journals. His recent books (all in Greek) include: Contemporary Greek Landscapes (editor, 2011), Athens: Melissa, Space in Radical Thinking (co-authored with D. Vaiou, 2012), Athens: Nissos/N. Poulantzas Institute, and Geographies of Capitalist Crisis and Uneven Development, (forthcoming, 2013), Kritiki: Athens.

Friday April 12, 2013
NYU Cantor Film Center (36 E 8th St.), Theater 101
6:00PM; free and open to the public

The struggle in Egypt that began in 2011 and inspired people around the world is at a critical juncture. Amidst a deadlock between the Muslim Brotherhood and the opposition, the persistence of police brutality and state institutions of the old regime, and a looming economic crisis, the divide between political elites and people is growing ever wider. How much has changed since the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak in 2011? What are the prospects for political change in the future?

Come hear from two of Egypt’s finest independent reporters who have covered the Egyptian revolution from the beginning.

Lina Attalah is the Chief Editor of Egypt Independent, a Cairo-based weekly print and online newspaper.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous is a correspondent for Democracy Now! and a fellow at the Nation Institute. He is based in Cairo.

The event will be moderated by Amy Goodman, host of the award-winning independent television and radio program, Democracy Now!

Egypt Independent was founded in 2009 as the English-language edition of the leading Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm. It’s become one of the most widely-read sources of critical reporting and analysis on Egypt. To continue providing quality coverage, Egypt Independent is launching an international subscriptions drive and wants your support.

Come hear about the struggles in Egypt. Subscribe to Egypt Independent!

Alwan for the Arts