Past Events

The Postgenomic Family: A talk by Alondra Nelson

The Postgenomic Family: A talk by Alondra Nelson

12/05/2012
12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Room 6112

Professor Nelson will discuss the state of the family after the genome. Nelson addresses the paradox of how ‘postgemonic’ can be seen as both denoting a marker of the proliferation of the logics and techniques of genetic science, and a historical and socio-technical juncture in which the family becomes simultaneously highly flexible and deeply intractable. She will discuss this paradox in the context of kin-keeping practices, novel affiliations, and views of kinship as both a health risk and health resource.

The Humanities in Revolt by Alastair Renfrew

The Humanities in Revolt by Alastair Renfrew

11/30/2012
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
English Department Lounge, 4th Floor

The “dirge-like chorus” of recent identifications of the demise of the Humanities has been willing to engage with broader social, political and ideological factors only insofar as they are seen to impact directly on the ways in which universities function. Few voices in this “chorus” have sought to pursue the implications of their own critique and to conceptualise the Humanities as a potential site of revolt against both the local effects of political and ideological agency, and indeed against the prevalent ideologies of our time. The purpose of this intervention is to question what theories of Revolution – mediated by and ‘answerable’ to an underpinning theory of conjuncture – can offer the contemporary Humanities; and to prepare an argument that that the practice of the Humanities can only now be understood in terms of “revolt”.

Urban Uprising: In History, In Process, In the Future

Urban Uprising: In History, In Process, In the Future

11/30/2012
10:00 am - 8:00 pm
Proshansky Auditorium

Urban Uprising

Day One: In History, In Process, In the Future

Friday, November 30th

Proshansky Auditorium | CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue | NYC 10016

9:30 to 10:00 am | Registration

10:00 to 10:30 am | Opening Keynote

David Harvey, Director, Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center

 

10:30 to 12 Noon | Urban Uprisings of the 1960s: Living Legacies

Chair: Frances Fox Piven Distinguished CUNY Professor of Political Science and Sociology
Jordan T. Camp, Visiting Scholar, UCLA Inst. of American Cultures & Bunche Center for Af-American Studies
Marian Kramer, Co-chair National Welfare Rights Union, founding member League of Revolutionary Black Workers
Karen Miller, Historian, CUNY, LaGuardia Community College

 

12 Noon to 1:00 pm | Lunch Break

1:00 to 3:00 pm | Global Urban Uprisings

Chair: Peter Marcuse, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, Columbia University
Hiba Bou Akar, Professor, School of Critical Social Inquiry, Hampshire College
Mavuso Dignani – with Abahlali baseMjondolo, South African miners and Democratic Left Front
Deen Sharp, Journalist, PhD student Graduate Center
Éva Tessza Udvarhelyi, Co-founder, The City is for All, Budapest, PhD student Graduate Center

 

3:30 to 5:30 pm | Securitization and the City

Chair: John Whitlow, CUNY School of Law, former attorney w/ Make the Road New York
Mizue Aizeki, Organizer with Immigrant Defense Project and documentary photographer
Christina Heatherton, Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, postdoctoral fellow
Pete White, Founder and Co-director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network
Helena Wong, Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence
 

6:00 to 8:00 pm | Roundtable on How to Organize a Whole City

Chair: Kazembe Balagun, Writer and outreach coordinator of the Brecht Forum
Ujju Aggarwal, PhD student Graduate Center, former organizer with Center for Immigrant Families.
Tammy Bang Luu, Associate Director, Labor and Community Strategy Center
Rachel LaForest, Executive Director, The Right to the City Alliance
Rob Robinson, Campaign to Restore National Housing, Take Back the Land, US Human Rights Network
Miguel Robles-Duràn, Urbanist, Director of the Urban Ecologies, New School

Click here for information about

Day Two Dec 1. Re-Imagining the City: Transforming Demands, Demanding Creativity

 

Urban Uprising: A Right to the City Film Series

Urban Uprising: A Right to the City Film Series

11/15/2012
5:15 pm - 8:30 pm
MNN El Barrio Firehouse

Trying to get your mind around the impact of Hurricane Sandy on our right to the city? We are. This is why Right to the City is working closely with the Brecht Forum on URBAN UPRISING this month- a series of events and actions for analysis, dialogue and action with community organizations, grassroots formations and university students to discuss the militarization of urban space, local citywide struggles and Sandy’s impact, and transformative demands and alternatives we can fight for in urban areas to help us build the cities of our dreams.

Define and Rule: Mahmood Mamdani on Colonial Statecraft

Define and Rule: Mahmood Mamdani on Colonial Statecraft

11/12/2012
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Proshansky Auditorium

Define and Rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference.

Jean and John Comaroff discuss their book, Theory from the South

Jean and John Comaroff discuss their book, Theory from the South

10/30/2012
4:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Room 9206 and 9207, CUNY Graduate Center

The Committee on Globalization and Social Change Presents

Jean and John Comaroff

(African and African American Studies and Anthropology, Harvard University)

In a roundtable discussion about their book

Theory from the South: Or,
How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa

(Paradigm, 2011)

With commentators:
Susan Buck-Morss (Political Science, CUNY Graduate Center)
Claudio Lomnitz (Anthropology, Columbia University)
Soulèymane Bachir Diagne (French and Philosophy, Columbia University)

Tuesday, October 30, 2012
4:30pm-6:30pm
CUNY Graduate Center Room 9206 and 9207

Free and open to the public

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Newsfeed: African Revolutions (Film screening)

Newsfeed: African Revolutions (Film screening)

10/24/2012
7:00 pm - 9:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre

This evening of documentaries and discussion is presented in partnership with MoCADA, the Museum for Contemporary African Diaspora Art as part of their series NEWSFEED: Anonymity and Social Media in African Revolutions and Beyond.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012 from 7 pm – 9.30 pm

Segal Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to the public.

Be it in New York, Paris or Bamako, the world is experiencing a paradigm shift that began in Africa. Sparked by the 2011 toppling of Egypt’s thirty-year dictator, calls for revolution echo through mass media and populate social networking newsfeeds. MoCADA’s Curatorial Series, NEWSFEED: Anonymity & Social Media in African Revolutions and Beyond, features a compilation of new media art, contemporary works and digital installations that investigate global interconnectivity and how anonymous parties define, construct, and support uprisings in Africa via social media. As text, images and videos are tagged, re-tweeted, and shared virally, are these so-called “revolutions” reflecting real world events or merely constructing an online reality? How does this digital dialogue influence global society’s relationship with Africa?

Stocktown: South Africa is a twenty minute episode directed by Teddy Goitom, which documents the current political issues in South Africa.

Yoole: The Sacrifice, directed by Moussa Sene Absa, recounts the story of eleven Senegalese immigrants who arrived on the shores of Barbados four months after leaving Europe in a raft. In April 2006, a small boat was found drifting aimlessly along the eastern coast of Barbados. Local fishermen left the boat alone for many weeks, assuming it had something to do with drug smuggling. It later emerged that the boat contained the bodies of 11 Senegalese people who had set out to Europe four months earlier. In Senegal, it is not unusual for young people to embark in a rickety vessel in search of money and happiness in Europe or North America. Director Moussa Sene Absa is himself Senegalese, and was in Barbados when the boat was discovered. He returns to his homeland to explore the stories of the young men who risk the voyage. Surrounded by the slum dwellings and other dilapidated buildings in the ghetto, the young adults talk about poverty, hunger, politics and corruption, Western Union, and Western paradise. Archive footage of a party conference with Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, who represents the political elite, is interspersed with scenes featuring local songs, rap and poetry. Using a variety of rhythms and styles, Absa applies his own narrative method and succeeds in connecting individual stories to the sociopolitical situation. This yields a portrait of Senegalese youth and an impression of the consequences of the distance between themselves and the political elite.

 

Maestra! The Cuban Literacy Campaign

Maestra! The Cuban Literacy Campaign

10/23/2012
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Room 5307, CUNY Graduate Center

NORMA GUILLARD joined the 1961 Cuban Literacy Campaign (the Campaign) when she was 15 years old. A social psychologist from Santiago de Cuba, she is one of the first Cuban women of her generation to call herself a feminist. She primarily works on the issues of gender, race, sexual orientation and issues of diversity and identity in a Cuban and Caribbean context. As a Cuban of African descent, Guillard has contributed much to the lively debates on race and racism in Cuba.

Whither Motown with George Galston

Whither Motown with George Galston

10/19/2012
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Room 9204

Views from two gifted observers: George Galster, author of Driving Detroit; and Camilo José Vergara, creator/curator of Detroit: No Dry Bones. With comments by Robert Burchell, Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research