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

Don Mitchell is Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse University. He is the author of They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California (University of Georgia Press, 2012). Mitchell is the recipient of the Retzius Medal in Gold from the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography. He is a leading participant in the Community Geography Project in Syracuse, NY.

A Public Conversation between protagonists from hemispheric student struggles in Chile, Quebec, and New York.
Can’t be there? This event will be livestreamed: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-at-ips

The overall theme turns on the difference between absence and presence in the city. This difference lies both physically — who is actually on the street?; and perceptually — how are people aware of others, accounting or discounting their presence in urban space?. How are those considered invisible or inconsequential enabled to ‘make presence’ in urban space – through their bodies, actions, activities. We want to account the roles of technological, trade, design, and politics in constructing presence and absence; finally, we want to pose questions about how to arouse people to want more engagement with one another, rather than retreat into isolation.

The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. In this presentation, Alondra Nelson recalls their fight for healthcare access. The Black Panther Party’s understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race. This legacy and struggle continues today in the commitment of activists such as the late Gloria Thomas and in the fight for universal healthcare.

On the tenth anniversary of the publication of his celebrated work The Karma of Brown Folk, Vijay Prashad traces his intellectual journey from that work to his newly released Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today (New Press, 2012), which reframes The Karma of Brown Folk’s pivotal question (“How does it feel to be a solution?”) to consider post-9/11 paranoia, the rise of South Asian Americans in the Republican Party, and South Asian migrant laborers in post-Katrina New Orleans.

So called ‘honour killings’ in different parts of the India have brought into sharp focus the extreme reaction to marriages that are seen as violating rules of one kind or another. What is clear however, is that these rules and boundaries of acceptable marriage shift, and have shifted, over time. This paper will explore these shifts and the contingencies in the response to marriages and relationships across caste (and other) boundaries.

Morrinho, founded in 1997, is a model made from pieces of bricks, installed in a favela (squatter settlement) in Rio de Janeiro. Over a thousand figurines inhabit this “toy,” avatars in a role-playing game that follows the rules of urban life where “bandits” and “good guys” alternate roles. In 2001, Morrinho was instituted as a cultural project and traveling exhibition. This event presents a series of short films narrated using Morrinho’s diminutive characters, with discussion led by the project’s participants, collaborators and researchers.

The Making of Global Capitalism, through its highly original analysis of the first great economic crisis of the twenty-first century, identifies the centrality of the social conflicts that occur within states rather than between them. These emerging fault lines hold out the possibility of new political movements transforming nation states and transcending global markets.