Past Events

Don Mitchell: Organized Resistance, Persistent Landscapes, and Sculpted Futures at the End of the Bracero Program in California

Don Mitchell: Organized Resistance, Persistent Landscapes, and Sculpted Futures at the End of the Bracero Program in California

10/18/2012
6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Science Center (4th Floor)

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.

Theatrum Mundi/ Global Street

Theatrum Mundi/ Global Street

10/12/2012 - 10/13/2012
All Day

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.

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination

10/11/2012
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Skylight Conference Room, 9th Floor

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.

Vijay Prashad: Reflecting on a Decade of the Karma of Brown Folk

Vijay Prashad: Reflecting on a Decade of the Karma of Brown Folk

10/10/2012
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Room 9204

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.

Contingent Patriarchy: A talk by Janaki Abraham

Contingent Patriarchy: A talk by Janaki Abraham

10/03/2012
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Room 5109, CUNY Graduate Center

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.

Very Informal Memorial for Neil Smith: Monday, October 1st at 16 Beaver Street

10/01/2012
5:00 pm - 11:30 pm
16 Beaver St

Tomorrow evening there will be an informal, open gathering at 16 Beaver Street in honor of Neil. There will be some food and wine provided, and you are invited to bring more since the crowd might actually be sort of crazy huge, in a manner of speaking.

There will not be official speeches. Instead, there will be an open mic set up so that those who wish to share their thoughts, read a poem, sing a song, tap dance, chant tribalistic anti-capitalist monosyllables, etc. will have an opportunity to do so. You can also just come and chat and spend a while in a space filled with others struck by this untimely loss.

We hope that as many faculty, students, activists, and everyone else who cared about Neil will be able to stop by tomorrow. Please forward this message appropriately.

Date: October 1, 2012
Time: Doors open at 5 pm. Stay for at least two tap dances, until 10-ish, or maybe longer if people feel like it.
Location: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor, New York NY 10004

Sincere thanks to 16 Beaver Group for helping this evening happen.

*** Please note, the CUNY Graduate Center is organizing and planning a formal public memorial service for Neil Smith, tentatively scheduled for early December 2012. Further details will be posted as they are confirmed. In addition, the AAG conference in Los Angeles in April 2013 will likely include something memorial-ish, and there will be a remembrance event at AAA in November 2012 in San Francisco. So if you cannot be at 16 Beaver on October 1st, there’s no reason to feel disgruntled. But, we’d be very, very happy to see you there.***

Project Morrinho: Favela Avatars

Project Morrinho: Favela Avatars

09/28/2012
6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Elebash Recital Hall

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: Book Party

The Making of Global Capitalism: Book Party

09/27/2012
7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Brecht Forum

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.

The Making of Global Capitalism: Discussion featuring Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin with David Harvey, Duncan Foley and Maliha Safri

The Making of Global Capitalism: Discussion featuring Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin with David Harvey, Duncan Foley and Maliha Safri

09/26/2012
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Proshansky Auditorium

The all-encompassing embrace of world capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century was generally attributed to the superiority of competitive markets. Globalization had appeared to be the natural outcome of this unstoppable process. But today, with global markets roiling and increasingly reliant on state intervention to stay afloat, it has become clear that markets and states aren’t straightforwardly opposing forces.