Please join us for:

The Hand That Feeds: Migrant Workers’ Poetry, Performance, and Film

Friday, October 30, 2015, 6:30 PM. Martin E. Segal Theater.

Join us for a poetry reading and performance by worker writers Christine Lewis and Samantha Lee , followed by a screening of The Hand That Feeds, a documentary about the behind the scenes world of an Upper East Side bagel shop, where undocumented immigrant workers face sub-legal wages, dangerous machinery, and abusive managers who will fire them for calling in sick.
The screening will be followed by a question and answer session with stars from the film and Mahoma López, a worker featured in the film who galvanized his co-workers to form an independent union.

The event Co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics (CPCP) and the Narrating Change, Changing Narratives Mellon Seminar in Public Engagement and Collaborative Research in the Humanities. This event is free and open to public.

Please join us in discussion: A TURNING POINT FOR GUATEMALA? POPULAR MOVEMENTS PUT A COUNTRY—AND A COMPANY—ON TRIAL

Thursday, October 22

6:00 PM

Segal Theatre

To view the LIVESTREAM of this event: Go to videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu  and click on the link in the “Live Videos” box on the upper right hand side of the page. Click on this event.

Could this year’s unprecedented urban mobilization against corruption signal a turning point for social movements in Guatemala? How are rural Guatemalans protesting the ways in which multinational corporations and private and government security forces continue to perpetuate a legacy of violence, displacement and repression in the countryside? What are the connections between these organizing efforts?

From September’s headline-grabbing indictment of Guatemala’s President on corruption charges, to ongoing rural opposition to extractive industries, we’ll hear directly from Guatemalans about this historic moment and how the country’s disparate social movements can work together to achieve human rights and justice.

Llan Carlos Dávila, a community leader and activist, and member of the Diocesan Committee in Defense of Nature (CODIDENA), will speak about the creative and resilient ways people in his region are opposing a destructive silver mining project led by U.S. and Canadian-owned Tahoe Resources. Llan Carlos is visiting NYC as part of a U.S. speaking tour, “Tahoe on Trial,” organized by the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA).

Gabriela Alvarez Castañeda of Guatemala Florecerás, a NYC-based activist collective, will discuss the group’s local organizing in support of #RenunciaYa, a campaign led by tens of thousands of Guatemalans demanding the resignation of President Otto Pérez Molina and an end to government corruption.

Pamela Yates will be the event’s discussant. Pamela is a co-founder and the creative director of Skylight Pictures. In 2011, she directed the documentary film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, which was used as key forensic evidence in the Ríos Montt genocide conviction in Guatemala. She is currently working on the film 500 Years, the third in a trilogy that explores the battle for the national narrative in present-day Guatemala.
Co-sponsored by CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture and Politics, Lehman College’s Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies, CUNY’s Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies, and Skylight Pictures.

Please join us for a talk by Tracy Metz, introduced by Ashley Dawson

‘Sweet&Salt: Water and the Dutch’

October 19, 6:30 PM room c201

The Dutch are past masters at keeping the water out of their low-lying country: in the Netherlands the art of water management was born of pure necessity. Over half the nation’s income is earned below sea level, and the attitude has always been that long-term prevention is better than repair after the fact. Water was the enemy and man exercised dominion over it, using all the increasingly sophisticated technology at his disposal. But the climate is changing and the Dutch, ever at the forefront of water innovation, are discovering that working together with nature is in the long run a safer bet. Urban designers , landscape architects and engineers are collaborating on ways to store water and avert flooding while at the same time making the cities cooler and more attractive. These ideas and designs – ‘the Dutch approach’ to the water-driven makeover of the landscape – are drawing interest all over the world, as many regions and urban areas find themselves confronted with water, both too little of it and too much.

Tracy Metz is a journalist, author and presenter originally from California but based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her most recent book is ‘Sweet&Salt: Water and the Dutch’, about the innovative approach the Netherlands are now taking to dealing with water. She is the director of the John Adams Institute, the independent podium for American culture in the Netherlands. She also has a monthly live talkshow and digital magazine called Stadsleven, ‘City Life’, about the issues – including water – now confronting the world’s cities. She writes for newspapers and magazines in the Netherlands and is an international correspondent for Architectural Record. Following her Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design she was appointed a visiting fellow. She speaks frequently on water issues in the Netherlands and abroad. www.tracymetz.nl | www.john-adams.nl | www.stadslevenamsterdam.nl

Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. He is the author of Extinction: A Radical History (forthcoming from O/R Press), The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature (2013) and Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Michigan, 2007). He is also co-editor of four essay collections: Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities (Haymarket, forthcoming), Democracy, the State, and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge, 2009); Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (Michigan, 2009); and Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (Duke, 2007). A former editor of Social Text Online[socialtextjournal.org] and of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom[aaup.org], he is currently completing work on a book entitled Extreme City: Climate Change and the Urban Future for Verso Press.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics.  It is free and open to the public.

Friday, OCTOBER 16
9:00am — 5:00pm

CUNY: The Graduate Center
ELEBASH RECITAL HALL
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10016

To view LIVESTREAM on Friday: Go to videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu  and click on the link in the “Live Videos” box on the upper right hand side of the page. **We have been experiencing some difficulties with livestreaming this week. Apologies of it is not working.

MORNING SESSION
9:20am – 12:20am

9:25am – 9:50am
Greetings and Opening Statement: J. Everet Green, Mercy College
Greetings: Mary Taylor, CUNY Graduate Center

10:00am – 10:40am
Biko and the Liberatory Potential of Non-racialism and Post-racialism
Speaker: Kimberly Ann Harris, Pennsylvania State University
Chair: Sara Mokuria, Senior Research Associate, UT Dallas Institute for Urban Policy Research

10: 45am – 11:25am
William R. Jones Philosophy of Liberation
Speaker: Brittany O’Neal, Ph.D., Long Island University – Brooklyn
Chair: Zay D. Green, Humanitas, Independent Scholar

11:30am – 12:00pm
James H. Cone and the Bible as History Book: Philosophical Assessment
Speaker: John H. McClendon, III, Ph.D., Michigan State University

LUNCH BREAK
12:00pm – 1:15pm

AFTERNOON SESSION
1:20pm – 5:00pm

1:20pm – 1: 30pm
Greetings and Introduction: J. Everet Green

1:40pm – 2:30pm
Navigating Black Identity, Politics, and Consciousness: A Life-Time of Reflection
Speaker: Mathylde Frontus, Ph.D., LMSW
Chair: Aileen Mokuria, William M. Raines High School

2:35pm – 3:20pm
Religion in 18th and 19th Century Intellectuals of African Ancestry
Speaker: Albert G. Mosley, Ph.D., Smith College
Chair: Brittany O’Neal, Ph.D., Long Island University – Brooklyn

3:25pm – 4:15pm
“Hubert Harrison: ‘The Voice of Harlem Radicalism,’” A Slide Presentation/Talk by Dr. Jeffrey B. Perry
Speaker: Jeffrey B. Perry, Ph.D., Independent Scholar
Chair: Julie Siestreem

4:20pm – 5:00pm
MUSICAL PRESENTATION
Performers:
• Kerry M. Brown, M.A., Philosophy, Independent Scholar/Multi Reed Woodwind Musician/Performance Artist
• Albert G. Mosley, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, Smith College

Saturday, OCTOBER 17                                                                        *note that this is NOT at the GRADUATE CENTER!
9:00am — 5:00pm

THE COMMONS
388 Atlantic Avenue
Brooklyn, New York 11217

MORNING SESSION
9:00am – 12:20pm
9:15am – 9:30am
Welcome: J. Everet Green

9:30am – 10:15am
Racism: An Inquisition of Philosophy and History vs. His/Her-Story, Using “Hatata” as a Prism
Speaker: Richard F. Ford Sr., Independent Scholar
Chair: Zay D. Green, Humanitas

10: 20am – 11:15am
My Father was Killed by the Police: Personal Reflections on Police and Power in the US
Speaker: Sara Mokuria, M.A., Senior Research Associate, UT Dallas Institute for Urban Policy Research
Chair: Julie Siestreem

11:20am – 12:15pm
The Meaning of the Black Spiritual: Music as an Existential Weapon
Speaker: Kerry M. Brown, M.A., Philosophy, Independent Scholar/Multi Reed Woodwind Musician/Performance Artist
Chair: Aileen Mokuria, William M. Raines High School

LUNCH
12:20pm – 1:30pm

AFTERNOON SESSION
1:30pm – 5:00pm

1:30pm – 2:30pm
On Rastafari Political Theology
Speaker: Neil Roberts, Ph.D., Chair, Department of Religion, Williams College
Chair: Kimberly Ann Harris, Penn State University

2:35pm – 3:30pm
Rending the Veil: How do we See each Other?
Speaker: Professor Al Prettyman, Publisher, Co-founder of the Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy
Chair: Brittany O’Neal, Ph.D., Long Island University – Brooklyn

3:35pm – 4:15pm
The Values of Pluralism and Naturalism for Black Humanity
Speaker: Professor Damion Scott, John Jay College, CUNY
Chair: J. Everet Green, Mercy College

4:20pm – 4:50pm
Discussion: Philosophy and Religion in Africana Traditions
Zay D. Green, Neil Roberts, Albert Mosley

*This conference is sponsored by the
Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center.*

Special thanks to Mary Taylor at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics for working assiduously behind the scene to make this event possible and to Professor Brittany O’Neal in assisting with the design of the announcement and the program. Special thanks also to Munayem Mayenin of London, UK for his support.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. It is free and open to the public.

Please join us in Film Screening: THE WANTED 18 Directed by Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan

Tuesday, October 13

6:00 PM

Martin E. Segal Theatre

Humorous and thought provoking, The Wanted 18 shows the power of mass mobilization and nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation during the First Intifada. The film tells the story of 18 dairy cows being brought to the West Bank town of Beit Sahour, as part of a self-sufficiency movement, which were then declared a security threat to the state of Israel. Blending stop-motion animation and graphic novel cartoons with archival footage and interviews, the film uses humor to get at a serious subject. This is a poignant film about nation-building from the bottom up, by the people, not the politicians. Variety called the film ‘mind-opening’ & ‘ingenious.’

Discussants:

Riham Barghouti (Adalah-NY)

Christopher Stone (Hunter College & The Graduate Center)

Emma Alpert (Just Vision)

The screening is co-sponsored by: The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center, MEMEAC, CUNY Graduate Center and The Committee on Globalization and Social Change, CUNY Graduate Center. This event is free and open to the public.

Please join us in celebrating Moustafa Bayoumi’s new book This Muslim American Life; Dispatches from the War on Terror

Tuesday, October 6

6:30-8:30 PM

Room 9204

Over the last few years, Moustafa Bayoumi has been an extra in Sex and the City 2 playing a generic Arab, a terrorist suspect (or at least his namesake “Mustafa Bayoumi” was) in a detective novel, the subject of a trumped-up controversy because a book he had written was seen by right-wing media as pushing an “anti-American, pro-Islam” agenda, and was asked by a U.S. citizenship officer to drop his middle name of Mohamed.

Others have endured far worse fates. Sweeping arrests following the terrorist attacks of

September 11, 2001 led to the incarceration and deportation of thousands of Arabs and

Muslims, based almost solely on their national origin and immigration status. The NYPD, with help from the CIA, has aggressively spied on Muslims in the New York area as they go about their ordinary lives, from noting where they get their hair cut to eavesdropping on conversations in cafés. In This Muslim American Life, Bayoumi reveals what the War on Terror looks like from the vantage point of Muslim Americans, highlighting the profound effect this surveillance has had on how they live their lives. To be a Muslim American today often means to exist in an absurd space between exotic and dangerous, victim and villain, simply because of the assumptions people carry about you. In gripping essays, Bayoumi exposes how contemporary politics, movies, novels, media experts and more have together produced a culture of fear and suspicion that not only willfully forgets the Muslim-American past, but also threatens all of our civil liberties in the present.

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America, which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Nonfiction. He is the editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara and co-editor of The Edward Said Reader. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY).

Jeanne Theoharis (Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn C0llege) and Arun Kundnani (author of The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror) will be discussants.

This event is free and open to the public.

The Emotional Logic of Capitalism

What Progressives Have Missed

A book talk by MARTIJN KONINGS

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29

6PM

SOCIOLOGY LOUNGE, ROOM 6112

The capitalist market, progressives bemoan, is a cold monster: it disrupts social bonds, erodes emotional attachments, and imposes an abstract utilitarian rationality. But what if such hallowed critiques are completely misleading? This book argues that the production of new sources of faith and enchantment is crucial to the dynamics of the capitalist economy. Distinctively secular patterns of attraction and attachment give modern institutions a binding force that was not available to more traditional forms of rule. Elaborating his alternative approach through an engagement with the semiotics of money and the genealogy of economy, Martijn Konings uncovers capitalism’s emotional and theological content in order to understand the paradoxical sources of cohesion and legitimacy that it commands. In developing this perspective, he draws on pragmatist thought to rework and revitalize the Marxist critique of capitalism.

Please join Garth Stevens, Brett Bowman, Gillian Eagle, & Kevin Whitehead, from the Department of Psychology, School of Human and Community Development, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa for a symposium on Tuesday, August 18th, 2015, 3:00-5:00 pm, Room 6304.01 (Psychology).

The Ruse of Reconciliation?

Discursive Contours, Impossibilities, and Modes of Resistance

in the South African ‘Reconciliation Project’

In this symposium we interrogate the ‘reconciliation project’ in South Africa that has become embedded in the trope of the exceptional miracle and highlight the prospects and problematics of reconciliation. The symposium addresses three related arguments. We first explore forgiveness and reconciliation as a fluid discourse that has served varied socio-political functions across historical periods. Second, we examine the limitations of forgiveness and its circular impossibility, as the injunction to forgive calls on us to forgive that which is unforgiveable in the Derridean sense. Third, we argue that in the absence of social repair and with growing inequality, the historical and collective trauma of apartheid violence is drawn upon as a psychological and socio-political resource. The symposium concludes with a commentary on reconciliation as a discourse that is implicated in the constitution of relations of power, both at the level of its reproduction and resistance in South African life.

Garth Stevens is a Full Professor and Clinical Psychologist in the Department of Psychology, School of Human and Community Development, at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. His research focuses on race, racism and related social asymmetries; critical psychology, ideology, power and discourse; violence and its prevention; and historical/collective trauma and memory. He has published widely in these areas, including Race, memory and the apartheid archive: Towards a transformative psychosocial praxis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Brett Bowman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, School of Human and Community Development, at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. His research is on the intersections of violence and social asymmetries in low-middle income countries. His current research examines how risks for violence translate into its enactments. He has published widely and contributed to the World Bank’s Diseases and mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Violence prevention in low- and middle income countries and the World Health Organization’s Violence and health in the WHO African region.

Gillian Eagle is a Full Professor of Psychology in the School of Human and Community Development at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and a Clinical Psychologist. She conducts research on socio-cultural, historical and political aspects of trauma and violence, focusing on the inter-relationship between the socio-political and intra-individual domains of human experience. Her 2010 co-authored book, Traumatic stress in South Africa, has re-invigorated the construct, continuous traumatic stress, and she co-edited a 2013 special issue of Peace and Conflict: The Journal of Peace Psychology on this topic.

Kevin Whitehead is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, School of Human and Community Development, at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. His current research involves applying ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches to embodied action-in-interaction in order to examine how violent encounters unfold in situ. He has published methodological and empirical research articles in a range of international journals including Social Psychology Quarterly, British Journal of Social Psychology, Research on Language and Social Interaction, Discourse& Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies, amongst many others.

Co-Sponsors: Critical Psychology Cluster (PhD Programs in Critical Social/Personality Psychology and Environmental Psychology); PhD Programs in Psychology, Sociology, and Geography; Africana Studies; The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; Committee on Globalization and Social Change; The Public Science Project; The Center for Human Environments; and The Center for the Humanities

This event is free and open to the public

Thursday, May 21, 2015
At 6:30 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center, Segal Theater (Ground floor)
365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016

“The Targeted Village” focuses on the residents of Takae district in northern Okinawa, their recent protests against the construction of U.S. military helipads and deployment of Osprey helicopters, and the Japanese government’s attempt to coax and silence them. Released in Japan in 2014, the 91-minute film is based on an award-winning TV program produced by Chie Mikami. The film takes its title from Takae’s history, where the U.S. military used their land and residents as a mock target in jungle warfare training during the Vietnam War. The subtropical rainforest surrounding Takae is still being used for U.S. Marine Corps training, including guerrilla attacks, infantry training and helicopter drills. The contested deployment of MV-22 Osprey aircrafts at the Futenma Air Base was met with an unprecedented, complete shutdown of the Air Base by Okinawa residents. They were later forcibly removed by police in scenes most major networks never aired. According to Mikami, the film “showed well who the people of Okinawa are fighting against and why they are forced to fight such a battle.”

The film will be followed by short presentations about Okinawa struggles and Q&A session with an Okinawa native Megumi Chibana (University of Hawai’i) and Yuko Tonohira (Sloths Against Nuclear State, NYC) who have been supporting on-the-ground struggles in Okinawa.

Refreshments to follow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics seminar room 6107.

Cosponsored by:

Asia-Pacific Islanders People Solidarity (APIPS)

The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center

The Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center

Revolutionizing American Studies, CUNY Graduate Center

This event is free and open to the public.