May 21, 2015
3pm
Room 5109
The Graduate Center, CUNY

Marina Sitrin will open a discussion on how we might understand many of the struggles that have been taking place around the world over the past few years – with a particular focus on Greece and Argentina, where she has spent time. Using the concept of societies in movement rather than social movements, the discussion will focus on those movements where people are looking to one another for power and transformation – and not formal institutions of power – while taking into consideration the rise of left political parties and governments. Examples to be discussed include struggles to defend the earth and the recuperation of workplaces, media and health care.

Marina Sitrin is a writer, activist and scholar. She is the co-author of They Can’t Represent US: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy (Verso Press, June 2014) as well as the author of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (AK Press, 2006) Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (Zed Books: 2012). Her work focuses on social movements and justice, specifically looking at new forms of social organization, such as autogestión, horizontalidad, prefigurative politics and new affective social relationships. Her forthcoming book with UC Press argues for an expansion of social movement theory putting forward the argument of societies in movement.

This event is sponsored by  The Committee on Globalization and Social Change and The Center for Place, Culture and Politics.

It is free and open to the public.

A talk by Joseph Slaughter, Associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and moderated by Peter Hitchcock, Professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

May 12, 2014
5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Room 5414, Graduate Center, CUNY.

Do we owe human rights to corporations? Recent histories of international law and human rights have begun to document the important role that nineteenth-century colonialism played in the formation and institutionalization of contemporary international human rights law. This talk considers the possibility that early modern corporate colonialism was a founding condition of contemporary international human rights law, and, furthermore, that the colonial charter company might be said to have opened a space in the international realm in the nineteenth century that human beings would only come to occupy in the middle of the twentieth. The colonial charter company was not merely a vehicle for the pursuit of nineteenth-century colonialism. It was charged with carrying some of what we now call human rights to supposedly backwards peoples in “unenlightened” parts of the earth; but it was itself the bearer of some international rights that we now regard as the human rights of individuals. I argue that a collection of qualities and capacities that we typically think of as uniquely human were first combined and protected at the international level in the legal personalities of charter companies. Corporations, and especially the colonial charter companies, were recognized as international persons in advance of the human beings they ostensibly serve.

BIOS
Joseph Slaughter is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University where he teaches postcolonial literature and theory, African, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures, narrative theory, human rights, and 20th-century ethnic and third world literatures. His first book, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International
 Law (Fordham, 2007) was awarded the 2008 René Wellek prize for comparative literature and cultural theory. He is currently completing two books: New Word Orders, on intellectual property and world literature, and Pathetic Fallacies, essays on human rights and the humanities.

Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is also on the faculties of Women’s Studies and Film Studies at the GC. He is the author of five books, including The Long Space, for Stanford University Press. His most recent publications include, “Accumulating Fictions” for Representations,“Immolation” for the Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, “How to Read a Discipline” for Comparative Literature, “Culture and Anarchy in Thatcher’s London” for an anthology on Hanif Kureishi, “( ) of Ghosts” in The Spectralities Reader, “The Space of Time: Chronotopes and Crisis” for Primerjalna Knjizevnost, “Defining the World” in Literary Materialisms and “Everything’s Gone Green: The Environment of BP’s Narrative” for Imaginations. Forthcoming articles include an essay, “Viscosity and Velocity,” for an anthology on oil (Cornell), and an essay on communism titled “The Leninist Hypothesis” for Poetics Today. Forthcoming book projects include a monograph on the cultural representation of labor, a monograph on worlds of postcoloniality, and an edited collection on the New Public Intellectual. He is currently working on two research projects: one about seriality in politics and culture; the other on the aesthetics of commodities and financial instruments.

This event is sponsored by Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Postcolonial Studies Group at the Graduate Center.

This event is open and free to the public.

Join us for the panel Debt Deliberations: Structural, Institutional, Financial

May 11^th, 2015
5:30-7:30 PM
Room c198
Graduate Center, CUNY

Reception and CPCP end of semester party to follow in room 6112 (Sociology Lounge)

This year the Center for Place, Culture and Politics has been thinking on, through, and beyond debt in its many manifestations. There has been a lot of work on debt in recent times, not least because it has come to dominate so many aspects of our lives. This panel will focus on several core aspects of contemporary debt and how it might be creatively engaged. Are the scales of debt a key to the ways in which it may be canceled?

Jane Pollard: “Financing everyday life: the resurgence of subprime auto loans in the US”

Esther Peeren: “Students and Universities at Risk: Debt and Speculation in Dutch Higher Education”

Sophia A. McClennen “The Rights to Debt”

Introduced by Peter Hitchcock, Associate Director Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, Graduate Center, CUNY

BIOS

Jane Pollard is Professor of Economic Geography in the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) and the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University, UK. She has degrees in Geography (BA, Sheffield University UK, MA McMaster University, Canada) and Urban Planning (UCLA, USA). Her research interests and writing have focused on geographies of money and finance, geographical political economy, and the practices and politics of economic geography as a subdiscipline. Her current research – while a Visiting Scholar in the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at CUNY – focuses on the extension of sub–prime loan markets and the financialisation of social reproduction.

Esther Peeren is Associate Professor of Globalization and Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and Vice-Director of the Amsterdam Center for Globalization Studies (ACGS). Her publications include The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2008).

Sophia A. McClennen is Professor of International Affairs and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where she directs the Center for Global Studies. She has published eight books. The most recent  Is Satire Saving Our Nation? was co-written with Penn State undergrad Remy Maisel (Palgrave 2014) Her next book is The Routledge Companion to Human Rights and Literature, co-edited with Alexandra Schultheis-Moore (due out from Routledge 2015). In addition she has published over 60 essays and edited six special journal issues.  She serves on ten editorial boards and has been elected to executive committees of MLA, ACLA, and IASA. In her current work on Latin American cinema and globalization she is studying the intersections between cultural forms, global change, and ideas of identity.

This event is open and free to the public.

Rerooting the Motor City: Notes on a City in Transformation:

Rerooting the Motor City: Notes on a City in Transformation was produced by Paper Tiger Television members: Maria Byck, Amanda Matles, Nadia Mohamed, Adrienne Silverman. From food deserts, to the plans to “rightsize” the city, Detroiters resist, rework, and remain resilient given the social and ecological failures of post-industrial global capitalism. With a critical lens on race and class dynamics, the human cost of industrial capitalism, produced scarcity and the problematics of frontier mentalities subtending “progressive” politics in the United States today are discussed. Rerooting weaves together segments on Detroit’s labor history, the roots of Detroit’s urban agriculture movement, a critical look at philanthro-capitalism and its relationship to urban renewal, as well as media (mis)representations of a city in transformation.

The screening will be followed by a discussion and Q&A with filmmakers Adrienne Silverman and Nadia Mohamed, and CUNY scholars Cindi Katz and Amanda Matles (Earth and Environmental Sciences), and will be moderated by CUNY scholar Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land (Sociology).

May 7
7:00 pm
Skylight Conference Room, 9th Floor

May 7, 2015
6-8 p.m.
Sociology Lounge (Room 6112)

Sustainability has become a ubiquitous concept guiding how urban neighborhoods are reimagined and redeveloped. But is a greener city necessarily a more just city? In Landscape of Discontent, Andrew Newman examines dramatic changes taking place a postindustrial section of Paris to illustrate the connections between the green turn in urban redevelopment and broader transformations in society, politics, and everyday life.

An in-depth look at politics in a multiethnic neighborhood, Landscape of Discontent is an important and timely contribution to current debates concerning integration and cultural difference in France. Through his original focus on urban environmentalism, Newman reveals how a diverse group of residents and activists, many of whom are French Muslims of West African and Maghrebi descent, struggle to reinvent the identity of their neighborhood, and in doing so, redefine their place in the nation.

Andrew Newman is assistant professor of anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit. He graduated from the CUNY Anthropology program in 2011 and was a Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics in 2010-2011 and in 2005-6. His research focuses on urban design social movements, and political ecology in urban areas, and he is currently working on research projects in Detroit and Paris.

This event is open and free to the public.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015
6pm-8pm
Graduate Center, Room C201
*need ID to enter the building

Due to lack of availability of equipment, this event will NOT be livestreamed.

The room seats 40. First come, first serve, seating.

Speakers:

Tamara Nopper (UPenn) –  “Korean banks, U.S. government small business support, and Black-Korean conflict.”

Angie Chung (and Sookhee Oh) (SUNY Albany) — “Gangnam Style: The Local Elite Politics of Koreatown Growth and Redevelopment.”

Norman Oder (Journalist) – “Gaining Chinese Capital for Brooklyn’s Most Controversial Project: Forest City Ratner’s Use of the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program and New Partnership with State-Owned Builder Greenland.”

Tarry Hum (Queens College and Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Immigrant Growth Coalitions and the Financialization of Community Development: The Role of Transnational and Ethnic Banks.”

Moderator: 

Peter Kwong (Hunter College and Graduate Center, CUNY)

Sponsored by the Graduate Center-The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, CUNY Mapping of Asian Americans in New York (MAANY) Seminar, Queens College Department of Urban Studies.

GREECE:   AUSTERITY OR BUST?  Kostas Vergopoulos and David Harvey in Discussion, moderated by Michael Pelias.

April 20^th
Segal Theater
6-8pm

(Space in the Segal theater is is limited to 70 seats. Admission is first come, first serve. Livestream viewing (40 seats) will be available in room 5318.05).

To view LIVESTREAM: 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.

Reception to follow in room 5318 (ARC lounge)

With the recent election of Syriza and the formation of a new government, Greeks have declared they will not tolerate more austerity.  But they cannot get relief without help from the other countries within the Eurozone. The only other option is to leave the Euro.  Help seems not to be forthcoming. Talk of a Grexit (as it is called) is increasing.  What are Greece’s prospects now?  And what might the global implications be of the momentous choices to be made in the next few months?

Kostas Vergopoulos is a founding member of Syriza, and Professor of Political Economy at the University of Paris VIII. His many books include the foundational works “The Agrarian Question in Greece” and (with Samir Amin) “The Peasant Question and Capitalism” as well as the more recent “The Love of Wealth: Money, Power, and Corruption in Greece”, “After the End: The Economy of the Catastrophe and the Next Day” and “The Incongruous Relation: Greece-Europe”.

David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography, and Director of Research at the Center for Place Culture and Politics, at the City University of New York (CUNY) and author of various books, articles, and lectures. He is the author of Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Profile Books, 2014), one of The Guardian’s (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/02/books-christmas-presents-economics-reviews“) Best Books of 2011, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2010). Other books include A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Limits to Capital, and Social Justice and the City. Professor Harvey has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for nearly 40 years. His lectures on Marx’s Volumes I and II are available for download (free) on his website.  He was director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics from 2008-2014.

Michael Pelias is a member of the Philosophy department as well as a member of the executive committee of the faculty union at LIU Brooklyn. He is the co-managing editor of and contributor to the journal, Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination and a co-founder of the Institute for the Radical Imagination, an alternative education and thinking institute. He works on the history of Materialism in the light of post-structuralist thought and the active synthesis of libidinal and political economy in the era of financialization.

This event is free and open to the public. It is Cosponsored by the  Center for Place Culture and Politics, and the Advanced Research Collaborative, Graduate Center, CUNY.