The Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Postcolonial Studies Group (Graduate Center) present:

“A Conversation about the Cultural Representation of Labor”

with Sonali Perera, Hunter College, author of No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization (Columbia, 2014)

and

Peter Hitchcock, GC and Baruch College, author of Labor in Culture; or, Worker of the World(s) (Palgrave, 2017)

 Moderated by Shoumik Bhattacharya

Tuesday December 5th:

6.30pm

Room 6112  

The Graduate Center, CUNY

365 5th ave, NY, NY, 10002

Books will be available for purchase

THIS IS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

THIS EVENT IS CO-SPONSORED BY THE CENTER FOR PLACE, CULTURE, AND POLITICS AND THE POST COLONIAL STUDIES GROUP  (GRADUATE CENTER).

From Socialist Finance to Peripheral Financialization: The Yugoslav Experience. Johanna Bockman and Fabio Mattioli in conversation

Wednesday, November 15 2017

6:15-8:15pm

Room 6112

The Graduate Center, CUNY

365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

Socialist countries have always had banks: central banks, savings banks taking local deposits, commercial banks, and export banks. Che Guevara was even the director of the National Bank of Cuba. What makes socialist banks “socialist”? And what are the relationships between socialist and global finance? How was socialist finance taken over by networks of secret services and company managers, who supported and structured the transition to authoritarian, capitalist parties in the late 1980s and 1990s? Here we look at the entanglements of global and socialist finance in Yugoslavia and to reflect on the new forms of peripheralization generated by financial flows in post-crisis Europe.

Johanna Bockman is Associate Professor of Global Affairs and Sociology at George Mason University. She is the author of the book Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism and the article “Socialist Globalization against Capitalist Neocolonialism: the Economic Ideas behind the NIEO” in Humanity. She is currently working on socialist, nonaligned banks and globalization.

Fabio Mattioli is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on the connection between finance, politics, and labor at the European periphery. Currently, he is working on a book manuscript titled Illiquidity and Power: The Economics of Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and LeftEast

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Discussion on Affordable Housing with Author Glyn Robbins

Friday, November 10

6:30-8:30 PM

Room 9206

The Graduate Center, CUNY

365 5th Ave, New York, New York 10016

Join Glyn Robbins and a panel of local housing activists for a roundtable discussion at the CUNY Graduate Center to discuss ideas for a progressive housing agenda in our city —rent control, new low income housing, and more!

London-based Glyn Robbins is a housing campaigner and leader of Defend Council Housing in the UK, NAHT’s sister organization. In 2015, Glyn kicked off a tour of the US tenant movement with stops in major cities, including the Big Apple. He has published a terrific book, There’s No Place: The American Housing Crisis and What It Means for the UK.

Glyn is visiting the US for a few days to share his book and serve as a catalyst to bring housing campaigners together, in DC, NYC and Boston. Glyn will be joined by Jon Furlong, who is featured promiently in the book, as well as others for a discussion about affordable housing.

Copies of There’s No Place will be available for purchase at the event. Proceeds will be split between Defend Council Housing and the National Alliance of HUD Tenants, the main sponsor of the event. Tenants & Neighbors is also a sponsor of this this event.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

This event is co-sponsored by The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, Defend Council Housing, Tenants & Housing and the National Alliance of HUD Tenants.

Into the contradiction – And other maxims of Anthropological Political Economy:

A Series of 4 Talks with Don Kalb at the Graduate Center

Friday, November 3:  Red October and Anthropology: Centennial Reflections

Room C415A 4:15-6:15

Monday, November 6: The Capitalist Transition Debate: There and Back Again

Rooms 9206/9207 6:30-8:30

Monday, November 13: The Floating Signifier of the “Global Middle Class”

Skylight Room 6:30-8:30

Monday, November 20: Populism and Dignity on Left and Right.

Skylight Room 6:30-8:30

Don Kalb is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen and until recently professor of sociology and social anthropology at Central European University; he is also a senior researcher at Utrecht University and a distinguished visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He has served as a Director of the SOCO program at the IWM in Vienna (Social Consequences of Economic Transformation in Eastern Europe) and was a Braudel Fellow at the EUI (2013), and a Distinghuished Visiting Professor at the Advanced Research Collaborative at CUNY Graduate Center in New York (2015). At the MPI in Halle he leads the ‘Financialization Project’ (with Chris Hann). In 2017 he started the project ‘Frontiers of Value’ at the University of Bergen, Norway.

His books include Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850-1950 (Duke University Press), 1997; The Ends of Globalization. Bringing Society back in, (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers), 2000; Globalization and Development: Key Issues and Debates (Kluwer Academic Publishers), 2004; Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn (Berghahn), 2005; Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe, (Berghahn) 2011; Anthropologies of Class (Cambridge U.P), 2015. He is Founding Editor of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology and of FocaalBlog

THIS EVENT IS SPONSORED BY THE CENTER FOR PLACE, CULTURE AND POLITICS AND THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY, GRADUATE CENTER, CUNY. ALL EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and Jacobin Magazine invite you to:

SPIRALLING OUT OF CONTROL: ON THE FATE OF CAPITAL AND CAPITALISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: A CONVERSATION BETWEEN NANCY FRASER AND DAVID HARVEY 

MODERATED BY BHASKAR SUNKARA

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 1^ST, 2017

6:30 PM

Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York

Nancy Fraser is Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor at the New School for Social Research and holder of an international research chair at the Collège d’études mondiales, Paris. Trained as a philosopher at CUNY, she specializes in critical social theory and political philosophy. Her new book, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory, co-authored with Rahel Jaeggi, will be published by Polity Press in spring 2018. She has theorized capitalism’s relation to democracy, racial oppression, social reproduction, ecological crisis, and feminist movements in a series of linked essays in New Left Review and Critical Historical Studies and in Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (2013). Fraser’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and was cited twice by the Brazilian Supreme Court (in decisions upholding marriage equality and affirmative action). She is currently President of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division and Roth Family Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Dartmouth College.

David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography 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. His new book, published by Oxford University Press, is called Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason.

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin magazine, as well as the publisher of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

THIS EVENT IS CO-SPONSORED BY THE CENTER FOR PLACE, CULTURE AND POLITICS AT THE GRADUATE CENTER, CUNY, AND JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Please join Brian Kamanzi (Pathways to Free Education) and Sonia Vaz Borges (CPCP, Graduate Center, CUNY) for a discussion on militant and radical education.

Monday, September 18

6-8pm

Sociology lounge (room 6112)

Brian Kamanzi is a Cape Town-based writer and electrical engineering Masters student at the University of Cape Town. He describes himself as committed to the social upliftment of his fellow people. He is a Pan-Africanist eager to make contributions to the movement and form cross-cultural connections with others in the struggle

Pathways to Free Education is a popular education collective which coordinates, produces and facilities popular education content and learning spaces on radical perspectives on education and its role in emancipatory politics. Our work is centered on the Western Cape and is not intended to speak to every context but instead to be simply a contribution and a community engagement resource for activists and ordinary people looking to engage with the Free Education debate with an internationalist perspective drawing inspiration to decolonisation movements of the past and present

Sónia Vaz Borges is a historian, social-political activist, and organizer with interdisciplinary experience with youth and elderly people in several European countries. She has BA in Modern and Contemporary History – Politics and International Affairs from ISCTE-IUL Lisboa, and a Master’s Degree in African History from Universidade de Letras de Lisboa. She received her PhD Philosophy from Humboldt University Berlin. Her dissertation, titled Militant Education. Liberation struggle. Conscientization, and underground educational structures in Guinea Bissau 1963-1978, focuses on the liberation schools and the international school network created by the liberation movement during the guerrilla war for independence in Guinea Bissau. She is currently working on her book manuscript with the same title. Sónia is also working on a new project on oral history, under the provisory title Remembering the struggle(s). Life and (hi)stories of PAIGC militants. She is also the editor of the booklets Cadernos Consciência e Resistência Negra and author of the book Na Pó di Spéra. Percursos nos Bairros da Estrada Militar, Santa Filomena e Encosta Nascente. Sónia is currently working on her first short film with filmmaker Felipa César.

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

Right to the City: Screening of Metropolitan Avenue

Tuesday, August 1
6:30 pm
The Museum of the City of New York

MCNY kicks off Season 2 of Smile, It’s Your Close Up with a screening of Metropolitan Avenue (Christine Noschese, 1985, 58 min), the story of a group of “traditional” women who combine old values with new roles to save their Brooklyn neighborhood from the threat of development. One of the first documentaries to air on public television, Metropolitan Avenue was screened as part of the launch of POV in 1988. Now, almost 30 years later, POV is the longest-running showcase on television for independent documentary films.

Join us for a screening of the film followed by a conversation with:

·         Miriam Greenberg and Penny Lewis, editors, The City Is the Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial Strategies in an Urban Age

·         Dianne Jackson and Marie Leanza, neighborhood activists and leaders featured in Metropolitan Avenue

·         Christine Noschese, Director, Metropolitan Avenue

·         Marc N. Weiss, supervising producer of Metropolitan Avenue at POV

·         Jessica Green (moderator), Cinema Director at the Maysles Documentary Center

Admission for this event includes Museum admission. Register online at mcny.org/smile[mcny.org] | Use code SMILE for $10 tickets (regularly $15)

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics

The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics presents:

Consciousness and Revolution II: Educating for Change in the Era of Authoritarian Populism

May 5th–6th 2017

The profound contemporary alienations shaped by long-term crisis require revolutions in the nature of struggle in order to consciously change the external world. Education is central to such change. Our conference combines militant scholars and scholarly militants to share knowledge, resources, history, and practices related to the role of pedagogy for developing consciousness in the present moment. We focus on ad hoc and insurgent educational form-and-content: survival schools in the Dakotas (including the one recently at the Standing Rock #NODAPL occupation; the PAIGC educational program that unrolled during the 1961–1974 war of liberation in Guinée-Bissau; “pop up” universities organized by young militants in conjunction with housing, anti-police, and other struggles in Portugal’s immigrant communities; research-center interventions in established universities such as CUNY, University of Quito, and elsewhere; union- and worker-center based political education in apartheid South Africa and neoliberal USA; and the purpose and ambition of current school strikes and uprisings in India, South Africa, Brasil, and beyond. Please check out the full program below.

Sponsored by the Center for Place Culture and Politics; the Center for Humanities, Graduate Center, CUNY; and Parsons First Year Program. This conference is free and open to the public. Admission will be granted on a first come, first served basis.

This conference was organized with the loving collective labor of: Ujju Aggarwal, Sónia Vaz Borges, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, David Harvey, Peter Hitchcock, Malav Kanuga, Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper, and Mary N. Taylor.

Please contact us at pcp@gc.cuny.edu if you plan to bring children on Saturday and would like to learn about accommodations.

Friday, May 5th, 2017
9:30am to 6:30pm
Elebash Recital Hall The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016

9:30am–10:00am | Welcome

10:00am–12:00pm | Contemporary Alienations: Roots and Branches
This panel looks at the different ways in which resistance proceeds within and between grassroots activism and national and international configurations of opposition. What lessons can be learned from Black labor organization or Kashmiri insurgency in this regard? How can feminist political consciousness be enhanced at different scales? How do past struggles continue to inspire present contingencies? By considering crisis across different political formations, this panel hopes to generate a significant crosstalk about the roles of activist consciousness in contemporary solidarity.

Shehla Rashid Shora, James Kilgore, Leigh-Ann Naidoo, Steven Pitts, and Robyn Spencer (moderator)

12:00pm–2:00pm | Genealogies of Militancy: From Alienation to Action 
This panel traces out insurgent educational practices in Portugal, India, and Brazil with an eye toward understanding how people confront and obstruct traditional societal institutions in order to reveal existing problems, bring to light alternatives, and/or embody the solution to a social issue. We will discuss how liberation movements use popular education to establish counter-narratives that restore people’s ability to determine their own life and destiny, define their relationships to other people, and to own their own labor and labor production. We will share movement lessons across historical-geographical conditions on three continents in order to conceive together transnational forms of popular education for the struggle against the rapid rise of authoritarian populist rule in the world.

Maria Luisa Mendonça, Alf Nilsen, Rui Estrela, Anjuli F. Raza Kolb, and Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper (moderator)

2:00pm–3:00pm | Lunch Break 

3:00pm–5:00pm | Education Pending Revolution 
This panel explores how liberation movements from different socio, cultural, and political backgrounds around the world organize themselves in order to create alternative and educational liberatory spaces towards emancipation and revolution. We will discuss, from historical and contemporary perspectives, the social and political circumstances that lead liberation movements to create such spaces as well as their objectives. We will also discuss the impact of these educational initiatives at the individual and collective levels. Departing from the experience and practices of these liberation movements we intend to create a dialogue that can help us to rethink the current state of education (its dangers and challenges), and the ways we can use education toward consciousness and long term revolution.

Marcella Gilbert, Flávio Almada, Ricot Jean-Pierre, Mary Philips, and Sónia Vaz Borges (moderator)

5:30pm–6:30pm | Keynote: Forms of Confronting 
Mariame Kaba

Saturday May 6th, 2017
9:30am to 4:00pm
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, Second floor
New York, NY 10011

Organization of day-two will be around multiple strategic discussions and breakouts with invited speakers and conference attendees.

Tuesday, April 25
6:00 – 8:00 PM
Skylight Room (9100)

Michel Foucault famously argued that Chicago school neoliberalism was beyond normativity, uninterested in the disciplinary categories of perversion or deviance. Yet neoliberal scholars were far from libertarian when it came to the legal regulation of sexuality and entertained a much more complex relationship to moral philosophy than what is suggested by Foucault. In this workshop, Melinda Cooper, (author of Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, 2017), will elucidate what she sees as the moral economy of neoliberalism and its provenance in the poor law tradition of family responsibility. This event will bring together Melinda Cooper with Leigh Claire La Berge, a scholar who has worked on the intersection of neoliberalism and sexual politics.

Speakers

Melinda Cooper is Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, and Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.

Leigh Claire La Berge is currently working on a book entitled Wages Against Artwork: The Social Practice of Decommodification, sections of which have been published in South Atlantic Quarterly and Postmodern Culture.  Her first book, Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (Oxford, 2015) tracked the contest between postmodern and realist fictions about finance in a nascent era of financialization, and her articles have appeared in Radical Philosophy, Studies in American Fiction, Criticism, Journal of Cultural Economy, and the Radical History Review. She is the co-editor, along with Alison Shonkwiler, of Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa, 2014). She is assistant professor of English at the City University of New York (BMCC) and a faculty fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics.

This event is sponsored by Zone Books, the Center for the Humanities, the PhD Program in Political Science, and the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center, CUNY. It is free and open to the public.