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Tomorrow! Thursday, Feb. 16: Talk at Clark U to explore dark humor in contemporary African American art

Barber, Tiffany
Tiffany E. Barber

absolutely_hilarious
Absolutely Hilarious, 1997. Peter Williams (born 1952). Oil on canvas.

Clark University
950 Main St.

FREE TO ALL!

Clark University will host “Dark Humor and the African Image,” a lecture by curator Tiffany E. Barber, at 7 p.m. Thurs., Feb. 16, in the Higgins Lounge in Dana Commons.

This free, public event is part of the Higgins School of Humanities’ spring symposium, “What’s So Funny?” as well as the on-going African American Intellectual Culture Series.

Barber will talk about how African American artists use satire, visual puns, farce, absurdity, kitsch, and the bizarre to present reverent, positive images of blackness in order to counteract the experience of slavery and racism.

She will draw upon her recent exhibition, “Dark Humor: African American Art from the University of Delaware,” to consider the significance of humor in contemporary art. She will discuss how black artists such as Camille Billops, David Hammons, Barkley Hendricks, and Peter Williams employ subversive humor to question the currency of cultural and racial stereotypes.

Barber is a scholar, curator, and writer of twentieth and twenty-first century visual art and performance with a focus on artists of the black diaspora living and working in the United States.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities, the Office of the Provost, and the Department of Visual Performing Arts.

InCity Voices

‘Home Grown: Cultivating the next generation of urban farmers’

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pics:Rose Tirella

Clark U, 950 Main St.

7 p.m.

Nov. 9

FREE TO ALL!

Clark University to host agricultural expert for ‘Home Grown: Cultivating the next generation of urban farmers,’ Nov. 9

Clark University will host “Home Grown: Cultivating the Next Generation of Urban Farmers,” a lecture by agricultural expert Jennifer Hashley, at 7 p.m. Wed., Nov. 9, in the Higgins Lounge in Dana Commons.

Demand for fresh, locally-grown food close to urban centers is increasing. In this lecture, Hashley will present her strategies for raising the next generation of environmentally responsible farmers.

Hashley has spent more than 15 years in the field of sustainable agriculture. She is the director of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and has helped transform New Entry into a nationally recognized farmer training program. She is responsible for the overall strategic direction and management of the organization that includes three incubator training farms, horticultural, livestock, and farm business training courses, a food hub (World PEAS), and several national -scale, capacity-building programs for beginning farmers and food security efforts.

Hashley is also an agricultural business instructor for the Mass. Department of Agricultural Resources and serves on the boards and steering committees of multiple agricultural organizations. She has earned numerous leadership awards for her food systems work, and has been selected as an Environmental Leadership Fellow and an Eisenhower Agriculture Fellow. In 2003, she and her husband, a full-time vegetable farmer, started Pete and Jen’s Backyard Birds, a diversified pasture-based livestock operation. This year, they relocated their farm to Lincoln, Mass., where they manage Codman Community Farms.

This free, public event is co-sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities, the Department of Economics and the George Perkins Marsh Institute.

It is part of the Higgins School’s Fall 2016 series “Home (De)Constructed,” which explores what “home” truly means.

InCity Yum Yums

Clark U parked in Yum Yums …

NedBlackhawk
Ned Blackhawk

April 15: Clark U. President’s lecture to focus on genocide of Native Americans

Clark University will host Yale University professor Ned Blackhawk for a President’s Lecture, “Colonial Genocide in Native North America: Varying Methods and Approaches,” on Friday, April 15, at 7:30 p.m. in Razzo Hall in the Traina Center for the Arts, 92 Downing St.

This free, public lecture serves as the keynote address for a weekend symposium, “Indigenous Identity and Mass Violence in North America: Genocide of Native Americans?” organized and sponsored by Clark’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Professor Blackhawk is a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada. He is currently a professor of History and American Studies at Yale University where he coordinates the Yale Group for the Study of Native America.

Blackhawk is author of “Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the early American West” (Harvard, 2006), a study of the American Great Basin that garnered half a dozen professional prizes including the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

Professor Blackhawk’s address will examine approaches to the study of genocide in Native North America. In it, he will chart the increased attention to indigenous genocide in Canadian history, and explore the reasons for the ongoing erasure of the subject in the study of U.S. history.

This lecture is sponsored by a generous gift from Clark alumnae Ellen Carno and Neil Leifer and is offered as part of the President’s Lecture Series.

InCity Voices

At Worcester State University: Dr. Cornell West, Too Smart  

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West at WSU. photo: Gordon Davis

By Gordon Davis
 
Dr. Cornell West spoke at Worcester State University last night. He is a difficult man to understand, but most philosophers are. He certainly stepped on everyone’s toes without any apparent concrete ax to grind.

At first Dr. West talked about love and how it will change the world. By love he means love or the love of human interactions and charity. He feels this should be our primary motivation. He reminded me of a gentleman in Worcester who also says that his enemies will be swept away with this love.

Next Dr. West talked of integrity of the individual and how we should not succumb to the prostitution of ourselves for money and banality. It was almost sermonlike.

Then toes started to get stepped on. He said many of the churches preached the gospel of prosperity or pray to God and you will get rich or be free of material want.

He attacked President Obama, saying we have a Black President, a Black Attorney General and a Black head of Homeland Security, and the racist cops still are not being punished.

Dr. West had a good word for Malcolm X whom he saw as a model of the redemption of the individual, a man who could change his life for the better in terms of social interactions and leadership.

The Constitution of the United took a hit. Dr. West pointed out that the Constitution made legal the exploitative nature of the political bosses of the American Revolution, codifying slavery.  His point, as I understand it, is: the things that are legal are not always just; we should not fall into the trap of thinking legality equals justice.

There was an irony, I suppose, in his analysis of presidential candidate Donald Trump. Dr. West sarcastically called Donald Trump “brother.” He said brother Trump was not yet a fascist. Dr. West thought Trump to be an egomaniac who likes showing off how smart he is. The irony is that Dr. West seemed to be doing the same thing.

Unfortunately, most of West’s audience was Worcester State University students who did not seem to grasp the shock values of Dr. West’s assertions. The terms he used, like “neo liberal,” seemed to confuse many.

From my own experience, terms used by contemporary college students like “intersectionality” go over my head as well.

Dr. West is in his sixties, and a generational gap may be developing with semantics of the 1960s and 2010s. I heard some of the students leaving say that they wanted to cut through the crap and get to the message.

One of the things Dr. West does not have is a cause to fight for. He did not say he wanted to close down Guantanamo. He did not say he wanted a $15/hour minimum wage. He did say he was for a general redistribution of power.

When you do not have a cause, speech becomes more philosophical or ethical.  It is like someone showing off how smart he is. 

What I learned years ago from Dr. Hampsch, one of my philosophy teachers at Holy Cross, is that Karl Marx changed philosophy when he said our job is to make history, not just to study it. That thought came to me as I listened to Dr. West.

InCity Voices

News you can use! Main South: lecture at Clark U! … Ladies! Train for jobs that pay the bills!

jonas620
Regina Jonas

FREE!

Clark University

Tuesday, March 29

The long-hidden history
of Regina Jonas, first ordained woman rabbi

Gail Twersky Reimer, former executive director of the Jewish Women’s Archive, will present “Regina Jonas: Forgotten, Remembered/Forgotten, Remembered,” about the first modern-day woman rabbi, at Clark University

Beginning at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 29

… in the Rose Library of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 11 Hawthorne St.

This David H. ’65 and Edith Chaifetz Endowed Lecture in Jewish Studies is free and open to the public.

The talk will include a screening of Reimer’s short documentary film, “In the Footsteps of Regina Jonas.”

In the summer of 2014 a special delegation of American rabbis, scholars, and communal lay leaders, traveled to Germany and the Czech Republic to honor and learn about Regina Jonas, the first woman to be ordained a Rabbi in modern times, and to publically commemorate her communal work as a rabbi both in Berlin and Theresienstadt. Jonas died at Auschwitz in 1944.

The group, which included the first American women ordained as rabbis by their respective movements (Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, Orthodox), eagerly embraced this newly discovered foremother.

In this talk, Reimer, who was part of the delegation, reflects on a series of questions related to women and Jewish collective history and memory.

As she traces Jonas’ life, she considers a range of possible explanations for why the historical record was so silent about her. She then looks more closely at the different trajectories of Jonas’ rediscovery in Europe and the United States, and what it teaches us about the dynamic relationship between memory and forgetting.

Reimer is the former executive director of the Jewish Women’s Archive, a not-for-profit organization she founded in 1995 to document and share the stories, struggles, and achievements of Jewish women. She holds a doctorate in English and American Literature and has co-edited two anthologies of Jewish women’s writings.

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InCity Voices

Dying for fashion

Clark University
950 Main St.
Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons
Worcester

FREE

Jan. 25 at Clark University: ‘Dying for Fashion’ lecture

Noted sociologist, author to present talk about apparel industry’s dark side
 
“Dying for Fashion: A First-Hand Report on the Hidden Cost of Our Clothes” is the topic of an upcoming talk by Clark University sociologist Professor Robert J.S. Ross at 4 p.m. Monday, Jan. 25, in the Higgins Lounge at Clark’s Dana Commons.
 
Drawing on his decades of research and having traveled to Bangladesh to investigate and study the aftermath of the Rana Plaza collapse that killed more than 1,100 people in 2013, Prof. Ross will discuss the horrific conditions of the global apparel business, where profits are outweighing the livelihood of workers.
 
The event is free and open to the public and co-sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities, the Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise, and the Geography, Sociology, Political Science, and IDCE departments. 
       
Since the 1990s, Prof. Ross has conducted research on the resurgence of sweatshops in the global apparel industry, and has since had his work on the topic published in The Nation, Foreign Affairs, and other media.

His book “Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and the Abuse in the New Sweatshop” brings light to the unseen horrors faced by    apparel industry workers, both in the United States and abroad. Ross helped establish Clark University’s undergraduate program in Urban Development and Social Change.
 

Uncategorized

Main South: lecture at Clark U

Eric Schwarz, author of “The Opportunity Equation: How Citizen Teachers are Combating the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools,” will speak at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18, in Tilton Hall, 2nd floor of the Higgins University Center at Clark University. 
 
Schwarz’s lecture, “The Opportunity Equation: How a shadow education system outside of school is growing America’s achievement gap and what we can do about it” is a continuation of the President’s Lecture Series.
 
Schwarz is the co-founder and former CEO of Citizen Schools, which deploys full-time AmeriCorps members and volunteer “Citizen Teachers” to teach extended day classes in engineering, law, business, journalism, arts, and more.

Citizen Schools was awarded Fast Company’s Social Capitalist Award in 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008; the Skoll Foundation’s Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2005; and was recognized by the White House Department of Education. The program currently operates in 12 school districts across seven states.
 
This event is free and open to the public. A question-and-answer session and book signing will immediately follow.

InCity Letters, InCity Voices, Uncategorized

“Almodóvar In/And Latin America” lecture at Clark University

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“Almodóvar In/And Latin America”

lecture by Paul Julian Smith (CUNY Graduate School)

Monday, October 28, 5 pm

Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons, Clark University campus, Worcester

From his 1980s films (“Matador,” “Law of Desire,” and “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”) to his recent films (“The Skin I Live In” and “I’m So Excited”) Pedro Almodóvar has infused world transgressive, Camp vision that has deep, moving and occasionally tragic insights.

What does this post-Franco Spanish director have to say specifically to Latin America and how has he been received there?

Paul Julian Smith is one of the foremost scholars in Hispanic cultural studies, particularly known for his work on Spanish and Mexican film. A professor at Cambridge University from 1991-2010, he was elected to the British Academy in 2008 and was appointed Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate School in 2010. His many books include “Writing in the Margin” (Oxford, 1988), “The Moderns: Time, Space, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture” (Oxford, 2000), “Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar” (Verso, 1994 and 2000), “Contemporary Spanish Culture: TV, Fashion, Art, and Film” (Polity, 2003), Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet (Manchester, 2007), and Spanish Practices: Literature, Cinema, Television (Oxford: Legenda, 2012).

InCity Letters, InCity Voices

Urbanization trends in China topic of Atwood Lecture

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Karen Seto, associate professor of the Urban Environment at Yale University, will deliver the Clark University Graduate School of Geography Atwood Lecture, titled “Urbanization trends in China: challenges and opportunities for environmental sustainability,” at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 13, in Razzo Hall, Traina Center for the Arts, 92 Downing Street.

Professor Seto will also participate in a faculty panel discussing “Land-use science and environmental sustainability: future directions and applications,” at noon, Friday, Oct.14, in the Grace Conference Room, Higgins University Center.

Seto studies the human transformation of land and the links between urbanization, global change, and sustainability. She is an expert in remote sensing analysis and integrating satellite data with social science research methods. She has pioneered methods to reconstruct historical land-use and to develop empirical models to explain and forecast urban expansion. Her geographic expertise is in Asia, especially China and India. She has also worked in Vietnam, Qatar, and the United States.

Professor Seto is co-chair of the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Project of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change and a coordinating lead author for Working Group III of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. She also serves on the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Steering Group and the U.S. National Research Council Geographical Sciences Committee.

From 2002 to 2008, Seto was the Global Thematic Leader for Ecosystem Management Tools for the Commission on Ecosystem Management of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. She is the executive producer of “10,000 Shovels: Rapid Urban Growth in China,” a documentary film that integrates satellite imagery, historical photographs, and contemporary film footage to highlight the urban changes occurring in China.

Professor Seto is an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow and recipient of a NASA New Investigator Program Award, a NSF Career Award, and a National Geographic Research Grant.

The annual Atwood Lecture series honors Wallace W. Atwood, founder of the Graduate School of Geography and President of Clark University from 1921 to 1946.

This lecture is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

InCity Letters

Lecture at Clark University to examine untold stories of Iraqi women

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Clark University presents “Untold Stories: Iraqi Women Between Dictatorship, Sanctions, and Occupation,” a lecture by Dr. Nadje Al-Ali, professor and chair of the Center for Gender Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, at 11:45 a.m. on March 14 in the Grace Conference Room of the Higgins University Center, 950 Main St.

Nadje Al-Ali’s main research interests revolve around gender theory; feminist activism; women and gender in the Middle East; transnational migration and diaspora mobilization; and war, conflict and reconstruction. She is currently President of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS). She is also a member of the Feminist Review Collective and a founding member of Act Together: Women’s Action for Iraq and a member of Women in Black UK.

Her most recent book (co-edited with Nicola Pratt) is entitled “Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives” (Zed Books, 2009). Other publications include “What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq” (2009, University of California Press, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); “Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present” (2007, Zed Books); “New Approaches to Migration” (ed., Routledge, 2002, with Khalid Koser); Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2000) and “Gender Writing – Writing Gender” (The American University in Cairo Press, 1994).

She has also authored numerous book chapters and journal articles.

This lecture is sponsored by the International Development, Community and Environment and Gender and Women’s Studies departments. It is free and open to the public