Recent Forums— Fall 2011
A Decade Later:
Muslim Communities and the Post 9/11 Interfaith Landscape
Thursday, December 1
7:30pm
Main Dining Room, Building W11 - click here for map
Speaker
Ibrahim Abdul Malik, Park 51, Advisory Board
Professor of American Muslim History and Culture, Fairleigh Dickinson University
Responders
Naila Baloch, Muslim Chaplain, Tufts
Introductions
Suheil I. Laher, MIT, Muslim Chaplain
The Very Rev. Jep Streit, Boston Episcopal Cathedral, Dean
Shaykh Ibrahim Abdul-Malik, Ed.D., Ph.D. is Professor of American Muslim History and Culture. He earned his first doctorate in 1971 from Harvard University in Science and Education. His second Ph.D., completed in 2007, was in Islamic Studies from the Graduate Theological Foundation.
During his 25-year career with the New York City School System (teacher, principal, vice-chairman, Board of Examiners), Dr. Ibrahim was also Adjunct Professor at City University of New York for ten years. Dr. Ibrahim was a co-founder of Imams Council of New York, and Associate Director of the UN Summer Internship Program, Geneva, Switzerland. After September 11, 2001, he served as a Volunteer Disaster Chaplain and Trauma Counselor at ground zero.
Dr. Ibrahim will speak to the state of Muslim Christian relations in NYC during the ten years since 9/11/2001. He will also address the questions: What is the status of interfaith/multi-faith activities (between Muslims and other religious groups)? To what extent are these activities fostering a sustained, respectful, mutual understanding and acceptance, particularly in light of the surge of these activities immediately following 9/11?
Responders:
Naila A. Baloch, Muslim chaplain at Tufts University, completed her masters in Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and was their first female, Muslim student to prepare for religious service. Born in a household of both Shi'as and Sunnis, she is deeply committed to building bridges, and says that the 9/11 events heavily influenced her choice to pursue Muslim chaplaincy in the U.S.
The Very Rev. Jep Streit, is the Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St Paul, Boston. He describes the Cathedral as a gathering place for an unlikely and wide-ranging assortment of people, all drawn together by the hope and possibility of finding God. Since September 2000, Muslims have gathered at the Cathedral for Ju’mah, their weekly Friday prayers.
Co-hosted with the Addir Fellows Interfaith Program.
Monday, November 21 at 7:00pm
Room 26-100 - click here for map
Reception to Follow
The documentary, Miss Representationn, written, directed and produced by Jennifer Siebal Newsom, premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and aired on OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network in October. The film explores how the media’s misrepresentation of women has led to the underrepresentation of women in positions of power and influence.
Miss Representation uncovers a glaring reality we live with every day but fail to see. The film exposes how mainstream media contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America. The film challenges the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls, which make it difficult for women to achieve leadership positions and for the average woman to feel powerful herself.
In a society where media is the most persuasive force shaping cultural norms, the collective message that our young women and men overwhelmingly receive is that a woman’s value and power lie in her youth, beauty, and sexuality, and not in her capacity as a leader. While women have made great strides in leadership over the past few decades, the United States is still 90th in the world for women in national legislatures, women hold only 3% of clout positions in mainstream media, and 65% of women and girls have disordered eating behaviors.
Stories from teenage girls and provocative interviews with politicians, journalists, entertainers, activists and academics, like Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow, Margaret Cho, Rosario Dawson and Gloria Steinem build momentum as Miss Representation accumulates startling facts and statistics that will leave the audience shaken and armed with a new perspective.
We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân
A film by Anne Peacemaker
Thursday, November 17
7:00pm
1-190 - click here for map
Celebrated every Thanksgiving as the Indians who saved the Pilgrims from starvation, and then largely forgotten, the Wampanoag Tribes of Cape Cod and Martha¹s Vineyard are now saying loud and clear, and in their Native tongue, 'Âs Nutayuneân' — We Still Live Here.
The Wampanoag's ancestors ensured the survival of the first English settlers in America, and lived to regret it. Now a cultural revival is taking place.
Spurred on by their celebrated linguist, Jessie Little Doe Baird, recent winner of a MacArthur Œgenius award, the Wampanoag are bringing their language home.
Like many Native American stories, this one begins with a vision. Years ago, Jessie began having recurring dreams: familiar-looking people from another time speaking in an incomprehensible language. These visions sent her on an odyssey that would uncover hundreds of documents written in Wampanoag, lead her to a Masters in Linguistics at MIT, and result in an unprecedented feat of language reclamation by her people. Jessie's daughter Mae is the first Native speaker of Wampanoag in a century.
Q&A with director to follow
Free & open to the public
Sponsored by Women’s and Gender Studies with support from The Technology and Culture Forum, The Office of Minority Education, The Office of Student Activities and MIT Linguistics.
Arab-Jewish Peacebuilding Projects- Can They Make a Difference?
Wednesday, November 16
7pm
Stata 32-124 - click here for map
Speaker
Harriet Feinberg, Middle East peace activist, writer, and educator
Presentation followed by panel discussion and Q&A with Palestinian alumni and instructors from Middle East Education through Technology (MEET). Refreshments will be served.
HARRIET FEINBERG is a Middle East peace activist, writer, and educator. She organized and for several years facilitated a monthly dialogue group of Arab-American and Jewish-American women which met for four years. She was one of the founders of the “Playing for Peace” project at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music. That project, which brings young musicians from the Middle East and other conflict areas to play music in the summer in rural New Hampshire, is now twenty-two years old and still flourishing. In 2010 she organized a panel entitled “Coexistence Projects from Multiple Perspectives” for the Association for Jewish Studies conference in Boston. She holds an Ed. D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Co-sponsored by MISTI MIT-MEET and the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT
This event is free and open to the public.
Refreshments will be served.
What is MEET?
MEET brings together excelling Israeli and Palestinian high school students into a fast-paced, world-class educational program focusing on computer science, entrepreneurship, and teamwork. Over the past six years, MIT students and alumni have traveled to the Middle East each summer to teach MEET's students about technology, business, and leadership, and to apply their skills to real-world problems, fostering joint projects with such industry and non-profit partners as Hewlett-Packard, Seeds of Peace, and others.
Join the MEET team this summer and you will gain valuable, memorable experiences as you teach and inspire a group of gifted, highly-motivated, and amazing Palestinian and Israeli high-schoolers.
In the process, you will live in, work in, and explore one of the most historic and influential regions in the world, and get some time to relax and see the sights on weekend trips, complete with guided tours (and off-road vehicles).
As an instructor, your travel and housing will be paid for, and you will receive a generous stipend for the summer.
How to Apply
Apply online by November 25 at http://apply.meet.mit.edu/instructor
Check us out on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/MEET-Middle-East-Education-through-Technology/6144957506
The Second Arab Awakening:
Challenges and Promise
Tuesday, November 15
4:30-6:30
E51-395 - click here for map
Speaker
Dr. Marwan Muasher, Vice President for Studies
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Marwan Muasher is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, where he oversees the Endowment’s research in Washington and Beirut on the Middle East. Muasher served as foreign minister (2002–2004) and deputy prime minister (2004–2005) of Jordan, and his career has spanned the areas of diplomacy, development, civil society, and communications. He is also a senior fellow at Yale University.
Muasher began his career as a journalist for the Jordan Times. He then served at the Ministry of Planning, at the prime minister’s office as press adviser, and as director of the Jordan Information Bureau in Washington.
In 1995, Muasher opened Jordan’s first embassy in Israel, and in 1996 became minister of information and the government spokesperson. From 1997 to 2002, he served in Washington again as ambassador, negotiating the first free trade agreement between the United States and an Arab nation. He then returned to Jordan to serve as foreign minister, where he played a central role in developing the Arab Peace Initiative and the Middle East Road Map.
In 2004 he became deputy prime minister responsible for reform and government performance, and led the effort to produce a ten-year plan for political, economic, and social reform. From 2006 to 2007, he was a member of the Jordanian Senate.
Most recently, he was senior vice president of external affairs at the World Bank from 2007 to 2010.
This program is hosted by the Emile Bustani Middle East Seminar and the MIT Center for International Studies with support from T&C.
Listen to this program with the link.
The True Cost of Coal:
The Beehive Design Collective 's
Depiction of a Complex Socio-Technical Issue
November 15
7:00pm-8:30pm
Interactive Workshop
8:30pm-9:30pm
32-141 - click here for map
The Beehive Design Collective, based in Machais, Maine, are touring the country presenting their collaboratively designed large-scale posters which weave together narratives and sharply examined social consequences of technological change. This exciting event will be interactive with discussion of the process of creating such a work followed with an interactive workshop.
The True Cost of Coal is dense with metaphors drawn from the natural world. It is rooted in history, grounded in the grinding urgency of Mountain Top Removal, fueled by the looming threat of climate change, and guided by the robust, grassroots resistance of everyday Appalachians. It is about communities envisioning, building, and defending a better world every day, in a million ways.
Art supplies will be provided, as will refreshments.
Co-hosted by the Grad Arts Forum and funded in part by a Director’s Grant from the Council for the Arts at MIT.
WALL STREET IN CONTEXT: Strategies for Restoring the Dignity of the 99%
Tuesday, November 8
7:00pm
32-123 - click here for map
Speakers
Pete Cannon, Occupy Boston, Medical Coordinator
Marisa Egerstrom, Occupy Boston, Organizer, Protest Chaplains
Professor Mel King, Occupy Boston, Protester and Professor Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT
Professor Thomas Kochan, Sloan School of Management, Co-Director, Institute for Work and Employment Research
Professor Michael Piore, Professor of Political Economy, MIT
Moderator:
Professor Jonathan King, Biology, MIT
Pete Cannon and Marisa Egerstrom, will describe and discuss the Boston expression of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Professors Tom Kochan and Mike Piore will locate the Occupy movement on the U.S. protest landscape. Offering their insights and observations of the campaigns of the 1930s, the 1960s and the recent union rights battles in Wisconsin, each will propose strategies for empowering the 99% to respond to the increasing U.S. wealth gap. Mel King, DUSP professor emeritus and Occupy Boston protestor, will give concluding summary remarks. Jonathan King (MIT Molecular Biology, Technology and Culture Forum Steering Committee) will moderate.
Pete Cannon is a medical coordinator at Occupy Boston. He has worked on mountaintop removal coal mining, anti-corporate globalization, climate change, grassroots disaster relief, and street medic organizing.
Marisa Egerstrom is a Ph.D. candidate in American Civilization at Harvard, where she studies American religious and cultural history. She is a lead organizer of The Protest Chaplains.
Thomas A. Kochan is the George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management and Co-Director of both the MIT Workplace Center and of the Institute for Work and Employment Research.
Michael Piore, has a joint appointment in the MIT Department of Economics and Political Science.
Mel King, Professor Emeritus Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) has extensive experience as a social activist, community developer, author, and politician.
Check back here soon for a video of this program
October 28-November 2
DON¹T BUY INTO RACIST, SEXIST PRE-PACKAGED COSTUMES!
October 28-November 2
Design and submit your awesome, progressive costume design to the Boston-wide costume PHOTO CONTEST!
First Place Prize: iPod Touch 8
Second Place: $50
Third Place: $25
Send your photos to feministsoccupyhalloween@gmail.com
Photos will be displayed at feministsoccupyhalloween.tumblr.com
Sponsored by End Violence, MIT Program in Women's and Gender Studies and GWAMIT
Wednesday, November 2
7:30-9:00
6-120 - click here for map
Miroslav Volf was educated in his native Croatia, United States, and Germany. He earned doctoral and post-doctoral degrees from the University of Tuebingen, Germany and has written or edited 15 books and over 70 scholarly articles. His most significant books include Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996) (winner of Grawemeyer Award in Religion); After Our Likeness (1998) in which he explores the Trinitarian nature of ecclesial community; and Allah: A Christian Response (2011), whether Muslims and Christians have a common God. He is actively involved in many top-level initiatives concerning Christian-Muslim relations and is a member of the Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum.
Professor Volf is the founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, whose Reconciliation Program aims to promote reconciliation between Muslims and Christians, and between Muslim-majority nations and the West, drawing on the resources of the Abrahamic faiths. This project is focused primarily on bridge-building, scholarly research on the major theological, political, cultural, social and ethical issues which traditionally divide Muslims and Christians, and on concerns which unite them.
On November 2nd, Professor Volf will address the key question of whether religious exclusivists can embrace pluralism as a political project.
Co-sponsored with the Addir Fellows Interfaith Program
Surveillance and Citizenship
Thursday, October 27
5:00pm-7:00pm
Bartos Theater, MIT Media Lab, E15 - click here for map
Speakers
Sandra Braman, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Susan Landau, Visiting Professor, Harvard University
Marcus Novak, University of California, Santa Barbara
Moderator
Ethan Zuckerman, Director and Principal Investigator, MIT Center for Civic Media
Co-sponsored with the MIT Communications Forum
Digital technologies have exponentially expanded the power of government and
corporations to keep tabs on citizens. But citizens in turn are exploiting
new technologies to expose the activities of governments, companies and even
each other.
How does the persistence and ubiquity of surveillance in our
digitizing world affect what it means to be a citizen? Does our emerging
condition of constant surveillance encourage individuals to curtail how they
speak and act - or to offer more information? In what ways are new forms of
citizen surveillance and public witness instruments of democracy and
transparency? In what ways are they tools of distortion and propaganda for
ideologues or special interests?
Our panel of three distinguished scholars will engage these and related questions on evolving notions of citizenship in the digital age. Panelists include Sandra Braman, professor of
communication at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, who has written
extensively on information technology, law and society; Susan Landau,
visiting professor at Harvard University and author of Surveillance or
Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies; and Marcos Novak,
professor and artist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose
work explores the relationship between humans and technology.
The 10th Annual International Development Fair
Friday, September 30
1:00-3:00pm
The Stata Center, Building 32 - click here for map
The Fair is traditionally held each year early in the fall semester and provides incoming and continuing MIT students, recent graduates and members of the MIT community an opportunity to learn about ways that they can become engaged in international development through student groups, non-profit organizations, academic course offerings and other activities on and around MIT's campus. Groups and organizations of all types set up booths to display their development projects and enlist the interested individuals who pass through the fair grounds.
The annual Fair is organized by the International Development Initiative and the Technology and Culture Forum.
(a one-day symposium on war, feminist activism and visual culture)
September 9, 2011
3:00pm-8:00pm (Schedule below)
Building W20-491 - click here for map
SPEAKERS
Marianne Hirsch Postmemory, Art and Archive”
Andrea Geyer Memory Now. A poetic challenge to Pasts, Presents and Futures”
SCREENINGS
Andrea Geyer, “Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb (2009; 42 min) and “Comrades of Time” (2010)
Coco Fusco “Operation Atropos” (2006; 59 min)
SCHEDULE
3pm-5pm: Screenings
5pm-6pm: Reception
6:15pm-8pm: Speakers with Q&A by Emma Teng
On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, we gather for talks by MARIANNE HIRSCH and ANDREA GEYER. Our speakers will address a set of interrelated questions: What is the role of art and the humanities in the work of social justice? What is the role of feminism? How does it provide a site of intervention? How do we critique what some critics are arguing is a permanent state of war or perpetual war? To address the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the symposium also asks how visuality has been instrumental in the conduct of war, and in critiques of it.
SPEAKERS
MARIANNE HIRSCH is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She is second Vice-President of the Modern Language Association. Most recent, together with Leo Spitzer, she published Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010). Among her publications, she is the author of Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997), The Familial Gaze (1999), a special issue of Signs on "Gender and Cultural Memory" (2002), and Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (2004). Her co-edited book Rites of Return is forthcoming in November, and her own book The Generation of Postmemory: Visual Culture After the Holocaust will be published next year.
ANDREA GEYER uses both fiction and documentary strategies in her image and text based works. She investigates historically evolved concepts such as national identity, gender and class in the context of the ongoing re-adjustment of cultural meanings and social memories in current politics. Recent works include Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb, a six-channel video engaging the historic trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in1961. The video raises questions about truth and justice and individuals’ responsibilities in relation to the nation-state. Among Geyer’s other recent projects is Spiral Lands, a photographic and textual historiography of the ongoing dispossession of indigenous people by colonization, governmentality, and capitalist development, a dispossession that is one of the longest struggles for social justice in North America. She has published two artist’s books: Audrey Munson, The Queen of the Artists’ Studios (Art In General/New York) and Spiral Lands/Chapter 1 (Koenig Books/London). Geyer’s visual works have been shown widely in the U.S. and Europe.
Sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Office of the Dean, MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Sciences; additional support from MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures, Women's and Gender Studies Program, and The Technology and Culture Forum.
For additional information, please go to the the MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures website.
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