Tag: social justice

Livable Futures, a Community Action Workshop

image.pngJoin a unique workshop on Palestine/Israel where presenters Tarek Maassarani, Rawan Odeh and Eran Nissan will introduce us to AI technology to help build consensus around actions we can take together at a local level on campus, in the Hudson Valley, and in Congress on Friday, April 5, from 12:00-1:30pm. The outcome is dependent on getting a wide diversity of participants with a range of outlooks and stories to share. You can read more about it here and RSVP. Includes lunch! Info, RSVP, Accommodation Requests: Registration form, reach out to Amanda Munroe at rp@vassar.edu Amanda Munroe.

The Cost of Borders

This lecture by Dr. Heba Gowayed will explore the marketplace between migrants, smugglers, and states. At borders, multimillion-dollar, state-sponsored industries of carceral and military technologies confront and contain people pursuing better tomorrows. In The Cost of Borders, Gowayed unravels this confrontation, arguing that borders, rather than static markers of sovereign territory, are dynamic marketplaces comprised of a series of transactions that are always costly and often deadly. Moving from Lesbos to Gaza to Tijuana, and centering the perspective of people on the move, this project shows how the costs of borders, patterned by inequalities of racism, sexism, and disability, fluctuate over time and space, and differ depending on who is attempting to cross. Heba Gowayed is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College, CUNY.

Memory, Resistance and Colonial Hierarchies of Belonging Across the Atlantic

This one-day hybrid symposium will explore how various groups have politically and historically advocated for justice by drawing parallels of remembrance against forgetting across different cultures, spaces, languages, bodies and times. By realizing parallels across multiple geopolitical histories of trans and cis migrant activists, feminists, workers, Europeans of color, Sinti and Roma populations and refugees we want to generate interdisciplinary discussions on the uses of memory as resistance. We invite various artistic, academic and activist perspectives to provide new perspectives that broaden the clusters of Memory, Resistance and Colonial Hierarchies of Belonging. While our focus is on Germany, we welcome contributions from other contexts that comparatively address how Western colonial, imperial, transnational, and transatlantic memories are tied and translated to other regions and contexts.

New York State Celebrates Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 2024

mlk

Join us Thursday, February 29th at 6pm at the FDR Library & Museum for a panel discussion and viewing of the inspiring film “New York State Celebrates the Life and Legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

Our Commission on Human Rights is hosting this free event in partnership with the NYS Division of Human Rights Hudson Valley Hate & Bias Regional Council, Dutchess County African-American Clergy Association,  and the Jewish Federation of Dutchess County and they will focus on the four pillars of philosophy that Dr. King believed were essential to achieving social justice and equality: Nonviolence, Beloved Community, Justice and Hope. 

Registration is required and found online.

Beyond the Burden of Elegy

Lawrence Jackson Poster

Lawrence Jackson is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History at Johns Hopkins University. He has recently published Shelter: A Black Tale of Homeland Baltimore (Gray Wolf Press, 2023), a memoir about his search for housing in the city of Baltimore as a single Black male parent. He will deliver a lecture on the competing narrative strategies that have shaped his memoir writing and other developments in Black literary history.