Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Conference: Winning the Crisis | Debt * Narrative * Movements * Counter-Archives | March 21 & 22

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Winning The Crisis: Alternatives, Possibilities and Organizing for the Future

March 21-22, 2012

A two-day conference of academics, activists, artists, and organizers

Brandworkers * George Caffentzis * Silvia Federici * Jim Fleming * Fran Ilich * Matthew Frye Jacobson * Monica Johnson of EDU Debtors Union * Aaron Levy * Movement for Justice in El Barrio * Tavia Nyong'o * Cheryl Payer * Amy Roberts of Occupy Wall Street Archival Project * Andrew Ross * William Scott * Shanté Paradigm Smalls * Jack Tchen * Trade Justice * Gregory Wilpert
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, NYU
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10003 (map)

Panels will be held from 1-5:30 pm March 21 & 22

Refreshments provided * Free and open to the public

FOR FULL SCHEDULE VISIT www.winningthecrisis.com


Another world is, indeed, possible. But another world will not arrive fully formed, nor will it arrive without deliberate action on our part. The deliberation has begun, and the time has come to gather — to think together about the struggle we share, to discuss the painstaking work of collaboration and co-creation, to engage in acts of political imagination capable of transcending the past and transforming the present.

Toward just such an end, we have organized a two-day discussion among academics, activists, artists and organizers (by no means mutually exclusive categories) with the aim of imagining what "Winning The Crisis" might look like for workers, students, debtors — in short, for the 99 percent.

A panel on debt will address a key root of contemporary crises. Panelists will discuss the varied modes of exploitation and dependency that structure both social and international relations. If our current dilemma stems from the rampant proliferation of debt, winning the crisis requires re-imagining debt and resistance against it. From macro discussions of debt forgiveness and re-structuring to more micro appeals for refusal and debt unionization, this panel will help us see beyond the false horizon imposed by a world system premised on arrears.

A panel on narrative will explore long historical perspectives that exceed the immediate origins of the contemporary crisis, as well as imaginaries and forms of futurity that can sharpen our understanding of the present and allow us to think more capaciously about what organizing and strategies of resistance might look like. It will include discussions of speculative fiction, representations of popular power (as well as the crises such power may cause for representation), and creative experiments in social infrastructure.

A panel on movements will bring together perspectives on and from within active social and political movements within New York and beyond. It will traverse multiple spaces and scales of struggle — from workers’ rights in transnational production chains, to local neighborhood-based organizing against the displacement of immigrants and low-income communities in El Barrio, to activist action against the advance of neoliberal “free trade” agreements, to the construction of a new socialism in Venezuela. This panel will also bring together varied perspectives on, and experiences with, different forms of envisioning and enacting systemic change — from analyzing the dialectics of social movements and State power in nation-wide structural transformation, to building a local movement around principles of horizontalism and autonomism; from lobbying and campaigning for the accountability of elected officials, to the intersections of worker-led organizing and institution-based advocacy and training.

Finally, if the document constitutes a “passageway in and across time,”* carrying residue of the past into the future, then, rather than serving as a mere repository of the past, the archive concentrates the potential of any movement, becoming a point of departure for possible futures. Archives have always been entangled with power, functioning to maintain hierarchies of knowledge, to control fields of legibility, and to subordinate collective memory to Histories penned by power. Looking forward, then, we must turn to counter-archives, collections and compositions that can move us beyond such epistemic enclosures, that point us to those desires, possibilities and collocations of memory that lie at the “border of invisibility.”** A roundtable of historians, curators, editors and rogue archivists will take up these questions of archives, counter-archives and an-archives toward framing a new future.


Organized by Jen Ayres, A.J. Bauer, Jennifer Flores Sternad, Andrew González and Justin Leroy
for the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University.

Monday, March 5, 2012

Call for Submissions: Hercircle Ezine

Diane Leon-Ferdico, a Draper alumna and current adjunct associate professor of arts in NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies is the interim Arts Editor of Hercircle ezine, a magazine of women’s creative arts and activism. Ms. Leon-Ferdico would like to solicit article submissions from current Draper student-artists who who would like to write about their process as it relates to a particular social or political project. Hercircle is not just interested in creative arts such as sculpting or painting--an article about your academic research could also potentially qualify for inclusion in the journal. 

The journal's call for submissions, as well as a recent sample article is below. Please send your questions and/or submissions to Diane Leon-Ferdico directly at DL4[at]nyu.edu.


***

Hercircle ezine is a magazine of women’s creative arts and activism.

We are looking for women who engage in their creative process in the visual arts, poetry and on topics that profile a social/political viewpoint. 

What we want is an essay between 800-1500 words that capture your process in the studio, how and why you create or write what you do.  Up to four images may be included or a copy of a poem.  Video excerpts from the artist may also be considered.
Please look at the website to become familiar with what we cover: www.hercircleezine.com

See a recent sample article ("My Story: Undocumented") written by Kat Chua here: http://www.hercircleezine.com/2012/03/01/my-story-undocumented/

Kindly send your submissions to:
Diane Leon Ferdico

Two SCA Events at NYU This Week: Metropolitan Studies Colloquium / Multiple Features of Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies

All events are located at SCA 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor, unless otherwise noted.
For more information on our upcoming events, please visit the SCA Events Calendar at http://sca.as.nyu.edu/object/sca.calendar


TUESDAY, MARCH 6
5:00 pm
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METROPOLITAN STUDIES COLLOQUIUM SPRING 2012 SERIES
CONNECTING CONCRETE and ABSTRACT: CONVERSATIONS ON URBAN REVOLUTION - INSPIRED BY HENRI LEVEBRE
Colloquium #2: HISTORICIZING SPACE with Manu Goswami (Assoc. Prof of History, NYU) and Kristin Ross (Prof. of Comparative Literature, NYU)

Throughout spring 2012 the Institute for Public Knowledge and the Program in Metropolitan Studies at NYU are staging conversations between leading scholars of the state, space, and everyday life. Despite the transformations of the past 40 years, despite the difficulty of Lefebvre’s thought, these scholars demonstrate the renewed relevance of an analysis of urban revolution. The conversations will be wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, like Lefebvre’s oeuvre itself. They will be participatory and open-ended, and particularly oriented toward scholars and activists with only a passing familiarity with Lefebvre’s work but a passion for understanding and engaging in radical change.


WEDNESDAY, MARCH 7
6:00 pm

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THE MULTIPLE FUTURES OF WOMEN'S, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES: THE SEQUEL
Panel Discussion with Kandice Chuh, Lisa Duggan, Ann Pellegrini, Sarita Echavez See, and Alexandra Vazquez

Back by popular demand, this evening forum addresses the dilemmas and possibilities of women's and gender studies in the contemporary corporate university, with an eye to intellectual and institutional alliances with other disciplines devoted to the study of intersectionality, such as queer studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies. What are the challenges currently facing the fields of women's, gender, and sexuality studies? You can see a video of the conversation held last fall at Barnard Center for Research on Women here. For more information contact the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at 212-992-9540 or email csgs@nyu.edu
Co-sponsored by the NYU Center the Study of Gender and Sexuality; Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, and by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and the Revolutionizing American Studies Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center.

The Object Ethnography Project Launches March 15, 7:00. Online and live in NYC!

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The Object Ethnography Project
launches
Thursday, March 15th
7:00 pm
Silver Center, Room 120
31 Washington Place
between Greene Street & Washington Square East
New York University

and online at
objectethnography.wordpress.com

Starting at 7:00, the OEP will be open to exchanges for objects based on swapping stories.
Come in person, or email your exchange-stories to max.liboiron@nyu.edu

You still have time to submit an object! We will be accepting objects until March 31.
Mail or drop them off to:
Lucrece Project
Att: Object Ethnography Project
NYU English Department
19 University Place, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10003

The project will continue until all objects have been exchanged for new stories.
More information about the Object Ethnography Project.

The Object Ethnography Project is sponsored by The Lucrece Project, NYU.

STRUCTURAL COMPETENCY: New Medicine for the Institutional Inequalities that Make Us Sick, Mar. 23, NYU

STRUCTURAL COMPETENCY: New Medicine for the Institutional Inequalities that Make Us Sick


Jonathan Metzl, MD, Ph.D. and Helena Hansen, MD, Ph.D., Organizers http://structuralcompetency.org


Friday, March 23, 2012. Conference 10:00am-5pm, Film Screening 5-6pm. NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, 20 Cooper Square, NY, NY, 10012.


This one-day working conference will assemble multidisciplinary practitioners and theorists to explore a new paradigm, Structural Competency, that proposes that a host of clinical disorders (e.g. hypertension, obesity, smoking, medication “non-compliance,” post-traumatic syndromes, depression, psychosis) must be addressed as the downstream implications of upstream decisions (e.g. food delivery systems, housing discrimination, urban infrastructure failure, biocapitalism, diagnostic codes). Structural competency extends beyond cultural competency to address the pathologies of institutions and policies that alter the behaviors and biologies of individuals.


The meeting is free and provides meals but room is limited. Participants include Ernie Drucker, Mindy Fullilove, Philippe Bourgois, Bruce Link, Jo Phelan, Jack Geiger, Marc Gourevitch, Rayna Rapp, Emily Martin, Faye Ginsburg, Kim Hopper, Dalton Conley, Alondra Nelson and Brad Lewis.