Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

The Power of Language: How Knowing More Than One Language Transforms the Mind and Society

Viorica Marian, Sundin Endowed Professor of Communication and Psychology at Northwestern University

Bilingualism and multilingualism are the norm rather than the exception in the world. Yet historically, scientific research has focused disproportionately on monolingual speakers as the standard. For an accurate understanding of the mind, we must recognize the brain’s ability to accommodate multiple symbolic systems simultaneously as the signal, rather than the noise, in human experience.

In this talk, I will present evidence that bilingualism reshapes cognitive architecture. My research integrates behavioral, neuroimaging, cognitive, and computational methods to capture the continuous parallel activation and interaction of multiple languages in the brain and their consequences for cognitive function, from perceptual processes to higher-order thinking. Behavioral methods such as eye-tracking and mouse-tracking reveal that bilinguals’ eye movements drift toward objects whose names overlap across languages, and that hand movements and decision-making veer toward alternatives activated by another language. Neuroimaging shows that managing multiple languages is like a workout for the brain and reshapes neural connections, leading to measurable structural and functional adaptations.

The consequences are evident across the lifespan. In Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium

Muslim France and the Contradictions of Laïcité: A History of the Present

Mayanthi Fernando, University of California Santa Cruz

In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class, igniting a debate – still raging more than 30 years later – about the place of Muslims in the French Republic and within its governing framework of laïcité (secularism). The dominant narrative about laïcité, both in France and in the US media, is that in 1905, France separated church and state, and religion was restricted to the private sphere. Public Muslimness is therefore seen as contravening this longstanding arrangement of what it means to be French.

Mayanthi Fernando will complicate that narrative to offer a different history of the present. First, she will show how laïcité has entailed not the separation of religion from politics and the public sphere but rather the French state’s intervention into religious life, including defining what counts as religion, belief, practice, symbol, and so on, using a Christian framework to make those distinctions. Fernando will then delve more deeply into the headscarf drama. The language of the 2004 law banning “conspicuous religious signs” classifies the Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

The Canary in the Coal Mine: The 1951 Refugee Convention and the Collapse of the Post WW II International Order

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University Emerita and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia Law School and the Center for Contemporary Critical Thought

The 1951 Refugee Convention is one of the most important human rights documents of the post-WW II period. Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (on which it is based) and the Genocide Convention, both of 1948, it embodied the hopes and aspirations of a new world order. Never again would those persecuted on account of their race, religion, ethnicity, political beliefs, and social group fail to find protection and refuge in countries other than those in which such persecution occurred.

The 1951 Convention, however, from the beginning was beset with some difficulties: first, it originally excluded countries of the Global South, whether by omission or by design. To this day, India is not a signatory of the Convention because the India-Pakistan War could find no place within its framework. Likewise, the categories of “protected groups,” named in the Convention, were based on Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

The World As We Would Have It Be: Collective Thriving in the Timeplace of Collapse

Norma Kawelokū Wong (Collective Acceleration), Native Hawaiian and Hakka Writer/Teacher, 86th Generation Zen Master, and Political Strategist

“We know the story of the collapse. We have much less imagination of the timeplace of the other side. Thus, the far horizon story should always take place beyond the apocalyptic time when everything completely fell apart and the skies were dark for so long no one knew lightness nor blueness. It is there and then we need to practice into.” –Norma Kawelokū Wong

We are living at a moment of rapid systemic breakdown in which chaos dominates our present condition and directs our future. Instability is no longer a failure of power but its primary technique, governing through exhaustion, fear, and confusion. Against this unpredictable, disorienting, and exhaustive background, who are we, who do we evolve to become, and how do we show up in this time of collapse? How do we relate to one another and what collectives do we build? Lastly, how do we interdependently grow and lead in times of uncertainty? In this conversation between Zen Read more

Mathers Theatre, 7 p.m.

The Archive

Neta Pulvermacher, Israeli/American Choreographer, Dancer, Director and a Professor of Dance at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (JAMD)

The Archive
Created and Performed by Neta Pulvermacher

“They are not here,
And they are not coming
There is nothing here…
There is nothing here for you
It’s just this room and you and me.
And they are not here…
Go home, go home…
There’s no sense in waiting”

When the last person who remembers is gone, whole worlds disappear forever. Israeli/American artist, choreographer and performer Neta Pulvermacher, situates her riveting one woman show, The Archive, inside this perforated post-memory landscape. Exploring her German-Jewish family history, she constructs a jarring, witty and deeply moving performative journey that follows the traces to Frankfurt and Berlin – once her family’s home.

Inside a room containing a table, three chairs, a reading lamp, and an old violin, Pulvermacher sifts through documents, photographs, and personal artifacts. She dances, sings, and tells stories, conjuring fragmented narratives, voices, and characters that connect briefly only to fade away into oblivion. In her “Archive,” she asks us to consider the ephemerality of memory, history, and experience.

The Archive premiered at Villa Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Finding Unity in History: Our Community Process Recovering Victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Phoebe R. Stubblefield, Director of the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, University of Florida

On June 1,1921, the unincorporated community of Greenwood Oklahoma was systematically looted and burned by a white mob.  The conflict derived from an attempt by the mob to lynch a young African American man, Dick Rowland, who had been accused of assaulting a white woman. Thirty-nine deaths were documented by death certificates, but the actual number of deaths is unknown due to the period of martial law which ended the rioting, poor documentation, and focus on recovery.  Twenty African American adult males were buried in the Tulsa city cemetery, Oaklawn, in unmarked graves.  In 2020 former mayor GT Bynum initiated the investigation, which continues today, to recover these and any other victims of the race massacre and return them to their families.  Our team of anthropologists have recovered over 50 individuals from unmarked graves in Oaklawn, and forensic analysis has identified six with gunshot wounds that make them potential victims of the riot.  Collaboration with our historians,  geneticists, and genealogists resulted in the first victim Read more

Althouse Hall, Room 106 – 4:00 p.m.

Film Screening of Tulsa:  The Fire and the Forgotten

A Centennial Exploration of the 1921 Race Massacre

“A landmark PBS documentary, Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten examines the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre on the 100th anniversary of the crime. The film includes interviews with descendants of the victims and probes how their families’ devastating experience affects their lives in today’s America, and also documents the current excavation of potential mass graves from the massacre. Through the historical lens of white violence and Black resistance, this project explores issues of atonement, reconciliation, and reparation in the past, present and future.” – (Description taken from the DVD Cover)

The film screening will provide historical context for this week’s program with Forensic Anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield titled, Finding Unity in History: Our Community Process Recovering Victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. This program is scheduled for Wednesday, March 25 at 7 p.m. in ATS.

This film screening is being presented by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues. Read more