Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Scripting the Moves: Culture and Control in a No-Excuses School

Joanne Golann, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Education at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University

Silent, single-file lines. Detention for putting a head on a desk. Rules for how to dress, how to applaud, how to complete homework. Walk into some of the most acclaimed urban schools today and you will find similar recipes of behavior, designed to support student achievement. But what do these “scripts” accomplish? Immersing readers inside a “noexcuses” charter school, Scripting the Moves offers a telling window into an expanding model of urban education reform. Through interviews with students, teachers, administrators, and parents, and analysis of documents and data, Golann reveals that such schools actually dictate too rigid a level of social control for both teachers and their predominantly low-income Black and Latino students. Despite good intentions, scripts constrain the development of important interactional skills and reproduce some of the very inequities they mean to disrupt.

Golann presents a fascinating, sometimes painful, account of how no-excuses schools use scripts to regulate students and teachers. She shows why scripts were adopted, what purposes they serve, and where they fall short. What emerges Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

Joseph Priestley Award Celebration Lecture

Positive Psychology & Beyond

Martin E.P. Seligman,  Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology and
Director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania

Agency is a psychological state that has changed the course of history and it is the immediate cause of progress and innovation. In the absence of this mindset, humanity stagnates.

Agency is the belief that I can influence the world, made up of three components: efficacy, optimism, and imagination. Efficacy is the expectation that I can achieve a specific goal now. Optimism is how long into the future I believe I can achieve that goal. Imagination is the range of goals that I believe I can achieve. Efficacy causes trying hard; optimism causes persistence, and imagination causes innovation. These are the mechanisms by which Agency causes progress.

Progress over the sweep of human history has been viewed through the lens of economics, ecology, theology, ‘great man’ biography, and ‘social force’ history, but almost never, until this book, through the lens of psychology.

Over the last 14000 years there have been several psychological epochs in which agency changes radically to keep pace with new Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

Exploring the Strange and Ancient Biology of the Brain Hidden in Our Guts

Subhash Kulkarni, Scientist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School

The Enteric Nervous System (ENS) is the second largest collection of neurons and glial cells outside of the brain. It is estimated to contain half a billion neurons and a couple of billion glial cells, which makes it a larger nervous system than the spinal cord. Located entirely within the lining of the gastrointestinal tract, it regulates not only important gut functions – including digestion, absorption, motility of the gut, immunity of the gut, but it also plays a central role in regulation of higher order functions such as satiety and behavior. Given the pivotal nature of the functions it regulates, the ENS in some or the other form has existed in animals long before the need to have a central nervous system, which would regulate higher executive functions, evolved. However, despite playing such a key role in an animal’s ability to survive, we know little about how it develops, how it matures, how it maintains itself in a constantly moving organ full of acids, Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link 

Race and the Origins of Modern Policing

Matthew Guariglia ’12, Senior Policy Analyst at Electronic Frontier Foundation

This talk will show how the modern police department, rather than originating as a “colorblind” institution, was built to explicitly consider race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality when enforcing laws and repressing individuals and communities. From searching for formerly enslaved African Americans, managing imagined Irish Catholic criminality, surveilling Jewish, Italian, and Chinese communities—police departments look and act the way they do because their early encounters with race and ethnicity led to periods of experimentation and growth. Central to the story of policing in the United States are the tactics and technologies cultivated by colonialism as oppressive tactics traveled home from the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico as well as from British and French imperialism in African and Asia. This history reveals the deep-rooted fault lines in American policing and the thinking that produced them in the first place. A book sale and signing will follow the presentation.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Division of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, the departments of American Read more

(Event rescheduled from 11/14/23)

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

This event is in-person only. It will not be livestreamed or recorded.

Morgan Lecture

Savage States: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow

Audra Simpson, Columbia University

How is the past imagined to be settled? What are the conditions that make for this imagining, this fantasy or rather, demand of a new beginning? In this lecture, Professor Audra Simpson will consider the making of ‘new time’ in light of histories of wrongdoing – residential and boarding schools and the dispossession that is tied to this in recent history – 1990 to the near present in Canada. This is a time of apology, and a time in which Native people and their claims to territory are whittled to the status of claimant in time with the fantasy of their disappearance from a modern and critical present. How has settler governance adjusted itself in line with global trends and rights paradigms away from overt violence to softer and kinder, caring modes of governance? This lecture will ask not only in what world we imagine time to stop, but will also take up the ways in which those that survived the time stoppage Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Bruce R. Andrews Lecture

Unseen Politics: Hidden Impact of Entertainment Media in Unequal America

Eunji Kim, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University

There is a simple and uncomfortable truth about the nation still recovering from the scars of a reality TV presidency: given the dazzling array of media choices, Americans are not watching news. If our media diet primarily consists of entertainment media, how does it shape politics? In this hyper-politicized world full of partisan news media, it might seem implausible that something as frivolous as entertainment media could possibly affect people’s political attitudes. Defying such conventional wisdom, Kim theorizes and describes the unique power of entertainment media in shaping political attitudes and behaviors. In particular, this talk introduces a puzzle in American politics that can be addressed by bringing entertainment media to the table. In this age of intensifying income inequality, the concerns about the fading American Dream from politicians on both sides of the partisan aisle are omnipresent. Nevertheless, many Americans continue to view the United States as the land of opportunity. Why do beliefs in economic mobility persist despite the raft of empirical evidence to Read more

Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy

April Baker-Bell,  Associate Professor of Language, Culture, and Justice in Education at the University of Michigan in the Marsal Family School of Education

In this talk, Dr. April Baker-Bell will discuss how anti-Black linguistic racism and white linguistic supremacy get normalized in teacher attitudes, curriculum and instruction, pedagogical approaches, disciplinary discourses, and research, and she will discuss the impact these decisions have on Black students’ language education and their linguistic, racial, and intellectual identities. Dr. Baker-Bell will introduce a new way to forward through Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy, a pedagogical approach that intentionally and unapologetically places Black Language at the center to critically interrogate white linguistic hegemony and anti-Black linguistic racism. A book sale and signing will follow the presentation.

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching, Learning and Scholarship (CTLS), the Faculty Success Center, and the departments of English and sociology.

Topic overview written by Ella Layton ’26

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Dr. April Baker-Bell  is an award-winning transdisciplinary teacher-researcher-activist and associate professor of Language, Culture, and Justice in Education at the University of Michigan in the Marsal Family Read more