Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

This program was in-person and livestream only. No recording is available for viewing.

Black History Month Conversation

The Psychology of Belonging: Navigating Identity on a College Campus

Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, President Emerita of Spelman College, Best-Selling Author and Clinical Psychologist

Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum—esteemed psychologist, scholar, and former president of Spelman College—joins Dickinson College for a moderated conversation inspired by her New York Times-bestselling book, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” And Other Conversations about Race. This dialogue will explore the psychological foundations of racial identity development and the ways in which students seek affirmation, belonging, and safety in community. Tatum will share insights into how identity formation shapes the student experience and why supportive environments are essential for student success.

As part of our Black History Month observance, this event offers a rare opportunity to engage directly with one of the nation’s leading voices in higher education. Together, we will reflect on what it means to build inclusive living and learning communities, a shared commitment that calls for both personal awareness and collective action.

Moderated by Dr. Jacquie Forbes, assistant professor of educational studies, Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

We Are Called to Be a Movement

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, President, Repairers of the Breach; Co-Chair, Poor People’s Campaign & New York Times Best-Selling Author

For years the Rev. William J. Barber II of the Poor People’s Campaign has been one of the most gifted moral fusion organizers, strategists and orators in the country. As an indispensable figure in the public policy and public theology landscape, he believes it’s time for everyone who cares about the state of our nation to heed the call and join forces to redeem the soul of America. It’s time to come together and renounce the politics of rejection, division and greed, and to lift up the common good, move up to higher ground and revive the heart of democracy. During this inspiring keynote, the Rev. Barber makes an impassioned argument with a message that could not be clearer: It’s time for change and the time needs you. A book signing will follow the presentation.

This program is presented by the Division of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.

Topic overview written by Supasinee Siripun ’27

Biography (provided by the Read more

Althouse Hall, Room 106 – 5 p.m.

Film Screening of King Coal

A lyrical tapestry of a place and people, King Coal meditates on the complex history and future of the coal industry, the communities it has shaped, and the myths it has created. Elaine McMillion Sheldon reshapes the boundaries of documentary filmmaking in a spectacularly beautiful and deeply moving immersion into Central Appalachia where coal is not just a resource, but a way of life. While intimately situated in the communities under the reign of King Coal, where McMillion Sheldon has lived and worked her entire life, the film transcends time and place, emphasizing the ways in which people are connected through an immersive mosaic of belonging, ritual, and imagination. Emerging from the long shadows of the coal mines, King Coal untangles the pain from the beauty and illuminates the innately human capacity for change.

This event presented by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and the Center for Sustainability Education and is part of Dickinson’s Fall Energy Transition Series. Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

A Conversation on the Making of the Film, King Coal

Elaine McMillion Sheldon, Filmmaker
Sherry Harper-McCombs, Dickinson College

Following a screening of King Coal the night before (Althouse 106 @ 5 p.m.), Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon will join the Clarke Forum for an event about her 2023 film King Coal. She will reflect on her creative goals and on choosing the film’s hybrid form—a blend of vérité, poetic narration, dance, and sound design—that echoes the mythic power coal still holds over Appalachian communities.

McMillion Sheldon will discuss how nonfiction storytelling can transcend the traditional bounds of documentary to express a region’s imagination and grief. Her documentary practice included work with creative collaborators to incorporate breath art, choreography, and archival fragments which reimagine coal not as a commodity, but as a cultural force embedded in daily life, rituals, and dreams.

A short presentation of select video and audio clips from the film will be followed by a ​conversation with Dickinson professor emerita of theatre & dance, Sherry Harper-McCombs, and a Q&A with the audience, opening a space for dialogue around environmental storytelling, regional identity, and the ethics of nonfiction filmmaking.

This Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

The Morgan Lecture

This event is in-person only. It will not be livestreamed nor recorded for future viewing. 

Love, Joy, Creativity & the Brain: The Heart of Culturally Responsive Education

Bettina L. Love, Columbia University

In this inspiring keynote, Dr. Love will explore the transformative power of love in education—within the classroom and beyond. Rooted in the belief that love and joy are the foundations of meaningful learning and human connection, she blends compelling storytelling, evidence-based research, and practical strategies to show how emotionally grounded teaching can radically reshape educational spaces.

Drawing from the groundbreaking neuroscience of Zaretta Hammond and the liberatory teachings of bell hooks, Dr. Love centers love not as sentimentality, but as an ethic—one rooted in care, accountability, and justice. She highlights how culturally responsive teaching, when combined with joy and emotional attunement, aligns both with how the brain learns best and how communities heal and thrive.

Creativity is presented as a vital force—a tool to honor cultural diversity, affirm identities, and spark curiosity—inviting students into deeper engagement and a stronger sense of belonging. This keynote offers educators an inspiring and actionable vision for designing classrooms where every child feels seen, Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

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

U.S.-China Policy: How We Got Here and Where We’re Headed

Matthew Turpin, Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and former National Security Council Director for China

Turpin will discuss the history of U.S. policy towards China, the debates that have shaped administrations since the end of the Cold War, and the risks and opportunities that policymakers weigh as they construct policy towards America’s most capable competitor.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Alexander Hamilton Society and the Department of International Studies.

Topic overview written by Ian Chavez ’28

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Matt Turpin is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution specializing in U.S. policy towards the People’s Republic of China, economic statecraft and technology innovation.  He is also a senior advisor at Palantir Technologies.

From 2018 to 2019, Turpin served as the U.S. National Security Council’s director for China and the senior advisor on China to the secretary of commerce.  In those roles, he was responsible for managing the interagency effort to develop and implement U.S. Government policies on the Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

This program will not be livestreamed. It will, however, be recorded for future viewing via Dickinson login on our website.

Never Enough: What the Neuroscience of Addiction Can Teach Us About Living Our Best Lives

Judith Grisel, Bucknell University

Most chemicals that people use to medicate or enhance reality have both risks and benefits, at different times and for different people. Nonetheless, regular use of any mind-altering substance causes the exact opposite states to a drug’s original effects. Chronic stimulants result in lethargy, sedatives lead to anxiety and insomnia, and euphoriants guarantee misery.  Dr. Grisel will explain how the brain adapts to addictive drugs by creating the states of craving, tolerance, and dependence that characterize addiction. She’ll address the synergistic influences of genetic predispositions, childhood trauma, and drug exposure during periods of brain development that make some people more vulnerable than others. These general principles will be applied to illustrate specific risk factors and neural changes associated with cannabis use, and conclude by illustrating how advances in neuroscience can help to reduce suffering from addiction.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Wellness Center and the Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

What Does It Mean to Be a Human Translator in the Age of AI?

Amélie Josselin-Leray, University of Toulouse

The advent of generative AI in the last two years has been considered as a matter of considerable concern in the field of language-related trades, and in particular in the field of translation and interpreting: will AI take over the jobs of translators and interpreters? In this presentation, Josselin-Leray will argue in favor of an even more pressing need to train future translators and show how the way to train translators has evolved in the last two decades, based on her 17-year-long experience as a trainer in a programme belonging to the EMT (European Master’s programmes in Translation) network, under the umbrella of the Directorate General for Translation at the European Commission. Over the last few decades, translators have been successively faced with new technologies such as Computer-Assisted Tools (also called translation memories) or Neural Machine Translation. Now they have to face Large Language Models (LLMs). To be able to integrate successfully the labour market which is more and more highly technologized, young language professionals thus need to acquire specific skills (post-editing, writing Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

Joseph Priestley Award Celebration Lecture

Misinformation in the Age of AI

Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Sciences

The intentional (disinformation) or unintentional (misinformation) spread of false information is not new, but with the advent of social media and the growth of narrowly-directed communication channels the problem has reached epidemic proportions. Prominent examples of disinformation include the intentional efforts of the tobacco industry to discount the impact of smoking on lung cancer and the campaign of the fossil fuel industry to question whether climate change is even happening and its role in warming the climate. Even misinformation can be deadly, as seen in resistance to childhood vaccines and the excess death toll during the COVID-19 pandemic caused by false rumors about the RNA vaccine. Coupled with the erosion in public trust in the efforts of our government and prominent institutions, including colleges and universities, it is difficult to craft simple solutions for the benefit of public health and safety. AI raises the stakes by making it easier to create and spread false information and more difficult to detect truth from fiction. Fortunately, there are promising approaches, but success will depend Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

This program will not be livestreamed. It will, however, be recorded for future viewing via Dickinson login on our website.

Rainbows and Mud: Pathways to Queer Thriving in a Marginalizing Society

Nic Weststrate, Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois Chicago

The over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced to state legislatures in 2024 are a painful reminder that circumstances framing LGBTQ+ lives haven’t gotten much better despite promises of progress and no shortage of hope. A subset of these bills concern LGBTQ+ curriculum censorship and book bans—bans that threaten LGBTQ+ people’s access to knowledge necessary for surviving and thriving in a marginalizing and increasingly hostile society. Such limitations around access to knowledge are conceptualized here as an epistemic injustice. Drawing from six years of research, this lecture will explore the ways that LGBTQ+ communities counter epistemic injustice by coming together across generations for social connection, storytelling, and wisdom-sharing. The studies leverage multiple methods, including an innovative letter-writing paradigm, close observations of intergenerational dyadic storytelling exchanges, and a multi-year community-engaged ethnographic experiment. By shining a light on the joys and challenges of LGBTQ+ intergenerational engagement, glimmers of a better future for LGBTQ+ Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

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

Breaking Issue

A World Transformed? Foreign Policy in the Current Moment

Dickinson Faculty Participants

Russell Bova, Professor of Political Science and International Studies
Magda Siekert, Senior Lecturer in Middle East Studies
Fatou Thioune, Assistant Professor of International Studies
Andrew T. Wolff, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies

The current administration’s approach to world politics appears to represent a radical departure from eighty years of US foreign policy consensus on a range of issues. In just two months, crucial US relationships to the outside world, including to Russia, NATO, the Middle East, Greenland, Canada, and many more, has been transformed dramatically. This panel will attempt to help us understand the causes, consequences, and durability of these dizzying changes in the US global role.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.

Biographies (provided by the participants)

Russ Bova is professor of political science and the J. William Stuart & Helen Stuart Chair in International Studies. Professor Bova is the editor of Russia and Western Civilization: Cultural and Historical Encounters and the author of the international relations textbook How Read more

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Althouse 106, 4 p.m.

Film Screening of Call Me by Your Name

The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and the Italian and Italian Studies department are hosting a film screening of the movie Call Me by Your Name. There will be a Q&A session following the film screening with André Aciman, the author of the book (of the same title) which inspired the screenplay.

Monday,  March 24, 2025

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

On Being from Elsewhere

André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name

I have been a foreigner in many countries but never a local. As a writer of memoirs, I have given the matter much thought. Although all memoirs tell the story of what happened, what a memoir is not always able to do is narrate what was desired to happen but never did happen. To write what happened is one thing—that’s what autobiographies are supposed to do—but to probe the psychological intricacies of desire, fear, heartache, disappointment, etc., is usually the domain of novels, not even of memoirs. But then here is the paradox: a memoir can borrow the conventions of fiction, even wants to sound novelistic, but without Read more

Carlisle Theatre, 7 p.m.

Film Screening of Counted Out

In our current information economy, math is everywhere. The people we date, the news we see, the influence of our votes, the candidates who win elections, the education we have access to, the jobs we get—all of it is underwritten by an invisible layer of math that few of us understand, or even notice. But whether we know it or not, our numeric literacy—whether we can speak the language of math—is a critical determinant of social and economic power.

The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, the LGBTQ+ Center, the Office of Diversity Equity & Inclusion, the Women’s & Gender Resource Center, and the departments of data analytics, economics, environmental studies & environmental science, and mathematics & computer science together with the Carlisle Theatre are co-hosting this screening.

Please see the film’s website https://www.countedoutfilm.com/ for further information about the film.

  Read more