Past Programs

Stephen Walt

Walt Final posterHarvard University

Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholars Program

Where is U.S. Foreign Policy Headed?

Thursday, April 26, 2018  (Rescheduled from March 22, 2018)
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

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This lecture explores the future of U.S. foreign policy under President Trump. Walt argues that Trump, his bellicose tweets notwithstanding,  is gradually being captured, coopted, and constrained by the foreign policy establishment. Under Trump, therefore, U.S. foreign policy is likely to be an even more inept version of our recent follies.

The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and Phi Beta Kappa and co-sponsored by the Office of Academic Advising, Political Science and International Studies.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Stephen Walt photoStephen Walt is Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a former academic dean. He also taught at Princeton and the University of Chicago and has been a resident associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy, co-chair of the editorial board of International Security, and co-editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs book series. A fellow of the American Academy Read more

Dale Bredesen

Bredesen Poster FinalUCLA and Buck Institute

Reducing the Global Burden of Dementia: The First Alzheimer’s Survivors

Wednesday, April 25, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

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Bredesen describes his treatment for Alzheimer’s and pre-Alzheimer’s, along with associated challenges and implications. A book sale and signing will follow the presentation.

The program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Office of Senior Associate Provost; the Career Center; Pre-Health Society; Pre-Health Program; Division of Student Life;  the Wellness Center; Department of Biology; and the Program in Policy Studies. It was initiated by the Clarke Forum Student Project Managers.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Bredesen with Cells Behind HimDale E. Bredesen, M.D. received his undergraduate degree from Caltech and his medical degree from Duke.  He served as resident and chief resident in neurology at UCSF, then was postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Prof. Stanley Prusiner.  He was a faculty member at UCLA from 1989-1994, then was recruited by the Burnham Institute to direct the Program on Aging.  In 1998 he became the founding president and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, and Adjunct Professor at UCSF; then in 2013 he returned to UCLA as Read more

Aloys Mahwa

 Mahwa PosterLiving Peace Institute  – Promundo

Masculine Identity and Sexual Gender Based Violence: The Case of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

Thursday, April 19, 2018
Althouse Hall, Room 106
Noon – 1 p.m. (Light lunch will be provided)
RSVP strongly encouraged, but not required to clarkeforum@dickinson.edu.

Sexual gender-based violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been described as the worst in the world.  Mahwa will discuss ProMundo and Living Peace Institute preventative approaches that engage men, working to eradicate the root causes of violence.

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

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Aloys MahwaAloys Mahwa is Promundo’s Living Peace project director in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Using group therapy and group education techniques, the Living Peace initiative addresses the trauma associated with conflict and promotes equitable, nonviolent paths to healing for individuals, families, and communities.

Mahwa manages the scale-up of Living Peace in the North and South Kivu provinces of eastern DRC, playing a key role in coordinating stakeholder working sessions, developing the Living Peace Institute, documenting and building upon the program’s lessons learned and best practices, and supervising monitoring and evaluation of the initiative. Mahwa joined Promundo after five Read more

Reece Jones

Reece Jones PosterUniversity of Hawaii at Manoa

Violent Borders: The State vs. the Right to Move

Monday, April 16, 2018
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Over 40,000 people died trying to cross a border in the past decade around the world. Jones argues these deaths are part of a long history of states using movement restrictions to protect privileges and to contain the poor. 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 Middle East Studies Program, the Departments of Sociology and International Studies and the Security Studies Certificate Program. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s semester theme, Citizen/Refugee.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Reece JonesReece Jones is professor of geography at the University of Hawaii and the author two books: Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (Verso 2016) and Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel (Zed Books 2012), four edited books, and over two dozen journal articles. His work has been published in the Guardian, the New York Times, and dozens of other media outlets around the world. He is currently working Read more

Nicole Guidotti-Hernández

Guidotti Hernandez PosterUniversity of Texas at Austin

Latinx: The Future is Now

Thursday, April 12, 2018
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

This lecture charts out the histories of how we went from using Mexican American and Puerto Rican to Chicano and Nuyorican and then to the latest iterations, Latina/o and now Latinx. While millennials are leading the charge with the Latinx conversation, Guidotti-Hernández argues their boomer intellectual forerunners are often outright resistant to the use of Latina/o let alone Latinx, indicating the futurist potential and political necessity of the term.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Departments of English,  American Studies, Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies, and the Women’s & Gender Resource Center. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s semester theme, Citizen/Refugee.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

J N e sessionNicole Guidotti-Hernández is associate professor of American Studies and Mexican American and Latina/o studies at UT Austin. She is an expert in Borderlands History after 1846, Transnational Feminist Methodologies, Latinx Studies, and Popular Culture and Immigration.

Her book titled Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S.  and  Mexican National Imaginaries, Duke University Press (2011) won the 2011-2012 MLA Prize in Chicana/o and Latina/o Read more

Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob – Bechtel Lecturer

Jacob Jacob Final PosterDickinson College

The Bechtel Lecture

(Dis)Owning God: Religious Identity and Violent Extremism in the African Sahel Region

Monday, April 9, 2018
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Religious identity, Jacob argues, has far greater normative influence on extremist recruitment and radicalization than religious beliefs and other appeals, but it has rarely been accounted for in counter-narrative campaigns and deradicalization programs in the West African Sahel region.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Bechtel Lectureship Fund.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Jacob Udo Udo Jacob jacobjJacob Udo-Udo Jacob is a visiting international scholar in the International Studies program of Dickinson College.  His teaching and research interest is located at the intersection between communications, conflicts and peace building with particular reference to the Lake Chad Basin, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Jacob visits Dickinson from the American University of Nigeria where he was chair of the Communications & Multimedia Design Program and interim dean in the School of Arts & Science. He has led the implementation of some very important donor-funded projects in support of peace building in North-East Nigeria and the Lake Chad region including a U.S. State Department-funded CVE project on peace journalism, Read more

Beyond Kinetics: Advancing Civil-Military Partnership in Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism

Extremism Poster FinalWednesday, April 4, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 6 p.m.

Panelists

Muhammad Umer Bashir, Pakistan Army
Shawn Diniz ’18, Dickinson College
Margee Ensign, Dickinson College
Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob, Dickinson College
Casey  Miner, United States Army
Yssouf Traore, Mali Army

ISIS and its affiliate organizations have recently suffered significant military losses in Syria, Iraq, North and West Africa as well as the broader Lake Chad Region. As important as these military achievements are, they signal neither the end of ISIS and its affiliates nor the defeat of their extremist ideologies. Instead, they usher in an increasingly diffuse and unpredictable phase in the global war on terror. This panel discussion explores how the United States, Pakistan, Mali and Nigeria have experienced and learned from the changing phases of extremism, focusing mainly on what has worked and what hasn’t.

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues in collaboration with the Carlisle Scholars Program at the U.S. Army War College.

Biographies from our Panelists

Umer eBrigadier Muhammad Umer Bashir is an artillery officer in the Army of Pakistan. He has commanded at the Regiment and Brigade levels, and performed as an instructor at the Pakistan Read more

Seeing = Believing?

VR PosterTuesday, April 3, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Panelists

Eitan Grinspun, Columbia University
Steven Malcic, Dickinson College
Tabitha Peck, Davidson College
Graham Roberts, The New York Times
Gregory Steirer (moderator), Dickinson College

Where is computer-generated imaging and sound technology, including virtual reality, going next? Our panel of experts will discuss new developments in these technologies and what they mean for the politics of media production and consumption.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Departments of English; International Business & Management; Philosophy; the Film Studies Program; and the Churchill Fund. This program was initiated by the Clarke Forum’s Student Project Managers and it is also part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series.

Biographies (provided by the panelists)

eitan previewEitan Grinspun is associate professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Columbia University, and co-director of the Columbia Computer Graphics Group. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and NSF CAREER Award recipient, NVIDIA Fellow and a Caltech Everhart Distinguished Lecturer. Prior to joining Columbia University, he was a research scientist at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences from 2003-2004, a doctoral Read more

Yoko Tawada

 Tawada Final PosterAward-Winning Writer

An Evening with Yoko Tawada

Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Known internationally for her novels, poems and essays in German and Japanese, author Yoko Tawada creates worlds in which foreigners, outsiders and animals, always aware of their strangeness, navigate and read their surroundings with wonder and minuteness. Tawada will collaborate with Bettina Brandt (Pennsylvania State University) in a multilingual performance which includes German and Japanese as well as English translations. 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 Departments of German; East Asian Studies; English; the Max Kade Foundation; and the Flaherty Lecture Fund. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s semester theme, Citizen/Refugee.

Biography (forthcoming)

TawadaYokoYoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, educated at Waseda University and has lived in Germany since 1982, where she received her Ph.D. in German literature. She received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for The Bridegroom Was a Dog. She writes in both German and Japanese, and in 1996, she won the Adalbert-von-Chamisso Prize, a German award recognizing foreign writers for their contributions to German culture. She also received Read more

Ajuan Mance

Mance Poster FINALMills College

The 1001 Black Men Online Sketchbook and the Art of Social Justice

Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Mance created 1001 Black Men: An Online Sketchbook as a reaction against the controlling images that have limited and defined media representations of Black men. Mance will use a slideshow of images from her series as the basis of a wide ranging discussion of art, Black maleness and gender performance, and representation.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Women’s & Gender Resource Center; the Popel Shaw Center for Race & Ethnicity; and the Departments of Africana Studies; American Studies; English; French; and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Headshot HawaiiAjuan Mance is a professor of English at Mills College in Oakland, California. She holds degrees from Brown University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A lifelong artist, she works in acrylic on paper and canvas, ink on paper and, for the 1001 Black Men project, ink on paper and digital collage. Ajuan has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout the San Francisco Bay Area as well as at the University of Read more

Martin Burt and Margee Ensign

burt ensign posterMartin Burt, Fundación Paraguaya
Margee Ensign, Dickinson College

A Conversation with President Margee Ensign and Global Entrepreneur Martin Burt

Monday, February 26, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Ensign and Burt will discuss what it means to be a social entrepreneur; ways to envision a life in the areas of social innovation, advocacy, and social change; and the possibilities of entrepreneurship as a mechanism for reducing poverty.

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE) Certificate Program and the Department of International Business & Management. This program is also part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series.

Biographies (provided by the speakers)

Burt thumbnailMartin Burt is founder (1985) and CEO of Fundación Paraguaya, a 33-year old NGO devoted to the promotion of entrepreneurship and economic self-reliance to eliminate poverty around the world. He is a pioneer in applying new poverty metrics, microfinance, micro-franchise, youth entrepreneurship, financial literacy and technical vocational methodologies to address chronic poverty around the world. He has developed one of the world’s first financially self-sufficient agricultural and tourism high schools for the rural poor. He is co-founder of Teach a Read more

Margot Canaday

Canaday Final PosterPrinceton University

Pink Precariat: LGBT Workers in the Shadow of Civil Rights

Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

This talk – part of a larger book project that centers the workplace in queer history – offers a preliminary ethnography of LGBTs working in mainstream occupations during the American economy’s “golden age” of the 1950s and 1960s.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Departments of English; American Studies; and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. It also part of the Clarke Forum’s semester theme, Citizen/Refugee.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

CanadayM copyMargot Canaday is a legal and political historian who studies gender and sexuality in modern America. She holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Her first book, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, 2009), won the Organization of American Historians’ Ellis Hawley Prize, the American Political Science Association’s Gladys M. Kammerer Award (co-winner), the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Prize, the American Society for Legal History’s Cromwell Book Prize, the Committee on LGBT History’s John Boswell Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies, Read more

Komozi Woodard ’71

Woodard Final PosterSarah Lawrence College

The Strange Career of the Jim Crow North: A Dickinson Story?

Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Live Stream Link

In the 1960s, the Congress of African Students at Dickinson College began the study of the Strange Career of the Jim Crow North with the early development of Africana Studies and the Black Arts Movement. This is the story of those Dickinson roots.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Waidner-Spahr Library; the Division of Student Life; and the Departments of History; Africana Studies; American Studies; Sociology; and the Churchill Fund. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

thumbnail picKomozi Woodard ’71 is professor of history, public policy and Africana studies at Sarah Lawrence College; he attended Princeton, Andover, Dickinson, the New School, Rutgers, Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania. Woodard was managing editor of Unity & Struggle and Black Newark newspaper and radio program in the Black Power Movement, Main Trend journal in the Black Arts Movement and Manhattan’s Children’s Express before writing and editing these: A Nation within a Nation: Read more

Emma Howard

Howard PosterPerformer and Writer

I’m Smiling Because I’m Uncomfortable

Friday, February 16, 2018
Adams Hall, Basement Kitchen, 4:30 p.m.

Why do we eat? Why do we stop eating? This one woman show is an autobiographical story traveling from early childhood experiences of queerness and lessons on body image, to a college eating disorder, to the present challenges of eating and living in a human body.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and is part of Love Your Body Week programming.

Biography (provided by the guest)

Howard HeadshotEmma Howard (Performer, Writer) is a recent graduate from the Experimental Theatre Wing at Tisch School of the Arts. Most of her work addresses eating and mental illness. When not writing or performing, she works for a non-profit theatre organization called The Possibility Project. To pay rent, she works at an overpriced vegan fast food restaurant that caters to a lot of men at JP Morgan. She is interested in one day becoming a medical and humanitarian clown and using physical comedy to tackle body image issues. Her favorite food to binge on is peanut butter granola.

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Substantia Jones

Jones PosterFounder and Photographer, The Adipositivity Project

The Adipositivity Project

Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Jones discusses (and displays) a decade of body politics activism promoting fat acceptance and physical autonomy by subverting that most commonly used tool of what she calls the angst industrial complex: photography.

The program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by The Trout Gallery. This program is also part of Love Your Body Week programming.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Detroit Greektown BC CBal BC CBal cropSubstantia Jones is the founder and Photographer of The Adipositivity Project.  Jones’ work has been included in art exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London, the Steirischer Herbst Arts Festival in Graz, Austria, Lesbiche in Sardinia, Italy, and in a two-month solo exhibition of her photographs at Te Manawa Museum in New Zealand. She’s also been featured in VICE News, Glamour Magazine, US News & World Report, Cosmopolitan, BUST, MIC.com, Huffington Post, Bustle, Mashable, The Establishment, on numerous podcasts and radio broadcasts, and in a TIME magazine video profile of Jones and The Adipositivity Project. She hopes to soon produce a book of her photographs, and looks forward to another Read more

Food Access & Poverty

Thursday, February 8, 2018Food Access Poverty Final
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Panelists

Alyssa Feher, Tapestry of Health
Becca Raley ’94 (moderator), Partnership for Better Health
Risa Waldoks ’12, The Food Trust
Robert Weed ’80, Project Share

Food security allows all people to have access to regular, culturally appropriate food sources to ensure a healthy existence. Increased reliance on national and state food assistance programs reflect rising poverty and food insecurity in our community. Panelists will discuss both the systemic nature of persistent poverty and food insecurity and innovations designed to address these root concerns.

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Department of Environmental Studies, the Center for Sustainability Education, the Food Studies Program, Partnership for Better Health and the Churchill Fund. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series.

Biographies (provided by the panelists)

Alyssa FeherAlyssa Feher has served as the director of the Tapestry of Health WIC Program servicing Cumberland, Perry, Mifflin, and Juniata counties since 2011.  Feher is responsible for overseeing clinic operations and works frequently with clients needing assistance from multiple agencies.  She previously served as the human resources manager Read more

Christopher S. Parker

Parker Poster FinalUniversity of Washington, Seattle

2018 MLK Jr. & Black History Month Symposium

Donald Trump, Race, and the Crisis of American Democracy

Monday, February 5, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

The Democratic Party likes to make the argument that Trump can be defeated by wooing working-class whites. A classed-based strategy must be scrapped in favor of one that emphasizes race.

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Popel Shaw Center for Race & Ethnicity.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Parker ChristopherChristopher S. Parker is Stuart A. Scheingold Professor of Social Justice and Political Science in the department of political science at the University of Washington, Seattle. After serving in the military for a total of ten years, and another five as a probation officer for Los Angeles County, Parker attended UCLA. He then earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago. Parker is the author of Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America (Princeton). Parker’s award-winning first book, Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South, was also published by Princeton University Press. He resides in Seattle.

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Gabriela González

Gonzalez PosterLouisiana State University

The Glover Memorial Lecture
Einstein, Black Holes and Gravitational Waves

Monday, January 29. 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.
(360 W. Louther Street, Carlisle, PA)

More than a billion years ago, the merger of two black holes produced gravitational waves  that were observed traveling through Earth on September 14, 2015. The talk will explain how Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves more than one hundred years ago, and describe the latest exciting discoveries with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors.

The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and the Glover Memorial Lecture Fund and co-sponsored by department of physics & astronomy and the Churchill Fund. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series.

Gonzalez Gabriela LSU previewBiography (provided by the speaker)

Gabriela González is a physicist working on the discovery of gravitational waves with The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) team.  She was born in Córdoba, Argentina, studied physics at the University of Córdoba, and pursued her Ph.D. in Syracuse University, obtained in 1995. She worked as a staff scientist in the LIGO group at MIT until 1997, when she joined the faculty at Read more

Solmaz Sharif

Sharif Final PosterIranian-American Poet

An Evening with Solmaz Sharif

Thursday, November 30, 2017
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Poet Sharif, a National Book Award finalist, will share work that explores, in eloquent detail, the conduct of contemporary war, the intimacy of loss, and the unbearable—but necessary—power of language. 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 Department of English, the Creative Writing Program, the Department of American Studies and the Women’s & Gender Resource Center.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

PhotoCredit:Arash SaediniaBorn in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif’s astonishing debut collection LOOK (Graywolf Press) was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award and 2017 PEN Open Book Award. In LOOK, she recounts some of her family’s experience with exile and immigration in the aftermath of warfare—including living under surveillance and in detention in the United States—while also pointing to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout, she draws on the Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, the language used by the American military to define and code its objectives, policies, and actions. The Publishers Weekly Starred Review Read more

Michael Snyder

snyder posterStanford University

Using Your Genome and Big Data to Manage Your Health

Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

New technologies that determine DNA sequencing means we can now profile people over time to better predict and diagnose disease. Snyder will share his work in these new technologies and the power they hold to transform how we manage human health. 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 Department of Biology and the Health Studies Program. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s semester theme, Big Data.

imageBiography (provided by the speaker)

Michael Snyder is the Stanford Ascherman Professor and chair of genetics and the director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University. Snyder received his Ph.D. training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and proteomics, and one of the major participants of the ENCODE project. His laboratory study was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism, and has developed many technologies Read more