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

Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Love Your Body Week Keynote

Out of Time: Fatness, Disability, and Fat Crip Time

April Herndon,  Winona State University

This talk explores the ways fat and/or disabled bodies are often depicted as being part of the past but not of a collective future because they are deemed too expensive, too much a reminder of vulnerability, too much in general. As a result, those of us living in fat and/or disabled bodies are often disciplined and pushed to pursue imagined futures—where many of us do not exist—through “treatments” and “cures,” robbing us of the present. Using my personal experiences as a fat and disabled woman and an intersectional Fat Studies and Disability Studies lens, I’ll explain how fat and/or disabled bodies challenge normative concepts of time. I’ll also suggest that Fat Crip Time, which acknowledges that fatness and disability can mean a person experiences time differently, can help us live in the present, know fat and disabled bodies as potential sites of joy rather than only hardship, and offer a framework for justice and liberation.

The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and by the Women’s & Gender Resource Center and Read more

Stern Center, Great Room, 12:00 p.m.

***Lunch provided, please RSVP to clarkeforum@dickinson.edu by noon on 11/13/24.

International Perspectives on 2024 Election

Panelists

Willibroad Dze-Ngwa, representing Yaoundé, Cameroon
Mario Guerrero, representing Mendoza, Argentina
Hilary Sanders, representing Toulouse, France
Konstantin Sonin, representing Moscow, Russia
Neil van Siclen, representing Bremen, Germany
Sarah Niebler (moderator), Dickinson College

The US presidential election is being watched closely throughout the world. Colleagues from Dickinson’s global programs will discuss the effects the results have for their countries and beyond.

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

Topic overview written by Bella Lapp ’26

Biographies (provided by the panelists)

Willibroad Dze-Ngwa is full professor and permanent faculty of political history, global issues and political sciences at the University of Yaoundé I, Cameroon. He studied political history and international relations in Cameroon and moved on to study political sciences at the Donahue Institute of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA with a focus on peace and security studies. Professor Dze-Ngwa is senior fellow and consultant on terrorism and violent extremism with the New York-based Global Center on Cooperative Security. He is visiting professor of Universite d’Artois, France; and founding president of the Heritage University Institute Read more

Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

The Molly and Wayne Borges Memorial Lecture

Danger, Purity and the Holy Land Past and Present

Robin Darling Young, Catholic University of America

To the holy city of Jerusalem and the land that surrounds it, three new and distinct assemblies laid claims of territorial and devotional holiness. This lecture explores the expression of those claims in discourse, in construction, and in demolition.

This joint event is sponsored by St. John’s Episcopal Church in Carlisle and the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Department of Religion.

Topic overview written by Sarah Ruschak ’27

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Robin Darling Young is Ordinary (Full) Professor of Church History at the Catholic University of America, and affiliated faculty of the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages. Her most recent publications are (as editor in chief) an annotated commentary and translation, from Greek and Syriac, of the Gnostic Trilogy of Evagrius of Pontus, and a translation of the Armenian Letters of Evagrius (CSCO, 2023) with Hovsep Karapetyan. She is at work on an interpretive study of that author as a philosopher in the Alexandrian tradition, and is co-translating the Contra Celsum Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

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

Open Forum on the 2024 Election

Dickinson Community Forum with Faculty Panel

Russell Bova, political science & international studies
Katie Marchetti, political science
Ed Webb, political science & international studies
Sarah Niebler, political science (will also serve as moderator)

Dickinson Faculty will discuss observations and analyses of the recent US Presidential election and take questions.

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

Topic overview written by Kylie De La Cruz ’27

Biographies (provided by the panelists)

Russell Bova is professor of political science and the J. William Stuart & Helen D. Stuart ’32 Chair in International Studies. Bova teaches a variety of courses on international relations and comparative politics. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on Russian politics and comparative democratization. He is also the author of How the World Works, an introductory international relations textbook.

Katie Marchetti is associate professor of political science. Professor Marchetti’s teaching interests focus on gender and U.S. politics, interest groups, intersectionality, political representation, and political methodology. Her research on these and other topics has been published in Politics Read more

Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

Puerto Rico – The 51st State? Explaining the Diminished Prospects for Puerto Rico Statehood

Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Director for Public Policy, External and Media Relations, and Development at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College

This lecture discusses the territorial condition of Puerto Rico in relation to the United States and the unlikely prospects in the near future that Puerto Rico will be admitted into the Union as member on equal standing with other states. In order to address this narrower topic, I will address more broadly the nature of the relation of Puerto Rico and the United States, the historical process of incorporation of the U.S. territories into the Union, the partisan reasons why Congress may not want to incorporate Puerto Rico as a state, the political reasons why a solid majority of residents of Puerto Rico may still not want Puerto Rico  to become a U.S. state, the economic, racial and cultural obstacles for Congress to admit Puerto Rico as a state, and the international context that provides little incentive for Puerto Rico’s decolonization.

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

Anita Tuvin Schlechter, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

Boosting Human Capital in Africa: Why It’s Needed, and How to Get It Done

Pascaline Dupas, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University

Boosting Africa’s human capital—the health, knowledge, skills, and resilience of its people—is key to the fight against world poverty amidst climate change, but also to Africa’s ability to harness its demographic potential . The lecture will discuss evidence-based policies that governments and international organizations can put in place to do a big push on human capital on the continent. 

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Bechtel Lectureship Fund and the departments of international studies and economics.

Topic overview written by Georgia Schaefer-Brown ’25

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Pascaline Dupas is Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She joined the Princeton faculty in July 2023. She was previously the Kleinheinz Family Professor of International Studies at Stanford University, where she spent 12 years on the faculty. She has also held faculty positions at Dartmouth College and UCLA.   

Dupas is a development economist studying the challenges facing poor households in lower income countries and their root causes. Read more

Stern Center, Great Room, 6 p.m.

Livestream Link

War in Gaza: An International Lawyer’s Perspective

Leila Nadya Sadat, the James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law at Washington University and a Visiting Fellow at the Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale

The current war in Gaza has roiled the international community. It has also been deeply upsetting to many in the United States. Historians, politicians, and pundits have weighed in on the origins of the conflict and its current conduct. International law, a discipline based upon global values, norms, and standards, offers a different perspective. This lecture will address the conflict from the perspective of the international lawyer, and discuss, in particular, the work of the United Nations, the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which have been tasked with bringing peace to the region and, in the case of the ICC and the ICJ, evaluating the legality of the parties’ conduct. In addition to explaining the role of international law and institutions, the lecture will reflect upon the gaps and shortcomings of the international legal system when faced with a seemingly intractable conflict.

This program is sponsored by the Program in Middle East Read more

Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

The Regulation of AI in the Creative Economy

Matthew Sag,  Professor of Law in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science at Emory University School of Law

Although we are still far from the science fiction version of artificial general intelligence that thinks, feels, and refuses to “open the pod bay doors,” we are clearly in the midst of a fundamental technological change. This presentation will address how Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Generative AI challenge existing legal frameworks and how copyright law in particular should respond.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) involves computer systems that can perform tasks that usually require human intelligence, judgement, or perception. AI today is mostly comprised of machine learning (ML). ML is a set of computational methods for classification and prediction based on clever processing of massive amounts of data without any explicit theory. ML models are inherently data dependent, and this presentation will explore some legal and social implications of that dependency. It will also outline how AI raises ethical and legal questions in relation to: the collection and extraction of data; the storage and sharing of data; the legitimacy of algorithmic decision-making; the social impact of Read more

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