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 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 Theater, 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

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Bruce R. Andrews Lecture

Combating Online Harms: The Importance of Rigorous Scientific Testing of Proposed Interventions

Joshua A. Tucker is Director of the Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia, Co-Director of the Center for Social Media and Politics, and Professor of Politics at New York University

In the digital information era, policymakers and technology companies have implemented
numerous interventions designed to mitigate online harms, ranging from misinformation to political polarization. However, Professor Joshua A. Tucker argues that we cannot rely on the assumption that these “common sense” solutions are effective; instead, they must be subjected to rigorous scientific testing. Drawing on extensive research from NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics (csmapnyu.org), Tucker will present findings from three major studies that challenge conventional wisdom. First, he will demonstrate how the popular advice to “do your own research” via search engines can paradoxically increase belief in misinformation due to low-quality search results. Second, he will discuss the limitations of source credibility labels, which appear to have little impact on downstream news consumption or trust in media. Finally, he will review the results of the U.S. 2020 Facebook & Instagram Election Study, which Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program

Democracy and the Arts

Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of the Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley and the Chair of the History of Art Department

What is the role of the arts in activating and sustaining democratic life? How have artists sustained the rights of free expression? Why are some forms of artistic expression censored? How have the arts contributed to social movements? Should the arts have a politically useful role? Or stay strategically “un-useful”? In different eras and regions of the world, artists have responded to these questions quite differently. This lecture explores a range of socially engaged art practices, considering how some seek to make community, how some seek to expose inequity, and how some open new ideas of what democracy might mean.

This program is presented by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and the Phi Beta Kappa Society Visiting Scholar Program. The event is also part of the Clarke Forum annual theme, Thought Experiments.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of the Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley and the Read more