Harvard 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 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

UCLA 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)

Dale 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

 Living 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 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

Dickinson 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 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

Wednesday, 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

Brigadier 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

Martin 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)

Martin 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

Sarah 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)

Komozi 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

Founder 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)

Substantia 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

University 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)

Christopher 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.

Video

Iranian-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)

Born 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

Monday, November 6, 2017
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Panelists

Jack Carroll (moderator), Cumberland-Perry Drug and Alcohol Commission
Carrie DeLone, Holy Spirit-Geisinger
David Freed, Cumberland County District Attorney’s Office
Duane Nieves, Holy Spirit EMS
Kristen Varner, The RASE Project

Watch Live

This panel will address the current opioid epidemic in Central Pennsylvania, focusing both on the situation we face now and plans and opportunities for ending this significant problem.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Program in Policy Studies, the Health Studies Program and the Wellness Center.

Biographies (provided by the panelists)

Jack Carroll is the executive director of the Cumberland-Perry Drug & Alcohol Commission.  The Commission is responsible for managing public funded substance abuse prevention, intervention, and treatment services for residents of Cumberland and Perry Counties.  Carroll has worked in several different capacities within the drug and alcohol field since his graduation from Penn State in 1976.

Carrie L. DeLone, M.D joined Geisinger Health System as the medical director of the Holy Spirit Medical Group in 2015.  DeLone is responsible for overseeing clinical operations at Holy Spirit Medical Group’s Read more

Pediatrician and Expert on Vaccines, Immunology and Virology

The Vaccine-Autism Controversy

Thursday, November 2, 2017
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

How have scientists, the media, and the public dealt with the question of whether vaccines cause autism? A book sale and signing will follow the presentation.

The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, Physics & Astronomy and the Health Studies Program.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Paul A. Offit, MD is the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as well as the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and a professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a recipient of many awards including the J. Edmund Bradley Prize for Excellence in Pediatrics from the University of Maryland Medical School, the Young Investigator Award in Vaccine Development from the Infectious Disease Society of America, and a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health. Offit has published more than 160 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety. He is also the co-inventor Read more

Pastor, Activist and Author

Wesley Lecture

An Indictment of the United Methodist Anti-Gay Doctrine

Thursday, October 26, 2017
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Does the United Methodist anti-gay doctrine violate John Wesley’s “do-no-harm” rule? Testimonies of queer church members and an analysis of a study by the American Psychology Association strongly suggest that it does.

This lecture is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and the Center for Service, Spirituality and Social Justice with special thanks to the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church and co-sponsored by the Department of Religion, the Division of Student Life and the Office of LGBTQ Services. It is also co-sponsored by the Churchill Fund and part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Rev. Franklyn Schaefer is a United Methodist pastor, chaplain and author (Defrocked, 2014). He and his wife immigrated from Germany in 1990. After obtaining a master’s of divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary (1996) and following ordination as an elder (1998), he served two church appointments in Pennsylvania. In between appointments, he obtained a clinical pastoral education degree from Penn State University while working as a resident chaplain Read more

Cuban Filmmaker

Imagining Cuba: Emerging Documentary Filmmaking within Social Change

Thursday, October 19, 2017
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Sainz explores the struggles of the emerging generation of documentary filmmakers in contemporary Cuba.

The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Departments of Spanish & Portuguese; Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies; Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies; Film Studies; the Women’s & Gender Resource Center; and First Year Seminars.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Damián Sainz  graduated from the University of Arts, Havana, Cuba with a degree in media arts and from the EICTV (International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños) with a degree in documentary direction. Sainz also studied at the Mel Oppenheim Film School in Montreal, Canada and at the Cinema Department at HEAD Genève, Switzerland. Sainz has worked as director, editor and producer in documentary films in Cuba, Canada, Switzerland and Spain and has collaborated with visual arts projects like Galeria Continua, Inventario at the Ludwig Foundation and online project Docuselfie. His short documentary films, focused on LGBTQ culture in the island and Cuban youth, have been selected and awarded in several international film festivals Read more