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

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

Exploring the Strange and Ancient Biology of the Brain Hidden in Our Guts

Subhash Kulkarni, Scientist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School

The Enteric Nervous System (ENS) is the second largest collection of neurons and glial cells outside of the brain. It is estimated to contain half a billion neurons and a couple of billion glial cells, which makes it a larger nervous system than the spinal cord. Located entirely within the lining of the gastrointestinal tract, it regulates not only important gut functions – including digestion, absorption, motility of the gut, immunity of the gut, but it also plays a central role in regulation of higher order functions such as satiety and behavior. Given the pivotal nature of the functions it regulates, the ENS in some or the other form has existed in animals long before the need to have a central nervous system, which would regulate higher executive functions, evolved. However, despite playing such a key role in an animal’s ability to survive, we know little about how it develops, how it matures, how it maintains itself in a constantly moving organ full of acids, Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link 

Race and the Origins of Modern Policing

Matthew Guariglia ’12, Senior Policy Analyst at Electronic Frontier Foundation

This talk will show how the modern police department, rather than originating as a “colorblind” institution, was built to explicitly consider race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality when enforcing laws and repressing individuals and communities. From searching for formerly enslaved African Americans, managing imagined Irish Catholic criminality, surveilling Jewish, Italian, and Chinese communities—police departments look and act the way they do because their early encounters with race and ethnicity led to periods of experimentation and growth. Central to the story of policing in the United States are the tactics and technologies cultivated by colonialism as oppressive tactics traveled home from the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico as well as from British and French imperialism in African and Asia. This history reveals the deep-rooted fault lines in American policing and the thinking that produced them in the first place. 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 Division of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, the departments of American Read more

(Event rescheduled from 11/14/23)

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

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

Morgan Lecture

Savage States: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow

Audra Simpson, Columbia University

How is the past imagined to be settled? What are the conditions that make for this imagining, this fantasy or rather, demand of a new beginning? In this lecture, Professor Audra Simpson will consider the making of ‘new time’ in light of histories of wrongdoing – residential and boarding schools and the dispossession that is tied to this in recent history – 1990 to the near present in Canada. This is a time of apology, and a time in which Native people and their claims to territory are whittled to the status of claimant in time with the fantasy of their disappearance from a modern and critical present. How has settler governance adjusted itself in line with global trends and rights paradigms away from overt violence to softer and kinder, caring modes of governance? This lecture will ask not only in what world we imagine time to stop, but will also take up the ways in which those that survived the time stoppage Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Bruce R. Andrews Lecture

Unseen Politics: Hidden Impact of Entertainment Media in Unequal America

Eunji Kim, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University

There is a simple and uncomfortable truth about the nation still recovering from the scars of a reality TV presidency: given the dazzling array of media choices, Americans are not watching news. If our media diet primarily consists of entertainment media, how does it shape politics? In this hyper-politicized world full of partisan news media, it might seem implausible that something as frivolous as entertainment media could possibly affect people’s political attitudes. Defying such conventional wisdom, Kim theorizes and describes the unique power of entertainment media in shaping political attitudes and behaviors. In particular, this talk introduces a puzzle in American politics that can be addressed by bringing entertainment media to the table. In this age of intensifying income inequality, the concerns about the fading American Dream from politicians on both sides of the partisan aisle are omnipresent. Nevertheless, many Americans continue to view the United States as the land of opportunity. Why do beliefs in economic mobility persist despite the raft of empirical evidence to Read more

Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy

April Baker-Bell,  Associate Professor of Language, Culture, and Justice in Education at the University of Michigan in the Marsal Family School of Education

In this talk, Dr. April Baker-Bell will discuss how anti-Black linguistic racism and white linguistic supremacy get normalized in teacher attitudes, curriculum and instruction, pedagogical approaches, disciplinary discourses, and research, and she will discuss the impact these decisions have on Black students’ language education and their linguistic, racial, and intellectual identities. Dr. Baker-Bell will introduce a new way to forward through Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy, a pedagogical approach that intentionally and unapologetically places Black Language at the center to critically interrogate white linguistic hegemony and anti-Black linguistic racism. 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 Center for Teaching, Learning and Scholarship (CTLS), the Faculty Success Center, and the departments of English and sociology.

Topic overview written by Ella Layton ’26

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Dr. April Baker-Bell  is an award-winning transdisciplinary teacher-researcher-activist and associate professor of Language, Culture, and Justice in Education at the University of Michigan in the Marsal Family Read more

Carlisle Theatre, 40 W. High Street, 7 p.m.

Film Screening of Retrograde

Baktash Ahadi, Filmmaker
Chris Mason, U.S. Army War College
Farida Mohammadi, Afghan Female Tactical Platoon
Asem Shukoori, Film Subject

Retrograde captures the final nine months of America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan from multiple perspectives: one of the last U.S. Special Forces units deployed there, a young Afghan general and his corps fighting to defend their homeland against all odds, and the civilians desperately attempting to flee as the country collapses and the Taliban take over. From rarely seen operational control rooms to the frontlines of battle to the chaotic Kabul airport during the final U.S. withdrawal, this Oscar-Shortlisted film offers a cinematic and historic window onto the end of America’s longest war, and the costs endured for those most intimately involved. The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with the panelists.

The film showing is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and the Carlisle Theatre.

Topic overview written by Ella Layton ’26, Clarke Forum Student Project Manager

Biographies (provided by the speakers).

Baktash Ahadi is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, storyteller, and executive leadership coach. He was born in Kabul in 1981, and his Read more

Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Livestream link 

The Bechtel Lecture

Know-Do Gap: A Fallacy for Scale-Up & Sustainability 

Malabika Sarker, Brown University

Implementation Research (IR) is a systematic process of causal analysis, bottlenecks of implementation identification, and optimum strategy selection in a particular context. IR refers to understanding know-do gaps; what, why, and how an intervention works in real-world settings and testing approaches to improve them, introduce potential solutions to a system, or promote their large-scale use and sustainability. Bridging the know-do gap is crucial for the successful implementation of any public health intervention especially in pertinent to scalability and sustainability. This presentation will showcase the fallacy in addressing the know-do gap as a simple linear two-dimensional strategy. In addition, it will illustrate with examples from Sarker’s research in Sub-Saharan Africa and Bangladesh, that the know-do gap is a continuum, not a binary theme.

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

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Dr. Malabika Sarker is a Professor of the Practice of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown School of Public Health, Brown University.  Professor Sarker is an Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

In Celebration of 150 Years of The Dickinsonian

A Conversation on Corrections in Ink

Keri Blakinger, Los Angeles Times
Renée Ann Cramer, Dickinson College

In this program, Blakinger will discuss her memoir which traces her journey from competitive figure skating, to struggles with an eating disorder and addiction, to eventually a two-year sentence in New York’s prison system. Blakinger will reflect on her experiences and how they have influenced her work as an investigative reporter covering mass incarceration. The discussion will be facilitated by Dickinson’s Provost Renée Ann Cramer. A book sale and signing will follow the presentation.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and The Dickinsonian and co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology.

Topic overview written by Isa Mester ’26, Clarke Forum Student Project Manager

Biographies (provided by the speakers)

Keri Blakinger is a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she covers the sheriff’s department and jails. Previously, she was an investigative reporter at The Marshall Project where she focused on incarceration and prior to that she covered the death penalty and prisons for the Houston Chronicle. She’s been featured on PBS News Read more