Bard’s Jonathan Becker Comments on the Desperate Rush to Evacuate Afghan Students and Scholars
Last month, Bard College and the Open Society University Network sent out a call to Afghan graduates of American programs in Afghanistan and the region. Immediately 120 replies came back. “I had a student this summer who had to miss class because ‘the Taliban surrounded our town.’ She indicated to me her final paper would be late because a bomb blew up her house,” Jonathan Becker told the Atlantic’s George Packer. “This is a tragedy of epic proportions.” Jonathan Becker is OSUN vice chancellor, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs, and director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard.
Bard’s Jonathan Becker Comments on the Desperate Rush to Evacuate Afghan Students and Scholars
Last month, Bard College and the Open Society University Network sent out a call to Afghan graduates of American programs in Afghanistan and the region. Immediately 120 replies came back. “I had a student this summer who had to miss class because ‘the Taliban surrounded our town.’ She indicated to me her final paper would be late because a bomb blew up her house,” Jonathan Becker told the Atlantic’s George Packer. “This is a tragedy of epic proportions.” After reading Honorable Exit, Thurston Clarke’s account of efforts by individual Americans to save their Vietnamese allies before the fall of Saigon in 1975, Becker realized how little time was left. In recent days Bard and Open Society have appealed to universities in the region to host Afghan evacuees, and to foundations and board members to pay as much as $400,000 to charter flights out of Afghanistan. “In many cases we have institutions to host them. Colleges, universities, and funders are stepping up,” Becker said. “That is not a problem. The challenge is the time to get people out and get them visas into those countries.” Jonathan Becker is OSUN vice chancellor, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs and director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard.
Michelle Murray, associate professor of political studies and director of global initiatives at Bard, comments on the new Comac C919 airplanes from China Eastern Airlines. Aiming to reduce China’s dependency on foreign technology, the People’s Republic has unveiled the new jets with plans to operate about 1,000 of them by the end of the year. But can the Comac C919 compete with the likes of Boeing and Airbus?
Professor Michelle Murray Weighs in on China’s First National Passenger Aircraft
Michelle Murray, associate professor of political studies and director of global initiatives at Bard, comments on the new Comac C919 airplanes from China Eastern Airlines. Aiming to reduce China’s dependency on foreign technology, the People’s Republic has unveiled the new jets with plans to operate about 1,000 of them by the end of the year. But can the Comac C919 compete with the likes of Boeing and Airbus?
“[T]he gay reparations movement encompasses a small but eclectic constellation of approaches to repairing the damage done by state-sponsored anti-gay discrimination and violence, with each approach entailing its own policies and philosophical emphases for how to repair that damage,” writes Professor of Political Studies Omar G. Encarnación in the Nation.
Professor Omar G. Encarnación: The Fight for LGBTQ Rights Must Include Reparations
If passed, a Senate resolution introduced in mid-June would apologize to LGBTQ federal workers for historical acts of discrimination. Real reparations demand far more.
“Based on the experience of nations like Spain, Britain, and Germany, gay reparations are best understood as policies intended to make amends for a history of systemic anti-gay discrimination,” writes Professor of Political Studies Omar G. Encarnación in the Nation. “But the movement is not one-size-fits-all; nor is it driven by gay people demanding financial compensation simply for claiming an LGBTQ identity, as some foes of the gay community have contended. Instead, the gay reparations movement encompasses a small but eclectic constellation of approaches to repairing the damage done by state-sponsored anti-gay discrimination and violence, with each approach entailing its own policies and philosophical emphases for how to repair that damage.”
Kramer vs America: Professor Omar G. Encarnación on How Activists Shaped the Response to the 1980s AIDS Crisis
As the cover story for this week's issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Professor of Political Studies Omar G. Encarnación reviews Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show: A political history of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993. The audacious, controversial, and highly effective ACT UP was led by the artist and activist Larry Kramer, whom Anthony Fauci described as “unique in that he totally transformed the relationship between activism and the scientific, regulatory and government community.” In his review, Professor Encarnación considers ACT UP’s impact on alleviating the AIDS crisis, how it paved the way for the work of advocacy groups around other diseases, and how its waning influence reflects on the state of gay rights in the U.S. and abroad.
Professor Sanjib Baruah on the Politics of Language in Assam
Language has been at the heart of political debate in Assam since the formation of the British colonial province of Assam in 1874, then through the turbulent decades leading to Indian Independence, the separation of the Sylhet district during Partition, and into our times. Professor of Political Studies Sanjib Baruah examines the history and politics of the region in the India Forum.
Political Theorist Lucas G. Pinheiro to Join Faculty of Bard Political Studies Program in Fall 2022
Bard College is pleased to announce that Lucas G. Pinheiro will join the faculty of the Political Studies Program as assistant professor of political studies, effective fall 2022. Pinheiro received his PhD in political science from the University of Chicago in 2019. His research bridges political theory and social history by focusing on the development of global capitalism, empire, and the legacies of racial slavery in the Atlantic world since the late seventeenth century.
About Lucas G. Pinheiro Lucas G. Pinheiro is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Department of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. His book manuscript, titled Factories of Modernity: Political Thought in the Capitalist Epoch, recasts the early modern factory system as a decisive stage for political thought and practice in Britain and its Atlantic colonies between 1688 and 1807. From this historical study, the book develops a long-range conceptual framework for understanding modern capitalism and confronting its enduring patterns of racialization, labor discipline, and inequality. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modern Intellectual History, Contemporary Political Theory, and Disability and Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2016), among others.
Pinheiro is the recipient of the 2020 Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation Award in New Political Science from the American Political Science Association and the 2021 Glenn and Claire Swogger Award for Exemplary Classroom Teaching from the University of Chicago. Pinheiro will spend the 2021-2022 academic year at Dartmouth College as postdoctoral fellow in the Political Economy Project and Department of Government. He will join Bard in August 2022 as assistant professor of political studies.
About Bard College Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
Bard College Appoints Political Theorist Mie Inouye to Tenure Track Faculty Position in Political Studies Program
Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Mie Inouye to a tenure track faculty position with the Bard Political Studies Program, effective fall 2021. A joint PhD candidate in political science and religious studies at Yale University, Inouye is a political theorist and organizer who studies theories of political action in 20th-century U.S. social movements. Her scholarship investigates the ways that institutions shape people’s understandings of themselves and the social world, and the practices that allow racially and economically oppressed people to develop and exercise agency.
About Mie Inouye In her dissertation, Antinomies of Organizing, Mie Inouye takes the praxis of political organizers as a source of political theory. She presents a dilemma that social movement organizers have faced in their pursuit of more democratic institutions: How can people constituted as political subjects by oppressive institutions develop the capacity to resist and transform those institutions? Drawing on histories, biographies, and her own archival research, she reconstructs the answers that four influential twentieth-century American organizers—William Z. Foster, Saul Alinsky, Myles Horton, and Ella Baker—offered to this question. She argues that the American organizing tradition offers democratic theory important insights into the modes, ends, and spheres of democratic participation.
Inouye is committed to engaged scholarship and has written on topics related to her research in Jacobin Magazine and The Forge. She holds a BA from Tufts University and an MA from the University of Toronto and is a joint PhD candidate in political science and religious studies at Yale University.
About Bard College Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
Walter Russell Mead on the “Biden Doctrine” and U.S. Foreign Policy
“Simply put, the Biden doctrine holds that geopolitical competition must not be allowed to drive world history,” writes Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College, in the Wall Street Journal. “Competition with China is real and must be vigorously pursued, but the essential goal of American foreign policy is to construct a values-based world order that can tackle humanity’s common problems in an organized and even collegial way.”
“A silent and dangerous epidemic”: Samantha Rose Hill on the Personal and Political Aspects of Loneliness
“We’re facing an existential crisis in our lives, and loneliness often appears when people are hungry for meaning. When people talk about loneliness, they’re often actually talking about social isolation. But they’re not the same thing, and I think this is kind of a dangerous way to understand loneliness.” Speaking on NPR’s To the Best of Our Knowledge, Professor Hill drew on Hannah Arendt’s 1951 On the Origins of Totalitarianism to describe a form of “organized loneliness” that, today, we see “not in totalitarianism but in tyrannical thinking. We see it in the emergence of populism from the left and the right. And we see it in the Republican Party, which is comfortable rejecting the facts of science in the face of a deadly pandemic, and where the president of the United States is unable to accept the reality of electoral defeat.”
Wednesday, October 20, 2021 Afghanistan: 20 Years On Online Event6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in 2001, in an effort to capture and defeat Al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden. Twenty years later, Joe Biden ended this "forever" war this past summer, noting that Washington achieved its goal of capturing bin Laden. Yet, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was chaotic, as thousands of Afghans scrambled to leave the country. Was withdrawal the right decision? Did the U.S. achieve its goal in Afghanistan? To answer thse questions, we'll be joined by former U.S. State Department official Annie Pforzheimer. Ms. Pforzheimer served as the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul from 2017-18. She also served as the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Afghanistan. She will be joined by Bard professor Fred Hof, also an alumnus from the State Department. Via Zoom. RSVP required.
A Guide to the Field and Turning It Into a Career Olin, Room 2015:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Among the fields that white men continue to dominate is international relations/foreign policy. Elmira Bayrasli is working to change that. Join us on Monday, September 13, at 6pm, as she discusses her multidisciplinary career, which has included stints at the U.S. State Department working for Madeleine Albright, as the chief spokesperson for the OSCE Mission for Bosnia-Herzegovina, and now as both the founder of a nonprofit focused on empowering women in foreign affairs and director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program. Learn about how to navigate the male-dominated field and get that dream job.
Thursday, September 9, 2021
9/11: 20 Years On Online Event6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 September 11. 2001 was the first foreign attack on U.S. soil. Not long after, then U.S. President George W. Bush put forward an aggressive plan to retaliate against the perpetrators. It gave birth to the "war on terror," which has been a core component of U.S. foreign policy since. How has this war on terror impacted U.S. foreign policy and America's place in the world? Joining us to answer that question and dive into a look at 9/11 20 years on are Karen Greenberg, Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law and the author of the forthcoming book, Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, Maha Hilal, the inaugural Michael Ratner fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and author of Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11, and Jamil Dakwar, BGIA professor and the Director of the ACLU's Human Rights Program. Via Zoom. RSVP required.
Thursday, July 15, 2021
Foreign Policy in the Digital Age Online Event12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Foreign policy is among the things that the Internet has revolutionized. No longer is diplomacy confined to oak-paneled rooms and gilded corridors. This change, as New York Times reporter Mark Landler noted, “happened so fast that it left the foreign policy establishment gasping to catch up.” Author Adam Segal joins us for a conversation about how technology has changed diplomacy, geopolitics, war, and, most of all, power.
Thursday, June 24, 2021
A conversation about activism and change Online Event12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 George Floyd's murder in May 2020 shined a brutal light on racism and inequality, not only in the U.S. but throughout the world. It renewed energy into the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Today, BLM is widely embraced and conversations about how to end systemic racism have become mainstream. What changed? And how are activists working to build on this momentum and achieve change? Talaya Robinson-Dancy and Cammie Jones join us virtually on Thursday, June 24 at 12pm for the Chace Speaker Hour to discuss. Talaya Dancy was the Founder and President of the Black Body Experience Council at Bard College and was the co-head of the Womxn of Color United club. Cammie Jones is the Executive Director of Community Engagement and Inclusion at Columbia University. Please join us on Zoom.
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
We'll be in-person in NYC this fall! Online Event6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Join us to learn more about the BGIA program, our courses, internships and our in-person semester in NYC this fall.
To apply for the fall '21 semester, please visit: https://bard.studioabroad.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=Programs.ViewProgram&Program_ID=41053
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
What have we learned about the coronavirus? Online Event12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Last March changed all of our lives. What have learned about the coronavirus? Now that there are vaccines, how quickly will we go back to "normal?" What does the future hold for future pandemics? We'll be joined by Laurie Garrett, author of many books on pandemics, including The Coming Plague, and Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project. Save the date: Wednesday, March 10, at 12pm EST/6pm Vienna. You don't want to miss this talk. RSVP required.
Tuesday, February 16, 2021
Learn more about the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program. Online Event6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Are you an undergrad eager for a career in international relations or foreign policy? Where do you start? What do you need to be considered? Join us to learn more about the Bard Globalization and International Affairs semester away program for Summer 2021/Fall 2021. We’ll help you get placed at a top organization, while earning academic credit. RSVP required.
Thursday, February 11, 2021
A Look at the Arab Spring a Decade Later Online Event12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5 A decade has passed since hundreds of thousands poured into Cairo's Tahrir Square, igniting the Arab Spring. What has happened since? Join us on Thursday, February 11 (exactly 10 years to the day that Hosni Mubarak stepped down), at 12pm EST/6pm Vienna. We'll be joined by Century Foundation's Thanassis Cambanis, author of Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story, and Michael Hanna, author of Arab Politics Beyond the Uprisings.RSVP required.
Thursday, January 28, 2021
Should the US set up a truth commission after the Trump presidency? Online Event12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5 We kick off our 2021 Chace Talk series with a discussion on Trump and truth, specifically, whether it's worth considering a truth and reconciliation commission. We’ll be joined by Bard College professor Omar Encarnación, who penned an article, “Truth After Trump,” for Foreign Policy magazine. Join us on January 28 at 12pm EST/6pm Vienna. RSVP required.