2018-19 Events
May 1, 2019
The students of Advocacy for Policy Change (LGLS 161b) tried to persuade audience members to vote for their bills, which were currently being considered by the Massachusetts Legislature.
April 8, 2019
Massachusetts state Sens. Diana DiZoglio and Cindy Friedman, and Kentucky state Rep. Attica Scott discussed their careers in politics and political advocacy, as well as their perspectives on political engagement, particularly at the state level, in conversation with the students from ENACT courses around the United States and members of the public. Melissa Stimell, academic program director of ENACT, served as moderator.
March 18, 2019
Daniel Terris, director emeritus of the Ethics Center, read from his latest book, "The Trials of Richard Goldstone" (2018, Rutgers University Press), and then participated in a panel discussion with Goldstone, a member and former chair of the Ethics Center International Advisory Board, and moderator John Shattuck, current chair of the International Advisory Board. A reception followed.
March 14, 2019
Tony and Pulitzer Prize nominee Anna Deavere Smith brought her acclaimed one-woman show of the same name to the screen. The film dramatizes accounts of students, parents, teachers and administrators caught in America’s school-to-prison pipeline, which pushes underprivileged, minority youth out of the classroom and into incarceration.
February 27, 2019
Politics professor Jytte Klausen moderated a discussion on counterextremism and Islamophobia with panelists Saida Abdi, associate director for community relations at the Boston Children's Hospital Refugee Trauma and Resilience Center; Farah Pandith, a foregin policy strategist, academic and former diplomat; and Paul Turner, senior conflict adviser at Creative Associates International.
February 7, 2019
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer's one-woman solo performance that challenges dominant narratives on race and gender, religion, popular culture and citizenship in the contemporary United States. The performance consists of a series of vignettes similar to scenes in a play, although without a linear narrative structure. These vignettes use movement, theater and poetry to share complex stories of Muslim life in the United States.
November 7, 2018
At the time of this event, the Israeli asylum system had become both institutionalized and increasingly exclusionary, to the point of preventing the entry of any asylum seekers and promoting their deportation. Kritzman-Amir, Israel Institute Visiting Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, discussed the gradual processes of institutionalization and exclusion in a comparative context and the broader implications for refugee protection and responsibility sharing.
September 25, 2018
In 1946, while the Nuremberg trial was concluding in Germany, U.S. investigators of war crimes committed by Imperial Japanese leaders were revealing a long-term program of brutal medical experimentation on Chinese captives, equivalent to Nazi atrocities. In addition, evidence emerged that the Japanese had conducted lethal widespread germ warfare on Chinese towns and cities from 1940 to 1942. None of these crimes, though, were revealed at the Tokyo war crimes trial. Based on her 2017 Pulitzer Prize-nominated book "Hidden Atrocities," former Boston College medical sociology professor Jean Guillemin's talk analyzed how U.S. military intelligence, in the name of national security, corrupted the apparently thorough prosecution case, which represented the charges of 11 allied nations, including China.
September 4, 2018
Nine cultural artists with a commitment to social integration and peacebuilding discussed the future of the arts as a means of social transformation. Participants included Babu Ayindo and Catherine Muhoma of Kenya, Ellada Evangelou of Cyprus, Mary Ann Hunter of Australia, Shahid Nadeem of Pakistan, Carmen Olaechea of Argentina and Lee Perlman of Israel.