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["REAL TALK: Difficult Questions about Race, Sex and Religion" October 20-21, 2016]

Hannah Arendt Center and Center for Civic Engagement present:

"REAL TALK: Difficult Questions about Race, Sex and Religion" October 20-21, 2016

The Hannah Arendt Center Annual Fall Conference

Thursday, October 20, 2016 – Friday, October 21, 2016
Olin Hall
10:00 am – 6:00 pm

  • Overview
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Speakers

Göran Adamson

[Göran Adamson]
Göran Adamson is Visiting Associate Professor at the Centre for European Studies, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. He is also Senior Lecturer in Sociology at West University, Sweden. In 2015, he published The Trojan Horse - A leftist Critique of Multiculturalism in the West, followed by Populist Parties and the failure of the Political Elites - The rise of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2016). At present he is finishing a new book: Masochist Nationalism - Multicultural Self-hatred and the Enchantment with the Exotic, based on George Orwell's essay Notes on Nationalism. He has a Ph.D. from the LSE, London.

Roger Berkowitz

[Roger Berkowitz]
Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College; Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities. Author of Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics.

Leon Botstein

[Leon Botstein]
President, Bard College. Chairman, Central European University. Board member Open Society Foundations. Music Director, American Symphony Orchestra 1992 to present. Artistic director, Summerscape and Bard Music Festivals. Music Director, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra (2003 to 2010).

Robert Boyers

[Robert Boyers]

ROBERT BOYERS is Editor of the quarterly magazine Salmagundi, Director of The New York State Summer Writers Institute and Professor of English at Skidmore College. He is the author of ten books, including two critical works on the intersection of politics and literature, the first entitled Atrocity and Amnesia, the second The Dictator’s Dictation. His most recent book (2015) is The Fate Of Ideas. A frequent contributor to such publications as The Nation, The New Republic and Harpers, he is the author of an essay entitled  “How ‘Safe Spaces’ Stifle Ideas” published in the March 13, 2016 Chronicle Review (published by The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Alexandra Brodsky

[Alexandra Brodsky]
Alexandra Brodsky is a co-founder of Know Your IX, for which she served as co-director for over two years. She got involved with Title IX work as an undergraduate at Yale when she and 15 friends filed a complaint against the university. Now, Alexandra  is a third year student at Yale Law School and an editor at Feministing.com. Alexandra’s writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, POLITICO Magazine,The Nation, the Atlantic, and Dissent. She tweets as @azbrodsky.

William Deresiewicz

[William Deresiewicz]

Author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (Free Press, 2014). A frequent speaker on college campuses, Bill taught English at Yale from 1998-2008. He is a Contributing Writer for The Nation and a Contributing Editor for The American Scholar. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper's, and elsewhere. He was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing of the National Book Critics Circle (2012), and the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture's Hiett Prize in the Humanities (2013).

Jennifer Doyle

[Jennifer Doyle]

Jennifer Doyle is Professor of English at UC Riverside. She is the author of Campus Sex/Campus Security (2015), Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013) and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2006). She was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital | The Andy Warhol Foundation (2012), in support of her writing on the intersection of art and sport. In 2015, she curated Nao Bustamante: Soldadera for the Vincent Price Art Museum in East Los Angeles; she is currently curator of a feminist performance art series for The Broad Museum in Los Angeles. In 2013-2014, she held a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of the Arts, London. 

Mary Gaitskill

[Mary Gaitskill]
Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels The Mare, Veronica, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award, National Critic’s Circle Award, and LA Times Book Award, and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. She is also the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To,which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998, and Don’t Cry. Gaitskill’s stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction and a Cullman Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Erica Hunt

[Erica Hunt]
Erica Hunt is a  poet, and essayist, author of Local History and Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right Before the Eyes and A Day and Its Approximates. Her poems and essays have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, Recluse, In the American Tree and Conjunctions. With poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt is co-editor of an anthology of new writing by Black women, Letters to the Future, forthcoming in 2017 from Kore Press. Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation and is a past fellow of Duke University/University of Capetown Program in Public Policy. She is now the Parsons Family University Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Long Island University. Before assuming her current post, Ms. Hunt worked for more than 25 years in social justice philanthropy, first as a program officer at New World Foundation, and later as president of the Twenty-First Century Foundation, a leading public foundation dedicated to advancing Black community change. Currently, she serves on the board of the Proteus Fund, a philanthropy supporting democracy, human rights and peace. 
 

Janet Halley

[Janet Halley]
Janet Halley is the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from UCLA and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She has taught at Tel Aviv Buckmann School of Law and in the Law Department of the American University in Cairo. She is the author of Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton 2006), and Don’t: A Reader’s Guide to the Military’s Anti-Gay Policy (Duke 1999). With Wendy Brown, she coedited Left Legalism/Left Critique (Duke 2002), and with Andrew Parker she coedited  After Sex? New Writing Since Queer Theory (Duke 2011). She is the editor of a collection of essays entitled Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law, 58 American Journal of Comparative Law, and the author of “What is Family Law?: A Genealogy,” published last year in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. Her current book projects are The Family/Market Distinction: A Genealogy and Critique and Rape in Armed Conflict: Assessing the Feminist Vision and its Law.  
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She is co-director of the Trafficking Roundtable and of the Up Against Family Law Exceptionalism Conference, an international collaboration dedicated to studying the role of the family and family law in colonization, decolonization and contemporary globalization. She was recently awarded the Career Achievement Award for Law and the Humanities by the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities.  She teaches Family Law, Gender and the Family in Transnational Legal Orders, Gender in Postcolonial Legal Orders, Trafficking and Labor Migration, and courses on the intersections of legal theory with social theory.

Samantha Hill

[Samantha Hill]
Samantha Rose Hill received her doctorate in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2014. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and The Humanities at Bard College. Her research and teaching interests include critical theory, the Frankfurt School, aesthetic theory, and the History of Political Thought. Hill is currently finishing a manuscript of Hannah Arendt’s poetry, which has been edited and translated into English: Into the Dark: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt. Previously Hill conducted post-doctoral work at the Institut für Philosophie at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main and served as a visiting lecturer at Amherst College.

Angus Johnston

[Angus Johnston]
Angus Johnston is a historian of American student activism, and of student life and culture more broadly. An advocate of student organizing, he is the founder of the website StudentActivism.net. He teaches history at the City University of New York, where he received his PhD in 2009 with the dissertation “The United States National Student Association: Democracy, Activism, and the Idea of the Student, 1947-1978.” 

Dima Khalidi

[Dima Khalidi]
Dima Khalidi is the founder and Director of Palestine Legal and Cooperating Counsel with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). Her work includes providing legal advice to activists, engaging in advocacy to protect their rights to speak out for Palestinian rights, and educating activists and the public about the repression of Palestine advocates.

Carolyn Lazard

[Carolyn Lazard]
Carolyn Lazard is a writer, film curator, and artist working in media and performance. Her work engages collective practice to address the ethics of care, dependency, and wellness. Lazard has presented work in various spaces including Light Industry, the Poetry Project, Roots and Culture, Anthology Film Archives, the Arnolfini, and the New Museum. She is a founding member of the art collective Canaries and is a 2015 recipient of the Wynn Newhouse Award. Lazard holds a B.A. from Bard college and she makes her home in Philadelphia.

Christopher Lebron

[Christopher Lebron]

Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Philosophy at Yale. He is author of The Color Of Our Shame: Race and Justice In Our Time (2013)and is currently at work on his second book, The Making of ‘Black Lives Matter’: A Brief History of an Idea. Lebronwasawarded First Book Prize by the American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory section. His article, “The Agony of a Racial Democracy,” was published in Theory & Event vol 15, no. 3, 2012, a symposium on the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

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His article “Equality From A Human Point Of View,” was published in Critical Philosophy of Race vol 2, no. 2 2014. His paper, “Thoughts on Racial Democratic Education and Moral Virtue,” was published in Research & Theory in Education vol 13 no. 2 (2015). Most recently he has written for The Boston Review and The New York Times.

Greg Lukianoff

[Greg Lukianoff]

President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, Freedom From Speech, and is co-author of FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus, as well as The Atlantic's September cover story entitled "The Coddling of the American Mind" written in partnership with Jonathan Haidt. He has testified before both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives about free speech issues on America’s campuses. 

 VIEW MORE >>
In 2008, Greg became the first ever recipient of the Playboy Foundation Freedom of Expression Award and in 2010 he received Ford Hall Forum’s Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award on behalf of FIRE. He has published articles in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, as well as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Globe, the New York Post, and numerous other publications. Greg also runs the Genetic Music Project, an open source genetic art project combining music and science. Greg is also an executive producer for Can We Take a Joke?, a feature-length documentary that explores the collision between comedy, censorship, and outrage culture on and off campus.

Kenneth Marcus

[Kenneth Marcus]
Kenneth L. Marcus is President and General Counsel of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and author of The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press: 2015) and Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (Cambridge University Press: 2010).  Marcus founded the Brandeis Center in 2011 to combat the resurgence of anti-Semitism in American higher education.  The following year, Marcus was named to the Forward 50, the Jewish Daily Forward’s listing of the “American Jews who made the most significant impact on the news in the past year.”
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The Forward described its 50 honorees as “the new faces of Jewish power,” predicting that “if Marcus has any say in it, we may witness a new era of Jewish advocacy.”  During his public service career, Marcus served as Staff Director at the United States Commission on Civil Rights and was delegated the authority of Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights and Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.  Shortly before his departure from the Civil Rights Commission, the Wall Street Journal observed that “the Commission has rarely been better managed,” and that it “deserves a medal for good governance.”  Marcus also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism.  Marcus previously held the Lillie and Nathan Ackerman Chair in Equality and Justice in America at the City University of New York’s Bernard M. Baruch College School of Public Affairs (2008-2011).  Before entering public service, Mr. Marcus was a litigation partner in two major law firms, where he conducted complex commercial and constitutional litigation. He has published widely in academic journals as well as in more popular venues such as The Jerusalem Post, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, and The Christian Science Monitor.  Mr. Marcus is a graduate of Williams College, magna cum laude, and the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.

Wyatt Mason

[Wyatt Mason]
Wyatt Mason is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. His work also appears in The New York Review of Books, GQ, The London Review of Books and The New Yorker. Modern Library publishes his translations of the complete works of Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete and I Promise to be Good. A 2003-2004 fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, he received the 2005 Nona Balakian Citation from the National Book Critics Circle and, in 2006, a National Magazine Award. He has served as a consulting editor at large for the Margellos World Republic of Letters of Yale University Press, an imprint devoted to world literature in translation, and has taught non-fiction writing in the MFA program of Bennington College. He was named a Senior Fellow of the Hannah Arendt Center in 2010.

Uday Mehta

[Uday Mehta]

Distinguished professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke and Liberalism and Empire. The American Political Association awarded him the J. David Greenstone Book Award in 2001 for the best book in history and theory. In 2002, Mehta received the prestigious “Carnegie Scholars” prize given to “scholars of exceptional creativity.” His forthcoming book is titled, A Different Vision: Ghandi’s Critique of Political Rationality.

Deroy Murdock

[Deroy Murdock]

New York political commentor Deroy Murdock is a Fox News Contributor; a former Media Fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University; and a Senior Fellow with the Atlas Network, which supports and connects some 462 free-market think tanks in the USA and 94 countries world-wide.

Mr. Murdock’s weekly column — “This Opinion Just In…” — appears in the New York Post, The Washington Times, the Boston Herald, The Orange County Register (CA), and other newspapers across America. He has been a frequent guest on CNBC, CNN, C-Span, MSNBC, and other TV and radio outlets. He has been a contributing editor with National Review Online since June 2000.

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As a popular public speaker, he has lectured or debated at the Cato Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations; Harvard Medical School, the Heritage Foundation; the National Academy of Sciences; Dartmouth, Stanford, and Tulane universities; and various fora, from Bogotá to Buenos Aires to Budapest. He is a native of Los Angeles, a graduate of Georgetown University, and a resident of Manhattan, where he earned an MBA from New York University. His program included a semester of study at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Suzanne Nossel

[Suzanne Nossel]
Suzanne Nossel was named executive director of PEN American Center in January, 2013. Her career has spanned government service and leadership roles in the corporate and non-profit sectors.
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Prior to joining PEN, she served as executive director of Amnesty International USA. Before joining Amnesty, Nossel served as deputy assistant secretary of state for International Organizations at the U.S. Department of State, where she was responsible for multilateral human rights, humanitarian affairs, women’s issues, public diplomacy, press, and congressional relations. Nossel has also served as chief operating officer for Human Rights Watch and deputy to the ambassador for U.N. Management and Reform at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. In the private sector, she has served as vice-president of U.S. Business Development at Bertelsmann Media Worldwide, vice-president of strategy and operations for The Wall Street Journal, and a consultant at McKinsey & Company.

Claudia Rankine

[Claudia Rankine]
Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. For Citizen, Rankine won the Forward Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (Citizen was also nominated in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a double nominee), the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award. A finalist for the National Book Award, Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. She lives in New York City and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.

Samuel Reed

[Samuel Reed]
Sam Reed is an undergraduate at Bard pursuing a B.A. in literature (2017) and a Masters in Teaching degree. He loves to read, run, and work with kids. Also a devoted student of Roger Berkowitz, he is happy to be part of the conference this year.

Annie Seaton

[Annie Seaton]
Director of Bard’s Difference and Media Project and conceptual artist with the Yam Collective. Collaborative artworks have recently been featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and more recently at the New Museum’s 2016 Black Women for Black Lives Matter show. Annie works on race and the pastoral aesthetic from the Greco-Roman period today, and she founded and directs the Difference and Media Project at Bard College.

Jana Schmidt

[Jana Schmidt]
Jana V. Schmidt's research pertains to questions of literature and art, their status vis-à-vis the political and the social, image theory, mimesis, and the representation of intersubjectivity. Her main focus as a literary scholar is on twentieth century German and American literature, literary theory (including "continental" philosophy and critical theory), and literature's relation to violence. 
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One nodal point for these inquiries has been the problem of reconciliation in the aftermath of the Holocaust. How to constitute a "world" after 1945 and how to integrate the victims' memories into such world-making are crucial questions for her work. Hannah Arendt's thought on conciliation, her literary writings, and her notion of world have shaped her answers to these questions in her dissertation, "An Aesthetics of Reconciliation – Intersubjectivity after the End of Community, 1945-1970." Jana's next project will investigate the figure of the survivor in postwar American literature and public Holocaust discourses. Other interests include Jewish studies, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, memory and memorialization, and the study of exile. An essay on the American painter Philip Guston and Jean-François Lyotard's notion of the figure is forthcoming with Bloomsbury. Jana holds an MA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is looking forward to teaching the First Year Seminar at Bard.
2016–2017

Judith Shulevitz

[Judith Shulevitz]

Judith Shulevitz is an essayist and editor who has helped found or relaunch several magazines, including Lingua Franca, New York Magazine, and Slate. Currently a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, she has served as editor of Lingua Franca, founding cultural editor and columnist at Slate, deputy editor and columnist for New York Magazine, columnist for The New York Times Book Review, and a senior writer and editor at The New Republic. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and other publications, and she has taught at New York University and Barnard College. She is the author of The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.

Kenneth Stern

[Kenneth Stern]

Mr. Stern is the Executive Director of the Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation, which works to combat – and to increase the serious study of – hatred and antisemitism. The Foundation emphasizes projects that impact college students and promote academic freedom, including those that help students engage difficult issues like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and learn how strong passions may influence thinking. Mr. Stern – a Bard alumnus, visiting assistant professor of Human Rights, and a Fellow of Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement – is an award-winning author and attorney, who was director of the division on antisemitism and extremism at the American Jewish Committee, where he worked for 25 years.

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Mr. Stern’s op-eds and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Forward, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and elsewhere. Mr. Stern has appeared on the CBS Evening News, Dateline, Nightline, the History Channel, PBS, and many other television and radio programs.

He has argued before the United States Supreme Court, testified before Congress (as well as before committees of parliamentarians in Canada and the U.K.), was an invited presenter at the White House Conference on Hate Crimes, and served as a member of the U.S. Delegation to the Stockholm Forum on Combating Intolerance.

Mr. Stern’s report on the militia movement, released 10 days before the Oklahoma City bombing, predicted attacks on the government, and the covering memo to the report said such attacks might occur on April 19, 1995, the anniversary of the deaths of members of the Branch Davidian sect. Mr. Stern’s report was called “prescient,” and his resulting book – A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate – was nominated for the National Book award.

Mr. Stern was the lead drafter of the “working definition” of antisemitism now adopted by the U.S. Department of State. He was also an integral part of the defense team in the historic London Holocaust denial case of David Irving vs. Deborah Lipstadt.

Mr. Stern was also defense counsel for Dennis Banks, co-founder of the American Indian Movement (chronicled in his award-winning book Loud Hawk: The United States vs. The American Indian Movement), and was co-counsel in a successful libel suit by Jack and Micki Scott against heiress Patricia Hearst. He also represented various organizations advocating for the homeless, enforced environmental laws in New York City, and was director of an organization advocating for victims of terrorism.

Mr. Stern has written extensively on just about every aspect of antisemitism (his two other books are Holocaust Denial and Antisemitism Today), especially on how institutions should understand and approach the topic. He has trained over 200 college and university presidents on how to respond to instances of bigotry on campus, and helped establish courses and programs on the study of hate at Gonzaga University and at Bard College. He is also the author of a model college syllabus about antisemitism (which he is teaching at Bard this semester), and another about antisemitism and the law (see http://jkrfoundation.org/resources/).


Ariana Stokas 

[Ariana Stokas ]
Dean of Inclusive Excellence at Bard College.  Earned her Ph.D in philosophy and education from Columbia University.

Dina Toubasi

Dina (2018) is a an Economics major at Bard College.

Mark Williams Jr. 

[Mark Williams Jr. ]
Mark Williams Jr. is a Senior at Bard College. 

Schedule


*** TENTATIVE SCHEDULE: SUBJECT TO CHANGE ***


Thursday, October 20

10:00 am  Welcome by Leon Botstein

10:15 am  Introduction by Roger Berkowitz

10:45 am  Opening Roundtable with:
                    Alexandra Brodsky
                    Janet Halley
                    Mary Gaitskill
               Moderator: Jennifer Doyle

12:30 pm  Lunch

1:30 pm   Greg Lukianoff 
               Moderator: Suzanne Nossel
               Discussant: Angus Johnston

2:30 pm   Erica Hunt, Christopher Lebron and Deroy Murdock
               Moderator: Samantha Hill
 
4:00 pm   Jennifer Doyle and Annie Seaton
               Moderator: Dima Khalidi

5:15 pm   Final Round Table: 
Alexandra Brodsky, Jennifer Doyle, Erica Hunt, 
Angus Johnston, Christopher Lebron, Greg Lukianoff,
Deroy Murdock, Suzanne Nossel and Annie Seaton

6:15 pm   Wine & cheese reception
 

Friday, October 21

9:30 am    Introduction by Uday Mehta

10:00 am   Göran Adamson and Judith Shulevitz 
                 Moderator: Roger Berkowitz 

11:00 am  Claudia Rankine
                Moderators: Roger Berkowitz
                Discussants: Robert Boyers, Carolyn Lazard, and Ariana Stokas

12:30 pm  Lunch 

1:00 pm   Conference Breakout Lunch Sessions

                1. Real Talk About Rape and Sexual Harassment on Campus, Olin 201
                    Moderators: Samantha Hill, Janet Halley, and Alexandra Brodsky

                2. Real Talk About Race and Religion on Campus, Olin 204            
                    Moderators: Ken Stern, Judith Shulevitz, and Deroy Murdock

                3. Real Talk About Class and Race on Campus, Olin 102 (Art History Room)
                    Moderators: Jana Schmidt and TBA.


2:00 pm   William Deresiewicz
                Moderator: Wyatt Mason
                Student Discussants:
                                  Sam Reed ‘17
                                  Dina Toubasi ’18
                                  Mark Williams Jr. ‘17

3:15 pm    Ken Marcus
                 Moderator: Ken Stern 

3:45 pm    Dima Khalidi               
                 Moderator: Peter Rosenblum

4:30 pm   SPECIAL PERFORMANCE:
Bard`s Latin Dance and AfroPulse will be teaming up to present an energetic and festive Afro Latin dance piece about peace, love, and unity following the ninth annual Hannah Arendt Center fall Conference, "REAL TALK." They will be performing a fusion of African Dance, Bachata, and Fiesta de Palo ( a dance done in the Dominican Republic). Bard`s Latin Dance club is a club that focuses on teaching Latin dances, particularly salsa and bachata. AfroPulse provides the Bard College community with a forum where African students, those of the African Diaspora, and all other interested students to come together and explore the continent in a multi-dimensional context.

4: 35 pm    Wine and cheese reception

 

Tuesday, October 18: Public Debate (OPTIONAL)

Resolved: The rapid rise of “safe space” rhetoric on college campuses has done more harm than good. The Bard College debate team will host this public debate in conjunction with the conference – “Real Talk: Difficult Questions about Race, Sex and Religion” (October 20-21, 2016). The debate will feature both the Bard and West Point debate teams on mixed teams. Co-sponsored by the Bard Debate Union, the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Center for Civic Engagement, and the Bard-West Point exchange.
  • Free & Open to the Public
  • Date: October 18, 2016
  • Time: 7:00 pm
  • Location: Bard College, Campus Center MPR

Register

Online Registration Is CLOSED.


Due to overwhelming demand, Online Registration Is CLOSED.
If you missed online registration, please do not worry. Visit the On-Site Registration Table and our student volunteers will assist you. We will not turn anyone away! However, if you wish to see a certain panel, we strongly recommend you arrive early! 
 

Conference Fees

The admission fee for this two-day conference is a flat rate of $45.00 per person. Admission is FREE for:
  • Members of the Hannah Arendt Center
  • Bard College staff and faculty
  • Bard College Students (Matriculated Students - does not include LLI)

Travel

Getting Here

[Getting Here]
Bard College's main campus is located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, on the east bank of the Hudson River, about 90 miles north of New York City and 220 miles southwest of Boston. The Conference takes place in Olin Auditorium in the Olin Humanities Building (C3 on the Bard map). 

Franklin W. Olin Humanities Building
35 Henderson Cir Dr
Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504

If you are driving, take Rt. 9G and enter onto campus using the west entrance with the stone sign for Bard College across from the Anne Cox Chambers Alumni/ae Center at Bard. After turning into Bard College, make a left at the Stop Sign, and Olin Hall will be on your right. Additionally, a security guard will be available at the Main Entrance to Bard College between 8:30 am and 11:00 am to assist drivers. Also, please check out Travel to Bard for more helpful hints.

Accommodations

[Accommodations]
A comprehensive list of nearby hotels, inns, and B & B’s may be found on the Bard webpage, HERE. We recommend booking your accommodations and restaurant dining as soon as possible. The Best Western Plus in Kingston, NY offers a special discounted rate during the Hannah Arendt Center 2-day Conference. To make reservations using the Bard discount, you must call the hotel direct at 845-338-0400, Monday–Friday from 9AM–5PM and ask for the “Hannah Arendt Bard College Discount.” We recommend booking early as this is one of the busiest weekends in the Hudson Valley due to the Sheep & Wool Festival.

Parking

[Parking]
There are two main parking lots; One across from Olin and one south of Olin Hall -- Please park in either lot. Additionally, you may also park in the gravel lot accross from the Stevenson Gymnasium off Annandale Road. 

Please click HERE to see venue map. The black objects represent Parking Lots.

Parking is free!

Debate

Resolved: The rapid rise of “safe space” rhetoric on college campuses has done more harm than good

October 18, 2016, 7:00pm

Bard College, Campus Center MPR

Public debate in conjunction with the annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference – “Real Talk: Difficult Questions about Race, Sex and Religion” (October 20-21, 2016). This debate will feature both the Bard and West Point debate teams on mixed teams. Co-sponsored by the Bard Debate Union, the Hannah Arendt Center, the Center for Civic Engagement, and the Bard-West Point exchange. 

Free & Open to the Public
Questions: [email protected]


[Debate]

Reading

Recommended Readings by our Speakers

Randall Kennedy, Black Tape at Harvard Law 
Christopher Lebron, I'm Fine How I am: A Response to Randall Kennedy's Defense of Respectability Politics
Jeannie Suk, The Trouble with Teaching Rape Law
Alexandra Brodsky, End the Rape Culture at University
Janet Halley, Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement: Backing off the Hype in Title IX Enforcement
Jennifer Doyle, Campus Sex Campus Security
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric 
William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

Other:
JENNIFER SCHUESSLER, Can Cries of ‘Free Speech’ Be a Weapon? Students Say Yes
PEN report, And Campus for All:  Diversity, Inclusion and Freedom of Speech at US Universities, HERE.


Contest


There will be a Student Opinion Contest in conjunction with The Hannah Arendt Center’s ninth annual fall conference "Real Talk: Difficult Questions About Race, Sex, and Religion." The author of the winning Response will receive $500 and have the response featured on the Hannah Arendt Center Blog. If appropriate, the response will also be printed in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center. 

The Question:

At a time when controversial questions are evacuated from public spaces, we must strive to maintain the idea of university life as a safe space for provocative and even uncomfortable thinking. How can we do this while honoring our unshakable commitment to justice and equality, to opening our academic and political worlds to ever more voices and experiences? This inquiry animates the Hannah Arendt Center’s ninth annual conference, “REAL TALK: Difficult Questions about Race, Sex and Religion.” With this in mind, The Hannah Arendt Center challenges students to think through and answer the following question:  How can college be a safe and inclusive space for asking hard and uncomfortable questions that are essential to our democracy?

Requirements: 

1. All participants in this year's Thinking Challenge must currently be enrolled in a two- or four-year higher education institution (not open to graduate students). Entries may be submitted individually, or in groups of two [max].

2. Responses can be in the form of an essay (maximum 1,500 words), multimedia blog (maximum 1,500 words), video essays or GoAnimate projects (maximum 5 minutes), xtranormal animations (maximum 5 minutes), digital map, or other related formats. For an example of a video submission, please view the video shown below. You can also view the entries of past Thinking Challenge winners here, here, and here.
 
3. Essays must incorporate quotations, video, or reactions from at least one talk or panel at the Hannah Arendt Center’s 2016 Conference “Real Talk” Students may attend the conference live at Bard College or view the talks via live webcast from the Arendt Center website. The Conference, "REAL TALK" will be held on Thursday and Friday, October 20-21, 2016.

4. Please email your completed entries to [email protected] by no later than noon on Monday, October 30th, 2016. Responses will be judged blindly by a panel of judges from the Arendt Center, including Roger Berkowitz and Samantha Hill. Winning responses should be bold, creative, and persuasive. If you have questions, please email Daniel Fiege, our Media Coordinator, at [email protected]. Thank you, and good luck! 


What Does Privacy Feel Like? from Ava Lindenmaier on Vimeo.


Webcast

For those unable to attend the conference in person, we offer a live webcast of the full event for you to enjoy from wherever you're located.
http://www.totalwebcasting.com/view/?func=VOFF&id=bard&date=2016-10-20&seq=1
This event occurred on:  The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College will host its ninth annual international conference from Thursday, October 20 to Friday, October 21 in Olin Hall, on Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson campus. The two-day conference, “REAL TALK: Difficult Questions about Race, Sex, and Religion,” asks: How can college be a safe and inclusive space for asking hard and uncomfortable questions essential to our democracy?
college
Hannah Arendt understood that as difficult and offensive as speech may be, free speech is at the heart of intellectual inquiry and political discourse: “Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.”
 
trigger warningStudents, faculty, and administrators across the country, however, are questioning whether colleges are safe spaces for talking about difficult and divisive issues. As campuses become more diverse, can colleges and universities confront issues surrounding racial, sexual, gender-based, and religious discrimination or harassment without limiting free and open discourse and a diversity of ideas? How can colleges maintain safe spaces for difficult and contested thinking while honoring their unshakable commitment to justice and equality?
 
campus protest“REAL TALK: Difficult Questions about Race, Sex, and Religion” convenes a diverse group of thinkers to ask questions such as: How can colleges bring racial and social justice into the heart of higher education? Should colleges and universities limit speech in the name of civility? Should trigger warnings be incorporated into college curricula? Can we balance the right to practice one’s religion with the desire for inclusiveness? Are “microaggressions” the kinds of speech that should be disciplined? Does civility limit free speech?

Arendt Center conferences are attended by nearly a thousand people and reach an international audience via live webcast. Past speakers have included maverick inventor Ray Kurzweil, whistleblower Edward Snowden, irreverent journalist Christopher Hitchens, businessman Hunter Lewis, author Zadie Smith, New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, and presidential candidate and political activist Ralph Nader. Previous conferences have explored the intellectual roots of the economic crisis, the future of humanity in an age increasingly dominated by technology that’s changing how humans live, the crisis in American education, and American exceptionalism.

For a full conference schedule, registrations, and bios of featured speakers, please visit hac.bard.edu/con2016. For more information or any questions about the conference, please contact [email protected] or 845-758-7878.
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