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An initiative of the University of Virginia (UVA), the USS consortium facilitates collaboration among participating institutions as they address both historical and contemporary issues dealing with race and inequality in higher education and in university communities, as well as the complicated legacies of slavery in modern American society. Bard College’s participation in USS is an outgrowth of work begun by students in Professor Myra Young Armstead’s course The Window at Montgomery Place in the 19th Century, which offers an historical exploration of northern social hierarchies during the antebellum period and the critical role of slavery in their formation, using the Montgomery Place Campus as a case study.

Professor Baruah provides historical and political context on citizenship registration efforts in the state of Assam, in northeastern India, which target illegal immigrants and fuel concern by Muslims and human rights advocates.

The neglected history of the Warsaw uprising helps explain the country’s nationalist politics today, writes Professor McMeekin.
 

The Bard Archaeology Field School has just wrapped four weeks of intensive archeological study at historic sites in Germantown, New York, near the Bard campus. Undergraduates, high school students, and community members are eligible to participate in this monthlong summer learning program for college credit. Students worked with anthropology professor Christopher Lindner to excavate sites related to the Palatine settlers of 1710, their descendants, and neighbors, including the Mohican people and, by the early 1800s, African Americans.

Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, by Bard College Assistant Professor of Anthropology Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, ​​​is forthcoming in December 2019 from Stanford University Press.

Waste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.

Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia (2019). Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine. Stanford: Stanford.