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“If strategies such as fact-checking and digital literacy efforts are to be trusted and if labelling and removal of false or misleading claims are to gain public acceptance, then the limits to how governments involve themselves in tackling influence operations online must be clear and transparent for their citizens,” writes Briant, visiting research associate in human rights.

Last month, Assistant Professor of History Jeannette Estruth sat down with filmmaker Swetha Regunathan at a virtual event at Bard College. Dr. Regunathan’s work often grapples with homelessness, immigration, exile, and climate change, telling the stories of people misrepresented or underrepresented in American film.

In her introduction to their conversation, Professor Estruth writes, “Regunathan’s films bear out the urgent reality that home—as place and as concept, as shelter and as structure of social belonging, as physiological human need and as place of physical safety—is an economically, structurally, and ecologically precarious idea for increasing numbers of people, especially people of color, women, and young people. When homes disappear or become untenable, people are forced to make new homes, new stories, and new meanings about these places and themselves. Regunathan’s films do the invaluable work of showing us that our past and present dreams of home persuasively compel urgent action today for our collective future.”
 

The Brooklyn Museum commissioned Bard College artist in residence Jeffrey Gibson to revive a neglected collection. Collaborating with associate professor of history Christian Ayne Crouch, the curators “took aim at the museum’s archive, cracking open the ideological biases—the ignorant and often racist beliefs and values—on which its collecting was premised,” writes Lynne Cooke of Artforum. Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks at the Brooklyn Museum is curated by Jeffrey Gibson and Christian Ayne Crouch with Eugenie Tsai and Erika Umali, and is on view through January 10, 2021.

“Given the unprecedented assault on American democracy by the Trump administration, it is far too risky to fall back on the default mode of letting bygones be bygones,” writes Encarnación. “The most important take-away from the 2020 general election is that while Trump was defeated, Trumpism was not. But harnessing the resources and prestige of the U.S. government to expose the whole truth about Trumpism, especially its contempt for basic human rights, will go a long way towards ensuring its passing.”
 

Fifty years ago, Fouad Chehab tried to create a state out of Lebanon and failed. Today Lebanon is no closer to his vision of real statehood but needs it more than ever, writes Bard Diplomat in Residence Fred Hof. “On Aug. 4, 1970,” Hof writes, “the man who had served from 1958 to 1964 as the third president of the independent Lebanese Republic, Gen. Fouad Chehab, issued a written statement declining to stand for the presidency again. [...] Fifty years later – to the day – a massive explosion nearly vaporized Beirut’s port, inflicting widespread death, injury, and wreckage throughout Lebanon’s capital. Lebanon’s so-called government had, with breathtaking negligence, permitted nearly 3,000 tons of extremely volatile ammonium nitrate to be stored in a warehouse; it had done so with barely a thought for public safety. Chehab’s understated rendering of fact in August 1970 – that Lebanon was not a state, thus making the presidency itself irrelevant – manifested itself exactly 50 years later as the deadly indictment of a ravenous, incompetent, and terminally useless political class.”
 

“We don’t know how to give and receive,” Seneca writes in the opening statement of De Beneficiis, newly edited and translated by Professor James Romm as How to Give: An Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving (Princeton University Press, 2020). Seneca counsels givers to be anonymous and forget they’ve given, and urges recipients to be grateful and remember. How to Give is the latest entry in a series from Princeton University Press called Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers. James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and director of the Classical Studies Program at Bard. 

CFR writes that Blinken, Deputy Secretary of State at the time, “discusses the benefits of an open-facing United States and how acting multilaterally with other countries has made the country’s leadership more effective. He also shares opinions on how the country should strengthen the liberal international order it built over the decades and adapt it to new global realities.” Walter Russell Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor in Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College.
 

Bard alumnus and philosophy major Adam Conover ’04 will host the new Netflix series The G Word with Adam Conover, which will be produced by Barack and Michelle Obama. The show—loosely based on Michael Lewis’s best-selling 2018 book The Fifth Risk—will blend sketch comedy and documentary elements, focusing on the U.S. government in an effort to introduce viewers to the civil servants who make it work.

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and the Human Rights Project announced today that Ama Josephine B. Johnstone has been selected as the seventh recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Her appointment is made possible by the Keith Haring Foundation as part of the second series of a five year-grant supporting the Fellowship—an annual award for a scholar, activist, or artist to teach and conduct research at Bard College. Johnstone’s appointment marks the shared commitment of the College and the Foundation both to exploring the interaction between political engagement and artistic practices and to bringing leading practitioners from around the world into Bard's classrooms.

“The Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism is an ongoing dialogue with leading artists, writers and scholars, bringing new modes of thinking, pedagogical models and ways of working into the Bard community.  International in scope, the Fellowship continues to evolve, raising issues that are current and introducing innovative responses to the challenges of the present,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Ama Josephine B. Johnstone is a speculative writer, artist, curator and pleasure activist whose work navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism, working to activate movements that catalyze human rights, environmental evolutions and queer identities. Johnstone is a PhD candidate in psychosocial studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She describes her research as taking “a queer, decolonial approach to challenging climate colonialism in Sub-Saharan Africa with a particular focus on inherently environmentalist pleasure practices in Ghana and across the Black universe.”

“Ama says that her work 'thrives in the fecund liminal spaces between the museum and the academy, the gallery and the protest,' and in this sense, among many others, she exemplifies the spirit and practice of Keith Haring. Her fearless creativity, coupled with her relentless critical curiosity, especially about human rights discourse itself, are going to be essential guides in any journey through our perilous times,” said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard's Human Rights Project.

Johnstone will be in residence at Bard during the spring 2021 semester to teach and develop local collaborations in the Hudson Valley, succeeding Pelin Tan as the 2019–20 Fellow. Details on the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism and previous fellows can be found at ccsbard.edu.

About the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and the Human Rights Project at Bard College
Bard College seeks to realize the best features of American liberal arts education, enabling individuals to think critically and act creatively based on a knowledge and understanding of human history, society, and the arts. Two pioneering programs developed under this mission are the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and the Human Rights Project.

CCS Bard was founded in 1990 as an exhibition and research center for the study of late 20th-century and contemporary art and culture and to explore experimental approaches to the presentation of these topics and their impact on our world. Since 1994, the Center for Curatorial Studies and its graduate program have provided one of the world’s most forward thinking teaching and learning environments for the research and practice of contemporary art and curatorship. Broadly interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encourages students, faculty, and researchers to question the critical and political dimension of art, its mediation, and its social significance.

The Human Rights Project, founded at Bard in 1999, developed the first interdisciplinary undergraduate degree program in Human Rights in the United States. The Project maintains a special interest in freedom of expression and the public sphere, and through teaching, research, and public programs is committed to exploring the too-often neglected cultural, aesthetic, and representational dimensions of human rights discourse.

Since 2009, CCS Bard and the Human Rights Project have collaborated on a series of seminars, workshops, research projects, and symposia aimed at exploring the intersections between human rights and the arts, and doing so in a manner that takes neither term for granted but in fact uses their conjunction to raise critical, foundational questions about each. While academic in nature, this research and teaching nevertheless draws heavily on the realm of practice, involving human rights advocates, artists, and curators.

About the Keith Haring Foundation
Keith Haring (1958-1990) generously contributed his talents and resources to numerous causes. He conducted art workshops with children, created logos and posters for public service agencies, and produced murals, sculptures, and paintings to benefit health centers and disadvantaged communities. In 1989, Haring established a foundation to ensure that his philanthropic legacy would continue indefinitely.

The Keith Haring Foundation makes grants to not-for-profit entities that engage in charitable and educational activities. In accordance with Keith’s wishes, the Foundation concentrates its giving in two areas: The support of organizations which enrich the lives of young people and the support of organizations which engage in education, prevention and care with respect to AIDS and HIV infection.

Keith Haring additionally charged the Foundation with maintaining and protecting his artistic legacy after his death. The Foundation maintains a collection of art along with archives that facilitate historical research about the artist and the times and places in which he lived and worked. The Foundation supports arts and educational institutions by funding exhibitions, programming, and publications that serve to contextualize and illuminate the artist’s work and philosophy. haring.com

# # #

MEDIA CONTACTS:
For further information, images, or to arrange interviews, please contact:

BARD COLLEGE CONTACT:
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Tel: +1 845.758.7412
Email: [email protected]

CCS BARD CONTACT:
Ramona Rosenberg
Director of External Affairs
Tel: +1 (845) 758-7574
Email: [email protected]
 

“Russet is the color of November in Maine. The color that emerges when all the more spectacular leaves have fallen: the yellow coins of the white birch, the big, hand-shaped crimson leaves of the red maple, the papery pumpkin-hued spears of the beech trees. The oaks are always the last to shed their plumage, and their leaves are the dullest color. They’re the darkest, the closest to brown. But if you pay attention, you’ll see that they’re actually quite pretty. . . . I’ve been thinking on russet lately, this color of oak and Rembrandt and austerity. Its terra-cotta earthiness fits my mood. I’m hunkering down for winter, making paprika-spiked stews and big pots of beans with bacon, always dutifully freezing a portion for later. I’ve been readying myself not for hibernation, but for months of social isolation.”

“Bard College Border Pedagogy: Experiential Learning, Syllabi, and a Model Unit on Encounters with Border Patrol” appeared in a special issue of the journal EuropeNow, titled Networks of Solidarity During Crises. The article highlights research by recent Class of 2020 graduates Giselle Avila, Lily Chavez, and Hattie Wilder Karlstrom that grew out of a spring 2020 tutorial exploring the border crisis and the context necessary for grasping it. The publication includes their reflections on the research, with links to the projects-in-progress, each of which is intended as a critical tool and resource for teaching. The students were advised by Peter Rosenblum, professor of international law and human rights, and Danielle Riou, associate director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College.
 
This course took place in conjunction with the launch of the Border Pedagogy Working Group, an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students in the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education, of which Bard is a member. 

“At the core is a fundamentally conservative effort to limit the possibilities of our constitutional order to the imagination of historical figures from the 18th century, many of whom believed in freedoms of religion, assembly and speech, but also in the existence of a natural aristocracy, chattel slavery and a rigid racial hierarchy,” writes Gilhooly, assistant professor of political studies at Bard College and author of The Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution: Slavery and the Spirit of the American Founding. “Until we acknowledge this ‘origin’ of originalism in defenses of slavery, we are ill equipped to imagine a constitutional order that transcends our society’s history of racial injustice.”
 

“Today, the Lebanese seem motivated to reach an agreement that would calm the nerves of international energy companies, spur exploration and eventually produce significant revenue for a broken economy. Israel should be prepared to accept the outcome it accepted in 2012,” writes Hof, who led the US mediation effort from late 2010 until November 2012. “It would not be advisable for Israelis, Lebanese or Americans to ignore altogether the results produced in 2012 by an intensive, good-faith mediation.”

“Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude,” writes Hill in Aeon. “The iron-band of totalitarianism, as Arendt calls it, destroys man’s ability to move, to act, and to think, while turning each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, and himself. The world becomes a wilderness, where neither experience nor thinking are possible.”

In the past six months, tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs and the federal government has provided more than $400 billion in unemployment benefits. According to Bard College economist Pavlina Tcherneva, there’s a more efficient way to get support to those out of work: it would be cheaper, and better all around for job seekers, to ensure across-the-board access to employment rather than unemployment checks. We have two choices, says Tcherneva: to guarantee unemployment or to guarantee employment. Both require spending, but Tcherneva says it’s far less expensive to establish a federal program supplying “basic jobs that folks can take when they need them.” Even while ensuring a minimum wage of $15/hour for more than 11 million Americans, she says, a job guarantee program would cost a fraction of today’s unemployment spending.

“The most important correction that Logevall develops is to the idea that Jack was a reluctant entrant into politics, grudgingly taking up the burden of Kennedy family ambition after the death of his older brother, Joe Jr., during World War II,” writes Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Literature, in Foreign Policy. “Logevall writes with command and authority but also with an unstuffy brio. The research is extensive, taking advantage of the material now fully available in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library after decades of family defensiveness about releasing files into the public domain.”

“Our infatuation with images and our flight from the real world is all around us. The President lied about the size of the crowds at his inauguration. He lied to the American people about the coronavirus. He is now lying about the threat of voter fraud,” writes Berkowitz. “The end goal of lying as a way of life is not that the lies are believed, but the cementing of cynicism. When cynicism reigns, not only is everything permitted but also everything is possible. Cynicism is the fertile ground in which power grows unstoppable absent the constraints of reality.”

“When you work on a region like Northeast India you are constantly reminded of the problematic nature of the nation state as a political institution. You understand why political formations before the advent of the nation state did not try to make political boundaries coincide with cultural or ethnic boundaries. Only state formations that allow significant decentralization of political authority could be expected to accommodate Northeast India’s ethno-cultural diversity and its colonial inheritance of layered and uneven sovereignty. Unfortunately, the trend in India in recent years has been towards more and more centralization. Perhaps there is something inherent in the logic of the nation state that pushes centralization and valorizes internal homogeneity. But the effort to exercise centralized control in such a context can only generate new conflicts.”

Bard anthropology professor Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins has been awarded the Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) for her book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). The Albert Hourani Book Award was established in 1991 to recognize outstanding publishing in Middle East studies. The award was named for Albert Hourani to recognize his long and distinguished career as teacher and mentor. Announced at the awards ceremony at MESA’s annual meeting, the Albert Hourani Book Award honors a work that exemplifies scholarly excellence and clarity of presentation in the tradition of Albert Hourani. In the words of the award committee, “This book offers an outstanding and novel contribution to the study of Palestinian life as a waste siege. Through a rich ethnography and a sophisticated theoretical analysis this book focuses on the governance and governing power of waste.”

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is a non-profit association that fosters the study of the Middle East, promotes high standards of scholarship and teaching, and encourages public understanding of the region and its peoples through programs, publications and services that enhance education, further intellectual exchange, recognize professional distinction, and defend academic freedom in accordance with its status as a 501(c)(3) scientific, educational, literary, and charitable organization. For more information, visit mesana.org.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is assistant professor of anthropology at Bard. Her research interests include infrastructure, science and environment, colonialism, austerity, the “sharing economy,” the Middle East, and Europe. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), is an ethnography of waste management in the absence of a state. She is currently working on a new book titled Homing Austerity: Airbnb in Athens. Her articles have been published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Jerusalem Quarterly, Jadaliyya, and The New Centennial Review, among others.(10.13.20)
 

Reporting by Emma L. Briant, visiting research associate in human rights at Bard College, has revealed that the Canadian Forces spent more than $1 million on behavior modification training used by SCL Group, the parent firm of Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica was the center of a scandal in which the personal data of Facebook users was provided to President Trump’s political campaign. Briant noted the training the Canadian military staff received is a direct descendent of SCL Group’s “behavioral dynamics methodology,” which promises to help military clients analyze and profile groups to find the best strategy to effectively influence a target audience’s behavior. Emma Briant specializes in the topics of propaganda and political communication. Her forthcoming book is Propaganda Machine: Inside Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry.

“In some ways, Europe’s focus on the spying potential of American companies calls to mind Americans’ arguments about Chinese companies,” writes Drozdiak, noting that Germany, France, and others are pursuing plans for a “federated cloud,” dubbed Gaia-X, which attempts to create a “European alternative to U.S. cloud providers like Amazon.com Inc. or Microsoft Corp., which are required under the U.S. Cloud Act to grant authorities access to data even if it’s stored abroad.”

“There’s no such thing as pure capitalism. I think what we’re looking at is trying to understand the role of government and the extent of that role. Because even when you think of a free market economy, we have a lot of socialized [services]—think of veteran benefits, veteran health insurance. Here we have Trump speaking at a veterans event and talking against socialism when we actually have socialized veteran health care. [...] The way I see it is that if we want to have an economy that is a little more stable—and that’s a market economy—we need to be able to provide some basic provisions to deal with economic security.”

Bard College announces the appointment of Professor Christian Crouch as the incoming Dean of Graduate Studies, beginning July 1, 2021. 

Professor Crouch has been Associate Professor of History and Director of American Studies at Bard since 2014. Her work focuses on the histories of the early modern Atlantic, comparative slavery, American material culture, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. with Distinction in Atlantic History from New York University, and an A.B. cum laude in History from Princeton University. 

She has taught in the Clemente Course in the Humanities since 2010 and served as Curatorial Advisor for the 2020–2021 Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire is Applied to a Stone it Cracks.” Her book, Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians, and the End of New France 1600–1848 (Cornell University Press, 2014) won the Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Prize for best book in French colonial history from the French Colonial Historical Society in 2015. Her recent scholarly work includes articles in William and Mary Quarterly (2018), Early American Studies (2016) and chapters in the edited volumes France, Ireland, and the Atlantic in a Time of War: Reflections on the Bordeaux–Dublin Letters, 1757 (Routledge 2017) and The French Revolution as Moment of Respatialization (De Gruyter 2019). 

Professor Crouch currently serves on the council of the Omohundro Institute and is a member of the inaugural cohort of Bright Institute Fellows. In 2019, she received a Georgian Papers Program Fellowship and previously was a 2016–2017 Hutchins fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the American Philosophical Society, the Yale Center for British Art, the John Carter Brown Library, the William L. Clements Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Newberry Library. Her current manuscript in progress, Queen Victoria's Captives: A Story of Ambition, Empire, and a Stolen Ethiopian Prince, studies the human consequences of the 1868 Maqdala Campaign. 

“I am delighted that Professor Crouch has agreed to accept this vital leadership position, said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “Graduate education has been a crucial part of the college's mission for nearly half a century. Its significance is defined by the specific constituencies each separate program serves, the capacity of graduate education to enrich the experiences and opportunities available to undergraduate students at Bard, and the contribution the graduate programs make to the long-term sustainability of Bard.”
 
Professor Crouch succeeds Professor Norton Batkin, who stepped down on September 1 after 15 years as Dean of Graduate Studies. During his tenure, Norton Batkin oversaw the growth and success of Bard’s graduate programs. He came to Bard in 1991 as visiting associate professor of philosophy and art history and director of the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS). “Bard owes an enormous debt of gratitude to Norton for his exemplary stewardship, energy and dedication,” Botstein said. “He demonstrated resilience and creativity as CCS Director, and Graduate Dean. Norton will continue teaching philosophy in the undergraduate college.” 
 
The College also announces that Michael Sadowski, executive director of Bard Early College Hudson Valley programs and director of inclusive pedagogy and curriculum in the office of the Dean of the College, has agreed to assume the position of Interim Dean of Graduate Studies for this academic year 2020–2021. Sadowski was the founding executive director of Bard Early College Hudson, Bard’s first early college program in the Hudson Valley. He also teaches courses in youth identity development for the Master of Arts in Teaching program, and on LGBTQ+ issues in American education in the Human Rights Program. He has been an instructor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he earned his doctorate, and was a visiting professor in 2016–17 at Stanford University. He will serve as Dean of Graduate Studies until July 1, when Professor Crouch assumes the position.

“As tensions mount between Washington and Beijing, companies in Europe increasingly risk becoming collateral damage in the crossfire of new rules and restrictions not necessarily designed for them,” writes Drozdiak for Bloomberg. “Europe has its own intricate relationships with both China, an important trading partner, and the U.S, a key geopolitical ally. Those relationships are made even more complex by the bloc’s efforts to boost European tech companies and rein in activity by both U.S. and Chinese giants.”

Sanjib Baruah’s new book In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast, published in 2020 by Stanford University Press, takes the history of the troubled relationship between India and its Northeast “as a vantage point to reflect on how the generalization of the territorially circumscribed nation-form, and of the sovereignty of the nation-state, has played out since decolonization.” In doing so, Baruah develops a sketch of how these political forms—seemingly inevitable—are actually “highly contingent artifacts.”
 

Mayer, who will assume her new post in September, is currently director of outreach and programs for the King County Library System in Washington State, one of the busiest libraries in the United States. She graduated from Bard with a joint major in American Studies and Multiethnic Studies, and holds an MS in Library Information Services from the University of Washington. Of her new appointment Mayer says, “This is a fantastic library system, and I am looking forward to collaborating on providing the most responsive services we can.”

“Its blind spots about the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans meant that when the culture wars began to rage, from the mid-1960s onward, voices like his seemed not so much wrong as irrelevant to both right and left,” writes Professor Aldous in the Wall Street Journal. “The legacy of that dead end continues to haunt the middle ground of American politics to this day.”

“What did normal, before the pandemic, look like? Several trillion dollars of needed repairs in our crumbling infrastructure. Normal was 87 million Americans who either didn’t have health insurance or were underinsured. Normal was 500,000 medical-related bankruptcies every single year in this country. Normal was 40 million people living in poverty. Normal was millions of people who aren’t prepared for retirement; who can’t afford to send their kids to school or can’t pay back their student loan debt. . . . These are the deficits that matter. Those are the kinds of shortfalls that I wish that we were all worried about.”

Created as part of Professor Peter Klein’s Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences course Hudson Valley Cities / Environmental (In)Justice, Galloway and Avery’s project distributes resource kits to high-volume homeless shelters in Kingston, as well as the community organization Beyond the 4 Walls Outreach Program. Not limited to masks, wipes, and PPE equipment, Thrive On! Kingston kits include other essentials such as soap, shaving kits, body wash, shampoo, reusable bags, water bottles, notebooks, pens, and blankets, among other items.

Marokey Sawo, a 2020 graduate of the Levy Economics Institute master’s program in economic theory and policy, and coauthor Michele Evermore take a second look at the percentage of laid-off workers getting better pay from the enhanced unemployment benefits that expired last week. “Many workers lose more than just wages in unemployment―they lose employer contributions to health insurance, paid leave, and retirement benefits as well,” they write. “These individuals are likely receiving less, not more, in unemployment than they were in their former jobs, even after accounting for the $600 per week benefits boost.”

“That slight asynchrony we like between ourselves and others is unpleasantly magnified by glitchy wifi,” writes Dunphy-Lelii in Scientific American. “Research shows that a response delay of as little as 1.2 seconds disrupts your feeling of connection with another person. You can’t read them, they can’t read you—are they laughing with you, or at you?”

Xinyi Wang experienced quarantine twice during the height of the pandemic, and although she had to quarantine for a total of three months, she still keeps a bright smile on her face. Her initial period of isolation was in Jiangsu, China, in January, when she went home from Bard for winter break. She was quarantined with her family during the week of the annual spring festival. Even though Xinyi was stuck inside, she enjoyed herself because “spring festival was fun, with a lot of eating and drinking.” Her time there was focused on her family, while her time at Bard has been focused on schoolwork.

Xinyi managed to make it back to Bard, and was surprised to be quarantined again because of COVID-19 regulations, but working on her Senior Project in classical studies has kept her busy. For her project she chose to write about an inspiring Greek female character: Ariadne, daughter of Pasiphaë and the Cretan king Minos, who helped the Athenian hero Theseus escape the Labyrinth after he slew the Minotaur. She discovered the character through her adviser, classics professor Lauren Curtis, and was intrigued by how a female character was viewed in ancient poetry and how the same character is perceived in 20th-century opera. Xinyi appreciates her professors, who have stayed connected with her through this difficult time. She is also grateful for her adviser, who has been a help above and beyond academics. “She is very supportive,” Xinyi exclaims. “She pushes me to get out more.”

Xinyi, who has one more year at Bard as a double major in the Bard College Conservatory of Music, finds joy in playing her violin and staying connected to her friends via WeChat. She has learned to enjoy the peace of the quiet campus. As she chooses her classes for the fall, she is looking forward to the coming academic year, when the campus will be full of people again.

“As families of detainees, we are deeply frustrated by the collective inaction and abdication of responsibility by the Security Council to address this crime against humanity,” said Mustafa, a Syrian journalist, activist and member of Families for Freedom, which campaigns for the release of Syrian detainees. “To have a loved one who’s detained or disappeared, and not to know their fate, is like waking up one day and realizing that you have lost a limb.” Mustafa’s father, a human rights defender, is among the disappeared.

Sociology major Bernadette Benjamin’s Senior Project focuses on understanding the experiences of black women in Japan and how women within the black diaspora navigate in that country. In her research, the Brooklyn, New York, native concentrates on how black women perceive their identity—whether racial, gender, national, or combined identity—in their interactions and encounters with others. Bernadette utilizes the idea of “controlling images” by Patricia Hill Collins and the book Stigma by Erving Goffman to evaluate the mechanisms black women use to analyze their experiences and sense of belonging in Japanese society. She also takes Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson to explain the citizen-versus-foreigner dichotomy in Japan and how that contrast, in turn, affects black women’s abilities to integrate into Japanese communities.

Bernadette will soon travel to Japan to begin the JET (Japanese Exchange and Teaching) program. She hopes to remain in Japan for two years before prepping to go to law school to study either educational or international law. While her current plans depend on the spread of COVID-19, she is optimistic about the plans she has in store.

Rising junior Maxwell Toth ’22, a joint French and American studies major, has been awarded a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship for study abroad. Max was awarded $4,000 toward his studies in Paris with the Institute for Field Education, a program that matches undergraduates with international internships aligning with their academic interests.

“I’m really honored to have received the Gilman Scholarship,” says Max. “As someone who’s barely traveled outside their home region of New England, studying abroad has been a dream of mine for quite some time.”

Max had originally planned to study abroad this fall, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic he chose to defer his plans to the spring and return to Annandale instead. This fall, he’s taking “a nice smorgasbord of courses,” ranging from The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to Contagion: Rumor, Heresy, Disease, and Financial Panic. Outside the classroom, he’ll continue his work as a Peer Counselor, campus tour guide, and Bard nursery school aide—“You can see I wear many hats on campus!”

“Regardless of how my semester abroad may be altered due to the pandemic, I am very excited,” Max says. “Beyond the City of Light, I really want to hop a train to Salzburg at some point and take the ‘Sound of Music’ tour—provided travel restrictions have loosened up by then!”

“Our research at the Levy Economics Institute demonstrates that a large job guarantee program, employing 15 million people at $15 an hour with benefits, would permanently boost economic growth by $550 billion (more than 2.5 percent of GDP) and private-sector employment by three to four million jobs, without causing inflation,” writes Professor Tcherneva in Foreign Affairs. “As the world confronts the grim consequences of COVID-19, it could do worse than to inoculate itself against the devastating effects of mass unemployment. A job guarantee would be a long overdue step on the road to economic and social justice.”

Read more about the proposed job guarantee at levyinstitute.org.

“Conti-Cook, who is thirty-eight, has long focused on ways to provide greater transparency on police misbehavior. Her legal efforts, she said, were inspired by her father, Jack Cook, a former college professor who was active with the Catholic Worker Movement and who served two years in prison after he refused military induction during the Vietnam War.”

Sasha Fedchin is a double major in classical studies and computer science. Originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, he is interested in machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and ancient languages. For his Senior Project in classics, Sasha explored how Seneca responded to ideas embraced by his predecessors in his tragedies, and employed various dramatic techniques to emphasize his position on a given issue. In particular, he studied Seneca’s use of trimeter, a meter commonly employed for dialogues in ancient drama, and how the trimeter of early Renaissance poets is different from that of Seneca. To conduct a comprehensive analysis of Latin trimeter, Sasha collaborated with the members of the Quantitative Criticism Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, who apply NLP and other statistical approaches to the study of literature and culture.

Sasha’s computer science Senior Project focused on code completion. Broadly, code completion aims to speed up the coding process by predicting what a programmer would want to type next. For his project, Sasha tackled a problem that involved predicting future imports in Java code with the help of graph neural networks. Having been previously involved in NLP research, he is excited to learn more about the ways machine learning can be applied to the study of natural and computer languages. Sasha is delighted to begin his PhD studies this fall in the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University.

Bard College announced today the appointment of Tania El Khoury as Distinguished Artist in Residence of Theater and Performance and Ziad Abu-Rish as Visiting Associate Professor of Human Rights. Together they will lead a pioneering Master of Arts program in Human Rights and the Arts, planned to commence in Fall 2021. Designed by Bard’s Human Rights Program, the Fisher Center at Bard, and the Central European University, and launched through the Open Society University Network (OSUN), the interdisciplinary program will bring together scholars, artists, and activists from around the world to explore the highly-charged relation between artistic practices and struggles for truth and justice.

The appointments deepen Bard’s relationship with El Khoury and Abu-Rish, both of whom were visiting faculty at the college in 2019. Abu-Rish taught in the Human Rights Program, while El Khoury co-curated the 2019 edition of the Live Arts Bard Biennial at the Fisher Center at Bard.  Where No Wall Remains: an international festival about borders included nine newly commissioned projects by artists from the Middle East and the Americas. In addition to their work with the new graduate program, they will also teach in the undergraduate college: El Khoury is joining the faculty of the Theatre & Performance Program; Abu-Rish is affiliated with the Human Rights Program.

The proposed M.A. program in Human Rights and The Arts links the study of advocacy, law, and politics to critical theoretical-historical reflection, and focuses on the power of aesthetic, performative, and curatorial forms in the fight for rights. Anchored in the intersection of art, research, activism and social change, it will offer students the opportunity to explore interdisciplinary training, creative knowledge production, and practice-based research. At its heart is a perspective that looks beyond the U.S.-based art and NGO industries to identify, assess, and engage with the ethical, intellectual, and political potential of this emerging hybrid form. Students in the program will pursue a core of interdisciplinary courses in human rights theory and practice, supplemented with electives across the arts and humanities, including, in particular, the study and practice of live arts and performance, and curatorial practices.

“The international and cross-disciplinary dimensions of this new program make it groundbreaking and timely,” said Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of the Fisher Center and Director of Bard’s Theater & Performance Program. “Students will work with artists, faculty, and curators across OSUN's international network and beyond. Artists and human rights experts will inform each other’s practices, offering a fully integrated pedagogy. At a time when the ideals of open society and liberal education are threatened, this program will offer unique and fertile opportunities to study and share best practices across the world.”

El Khoury is internationally recognized for her installations, performances, and video projects. A Soros Arts Fellow for 2019, El Khoury's work explores political histories and contemporary issues through richly-researched and aesthetically-precise events focused on audience interactivity and concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters. In as Far As My Fingertips Take Me, a one-on-one performance, a refugee artist painstakingly inscribes a drawing on the arm of a guest while narrating the story of his sisters' escape from Damascus.  In Gardens Speak, an interactive sound installation, the audience is asked to dig in the dirt to exhume stories of the Syrian uprising. El Khoury holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is affiliated with Forest Fringe in the United Kingdom and is the co-founder of the urban research and performance collective Dictaphone Group in Lebanon.

Abu-Rish was previously Assistant Professor of History and Founding Director of the Middle East and North Africa Studies Certificate Program at Ohio University. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and serves as Co-Editor of Arab Studies Journal. He has a highly successfully track-record of institution building, public scholarship initiatives, and graduate student training. He co-edited Jadaliyya, organized summer institutes for graduate students, and contributed to various research centers and academic associations. Abu-Rish has published widely on politics, economics, and popular mobilizations in Lebanon and Jordan, and is a co-editor, with Bassam Haddad and Rosie Bsheer, of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of An Old Order? (2012). He is currently completing a book entitled The State of Lebanon: Popular Politics and the Institution Building in the Wake of Independence.

“Almost 20 years ago Bard was the first U.S. institution to offer a full, free-standing, interdisciplinary B.A. in Human Rights,” said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard's Human Rights Program. “Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish will expand this to the graduate level and explore the forces that emerge at the intersection between human rights and the arts. The program will underscore the importance of the arts and humanities in confronting pressing social issues, and serve as an incubator of new ideas and strategies within the human rights movement at a time when it is widely understood to be under assault.”

The program is supported by the newly-founded Open Society University Network, a global project of Bard College, the Central European University, and the Open Society Foundations, with university and research partners stretching from Germany and Kyrgyzstan to Ghana and Colombia.7/8/20
 

This summer, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Learning is making its vast digital collection of food-centric discussions, demonstrations, recipes, interviews and hundreds of archival objects available for free as part of its online course A Seat at the Table: A Journey Into Jewish Food. “Food helps to alleviate some of the anxiety that everyone is feeling in this particularly stressful time we’re in,” says Jonathan Brent, Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard College and YIVO Executive Director and CEO. “Food enables us to have that kind of deep experience of memory, sensory pleasure, imagination and knowledge. There’s a great deal of value in studying the history of food. And it’s especially relevant now, when people are locked indoors and searching for things to do.”
 

“This engenders an element of a vicious circle at work: not only will the pandemic and its fallout worsen inequality; inequality will exacerbate the spread of the virus, not to mention undermine any ensuing economic recovery efforts,” Papadimitriou told ABC News. “A reduction in income inequality is one of the most important—if not the single-most important—structural changes that needs to be implemented so that the U.S. economy can return to a sustainable growth path in the medium run.”
 

“While scientists scramble to find effective treatments for COVID, we know how to protect existing jobs and create good employment opportunities for the unemployed, whoever and wherever they may be,” writes Tcherneva. “It is time for a permanent federal job guarantee.”
Read her article in the American Prospect.

Professor Tcherneva talks about the Modern Monetary Theory and why it allows for full employment at a living wage—even now.
Listen to the interview on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show

Professor Tcherneva talks about her new book, The Case for a Job Guarantee, (Polity, 2020) in an interview with New Books Network.

“Discussions on a universal job guarantee have never been timelier. The Case for a Job Guarantee is a deeply thought-provoking book and deserves serious consideration.”
Read the London School of Economics blog book review.

She was also quoted in the New York Times last week in an article about public jobs programs for the unemployed.

Professor of Political Studies Omar G. Encarnación writes for Foreign Policy magazine in response to last week's historic Supreme Court ruling extending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to LGBTQ people. Professor Encarnación examines the foreign experience to try to find answers for why advances in LGBTQ rights are so difficult in our country.

“In India, critics have legitimately called out the hypocrisy of elites who express digital solidarity with American protesters but ignore police violence and racial prejudice at home,” writes Sanjib Baruah, Professor of Political Studies at Bard College, for the Indian Express. Baruah examines the uprising in the U.S. and the response in India in the context of a global history of racial thinking and the ideology of racial hierarchy.

Pavlina Tcherneva, associate professor of economics at Bard, spoke with David Brancaccio on the Marketplace Morning Report about her new book, The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity).
 

Roger Berkowitz, professor of political studies and human rights and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center, reflects on the progress that the Movement for Black Lives has made over the last five years. “We are witnessing the rise of a revolutionary movement of political civil disobedience with the power to reimagine the tragedy that is race in America,” writes Berkowitz. “By risking their lives — both in the face of police violence and the coronavirus — these civil disobedients are engaging in the kind of courageous political action that Hannah Arendt so valued. What is going on is neither protest nor riot: it is a mobilization of political action through civil disobedience, and it is unfolding on a scale not seen in my lifetime.”

“Around the world, right-wing populist leaders are exploiting the pandemic for their own political benefits . . . In Bolsonaro’s case, the pandemic is providing him with a golden opportunity to remind the public of one of the things that got him elected in the first place: his law-and-order background (he was a parachutist in the Brazilian Army) and affection for the military,” writes Encarnación in Foreign Policy. “Since the crisis erupted, Bolsonaro has brazenly encouraged the militarization of the government by, among other things, expanding the powers of the generals in his administration beyond the confines of military affairs and by amplifying calls for a military takeover at rallies where he has been in attendance.”
 

Bard alumna Emma Kreyche ’02, director of advocacy, outreach, and education for the Worker Justice Center of New York, spoke with the Public News Service about the vulnerability of farm laborers after an undocumented immigrant became the first farm worker in the state known to have died from Covid-19. Although farm laborers are recognized as essential workers, because they are undocumented they have little job security, often live in group settings with limited access to health care, and, when they do get sick, are fearful of seeking medical care. “The Covid pandemic is really underscoring and highlighting the various systems failures that have played upon this community for many, many years,” says Kreyche.

With Covid-19 ravaging economies, Bard College professor Pavlina Tcherneva, and colleagues around the globe, have issued an urgent plea: we need to transform the way we work.

On May 16, more than 4,000 researchers across all five continents signed on to the op-ed “Let’s democratize and decommodify work,” which was published in 41 publications, in 27 languages, in 36 countries around the world. It is an urgent call to policymakers to rewrite the rules of our economic system in the midst of an unprecedented health, climate, and political crisis intensified by Covid-19, and is centered on these three principles: democratize (firms), decommodify (work), and remediate (policies) in order to respect planetary boundaries and make life sustainable for all.

This new initiative, known as Work: Democratize, Decommodify, Remediate, was launched by a core group of eight women, all leading scholars in their fields, including Bard College professor Pavlina Tcherneva; Julie Battilana, Harvard Business School; Helene Landemore, Yale University; Julia Cagé, Sciences Po Paris; Dominique Méda, Université Paris Dauphine; Isabelle Ferreras, University of Louvain; Lisa Herzog, University of Groningen; and Sara Lafuente Hernandez, European Trade Union Institute. A central tenet is the need for a job guarantee in line with Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
 

A job guarantee would not only offer each person access to work that allows them to live with dignity, it would also provide a crucial boost to our collective capability to meet the many pressing social and environmental challenges we currently face. Guaranteed employment would allow governments, working through local communities, to provide dignified work while contributing to the immense effort of fighting environmental collapse. Across the globe, as unemployment skyrockets, job guarantee programs can play a crucial role in assuring the social, economic, and environmental stability of our democratic societies.

 “Around the world, you see various forms of large-scale employment programs for the unemployed, but a job guarantee is different,” says Professor Tcherneva. “It is a missing piece of the safety net.” Tcherneva, who studies macroeconomics and full employment, is a longtime advocate of a federal program that ensures a job for anyone who wants one. Her new book The Case for a Job Guarantee, forthcoming from Polity in June, provides a primer.

To learn more about the Democratize, Decommodify, Remediate initiative, visit democratizingwork.org.

Read the full op-ed in the Guardian.
Humans are not resources. Coronavirus shows why we must democratise work
 

In lockdown and through our screens, we’re reminded of all that’s special and strange about group reading: a solitary, private act made public.

Gal Beckerman's immersion in virtual book gatherings began in March, when he joined the Hannah Arendt Center's Virtual Reading Group. The group has been steadily reading through the works of Arendt online for six years. When the pandemic hit, the center opened the group up to anyone interested, and participation jumped from around 30 to close to 100.

Read an excerpt below of Gal Beckerman's story for the New York Times, and read the full story here.

I’ve looked forward to these online meetings every Friday, when for nearly two hours we discuss one of the chapters in a book that contains essays about thinkers like Karl Jaspers and Rosa Luxemburg, whom Arendt admired for bucking the ideologies of their time. It’s not just that the group is helping me understand Arendt, a philosopher I’ve always wanted to read, but I enjoy seeing everyone sitting at home in front of their bookshelves, some a little too close to the camera, some reclining in big easy chairs, others eating a snack, bringing snippets of their own life and thoughts to the discussion.

When I spoke with Berkowitz [Roger Berkowitz, Bard professor and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center] he paraphrased an evocative metaphor Arendt uses in “The Human Condition” that seemed uniquely apt for our current moment of isolation. “When you have a group of people sitting around a table talking, the table is what makes them a group,” he said. “And if you take the table away, they’re just individuals, they’re not connected.”

Is Zoom our table? Without it we would all just be people reading in our houses alone. With it, we are the people who read books together. Whether this will sustain a public world, as Arendt would surely hope, is hard to tell. We have no choice but to try.