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“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.

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.”

“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.

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.

 “The Legacy of Wynne Godley,” a virtual conference of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and Universita’ degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale, gathers former colleagues and others on the 10th anniversary of Godley’s passing to provide memories and offer insights on his work. The longtime head of the Levy Institute’s Macro-Modeling Team, Godley has been considered “the most insightful macroeconomic forecaster of his generation.”

Kevin Barbosa has won a Fulbright Award to Mexico City. The Class of 2018 alumnus was a member of the men’s swim team and speaker of the student government at Bard. He has been selected for a Binational Business Internship, a unique program supported by Fulbright that allows grantees to live and work full time in Mexico City. “I wanted to live in Latin America and use the knowledge I gained in banking and finance to help an organization that was specifically targeting economic issues common in Latin America, and the Binational Business Program in Mexico was the perfect solution,” Barbosa explains. The program is currently delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Barbosa will be interviewing with a group of financial technology companies in the fall. He is also studying for his law school exams.

“Around the world, you see various forms of large-scale employment programs for the unemployed, but a job guarantee is different,” says Tcherneva. “It is a missing piece of the safety net. When you think about how we provide the safety net for other things—we have a problem with retirement security? Guarantee retirement income. There’s food insecurity? Guarantee food. A problem with shelter? Guarantee shelter.” The Case for a Job Guarantee is forthcoming in July from Polity.

In the coming months, policymakers will be forced to strike a difficult balance between protecting people’s health and protecting their livelihoods. “If the problem is we need jobs, the government should create them. Hire the unemployed. It’s a very straightforward solution,” says Professor Tcherneva.

For weeks, people have been re-creating works of fine art using household items and posting their tableaus on social media. At a time when museums are closed, galleries have shuttered, and art education has largely moved online, “these images have formed a living archive of creativity in isolation,” writes Kelleher. “There are so many people who miss the quietly social act of looking at art with others. For now, they will have to make do with virtual gallery tours and riffs on famous paintings posted to Instagram.”

“Put simply, the blame-shifting from the Trump administration elides the fact that both China and the United States bear responsibility in creating the conditions that exist today,” says Professor Murray. “An important effect of this rhetoric is that it positions China as a lesser, distinctly incapable global power relative to the superior United States, which in turn, precludes the kind of international cooperation that a pandemic requires.”

Bard Associate Professor of Economics Pavlina Tcherneva talks with Elmira Bayrasli, Director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, about how Modern Monetary Theory can help save the U.S. economy from the devastation left by COVID-19. “We need to re-engage in this conversation about the role of the public sector and what kind of an economy we want after the pandemic,” says Professor Tcherneva.
Interview with Opinion Has It, from Project Syndicate

Further Interviews with Professor Tcherneva
Corporate Coronavirus Bailout Threatens Prolonged Economic Pain (The Gray Zone)

The Nordic Way to Economic Rescue (New York Times)

Bard College seniors Hattie Wilder-Karlstrom ’20 and Sabrina Slipchecnko ’20, have been awarded prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowships, which provide for a year of travel and exploration outside the United States. Continuing its tradition of expanding the vision and developing the potential of remarkable young leaders, the Watson Foundation selected Wlider-Karlstrom and Slipchecnko as two of 47 students to receive this award for 2020-21. The Watson fellowship offers college graduates of unusual promise a year of independent, purposeful exploration and travel—in international settings new to them—to enhance their capacity for resourcefulness, imagination, openness, and leadership and to foster their humane and effective participation in the world community. Each Watson Fellow receives a grant of $36,000 for 12 months of travel and independent study. Over the past several years, 21 Bard seniors have received Watson fellowships.

Hattie Wilder-Karlstrom ’20, from Amherst, Massachusetts, will explore the ways that structured play, including but not limited to soccer and music, functions as a form of humanitarian aid, especially in refugee communities, in Kenya, Greece Germany, Canada, Chile, and Colombia. A history major with a concentration in Latin American and Iberian Studies, Wilder-Karlstrom says, “In a world full of division, constructed and natural, it is easy to remain in our comfort zones, keeping the ‘us’ in, and the ‘others’ out. I believe that finding commonalities with strangers is one of the great beauties of life and that humanity has an amazing ability of cropping up everywhere, despite all odds. A border region is a place of mixture, of conflict, of transition, and as such is endlessly fascinating. Therefore, my project looks to understand the impact of borders, break down boundaries through structured play, and in a time of rising fascism and nationalism, begin to ask the question of what borderlessness and welcoming could mean for the world.”

Bard College Berlin senior Sabrina Slipchecnko ’20, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, will spend the year in Austria, Greece, Ukraine, Argentina, and Turkey, where she will explore crossovers of queerness and Orthodoxy in Jewish social life, to connect history to the present, to rediscover mystic enchantment, and will make a series of animated movies from her investigations.  “As a queer person, the idea of God has been a refuge in uncomfortable times. I want to know that queer people can have meaningful spiritual lives. I want to recognize us as a constant part of religious society, to undo the ingrained hatred and supposed impossibility of our existence. When I encounter the proof of our being, from the past to the present, I feel that we can claim a place in our spiritual communities again—because we’ve always been here,” says Slipchecnko.

A Watson Year provides fellows with an opportunity to test their aspirations and abilities through a personal project cultivated on an international scale. Watson Fellows have gone on to become leaders in their fields including CEOs of major corporations, college presidents, Emmy, Grammy and Oscar Award winners, Pulitzer Prize awardees, artists, diplomats, doctors, entrepreneurs, faculty, journalists, lawyers, politicians, researchers and inspiring influencers around the world. Following the year they join a community of peers who provide a lifetime of support and inspiration. Nearly 3000 Watson Fellows have been named since the inaugural class in 1969.

Robert Cioffi, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies, recently spoke at an online Open House for the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C., where he is currently a fellow. He led a presentation and discussion on the timely topic of ;“Disease and Social Order: The Plague Narratives of Thucydides and Lucretius,” which was live streamed on YouTube.

For the upcoming summer of 2020 (or 2021, depending on COVID-19), Bard College Classical Studies Major Em Setzer ’22 has been awarded a Digital Humanities Internship at the Center for Hellenic Studies, a research institute for Classics in Washington, D.C. As an intern, Em will reside in D.C. at the Center, and over the course of eight weeks, will work on the Free First Thousand Years of Greek project and on the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri. Congratulations, Em!

As the coronavirus barrels toward the U.S., all eyes are on the Federal Reserve, which on March 3 delivered a 50-basis-point interest-rate cut. But interest rates are a blunt tool for tackling the many challenges we face, says Bard economist Pavlina R. Tcherneva. “Fragile labor markets, inadequate safety nets, lack of universal health care, and mandatory paid leave mean that public-health concerns are worsened and multiplied by economic insecurity,” she writes. “But neither exports nor competitiveness  would resolve this crisis. What we need now is aggressive public-health-services mobilization and an economic stabilization package. And that’s the job of Congress, not the Fed.”

Bard College and Foreign Policy Interrupted (FPI), in cooperation with the Open Society University Network (OSUN), announce the launch of the FPI-Bard Fellowship. The FPI-Bard Fellowship is for midcareer women in foreign policy who are eager to share their expertise and engage in policy discussions.

The fellowship is a six-week online workshop that covers such topics as op-ed writing, media training, editorial story pitching, and public speaking. It is intended for women over 30 in the middle of their careers in international relations, finance and investing, technology, foreign policy, or national security. There are five slots for the FPI-Bard Fellowship, which will take applications through Friday, April 3. Interviews will be conducted mid-April. Final decisions will be made by May 1.

FPI started the fellowship in 2014 and has trained over 40 women, across a wide range of areas, including cybersecurity, Asian defense, conflict resolution, science, and technology. Previous FPI Fellows have been published in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the New Republic, and the New York Times.

“I’m thrilled to partner with Bard College and the OSUN network on an expanded version of the fellowship program,” said FPI cofounder and CEO Elmira Bayrasli. “Bard and OSUN’s global reach and focus on building community and creating value makes it the right partner.” Bayrasli was named director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program (BGIA) in January.

“This is a fellowship for women around the world, from different backgrounds and disciplines. Bard and OSUN provide wonderful networks to help FPI reach more talented women whose voices and expertise can only add value to today’s pressing challenges,” said Jonathan Becker, executive vice president of Bard College and vice chancellor of OSUN.

For information about applying for an FPI-Bard Fellowship, write to [email protected].
 

On Friday, February 28, the Bard Debate Union together with the Center for Civic Engagement hosted the Ninth Annual Middle and High School Debate Tournament at Bard. The tournament was the largest it has ever been, welcoming over 150 students, teachers, and parents from schools in Red Hook, Rhinebeck, Poughkeepsie, Arlington, Cold Spring, Garrison, and Dover.

The three topics up for debate, all drawn from this year's World Universities Debating Championship, were: abolishing the Olympic Games, whether news platforms should be required to uphold BBC–style impartiality, and the pros and cons of social credit systems. The students had been researching and preparing for their debates for nearly two months. At Bard, each of the three debates were judged by panels of Bard Debate Union members and teachers and coaches from the participating schools. At the end of the day, top speakers and teams were announced, with the winning high school team from Poughkeepsie High School and the winning middle school team from the Manitou School.

"As always," says Co-Director of the Bard Debate Union Ruth Zisman, "the middle and high school tournament is our favorite day of the year. Not only does it give us all a chance to remember the excitement and power of debate by watching people do it for the first time, but it gives us an opportunity to connect with debaters and educators from all over the Hudson Valley for an exciting day of open discourse and conversation."


Since 2012, when the tournament first took place, the Bard Debate Union has worked tirelessly to help foster the development and growth of debate programs all over the world, often in unlikely places: in 10 local school districts, three New York State Prisons, seven Bard Early Colleges and Early College Centers, and five international partner institutions from Kyrgyzstan to Russia to Palestine. For the Bard Debate Union, debate is about much more than just competition; it is about opening space for important and difficult conversations, connecting with the community both locally and globally, and helping to empower the young leaders we need in the 21st century.

The Middle and High School Debate Tournament was only the beginning of a big weekend for the Bard Debate Union. Bard students went on to win the Empire Debates at the King's College in New York City the next day, Saturday, February 29. Read that story here.

Upcoming events for the Bard Debate Union include:

Mar 15–20: Fourth Bard Network Debate Conference at Central European University (Budapest, Hungary)
Mar 27–29: North American Women and Gender Minorities Debating Championship (Rochester, New York)
Apr 18–20: US Universities Debating Championship (Chicago, Illinois)
May 1: Bard Prison Initiative Public-Style Debate (Eastern New York Correctional Facility)
May 9: Bard Early College Debate Tournament (Bard High School Early College Newark)
 

The Bard Debate Union won the 9th Annual Empire Debates at the King's College in New York City on Saturday, February 29 and Sunday, March 1. The tournament—an annual favorite for the Bard Debate Union—welcomes college and university debate teams from throughout the United States. All participants debated in five preliminary debates on topics ranging from the reunification of Northern Ireland to the use of state travel bans to the celebritization of political figures. Top placing teams advanced to a semifinal and then final round.

After a very close final round against teams from McGill, Morehouse, and Vanderbilt, Bard Debate Union members Gwen Stearns '21 and Pascal O'Neill '23 were named champions of the tournament. Hadley Parum '21 and Elaina Taylor '20 were semifinalists. The team also won a number of speaker and judge awards: Gwen Stearns '21 was Fourth Open Speaker, Matt Caito '20 placed 10th Open Speaker, Pascal O'Neill '23 was named Third Novice Speaker, Dalia Alayassa (PIE student from Al-Quds Bard, currently studying at BGIA) was Second ESL Speaker, and Rayo Verweij '20 advanced as a judge. An outstanding showing by the entire team.

The Debate Union's victory was the second act in a big weekend for the team. The day before, they had hosted the largest-yet Middle and High School Debate Tournament on the Bard campus. Read that story here.

In a live recording at the Brooklyn Public Library, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and author Anand Giridharadas discuss how the Democratic Party can win over voters in the 2020 election, moderated by Elmira Bayrasli, Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program director.

Bard College student Sonita Alizada addressed the United Nations on Tuesday, February 11, 2020. Sonita is a rapper and a human rights activist from Afghanistan. She spoke movingly about how she was sold into child marriage twice, escaped, and went on to become an advocate for education for girls worldwide.

Sonita's family left Afghanistan for Iran when she was a girl, and lived in Iran for several years as undocumented refugees. During this time, Sonita began to make music to express her frustration and fear as her family began to discuss selling her as a child bride. "I was breaking the law in Iran at that time. And still now women are not allowed to sing or rap solo," she explains. "Honestly, back then I knew the law, but I felt like my dreams were bigger than the fears that I had from the police."

She met the Iranian filmmaker Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami, who helped Sonita make a music video for her song "Brides for Sale," which went viral and called attention to Sonita and the plight of many Afghan girls. Maghami made a documentary about Sonita's struggle to escape child marriage, Sonita, which was released by New Wave Films in 2016. Sonita won the World Documentary Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the IDFA Amsterdam Film Festival. With support from Maghami, the True Life Fund, and the Strongheart Group, Sonita was able to move to the United States, complete her secondary education, and continue to college.

Sonita was taking English language classes at American University in Washington, D.C. when a friend told her about Bard. "I felt like this would be the best place for me, because I like a close connection with my professors. So when I came here I realized that professors here, they were supportive, students were diverse, and it’s been—I really like it here and am happy with the decision that I made because they're not only supporting my education; they also support me with my advocacy work, which is very important."

Sonita is taking classes in human rights and international studies at Bard. "I'm taking First-Year Seminar, of course. I loved Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—not so much Darwin!" She enjoys working with other Bard students who are English language learners. Denise Minin, the English language program coordinator at the Learning Commons, has become a friend and an advocate to Sonita. She continues to write music and perform, regularly booking the recording studios on campus so she can work on her first album.

Sometimes, her music and her advocacy work have her studying on the train or in a hotel before an event. "I usually have some time before the performance or before the speech, so I do my homework in between," she explains.

These days, Sonita misses her family. "I didn’t tell my family when I came to the U.S. They wouldn’t have let me come here, so I basically ran away." Though her parents were initially angry, seeing Sonita's success with music and school has changed their way of thinking. "Right now they are my biggest fans," she says. Her sister rejected a marriage prospect, and their parents didn't force her. The transformation Sonita has seen in her own family gives her hope.

They understand that a girl can actually support herself. My mother, she thought I had no chance of saving myself, because they always think that we have to marry a guy, and only the guy can take care of us. So now it’s proven to her that girls are strong, they can make their own decisions, they can support themselves, they can also support others. It took a long time. It’s not that easy. But I’m just saying that change is possible even in families, Afghan families that are very conservative. They just follow old traditions. But for my mother to change that much, it was very shocking for me. I felt like if I can change my mom, if I can change my family, I can change other families, too, to think about their girls, to see that there are other possibilities for their girls other than just being mothers while they are children.

Sonita has been nominated for a Women Building Peace Award, as presented by the United States Institute of Peace. The award honors a woman peacebuilder whose substantial and practical contribution to peace is an inspiration and guiding light for future women peacebuilders. Sonita will find out the results over the summer.

Sonita has a busy semester shaping up. In addition to coursework and her album, she's started to write a book about her life. She's looking forward to performing at a Human Rights Watch event in San Francisco next month. She will also likely be speaking at the UN again in March, on behalf of the organization Girls Not Brides.

She continues to push to address the root causes of child marriage—poverty and lack of education—and to advocate for local people to take the lead in reform in their own countries. "The problem with some organizations is that they come from the U.S., they come from other countries, to a country like Afghanistan, but they don't really understand the root of this problem," she observes. "You can't just fight with your ideology against their culture. So they need to ask leaders from their communities to help them with what changes they want to bring." Organizations need to not only support the girls, she explains, but also educate the parents.

Sonita finds that her roles as a college student and public figure exist in harmony. "There are so many courses here that talk about human rights," she observes. "The students here are very engaged with human rights and helping the environment—with everything. My friends, they're very supportive of girls’ education. So whatever I do most of the time they’re like, 'This is kind of what we do.' They are doing projects, too. We're doing the same kind of work, I just do it somewhere else." She describes her friends working on civic engagement projects and volunteering, then laughs, "I find them more active than me sometimes."