Bard News & Events

On Monday, November 13, the Bard Debate Union hosted the third Intra–Bard Network online debate. The debate featured two students each from Bard College, Bard College Berlin, Al-Quds Bard (Abu Dis, West Bank), and Smolny College (St. Petersburg, Russia). The four teams debated the topic "This house opposes the privatization of water" with thoughtful, researched, and persuasive arguments. Debaters from all Bard Network institutions will gather March 15–18 at Smolny College for the second Bard Network Debate Conference and Tournament.

Students from Bard Microcollege Holyoke, Bard College, and Bard College at Simon's Rock met at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Mass., on Saturday, November 11, for the first Bard Women and Leadership Summit. After hearing from inspiring women leaders, students collaborated to envision their own organizations to address the urgent issues of the day. The Care Center, home of Bard Holyoke, made it possible for Holyoke students to attend the meeting.

Bard College Experimental Humanities Digital Projects Coordinator Gretta Tritch Roman will receive the Dutchess County Historical Society’s (DCHS) Dutchess Award at the group’s annual awards dinner this month. Roman was lauded for her "exceptional, highly innovative contributions to her students and to the broader community in the areas of preservation, history, and education," according to the award citation. Roman coordinates the Bard College Experimental Humanities Digital History Lab (DHL), an innovative humanities laboratory focused on the production of local history projects between Bard College faculty and students and the community of citizens, public servants, historical societies, and libraries dedicated to local history in the Hudson Valley.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2950

The Museum of Modern Art will exhibit photographs spanning Stephen Shore's entire career. This is the first survey in New York of this magnitude, and will be on view November 19 – May 28, 2018. Over the last five decades, Professor Shore has "conducted a continual, restless interrogation of image making, from the gelatin silver prints he made as a teenager to his current engagement with digital platforms." He is "One of the most significant photographers of our time."
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3769?locale=en

The study, "Trojan Females and Judas Goats: Evolutionary Traps as Tools in Wildlife Management," brings together the science from the pest-control, eco-evolutionary, and conservation communities to create a conceptual framework by which evolutionary traps can be repurposed as tools of deception to eliminate or control target pest species.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2948

Faculty Agata Lisiak recently published the article "Mothering and othering in the city: Polish migrants in the UK" in the journal Families, Relationships and Societies issued by Policy Press, University of Bristol. From the abstract: This article addresses the many complexities of migrant mothering by examining the unique ways in which it is performed, negotiated and made sense of by migrant mothers themselves. Drawing on interviews conducted with recent Polish migrant women who mother small children in British cities, I study how mothering is inscribed with value and how kinwork is done locally, among 'people like us' (Stack, 1974). Families, Relationships and Societies is a social science journal designed to advance scholarship and debate in the growing field of families and relationships across the life course. Link to article

On Monday, November 13, celebrated fantasy writer and critic Elizabeth Hand reads from her fiction collection Saffron and Brimstone. The Washington Post writes, "Hand's work is pulsing with tension throughout, charged with its own chilling luminosity." Hand will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2949

Bard seniors Mya Gelber and Kevin Barbosa represented the College at this year's Student Conference on U.S. Affairs (SCUSA) at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, held November 1-4. The three-day conference focused on "The Politics of the Forgotten and the Aggrieved: Remaking the World Order?" SCUSA attracts students from colleges and military academies across the country and has students participate in intensive roundtable sessions on specific national security issues as well as plenary sessions led by prominent military and civilian officials. Bard's participation in this conference is part of the overall Bard–West Point Initiative and is supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Conducted by Leon Botstein, music director, the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra will perform Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto in E flat with soloist Szabolcs Koczur, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, "Titan."
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=2947

On November 1, Bard College at Simon's Rock Provost Ian Bickford gave a talk at The City Club of Cleveland entitled "Why Wait? Early College: National and Local." Dr. Bickford focused on the growing influence of Bard's model on national education policy and within the city of Cleveland, where a second Bard High School Early College campus opened this fall. Students from both of the BHSEC Cleveland campuses attended, and offered up their own experience of the program near the end of the event. The talk can be streamed via the City Club's website.

Bard College Berlin and the Bezirksamt Pankow invite you to the second event in the Pankow Conversations series - CommuniTEA / Winter Handwerke - hosted at BCB's arts building "The Factory" on November 15, 2017 from 6:00pm. Pankow Conversations is a series of three conversation evenings taking place in three different locations in Pankow in October, November and December 2017. The goal is to interactive community events each dedicated to one theme connected to migration that will be explored and discussed in an open forum in order to bring together our neighbors around Pankow, residents of refugee shelters and Bard College Berlin Students. The project is an extension of Campus Conversations, a student-run, weekly event on the Bard College Berlin campus, which was initiated in 2016 and has an excellent track record of bringing refugees, students and neighbors together for language learning and cultural exchange. The second event welcomes all those living in Pankow to participate in various winter craft workshops. Parallel to the workshops, we will be engaging in discussion about neighborhood and community. What do these concepts mean to you? What role do you play within your own community or neighborhood? We hope to bring together people of many different backgrounds, who all live in Pankow for an evening of friendly conversation. Translation between Arabic, English and German will be provided. Link to Facebook event Time: Wednesday, November 15, 2017, 6:00-9:00pm Venue: Bard College Berlin - The Factory (map) Eichenstrasse 43, Berlin - Pankow Admission free

An article co-written by Bard College Berlin student Karam Alhamad (BA 2021) with Vera Mironova (International Security Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School) and Ekaterina Sergatskova (Russian journalist) was recently published by Foreign Affairs. Titled "The Lives of Foreign Fighters Who Left ISIS," the piece centers on foreign fighters who have escaped ISIS and on their current lives in hiding. Drawing on conversations with current and former Russian-speaking fighters, the authors discuss the reasons to leave and how the profiles of foreign fighters who have fled ISIS have changed over time. Link to full article

Over this past weekend, the Bard High School Early College Cleveland West Debate Union traveled to Cornell University to compete in the Alfred “Tuna” Snyder World Schools Debate Tournament. The tournament, dedicated to the foremost advocate for expanding the scope of American debate worldwide, was attended by top-level debaters from across the country and the world. Two BHSEC teams each debated in six rounds of Worlds Schools Debate, a style that mixes research with improvisation and values strong argumentation skills and intellectual flexibility. In a weekend that included debates against the U.S. National Team and the Canadian National Team, as well as teams from as far away as Bangladesh, the Bard students proved their mettle and showed off their intellectual prowess.

Dr. Guy Risko, Faculty in Literature, and the teams of Nailah Thomas, Aracely Rios, and Duncan Godwin and James Greathouse, Anne Marie Abreu, and De Quan Wright pushed the debate team to improve on its performance from the previous year. With victories by both teams on topics ranging from fixing the gender wage gap to the morality of religiously affiliated rehabilitation centers, the Bard teams successfully deployed their research skills and argumentative acumen at the highest level. As the year moves forward, the debate team will begin to focus on public debates about Puerto Rican statehood and upcoming college tournaments in the spring semester. 

On November 10, 2017, in the frame of the Faculty Colloquium Series, guest faculty Dr. Peter Laki will give a presentation entitled "Requiem for a Requiem: A Hungarian Composer's Aborted Homage to John F. Kennedy." Sándor Veress, one of the most important Hungarian composers of his generation (1907-1992) emigrated to Switzerland in 1947. Following John F. Kennedy's assassination, he planned a large-scale choral work to honor the memory of the American President. The work was never completed, but extensive sketches exist, which give us some idea about what this work would have been like. An examination of the extant material and a review of the aborted composition's history will reveal some aspects of the unlikely encounter between a composer steeped in the Hungarian national school on one hand, and American culture and politics on the other. Peter Laki, a native of Budapest, studied at the Franz Liszt Conservatory (now University) in his hometown, at the Sorbonne in Paris, and at the University of Pennsylvania where he earned his PhD. Formerly program annotator and lecturer for the Cleveland Orchestra, he is currently Visiting Associate Professor at Bard College Annandale. He is the editor of Bartók and His World (Princeton University Press, 1995). He has published numerous articles in musicological journals and lectured widely at international conferences. Time: Friday, November 10, 2017 from 12.30pm to 1.30pm Venue: The Cafeteria (Waldstr. 70), Seminar Room upstairs

https://www.inforadio.de/medienpartnerschaften/teaser_podiumsdiskussion/raetselhaftes-amerika.html

On December 7, Bard College Berlin is pleased to host award-winning filmmaker Mahmoud Kaabour for a screening of his documentary "Champ of the Camp" (2013, 75mins). The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker. "Champ of the Camp" is the first ever feature-length documentary filmed in the controversial labor camps of the United Arab Emirates. The film follows a massive Bollywood singing and trivia competition that searches across more than 70 camps throughout the country to find and crown the champ of all camps. Narrated (and sung) entirely in the voices of the laborers, the film alternates between the X Factor-style suspense of the competition and the gritty reality of the labor environment, while weaving in intimate access scenes of their daily routines and emotional reflections on their life as laborers in Dubai. The film screens as part of the class "History and Memory: Forced Migration from Nineteenth to Twenty-First-Century Germany" taught by Marion Detjen, and will give us the opportunity to discuss, at the end of the term, possibilities to include global migratory developments and their artistic reflections in the German memory culture. The languages of the film are Hindi, Urdu, Bhojpuri & Bangladeshi With English subtitles Time: Thursday, December 7, 2017 from 7:00pm Venue: Bard College Berlin, Lecture Hall Platanenstrasse 98a, 13156 Berlin (map Admission free

Faculty Michael Weinman recently published a post entitled "Charlottesville, Thomas Jefferson, and America's Fate" on Public Seminar, in response to Keval Bhatt's post on the same platform "Subverting the Symbols of White Supremacy." From the piece: Bhatt and I will continue to agree with one another in disagreeing with those who see a yawning gap between Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee on a number of issues vitally important for Americans today; chiefly, the racial superiority of whites and the acceptability of the institution of slavery. We will continue to agree with one another in insisting that Thomas Jefferson does not embody all that is good and none that is bad in America's ongoing myth of itself as a "city on the hill" and "beacon for freedom and equality." But my fear — offered in exchange for Bhatt's — is that we won't be able to continue expressing those views in an open and more-or-less democratic public space for very long if we insist, against the will of the majority of residents of Charlottesville and Americans more generally, that (effectively) the Spencers and Kesslers are right that Jefferson is of a piece with Lee and Jackson and thus all three need to be shrouded until they are removed from our public spaces. Link to full post

The DANCE LAB led by Eva Burghardt has been researching and experimenting with different approaches to contemporary dance, improvisation and instant composition. The students have been playing with the relationship to space, time and effort, bringing attention to different movement qualities, inner and outer awareness and the connection to each other. In the showing we would like to share our improvisation practice as well as the individual sketches of composition made by the students, which are inspired by their own stories and backgrounds. What is home? Where are my roots? What has shaped me? What was my first dance? Time: Sunday, November 26, at 7:30 pm Venue: Bard College Berlin, The Factory Eichenstrasse 43, Berlin-Pankow (map) Refreshments will be served. BVG Directions: BVG Directions: Bard College Berlin is in Niederschönhausen, a 12-minute tram ride from the "Pankow" S/U-Bahn station. Take the M1 tram towards the destination "Rosenthal Nord" (not "Schillerstrasse"), exit at "Friedrich-Engels-Str. / Eichenstrasse". Bard College Berlin's arts building is 2 blocks away on the right side with a large red banner in front.

On Thursday, November 23, 2017, Dr. Shana Almeida from York University, School of Social Work, Toronto will give a guest lecture entitled "When 'Diversity is Our Strength': Negotiating Discussions and Discourses of Race in the City of Toronto" in the frame of the course "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air" taught by Prof. Dr. Agata Lisiak. In 2016, BBC Radio 4 officially declared Toronto, Canada to be the most diverse city on earth. According to BBC reporter Ed Davey, Toronto is most diverse because approximately 51% of Toronto's population is foreign-born, with over 230 nationalities living there ("WS More or Less: The World's Most Diverse City", 2016). Responding to the declaration made by the BBC, Patricia McCarney, Director of Global Cities Institute at the University of Toronto, remarked that Toronto's top ranking is "proof of Toronto's welcoming attitude to newcomers", and to its cultural openness (Ngabo, 2016). How then do we discuss experiences and realities of racism, in a city that is defined by its post-racial sensibilities? In this presentation, Dr. Almeida draws on several City of Toronto policy documents to demonstrate how the matrix of diversity discourse re-frames claims of racism, making racial Others articulate(d) subjects only to the extent that diversity is reiterated, reproduced and cited by them, and through them. She engages with an understanding of diversity as performative in order to trace and make visible how historical and racial norms become perpetually linked to raced bodies, through texts and speech acts, in order to maintain the 'diverse' City of Toronto and its reputation for inclusion on the world stage. In an interesting twist, she also shows how diversity discourse in the City of Toronto both rejects and requires race, in order to reproduce itself. Dr. Shana Almeida is a scholar, researcher, and activist in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her research and teaching contributions are informed by over eight years of work experience in the municipal government of Toronto, Canada, as Special Advisor to Toronto City Councillor Olivia Chow, and as Chief of Staff to Toronto City Councillor Gord Perks. During her time at the City, Dr. Almeida spearheaded several City-wide policy initiatives, especially in the areas of anti-racism, immigration, employment, recreation, public health, poverty, and housing. Dr. Almeida completed her Ph.D. in the School of Social Work at York University in Toronto (2016). Her doctoral thesis, an exploration of how race is reproduced and organized through "diversity" discourse in the City of Toronto, provides the foundation for her forthcoming book Toronto the Good? Negotiating Race and Belonging in the Diverse City, with University of Toronto Press. This book represents a significant departure from popular understandings and depictions of diversity and the City of Toronto in that it uniquely attends to the question of what diversity does in and for the City, as a discourse and as a mechanism of power. Dr. Almeida has been invited to share her work locally and internationally, including in Toronto, Berlin, Frankfurt, London, and Grahamstown, South Africa. Time: Thursday, November 23, 2017 from 1:30pm Venue: Bard College Berlin, Lecture Hall Platanenstrasse 98a, 13156 Berlin (map) Admission free