About the Event
In conversation with conceptual artist Sama Alshaibi, Brown University professor Nadje Al-Ali and Columbia University professor Kathryn Spellman Poots will discuss her art and the significance of war, exile, borders and environmental destruction in her work. What role do gender and her body play in her work? And how does her art draw on historical sources and contemporary realities to express exploitations of freedom?
This conversation is part of a joint Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University series on gender, art and body politics in the Middle East and its diasporas. The series examines intersecting inequalities and body politics expressed, represented and transgressed in both visual and performance art.
About the Speaker
Born in Iraq and now based in the United States, Sama Alshaibi is an artist working between photography, video and installation. Her practice explores the notion of aftermath—the fragmentation and dispossession that violates the individual and a community following the destruction of their social, natural and built environment. She often complicates the coding of the Arab female figure found in the image history of photographs and moving images.
In 2021, Alshaibi was named a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of the Phoenix Art Museum’s Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award. Her work has been exhibited in numerous biennales and museums, including the 55th Venice Biennale, the 2020 State of the Art (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art), Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Institut Du Monde Arabe (Paris) and Barjeel Foundation (U.A.E.), among others. In 2015, Aperture published her monograph Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In, featuring the artist’s Silsila series. Alshaibi is a Regents Professor of Art at the University of Arizona, USA.
,1,In January of 2019, journalist Elizabeth Rush joined 56 scientists and crew people aboard an ice-breaking research vessel to study the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica. The glacier, which is about the size of the state of Florida, has been nicknamed the “Doomsday Glacier” for the effect its disintegration would likely play in the rise of global sea levels.
“If we lose Thwaites, there's great concern that we will lose the entirety or big portions of the West Antarctic ice sheet and that those glaciers combined contain enough ice to raise global sea levels 10 feet or more,” Rush told Dan Richards on this episode of Trending Globally.
Rush recounts her voyage aboard the Palmer and how it reshaped her understanding of our changing climate and planet in her 2023 book, “The Quickening: Antarctica, Motherhood and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World.” However, as the title suggests, the book is also about another, more personal journey: Rush’s decision to have a child.
The resulting book is part adventure travelogue, part mediation on the meaning of motherhood, and part climate change manifesto. It also offers some much-needed wisdom on how to envision a future when it feels like the world is falling apart.
Learn more about and purchase “The Quickening” (https://milkweed.org/book/the-quickening)
Learn more about “The Conceivable Future” (https://www.conceivablefuture.org/)
Transcript coming soon to our website (https://trending-globally.captivate.fm/)
,1,Ambassador Victoria Nuland is Shelby Cullom Davis Professor in the Practice of International Diplomacy and Director of the International Fellows Program at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. A U.S. diplomat for 35 years, she served six U.S. Presidents and 10 Secretaries of State of both political parties and holds the rank of Career Ambassador. She was Acting Deputy Secretary of State from July 2023 until March 2024, and served concurrently as Under Secretary for Political Affairs. Her tenure as U/S for Political Affairs began in April 2021.
,1,Smuggling is typically thought of as furtive and hidden, taking place under the radar and beyond the reach of the state. But in many cases, governments tacitly permit illicit cross-border commerce, or even devise informal arrangements to regulate it. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the borderlands of Tunisia and Morocco, Max Gallien explains why states have long tolerated illegal trade across their borders and develops new ways to understand the political economy of smuggling. His book, “Smugglers and States – Negotiating the Maghreb at its Margins” examines the rules and agreements that govern smuggling in North Africa, tracing the involvement of states in these practices and their consequences for borderland communities. It demonstrates that, contrary to common assumptions about the effects of informal economies, smuggling can promote both state and social stability. States not only turn a blind eye to smuggling, they rely on it to secure political acquiescence and maintain order, because it provides income for otherwise neglected border communities. More recently, however, the securitization of borders, wars, political change, and the pandemic have put these arrangements under pressure. Gallien explores the renegotiation of the role of smuggling, showing how stability turns into vulnerability and why some groups have been able to thrive while others have been pushed further to the margins.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Max Gallien is a political scientist specialising in the politics of informal and illegal economies, the political economy of taxation and the modern politics of the Middle East and North Africa. He is a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and a Research Lead and the International Centre for Tax and Development. He is the author of “Smugglers and States – Negotiating the Maghreb at its Margins” (Columbia University Press, 2024).
,1,Jeff Colgan, Director of Climate Solutions Lab (CSL) and Richard Holbrooke Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs, explains the Climate Syllabus Bank project at Climate Solutions Lab, located at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
The Climate Solutions Lab syllabus bank fosters and improves university-level courses on climate change in the social sciences. At many universities, such courses are scarce — despite student demand on the world's most important global problem. For potential instructors, developing a new syllabus from scratch can be a barrier to teaching the course. So, we offer existing syllabi, for free, to anyone in the world. Different courses have different features, such as documentary films or class simulations.
We are extremely grateful to the instructors who have volunteered their syllabi for this purpose. More syllabi are welcome.
To submit a syllabus, please use this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdTDGnl7u1_evbPhJ_MMSTqyUXEQMyJX6xrbGQo6C0ZemlIcQ/viewform
,1,On June 4, results came in from the largest democratic election in history. Over 640 million people voted in India’s election, which took place at over one million polling places across the country over the course of six weeks.
Many predicted that India’s prime minister Nerandra Modi and his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would dominate the election, grow their ranks in Parliament, and further impose their Hindu-nationalist ideology on the country.
However, that wasn’t what happened. Modi was reelected, but his party lost over 60 seats in the lower house of Parliament. The BJP will have to govern as part of a multi-party coalition, and most likely moderate their Hindu-nationalist aspirations.
On this episode, you’ll hear from Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist at Brown University and director of the Watson Institute’s Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia (https://watson.brown.edu/southasia/) , about this historic election: what led to its surprising outcome, what it means for the Hindu-nationalist movement embodied by Prime Minister Nerandra Modi, and what it might tell us about the struggle for democracy occurring in countries around the world.
*Trending Globally will be taking a brief summer hiatus, but we’ll be back in July with all-new episodes*
Learn more about the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia (https://watson.brown.edu/southasia/) at the Watson Institute
Learn more about the Watson Institute’s other podcasts (https://home.watson.brown.edu/news/podcasts)
Transcript coming soon to our website (https://trending-globally.captivate.fm/)
,1,Please join us as we welcome the following 6 writers to discuss their work.
Angie Cruz
Fred D'Aguiar
Francisco Goldman
Shara McCallum
Tiphanie Yanique
Javier Zamora
There will be a book signing and reception following the event.
Sawyer Seminar Series
,1,Join the Watson Institute and Derek Penslar for an informal discussion on the current events in Israel-Gaza.
Derek Penslar, is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History, Harvard University.
Moderated by, Omer Bartov, Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies
,1,As Watson celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month, join the Master of Public Affairs students Jessica Saenz Gomez, and Lizbeth Lucero for a fireside chat with Dr. Laura Lopez-Sanders. Dr. Lopez Sanders is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Brown University, whose work and research interests include public policy, immigration, race and ethnic relations, social inequality and more. Join us to hear about Dr. Laura Lopez-Sanders’ important policy work and research, and get to learn more about her journey and story as a Latina scholar in academia.
,1,Andrea Gutierrez, Sarah Khan, Sylvia Houghteling and Yael Rice — Crafting Cuisine: A Celebration of Food and Art in South Asia
Friday, December 1, 2023
2:00 PM to 4:00 PM EST
McKinney, 111 Thayer Street
Join us for Crafting Cuisine: A Celebration of Food and Art in South Asia with subject matter experts Andrea Gutierrez, Sarah Khan, Sylvia Houghteling and Yael Rice.
Andrea Gutierrez is an Assistant Professor of Instruction at The University of Texas at Austin. In her work, she researches Pre-modern South Asia, South Asian Food History, and Animal Studies in South Asia. She has delved into the historical intersections of food and spirituality in early India, and has not only explored diverse topics such as animal language in ancient texts and temple rituals but has also been recognized for their exceptional research through prestigious awards such as the ICAS Book Prize and the Getty Library Research Grant
Sarah Khan is the EPE Director of Undergraduate Studies/Assistant Professor at Yale University. She researches gender and comparative politics, with a regional specialization in South Asia. In her work, she studies gender gaps in political preferences, and the barriers to women’s political participation and representation. She also researches strategies to prevent and address violence against women in the developing world.
Sylvia Houghteling is an Associate Professor of History of Art at Bryn Mawr. She specializes in early modern visual and material culture with a focus on the history of textiles, South Asian art and architecture, and the material legacies and ruptures of European colonialism. Houghteling’s first book, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022), a recipient of a College Art Association Millard Meiss Publication Fund Grant, examined the textiles crafted and collected across the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing how woven objects helped to shape the social, political, religious, and aesthetic life of early modern South Asia. Her ongoing research is concerned with questions of temporality and the unique material histories of the Indian Ocean trade.
Yael Rice is the Chair of Architectural Studies/Associate Professor of Art & the History of Art and of Asian Languages and Civilizations at Amherst College. She specializes in the art and architecture of South Asia and Greater Iran, with a particular focus on manuscripts and other portable arts of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. Between 2009-12, she held the position of Assistant Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in that capacity curated exhibitions of court portraits from South Asia, ragamala paintings, and works by Rabindranath Tagore and other seminal Bengali artists of the early twentieth century.
,1,Rohini Somonathan is Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics. She received her Ph.D in 1996 from Boston University and held faculty positions at Emory University, the University of Michigan and the Indian Statistical Institute before joining the Delhi School of Economics in 2005. Her research focuses on how social institutions interact with public policies to shape patterns of economic and social inequality. She is particularly interested in exploring the intellectual and ideological environment within which state policy is created and justified. Within the broad area of development economics, she has worked on group identity and public goods, gender equality, child nutrition and environmental quality.
,1,This is part three in our companion series to the book “Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation” (co-edited by Mark Blyth, Lucio Baccaro and Jonas Pontusson).
On this episode, Mark talks with four contributors for the book: Alex Reisenbichler, Aidan Regan, Oddný Helgadóttir, and Jonas Nahm. They look at case studies in a handful of countries, as well as some of the cross-cutting trends affecting all growth models across the world. They explore the role of finance and politics in growth models, and how the climate crisis is making us rethink this all even further.
,1,Join Lyle Goldstein, Visiting Professor of International and Public Affairs, for a conversation with Mike Mochizuki, Japan-U.S. Relations Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. This is the final event in a series of talks about the China-Japan relationship, “Stepping Back from the Brink: An Exploration of Contemporary China-Japan Relations.”
Professor Mochizuki holds the Japan-U.S. Relations Chair in Memory of Gaston Sigur at the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. Dr. Mochizuki was director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies from 2001 to 2005. He co-directs the “Memory and Reconciliation in the Asia-Pacific” research and policy project of the Sigur Center. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He was also Co-Director of the Center for Asia-Pacific Policy at RAND and has taught at the University of Southern California and Yale University.
,1,Backlash is hardly a new political force — since America’s founding, change has often been driven by citizens mobilizing in opposition to policies, programs, or social movements.
But recently, as our guest on this episode explains, backlash movements have come to dominate our politics in unprecedented ways. He argues that to build a more stable and healthy politics, we need to better understand how these forces work.
Why do certain policies, movements, or individual politicians incite powerful backlash movements while others don't? And why — whether we’re talking about immigration, healthcare, reproductive rights, or countless other issues — has backlash come to dominate so many different policy realms?
On this episode, Dan Richards explores these questions with Eric Patashnik, a political scientist at the Watson Institute, and author of the book “Countermobilization: Policy Feedback and Backlash in a Polarized Age.” In the book, Patashnik provides a theory of political backlash — what causes it, why it’s diffused through our politics over the last few decades, and how policymakers and politicians can learn to remain effective in a political moment dominated by backlash and countermobilization.
,1,About the Event
In conversation with conceptual artist Sama Alshaibi, Brown University professor Nadje Al-Ali and Columbia University professor Kathryn Spellman Poots will discuss her art and the significance of war, exile, borders and environmental destruction in her work. What role do gender and her body play in her work? And how does her art draw on historical sources and contemporary realities to express exploitations of freedom?
This conversation is part of a joint Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University series on gender, art and body politics in the Middle East and its diasporas. The series examines intersecting inequalities and body politics expressed, represented and transgressed in both visual and performance art.
About the Speaker
Born in Iraq and now based in the United States, Sama Alshaibi is an artist working between photography, video and installation. Her practice explores the notion of aftermath—the fragmentation and dispossession that violates the individual and a community following the destruction of their social, natural and built environment. She often complicates the coding of the Arab female figure found in the image history of photographs and moving images.
In 2021, Alshaibi was named a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of the Phoenix Art Museum’s Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award. Her work has been exhibited in numerous biennales and museums, including the 55th Venice Biennale, the 2020 State of the Art (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art), Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Institut Du Monde Arabe (Paris) and Barjeel Foundation (U.A.E.), among others. In 2015, Aperture published her monograph Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In, featuring the artist’s Silsila series. Alshaibi is a Regents Professor of Art at the University of Arizona, USA.
,1,Borrowing heavily from the unwritten Constitution of the United Kingdom, and after 2-years of debates in the Constituent Assembly, India adopted its Constitution, the basis for its Republic. Join us for a talk with Dr. Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, former Finance Minister of Tamil Nadu, that will touch upon core constructs such as administration and governance, representation of citizens, and the separation and execution of powers to consider whether the outcomes over the last roughly 75 years have delivered on the vision of the Constituent Assembly.
Dr. Palanivel Thiaga Rajan serves as the Minister for Information Technology & Digital Services, Earlier he served as the Minister for Finance & Human Resources Management in the Government of Tamil Nadu, India. During his stint as Finance Minister, Hon’ble Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu Thiru M.K.Stalin nominated Dr Palanivel Thiaga Rajan to the Goods & Service Tax Council (GST Council) as a GST Council Member to represent the Government of Tamil Nadu. Dr Palanivel Thiaga Rajan was also a member of the Group ofMinisters (GoM) on (1) System Reforms (standing committee) & (2) Casinos, Race Courses and Online Gaming as nominated by the Chairperson of the GST Council i.e., Hon’ble Union Minister for Finance,Government of India.
,1,Mark Blyth, political economist at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and Carrie Nordlund, political scientist and Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Programs at Brown University, share their take on the news.
On this episode:
Trump potentially gets removed from the GOP primary ballot in Colorado, and the risks of involving the courts in a presidential election
How the politics of immigration will affect the 2024 race in the US
Elise Stefanik grills University presidents on Capitol Hill, highlighting the thorny politics of Israel, Gaza, and free speech on college campuses
The political economy of Argentina’s new president Javier Milei
The Fed decides to hold interest rates steady, and the market reacts with…enthusiasm
China’s economic slowdown, and the limits of growth in authoritarian societies
Where the Israeli-Gaza conflict goes from here, and how it might affect US politics going forward
Google’s loss in court to Epic Games, and American’s very mixed record regulating monopolies.
,1,Join us for a Graduate Student Seminar - Misinformation and its Moderation on WhatsApp with subject matter expert Kiran Garimella.
Kiran Garimella is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Kiran’s research is focused on building innovative, opt-in, privacy preserving data-collection tools for platforms like WhatsApp, with the goal of developing interventions to stop/slow the spread of misinformation.
,1,Chandra Bhan Prasad is an Indian scholar, political commentator, and author of the Bhopal Document, impacted the policies of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and has been widely cited in discourses on Dalits. Prasad is the co-author author of Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs (with D Shyam Babu and Devesh Kapur), Dalit Phobia: Why Do They Hate Us?, What is Ambedkarism?, and Dalit Diary, 1999-2003: Reflections on Apartheid in India. He is also the founder of the ByDalits.com platform and the editor of Dalit Enterprise Magazine and has been widely quoted by the world press on issues of caste and the treatment of Dalits in India. Prasad’s main areas of research and writing are Dalit capitalism, India’s march to modernity, and Westernization in India.
