Author Archives: Lee Smithey

Memoriam: Charlotte Lacey and The East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives

We would like to share this loving memorial to Charlotte Lacey by her partner, Michael Panella:

In Memoriam

Charlotte Lacey, the only Delaware County native and the youngest member of the the peace group, The East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives, passed away on January 5th in Vancouver, Canada.

Charlotte was 18 years old when on one night in 1970 she along with 10 nuns, priests and young people simultaneously burglarized three of the four Philadelphia draft boards destroying the files of those young men about to be involuntarily sent to Vietnam to kill and be killed. The group also burglarized the lobbying offices of GE in Washington. The GE documents taken exposed the collusion between Congress and GE, the second largest war contractor at the time. Charlotte Lacey and The East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives

Charlotte, at that young age, had not only the strong moral compass to see that the Vietnam war was wrong but she had the courage to put her liberty and maybe her life on the line in her effort to stop that war. The 11 members of the Conspiracy to Save Lives published their names with a photo taking responsibility for this non-violent resistance to the war, the draft and the military-industrial complex.

Charlotte was a very special loving person who lived the rest of her life in Canada. Delaware County and all peace loving Americans should be very proud to have had her as their courageous daughter.

Charlotte Lacey and the The East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives

From Mississippi to Jerusalem: Jewish Civil Rights Veterans of SNCC

Come learn about the intersection of Judaism and civil rights activism! This 2-day event series features Jewish activists Dorothy Zellner, Ira Grupper, Larry Rubin, and Mark Levy, all of whom participated in the Civil Rights movement as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Come to one or all of the three events! There will be light food and drink!

Hosted by SASS, Race to Action, and formerly-known-as Hillel at Swarthmore College (directions)

Racial Justice Action Now and Past: Learning from SNCC
March 24
Bond Hall
4:30pm
Too often the civil rights movement is considered a thing of the past. In this panel discussion, we will hear from our panelists how strategies from the Civil Rights movement can be used to effectively advocate for justice today.

Practical Organizing Workshop
March 24
Location TBD – possibly Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility
7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Come learn important skills from experienced organizers! We will discuss topics ranging from self-care to dealing with the press.

From Selma to Jerusalem
March 25
Bond Hall
5:30pm
Our panelists will discuss the relationship between the Civil Rights movement and the current situation in Israel-Palestine.

Facebook invitation for this event.

Moore Research Fellowship at Swarthmore College

Interested in conducting research in the Friends Historical Library or the Peace Collection at Swarthmore College? Apply for the Moore Research Fellowship!

Margaret W. Moore and John M. Moore Research Fellowship
Swarthmore College

SYNOPSIS: The purpose of the Margaret W. Moore and John M. Moore Research Fellowship is to provide a stipend to promote research during the academic year or summer months using the resources of the Friends Historical Library and/or the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

Deadline(s):      03/31/2015
Established Date: 04/10/2003
Follow-Up Date:   02/01/2016
Review Date:      02/26/2015

Contact: Christopher Densmore, Curator

Address:
Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore, PA 19081-1399
U.S.A.

E-mail: cdensmo1@swarthmore.edu
Web Site: http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/
Program URL: http://bit.ly/185AMb7
Tel:              610-328-8557
Deadline Ind:     Receipt
Deadline Open:    No

Award Type(s): Facilities-Access To Fellowship Summer

Citizenship/Country of Applying Institution: Any/No Restrictions

Locations Tenable: U.S.A. Institution (including U.S. Territories)

Appl Type(s):

Faculty Member
Researcher/Investigator
Graduate Student

Target Group(s): NONE
Funding Limit: $0 NOT PROV
Duration: 0
Indirect Costs: Unspecified
Cost Sharing: No
Sponsor Type: College/University
Geo. Restricted: NO RESTRICTIONS

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of the Margaret W. Moore and John M.
Moore Research Fellowship is to provide a stipend to promote research during the academic year or summer months using the resources of the Friends Historical Library and/or the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Strong preference will be given to projects utilizing resources only available at Swarthmore. Moore fellows will be asked to give a lecture at Swarthmore College subsequent to and based upon their research at a date agreed upon by the Moore Fellowship Committee and the Moore fellow.

ELIGIBILITY
Those eligible to apply include Swarthmore College students and
faculty, as well as faculty, graduate students, and scholars from
outside the Swarthmore College community.

FUNDING
The amount of the stipend will be announced. (jap)

KEYWORDS:

American History
Religious History
Conflict/Dispute Resolution
Social Change
Peace/Disarmament/Amnesty

Dr. Denise Crossan to join Peace and Conflict Studies Program as Lang Professor

The Peace and Conflict Studies program is thrilled to join the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility in welcoming a new colleague in Peace and Conflict Studies for the 2015-2016 academic year!

Dr. Denise Crossan
Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change
2015-2016

As the Lang Professor, Dr. Denise Crossan will engage with alumni, community members, faculty, staff, and students through instruction, research, and engagement activities surrounding the topics of social innovation and social entrepreneurship.

Dr. Crossan will offer two courses on social entrepreneurship in 2015-2016:

PEAC 039 Social Entrepreneurship for Social Change (Fall 2015)
PEAC 049 Be the Change: Social Entrepreneurship in Principle and Practice (Spring 2016)

Dr. Crossan joined the School of Business at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD) in January 2009 as Ireland’s first Lecturer in Social Entrepreneurship, and is the founding director of TCD’s new center, Initiative on Social Entrepreneurship. There she has taught courses such as “Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation: Organisation and Management,” and has consulted with many groups as they develop earned income strategies to sustain their work for the common good.

All members of the College community are encouraged to connect with Dr. Crossan during her time at Swarthmore as she is an incredible colleague with expertise in the areas of innovation, leadership, NGOs, social entrepreneurship, as well as strategic management and marketing.

Endowed by Eugene M. Lang ’38, the Lang Visiting Professorship brings to Swarthmore outstanding social scientists, political leaders, and social activists whose careers demonstrate sustained engagement with major issues of social justice, civil liberties, human rights, and democracy.

Along with the sponsoring academic program, Peace and Conflict Studies, this Lang Visiting Professorship is co-hosted by the Lang Center.

Stanley Hauerwas to speak on “light”

“How to think about light theologically”
A lecture by Dr. Stanley Hauerwas

Where: Bond Memorial Hall at Swarthmore College (directions)
When: Monday, February 23rd at 7:00 pm

Dr. Stanley Hauerwas is perhaps the most famous American
ethicist-theologian alive today. Dr. Hauerwas is currently the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School where he also holds a joint appointment in the Duke University School of Law.

Among his many honors, Dr. Hauerwas was named in 2001 “America’s best theologian” by TIME magazine. Also in 2001, Hauerwas delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews College in Scotland.

As the country’s foremost Christian pacifist, Hauerwas has written on a wide range of topics from war, peace, law, American politics, the Christian Church and ethics. In ethics, Dr. Hauerwas has been at the forefront of the resurgence of Aristotelian virtue ethics in the American academy.

This task he undertook in collaboration with the equally renowned
philosopher, Dr. Alasdair MacIntyre, with whom he worked and taught for many years. This Monday at 7pm in Bond Memorial Hall, Dr. Hauerwas will speak on the topic “How to think about light theologically.” Don’t miss this lecture by one of the most famous living pacifists and theologians!

Contact: ekast1

Theater of Witness covers new ranges of emotional spectrum

The following piece appeared in the most recent issue of The Phoenix.

Theater of Witness covers new ranges of emotional spectrum

By Daniel Bidikov on February 12, 2015

Theater of Witness is a series of staged dramatic performances and cinema pieces through which subjects recount complex personal histories. It was brought to Swarthmore on Monday, February 10 by its founder and director Teya Sepinuck. Sepinuck served as adjunct faculty in member in the college’s dance department for almost 20 years before leaving to found the Philadelphia-based TOVA: Artistic Projects for Social Change in 1991. More recently, she has been in Northern Ireland expanding the Theater of Witness program.The program opened with Sepinuck reading a short passage from her book, describing an encounter with children who were unwitting victims of war. It seemed generic, too distant to be meaningful. Sepinuck then moved towards presenting the actual “theater” of witness.She started with some footage of a young boy narrating on and off camera, accompanied by footage of his Philadelphia neighborhood. It is part of a piece connecting mothers of young gang violence victims to the perpetrators of said violence. The relationship between victim and perpetrator is essential and unique to Sepinuck’s work.“It’s harder to identify with the perpetrator,” said Sepinuck. “But it’s important.”

After a brief and interesting, if not completely comprehensive, introduction to the methods of the program, Sepinuck showed a few particularly powerful Theater of Witness performances.The first video featured a man named Hakim Ali telling his story. Ali had committed acts of gang violence, and had not spoken about it or outwardly reflected on it before participating in Sepinuck’s program.

“It’s very healing,” said Sepinuck.

On stage he is full of emotion, the kind of regret and loss that is easy to feel and almost impossible to communicate. Sepinuck shared a story about how the mothers of victims and convicted perpetrators alike were in tears, moved to unabridged expression by the stories of their sons. But none of them were shown on screen, and the distance remained.

Next was the story of a couple from Sepinuck’s film “Raising Our Voice.” The work was inspired by a man who called Sepinuck, requesting to participate after having seen one of her programs. He confessed to committing domestic abuse and told Sepinuck that he kept hearing her name when he was praying. The film opens with a monologue from the man’s wife, who decided to participate in the program after watching him. She fights tears on screen as she outlines a history of helplessness and running away, ending on a note of strength and confidence. The scene then cuts to the man’s own story as the film follows him through a saga of masculine pressure that poisoned his protective instincts of love. The two end up on stage together, dancing closely. The “healing” capability that Sepinuck had referred to earlier was more than just cathartic introspection. It unifies parties that have damaged each other. As the couple dances on screen, there is not exactly forgiveness, but there is still love.

Sepinuck then presented her more recent work on the lives of those who had lost loved ones due to separatist and military violence in northern Ireland. She showed individually narrated short films: one of a young woman named Victoria, whose father was killed in an IRA related bomb attack and one of a young man named Fionbarr, whose father died at the hands of suspicious British police. Sepinuck then showed a Theater of Witness project featuring a young woman who had given herself to the IRA years ago as she tells the story of her impassioned extremism and its abrupt end due to a brain hemorrhage. She is then shown on stage together with the wives of men killed by IRA activity, in an example of the show’s careful exploration of the relativism of innocence and the universality of pain.

To conclude, Sepinuck showed material from her film “Living with Life”, a Theater of Witness project done at the State Correctional Institute in nearby Chester. A group of men sentenced to life in prison are interviewed about their free lives and current emotions at an unexpected, almost inconceivable depth. This is followed by their performance of an original composition by the prisoners, about how they must hold on to some fragments of sanity while confined. It is a perspective on life that, as consumers of a media saturated with grotesquely fantasized prison environments, is almost never seen.

Lakey workshop “Get on your feet: Organizing for Peaceful Protest”

GET ON YOUR FEET: ORGANIZING FOR PEACEFUL PROTEST
A workshop with George Lakey

Thursday, February 26
7:00 – 10:30 p.m.
Keith Room – Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility
Swarthmore College (Directions)

You *can* go beyond the boring limits of choosing between a march or a rally by coming to this workshop and learning about:

action logic
edgy actions
using actions leadership development
maximizing the empowerment potential of the actions you design
one-offs vs. campaigns

The workshop includes question time on the use of nonviolent direct action compared with other techniques for social change.

George Lakey is formerly a Lang Professor in Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College. He founded the Global Nonviolent Action Database.

Dr. Sa’ed Atshan to join faculty in Peace and Conflict Studies

We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Sa’ed Atshan will join the Peace and Conflict Studies program for the fall semester of 2015!

Professor Atshan will offer a range of exciting new courses!:

PEAC 003 Crisis Resolution in the Middle East (Spring 2016)
PEAC 015 Introduction to Peace and Conflict Studies (Fall 2015)
PEAC 043 Gender, Sexuality, and Social Change (Spring 2016)
PEAC 053 Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Fall 2015)
PEAC 103 Humanitarianism: Anthropological Approaches (This is a two-credit seminar, cross-listed with ANTH) (Spring 2016)

Dr. Atshan graduated from Harvard University in 2013 with a Ph.D. in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies. He holds an M.A. in Social Anthropology from Harvard, an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a B.A. in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies from Swarthmore College. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

Over the past six years, Atshan has regularly taught “Introduction to Peace and Justice Studies” in the Peace and Justice Studies Program at Tufts University, where he has also taught courses on “The Arab Spring and Nonviolent Strategic Action” and “Gender, Sexuality, and Human Rights in the Middle East.”

Dr. Atshan designed and taught courses at Harvard and Brown on social movements in the Middle East and the Arab Spring, among other topics. He has earned four of Harvard’s excellence in undergraduate teaching awards along the way.

Sa’ed has won multiple awards and fellowships from important organizations that include the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation, and in 2009, he was awarded a Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace.

In addition to his work on humanitarian politics and aid intervention, Atshan has conducted research into nonviolent Israeli and Palestinian social movements, countering old characterizations of nonviolence as foreign to the region. Instead he discovers and reveals “co-resistance” or coalition and joint struggles for social justice between Israeli and Palestinian activists.

Professor Atshan has worked with a range of organizations that include Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Seeds of Peace International Camp, the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department, and Medical Aid for Palestinians, all indicating his commitment to the practical pursuit of peace and justice to which our field aspires.

We look forward to having such an innovative scholar and teacher join our program!

Engaging Human Differences: a teach in with Professor David Kyuman Kim

Engaging Human Differences:
A teach in with Professor David Kyuman Kim

February 19, 2015
7:00 – 9:00 p.m. in Kohlberg Hall Room 116
Swarthmore College (directions)

Ferguson, Staten Island/NYC, Paris. Philadelphia. In this time of intensifying and proliferating tensions regarding how the law and the police state engage human differences of race, religion, gender, sexuality, and class (amongst many others), the need to find language and spaces of dialogue have become more urgent.

For this event, David Kyuman Kim (Connecticut College scholar of race, religion, and public life) will lead a teach-in with the Swarthmore community taking up these issues, especially as they effect the stakeholders of Swarthmore. A successful teach-in will take the temperature of the constituents of Swarthmore (students, staff, faculty, and local community) in regard to these tensions around race and the like, and build-up an organic dialogue that will serve as a catalyst for on-going conversations at Swarthmore and beyond.

Sample questions:

How has Swarthmore engaged questions of race, religion, and public life?
How have Swarthmore’s initiatives around diversity helped and/or hindered an effective dialogue that enables students, staff, and faculty to engage what is happening in Ferguson, NYC, and beyond?
What discourses around race, religion, gender, sexuality, class, and state authority are working and which are not working at Swarthmore? And how might we begin a conversation to transform these discourses to help equip the community to be more effective in addressing these pressing issues?

This event is part of the ongoing residency: Radical Democracy and Humanism: Intersections between Performance and Action

Update: Feminist Perspectives on Resistance and Solidarity in Palestine and Israel

The event originally announced for March 2 featuring Dr. Simona Sharoni is being updated to include Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi

Feminist Perspectives on Resistance and Solidarity in Palestine and Israel

Dr. Simona Sharoni and Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi

Monday, March 2, 2015
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Bond Memorial Hall
Swarthmore College (directions)

Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi and Dr. Simona Sharoni met over twenty five years ago and have collaborated over the years on multiple scholarly and activist projects. Aside from sharing a life commitment to the struggle of peace with justice in Palestine and Israel, these two prominent feminist scholars have made contributions to other struggles for social, gender and sexual justice in the academy as well as at other international and North American sites.

Abdulhadi and Sharoni will offer such analyses including:

The distorted dominant media coverage of the assault, which ignored the power disparities between Palestinians and Israel
The racist and gendered images and statements deployed by Israeli officials and citizens to legitimize the violence.
The impact of the violence on, and the responses of Palestinian and Israeli women
The response of the international community with particular attention to the growing visibility and impact of the global movement of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), on one hand, and efforts to hold Israeli officials accountable and investigate possible violations of human rights and international conventions.
Prospects for a just and lasting peace in the region in the aftermath of the Israeli war on Gaza and the earlier repressive campaign in the West Bank.

Dr. Simona Sharoni is a feminist scholar, researcher, and activist. She is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at State University of New York in Plattsburgh, and her research includes a comparative analysis of gender dynamics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in the North of Ireland as well as a critical explanation of militarization and masculinities and especially the interplay between political violence and gander-based violence.

She is the author of Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s Resistance and was the founding Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and a founding member of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section at the International Studies Association. For more information about Dr. Sharoni: http://www.plattsburgh.edu/academics/gws/faculty/sharoni.php.

Rabab Abdulhadi is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies/Race and Resistance Studies and the Senior Scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, at the College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University. Before joining SFSU, she served as the first director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. She received her BA (Summa Cum Laude) in Special Honors Curriculum, Sociology and Women’s Studies from Hunter College in New York and her MA, MPhil and PhD from Yale University.

A co-founder and Editorial Board member of the Islamophobia Studies Journal, she co-authored Mobilizing Democracy: Changing US Policy in the Middle East, and co-editor Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging, winner of the 2012 Evelyn Shakir National Arab American non-fiction Book Award, and a special issue of MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies special issue on gender, nation and belonging (2005).Her work has appeared in Al-Shabaka; Gender and Society; Radical History Review; Peace Review; Journal of Women’s History; Taiba: Women and Cultural Discourses; Cuadernos Metodologicos: Estudio de Casos; This Bridge We Call Home; New World Coming: The 1960s and the Shaping of Global Consciousness; Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power and Public Life in America; The Guardian, Al-Fajr; Womanews; Palestine Focus; Voice of Palestinian Women; and several Arabic language publications, such as Falasteen Al-Thahwra; Al-Hadaf; and Al-Hurriyah.

Abdulhadi taught at eight transnational sites of higher education including the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and Birzeit University in Palestine. The recipient of several honors and awards (including the New Century Scholarship, Sterling Fellowship, Phi Beta Kappa, and teaching excellence awards from Yale University and AUC), she serves on the Board of Policy Advisors of the Palestinian Think Tank, Al-Shabaka and the International Advisory Board of the World Congress of Middle East Studies (WOCMES). As a scholar/activist committed to justice-centered scholarship and pedagogy, she co-founded the Union of Palestinian Women’s Associations in North America (UPWA), the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC), California Scholars for Academic Freedom and the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). She co-organized and led several delegations to Palestine made up of Indigenous scholars and scholars of color and has participated in academic, intellectual and public sites in the Global South and North, including World Social Forum in India, Brazil, Kenya, Senegal, and Tunisia.

The event is sponsored by War News Radio, J Street, SPJP, and the Peace and Conflict Studies Department.

For more information on the event, please contact Sabrina Merold (smerold1@swarthmore).