Author Archives: Lee Smithey

Aviva and Noam Chomksy to speak on economic development and the environment

The Peace and Conflict Studies program at Swarthmore College is pleased to be a co-sponsor of this upcoming event. Please mark your calendars.

Whose Planet? Whose Economic Development?

Jobs vs. Environment in the United States and Latin America

November 12, 2013

Aviva Chomsky lecture: 4:30 p.m.

Noam Chomsky lecture: 7:00 p.m.

Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema

Swarthmore College

Directions

Aviva Chomsky is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Her most recent books include A History of the Cuban Revolution, Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class, and They Take Our Jobs! And Twenty Other Myths about Immigration. She has been active in Latin America solidarity and immigrants’ rights movements for several decades.

Noam Chomsky joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955, where he is institute professor and professor of linguistics emeritus. Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs, and United States foreign policy. Among his recent books are New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind; On Nature and Language; The Essential Chomsky; Hopes and Prospects; Gaza in Crisis; How the World Works; 9-11: Was There an Alternative?; Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire, and Resistance; The Science of Language; Peace with Justice: Noam Chomsky in Australia; and Power Systems.

Contact:

Phone: (610) 328-8000

Email: calendar@swarthmore.edu

Thanks to Mary Walton for her lecture on Alice Paul ’05 and Mabel Vernon ’06

We would like to thank author Mary Walton for her lecture this afternoon on the courageous work of Swarthmore alums Alice Paul ’05 and Mabel Vernon ’06 in their organizing and nonviolent campaigns to secure the vote for women in the United States.

A standing-room only crowd of people from the Swarthmore community and the local community gathered in the Scheuer Room to celebrate the International Day of Peace, the College’s sesquicentennial, and 125 years since the first peace studies course in higher education was taught at Swarthmore. The audience expressed their appreciation for Ms. Walton’s presentation with extended applause.

We would like to thank all of our co-sponsors who made this event a success, including Peace Day Philly for including our event in the city-wide celebration of the International Day of Peace.

Sponsors: Peace and Conflict Studies, the President’s Office, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Friends Historical Library, History Department, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Women’s Resource Center, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, English Literature Department, and Political Science Department.

How death penalty defense lawyers cope with stress and trauma

Fighting for Their Lives — A Talk by Susannah Sheffer ‘86

Friday, Sept. 27, 2013, 3:00 – 4:30 p.m.

Lang Center, Keith Room, Swarthmore College

Download a flyer.

Directions to Swarthmore College

How do attorneys who represent clients facing the death penalty cope with the stress and trauma of their work? What is it like to work so hard and lose so often?

Through conversations with twenty of the most experienced and dedicated post-conviction capital defenders in the United States, Susannah Sheffer explores this emotional territory for the first time in her new book, “Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experiences of Capital Defense Attorneys.”

From these capital defenders we can learn not only about the deep and long-term effects of the death penalty but also about broader human questions of hope, effectiveness, success, failure, strength, fragility, and perseverance.

“I am grateful to Susannah Sheffer for bringing these stories to light.” – Sister Helen Prejean, author of “Dead Man Walking.”

Susannah Sheffer (Swarthmore ’86) is Project Director and Staff Writer at Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, a non-profit organization of families of murder victims and families of people who have been executed. In addition to “Fighting for Their Lives” (Vanderbilt University Press), her poetry collection “This Kind of Knowing” was also published this year by Cooper Dillon Books.

Sponsored by Lang Center for Social & Policy Studies, Philosophy Department, Religion Department, and Pre-Law Advising Office.

Nimesh Ghimire wins image competition for Peace Innovation Lab

Just spotted this on the facebook page for the Peace Innovation lab in Nepal, co-founded by Nimesh Ghimere ’15:

Peace Innovation Lab’s Nimesh Ghimire was adjudged one of the winners of a regional image competition organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) – Bangkok.

Nimesh’s work (a photograph taken while on his way to our Lab in Lamjung) will be displayed – alongside other top submissions from the Asia-Pacific region – in the “Learning to Live Together” Asia-Pacific Exhibition, to be held in Bangkok, Thailand between 17-22 September at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center.

Mark your calendars: Alice Paul ’05, Mabel Vernon ’06, and the Battle for the Ballot

Mark your calendars for the College’s first sesquicentennial celebration event, a talk by author Mary Walton:

A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul ’05, Mabel Vernon ’06, and the Battle for the Ballot

Mary Walton

September 19, 2013; 4:15 p.m.

Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College

Maps and directions

Download a flyer

Mary Walton

On September 19th, Peace and Conflict Studies and co-sponsors will celebrate the International Day of Peace, 125 years of peace and conflict studies at Swarthmore College, and the start of the College’s Sesquicentennial with a talk by Mary Walton, author of A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot. The focus of Walton’s talk will be Alice Paul (Class of 1905) and her friend and fellow Swarthmore alum, Mabel Vernon (Class of 1906).

A New Jersey Quaker, Alice Paul was the leader of the militant wing of the suffrage movement from 1913 to 1920. Hers was a David-and-Goliath struggle to convince a reluctant congress and a stubborn president to give women the vote. Paul and her followers were the first people to picket the White House. They were arrested, thrown in jail, brutalized and force fed when they went on hunger strikes. A pioneer in non-violent resistance, she was to suffrage what Gandhi was to Indian independence, what Martin Luther King Jr. was to civil rights.

In 1913, Mabel Vernon gladly gave up teaching to join her college friend, Alice Paul, in working full time for the Congressional Union. From that day on, she devoted her life to suffrage and other causes. Mabel Vernon was among the most militant suffragists. In 1916, she stood up in a full auditorium and heckled President Wilson as he spoke about democracy. Vernon picketed the White House and was among the first suffragists to go to jail.

Mary Walton is the author of four previous works of nonfiction. She was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer for many years where she wrote more than a hundred magazine stories as a staff writer for the Sunday Inquirer Magazine. She has also written for the New York Times, Washingtonian, theWashington Monthly, and the American Journalism Review. After graduation from Harvard University, and a turn at social work and community organizing, Walton began her journalism career in 1969 as a reporter for the Charleston (WV) Gazette.

International Day of Peace 2013

Bibliographic links for photographs.

David Kairys to deliver Constitution Day Lecture on Supreme Court speech law

Peace and Conflict Studies is pleased to be a co-sponsor of this year’s Constitution Day Lecture featuring Prof. David Kairys (Temple University)

Kairys is a leading constitutional scholar and civil rights lawyer. He is widely known for his creative and regularly successful strategies and legal theories on civil rights and liberties, police abuse, criminal defense, and government and corporate misconduct. His latest book is Philadelphia Freedom, Memoir of a Civil Rights Lawyer.

New peace and conflict studies logo celebrating 125 years since first course taught

This summer, we announced on our blog that we are celebrating 125 years since the first peace studies course in higher education, “Elements of International Law with special attention to the important subjects of Peace and Arbitration,” was taught at Swarthmore by Professor William Penn Holcomb in 1888. Read more.

Today, we are unveiling a commemorative logo to celebrate this historical achievement and the College’s commitment to the field through its Program in Peace and Conflict Studies.

Video by George Lakey on Nonviolent Action

Professor George Lakey produced a video this summer drawing on the Global Nonviolent Action Database for a new curriculum being developed by the United Nations Institute for Training and Development (UNITAR) in Geneva, Switzerland. The video outlines three different applications of nonviolent action/civil resistance.

An invitation to help conceptualize a mural on campus

For Swarthmore students, staff, and faculty:

As part of the Mellon-funded Tri-College Creative Residencies Program, David “Dee” Craig, a mural artist from Belfast, Northern Ireland, will come to the Tri-Colleges for a month-long residency immediately following Fall Break.

Part of the residency will involve painting a mural on our campus, and we would like to invite anyone who is interested in helping to conceptualize the content of the mural to join us for discussion on *Thursday, September 5 at 4:00 p.m. in Kohlberg 228 and on *Wednesday, September 11 at 4:00 p.m. in Kohlberg 228.

For more information on the artist and the residency, visit http://bit.ly/16WRWmQ

Stay tuned for more announcements about events related to the residency.

Craig mural at the 2007 Smithsonian Folklife Festival

The passing of a poet: Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013

We join with so many others around the world today in grieving the loss of 1995 Nobel Poet Laureate and 1994 Swarthmore honorary degree recipient, Seamus Heaney. He was aged 74.

In some of his work, Heaney expressed the deep grief generated by violent conflict in Northern Ireland and nurtured the possibility of hard-won peace. Here are lines from the chorus at the end of “The Cure at Troy,” Heaney’s translation of “The Philoctetes,” by Sophocles.

Human beings suffer,

They torture one another,

They get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

Can fully right a wrong

Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols

Beat on their bars together.

A hunger-striker’s father

Stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that further shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracle

And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:

The utter, self-revealing

Double-take of feeling.

If there’s fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

The outcry and the birth-cry

Of new life at its term.

See a photo tribute to Heaney at the Irish Times.

Photo attribution: By Sean O’Connor, cropped by Sabahrat (File:Seamus Heaney.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASeamus_Heaney_(cropped).jpg