Land of Destiny (2010, 80 min.): A hard-working petrochemical town is rocked by revelations that its workers suffer an epidemic of cancers. But even more terrifying is the looming spectre of deindustrialization and joblessness.

Titled after the lyrics of a 1969 Blue Mink song, Melting Pot, which advocates obliterating difference as a utopian means of “getting along,” this talk–using examples from deSouza’s own artwork–will examine different artistic strategies of erasure, redaction, translation and recuperation, and will further consider cross-disciplinary solidarities between art practices and other fields of investigation. Whether official or oppositional, the very nature of art doesn’t allow it to be fully disciplined within existing structures and hegemonies, and this talk will consider what, if any, radical solidarities may be generated through art’s undisciplined possibilities. [...]

ROGER BERKOWITZ is Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking at Bard College, where he is Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition.

A symposium on North Africa and the Middle East at Queens College

While Haiti’s complex and “cursed” past was often used by journalists to explain its recent and tragic upheaval, these historical retellings frequently did more to malign and undermine the promising cultural and political forces the country was founded on than to illuminate them. How might historians and other academics responsibly and effectively contribute to a global public discourse?

John Holloway's latest book, Crack Capitalism, argues that radical change can only come about through the creation, expansion and multiplication of 'cracks' in the capitalist system. These cracks are ordinary moments or spaces of rebellion in which we assert a different type of doing.

Occupying Language is an open conversation. Through it, we invite you to join us to explore insurgent movements that have been organizing in Latin America over the past twenty years, and to connect key concepts and language from those struggles with what is new and beautiful in the social relations being created by people’s movements in the United States today.

A reflection about the impact of anti-immigration legislation and the dangers that surround in-transit migrants. We will finish with a March of Silence and Vigil to remember the missing migrants

In the spirit of Walter Benjamin's 'now time', let's pull the brake and reflect together about the state of global movements. On Friday, October 26th, 2012, join us for a day of dialogue between scholars and movement participants from Greece, Spain and Occupy.

Economic crises are increasingly a product of the conditions of a global contemporaneity. As such, there is both an increasing convergence between the temporal structures of contemporaneity and crisis – contemporaneity is a temporality of crisis, of a sort – and a growing disjunction between the economic and political temporalities of crises themselves. At a structural level, long-established modes of articulation between processes, events and acts (and the historical narratives associated with them) are breaking down. This lecture reflects upon these issues from the standpoint of the philosophy of historical time. What does the philosophy of historical time have to contribute to rethinking the relations between crises and political action?