On October 23, 2012, the Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies was pleased to host a talk by Silvia Federici on "Witch-hunting past and present in the global political economy.”  The following is an excerpt from an interview with Prof. Federici with Matthew Carlin.  Prof. Carlin is an Assistant Professor in our department and one of the organizers of the Speakers Series.


Silvia Federici is a long time feminist activist, teacher and writer.
 In 1972s she was a co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the international campaign for wages for housework in the United States and Internationally. In 1990 she was a co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and from 1991 to 2003 she was one of the editors of the CAFA newsletter. In 1995 she helped found the Radical Philosophy Association Anti-Death Penalty Project.
She has taught at the University of Port Harcourt (Nigeria) and she is now Emerita Professor at Hofstra University (Hempstead, New York).
Federici has authored many essays on feminist theory, women’s history, political philosophy and education. Her published books include: Revolution at Point Zero. Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle; Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation; Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and its Others (editor); Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (co-editor).

Stanley Aronowitz, Distinguished professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and one of the key figures in Cultural Studies as well as sociology and the labor movement, will be speaking with Michael Pelias (LIU - Philosophy) on
Friday, December 9th,  from 5:15-7:30, at Pratt Institute Room: 107/ENG Bldg (formerly 110, the lecture room straight ahead from the stairwell upon entering the Engineering building...)

The lecture/presentation "The State of Academic Unionism" is hosted by Pratt Faculty's union, UFCT Local 1460.

Please RSVP ASAP as seating will be limited. Moreover, students, friends, and guests are welcome, but the organizers will need to know just how many to accommodate.
RSVP to Kye Carbone at kyecarbone@gmail.com

Stanley Aronowitz has taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York since 1983, where he is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education. He received his B.A. at the New School in 1968 and his Ph.D from the Union Graduate School in 1975. He studies labor, social movements, science and technology, education, social theory and cultural studies and is director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work at the Graduate Center.
He is author or editor of twenty-five books including: Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters (2008); Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (2006); Just Around Corner (2005); How Class Works (2003); The Last Good Job in America (2001); The Knowledge Factory (2000); The Jobless Future (1994, with William DiFazio); and False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (1973, 1992).
Stanley is founding editor of the journal Social Text and is currently a member of its advisory board. Most recently, he co-founded Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination and serves as co-editor in the journal's editorial collective. He also serves on the advisory board of WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society, and has sat on the editorial boards of Cultural Critique and Ethnography. He has published more than two hundred articles and reviews in publications such as Harvard Educational Review, Social Policy, The Nation, and The American Journal of Sociology. Prior to coming to the Graduate Center he taught at the University of California–Irvine and Staten Island Community College (now The College of Staten Island). He has been visiting professor or scholar at University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Paris VIII, Lund University (Sweden), and Columbia University.

http://www.stanleyaronowitz.org/new/about

Michael Pelias teaches Philosophy at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus. His courses include the ancients, Machiavelli to Nietzsche, Philosophy and Film, Philosophy of Money, and Continental Philosophy since Hegel. He is the co-mananging editor of Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, a member of the 15th Street Manifesto Group and a member of the Long Island University Faculty Federation's negotiating committee.

Author and journalist Christian Parenti of The Nation is coming to Pratt on Monday, September 26 at 6:30PM.  He will be speaking about his latest book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the Future, as well as his other work.


From http://www.pratt-union.org/



Please join the Pratt Faculty Union (UFCT 1460) for a special presentation by Christian Parenti, investigative journalist, contributing editor at The Nation, Puffin Foundation Writing Scholar at The Nation Institute, and visiting scholar at the Brooklyn College Sociology Department.  He is also the author of Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (2000); The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America (2003); and The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (2004).

The world’s developed nations currently face a political, social, and ethical dilemma: how will they react to the ravages of climate change that are affecting undeveloped nations in the global south right now?  These same developed nations must also come to terms with the ways their neo-liberal, neo-colonial policies have helped turn these undeveloped nations into “failed states” that are more vulnerable and less able to respond to climate change.  Parenti’s latest book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011), deftly looks to the past and to the future in an effort to come to grips with the new world order that climate change is bringing about.

In Tropic of Chaos, Parenti argues that the effects of climate change are at the root of violent conflicts breaking out throughout the global south.  He shows how areas in the “tropic of chaos”—East Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, India, and Pakistan—have been made especially vulnerable to climate change due to the effects of both Cold War proxy conflicts and neo-liberal economic restructuring and privatization, and how the West is already preparing for these conflicts through developing the techniques and arsenal associated with counter-insurgency warfare.


For more information, please contact Kye Carbone (kyecarbone@gmail.com) or Suzanne Verderber (sverderb@pratt.edu).

And for those of you who are interested in looking for a little extra inspirational mojo, check out The Education of Shleby Knox (2005). Watch a good, southern, Baptist girl rile up her town when she begins to openly oppose abstinence-only sex education in Lubbock, Texas--a school district with one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy and contracted STDs in America.