The Center for the Study of Women and Society
presents:
Feminist Perspectives on Resistance and Solidarity in Palestine and Israel

Rabab Abdulhadi and Simona Sharoni met over twenty five years ago and have collaborated on multiple projects. They will discuss the following topics: 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 and the growing visibility and impact of the global movement of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), the efforts to hold Israeli officials accountable and investigate possible violations of human rights and international conventions; and 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.

Friday, February 27, 2015
3:00-5:00pm
Room C201
The Graduate Center, CUNY.

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. She is a co-founder of the Islamophobia Studies Journal, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Associations in North America (UPWA), and the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC).

Simona Sharoni is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh. Sharoni is the founding Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA), a founding member of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section (FTGS) at the International Studies Association (ISA), and co-founder of Faculty Against Rape (FAR).

Co-sponsored with the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.

The event is free and open to the public.
For more information see the Women’s Studies website: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/womencenter\

Luz Rivera Martinez of the Consejo National Urbano Campesino (CNUC) and George Caffentzis in conversation.

Friday, February 20, 6-8PM. Room 9204

Headlines about Mexico are wildly divergent. While business magazines proclaim “the Mexican Moment” emerging from a slate of recent reforms, news of the murder and disappearance of nearly 50 rural teacher’s college students by police quickly silenced the applause.

Attacks on the Zapatistas, imprisonment of indigenous leaders defending water, and cover-ups of military executions all point to a rise in extra-judicial violence. Add to this the fact that the recent “reforms” were no less than the privatization of oil, communications, and education resources left pending after NAFTA, and you can see the extent of the turmoil.

But instead of a “troubled neighbor south of the border,” Mexico is home to inspiring movements building autonomy and justice with dignity against great obstacles.

Join Luz Rivera Martinez as she speaks about her 20 years of experience constructing autonomy, organizing outside the electoral system, and resisting genetically modified corn while protecting millennia-old varieties. She works with peasant families in Tlaxcala, Mexico – a state where corn originated, whose name means “place of the corn tortilla,” and where 52 natural varieties of corn are planted. This bountiful grain was created over thousands of years, primarily by women, and has now come to feed the world.

Just as corn is a gift of sustenance and rejuvenation Mexicans have given to all of humanity, Mexican movements such as Luz’s Consejo Nacional Urbano Campesino (CNUC) are guiding us toward daybreak after the long, cold night of neoliberalism.

George Caffentzis will join Luz in conversation with an update on the present status of the Zapatistas’ project

BIOS

Luz Rivera established CNUC in the early 1990s to coordinate resistance to the impending North American Free Trade Agreement, especially regarding its dismemberment of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, which enshrined the Mexican Revolution’s battle cry that “the land belongs to those who work it.” Luz and the members of CNUC knew that NAFTA would decimate the small-scale agricultural sector that the Revolution had established at such a great cost.

As CNUC’s lead organizer, Luz has worked tirelessly to demand government accountability, defend family farms, resist the use of GMO seeds, and build inspiring, community-based autonomous projects. CNUC has a long history of disposing of corrupt leaders, democratizing the budget, coordinating community-driven infrastructure projects, including peoples’ history in education, and expanding access to healthcare.

CNUC also joins voices with organizations around Mexico and around the world denouncing State-sponsored violence and rebuilding the social fabric. As an adherent to the Zapatistas’ Sixth Declaration – an international network of organizations struggling against neoliberalism and for autonomy from the grassroots – Luz and CNUC fight tirelessly to build “a world where many worlds fit,” a world for the people of all the colors of corn.

George Caffentzis is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine, and a member of the Midnight Notes Collective and Strike Debt. He has written extensively on commoning and enclosures, especially since teaching at the University of Calabar in Nigeria for five years in the mid-1980s. That is where and when he realized that primitive accumulation of capitalism is an on-going process and that commoning has been an essential weapon in class struggle. His articles on the commons and commoning include “Commons Against and Beyond Capitalism” (with Silvia Federici), and “The Future of ‘The Commons’: Neoliberalism’s ‘Plan B’ or the Original Disaccumulation of Capital?”

The Mexico Solidarity Network is an organization dedicated to popular education and autonomous community organizing. In addition to our community work in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood and speaking tours, MSN also administers a unique, social justice-oriented study abroad program that allows students to learn about grassroots movements in Mexico by living with the families that comprise them, including members of CNUC. For more information, visit www.mexicosolidarity.org/studyabroad

This event is sponsored by The Mexico-US Solidarity Network and Center for Place Culture and Politics, Graduate Center, CUNY.  The event is free and open to the public.

The People, Place, and Space Reader Book Launch
with editors Jen Jack Gieseking, William Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert
February 19th, 2015
6.30-8.30 pm
Skylight Room (8th Floor), Graduate Center, CUNY.

Each film will be advertised here separately with the time and location

Join us for a screening of My Brooklyn

February 17th, 2015 at 7:00 pm / Skylight Room.

Followed by a discussion with Kelly Anderson (Filmmaker and Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College), Sharon Zukin (Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center), and Sara Martucci (Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center).

My Brooklyn is a documentary about Director Kelly Anderson’s personal journey, as a Brooklyn “gentrifier,” to understand the forces reshaping her neighborhood along lines of race and class. The story begins when Anderson moves to Brooklyn in 1988, lured by cheap rents and bohemian culture. By Michael Bloomberg’s election as mayor in 2001, a massive speculative real estate boom is rapidly altering the neighborhoods she has come to call home. She watches as an explosion of luxury housing and chain store development spurs bitter conflict over who has a right to live in the city and to determine its future. While some people view these development patterns as ultimately revitalizing the city, to others, they are erasing the eclectic urban fabric, economic and racial diversity, creative alternative culture, and unique local economies that drew them to Brooklyn in the first place. It seems that no less than the city’s soul is at stake.

Please join us for the launch of the Fair Food Program’s 2014 Annual Report

Thursday, December 11th, 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Room 9206,  The Graduate Center, CUNY

Watch the livestream here: http://videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu/videos/video/2488/?live=true

Presentation by:

Lucas Benitez, Co-Founder, Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Sean Sellers, Co-Founder and Senior Investigator, Fair Food Standards Council

Judge Laura Safer Espinoza, Executive Director, Fair Food Standards Council

Roundtable discussion with:

Erik Brown, Senior Global Produce and Floral Buyer, Whole Foods Market

Janice Fine, Associate Professor, School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University

Greg Tzeutschler Regaignon, Research Director, Business and Human Rights Resource Centre

Moderator: Cathy Albisa, Executive Director, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative

To see the report, please go to:
http://fairfoodstandards.org/reports/14SOTP-Web.pdf

Click here for more information and to reserve your spot<http://www.nesri.org/sites/all/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=6140&qid=142026>.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.
It is open and free to the public.