Fall Series Brings Together Students and Senior Citizens on Challenging Topics
CHALLENGE AND CHANGE: CRITIQUING THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
The Fall 2018 Senior Citizen Lecture Series Challenge and Change: Critiquing the American Experience continues October 16th at 11:10 a.m. in Founders Hall with the Dr. Frank Greene Honors Lecture by Tabitha St. Bernard-Jacobs, SFC alumna and former organizer for the Women's March.
The lecture series brings together current St. Francis College students with senior citizens from the Brooklyn community for an exchange of opinions and viewpoints about hot button issues of the day. The series is organized by Emily Horowitz, Chair of the Sociology and Criminal Justice Department and Athena Devlin, Chair of the English Department.
All events will be held on Tuesdays at 11:10 a.m. in Room 4202 unless otherwise noted.
Schedule of Events:
October 16 - Becoming an Activist - Dr. Frank Greene Honors Lecture
**Founders Hall**
Tabitha St. Bernard (SFC graduate, organizer of Women's March) on Becoming an Activist (Frank Greene Lecture - Honors Program Event)
Tabitha St. Bernard-Jacobs is a St. Francis graduate, and served as Youth Initiative Coordinator of the Women's March. She is also a fashion activist who runs the zero-waste clothing label, Tabii Just. An advocate for fair and ethical labor for garment workers, Tabitha works with schools, conferences and non-profits to educate people about the global effects of fast fashion on small manufacturing communities. She is a go-to speaker on zero waste in the fashion industry and methods of reducing waste for a fashion brand from the first step of sourcing fabric or designing to empowering the customer with knowledge to re-usable packing materials. She has shown collections during New York Fashion Week and dressed prominent women for the red carpet - her work has been exhibited at Princeton University and the Brooklyn Navy Yard Museum. She also writes about raising a biracial child in America with her husband on their blog, currybagel.com. She has written about dealing with race relations as an interracial family for several publications, such as The Stir and Huffington Post.
October 23 - J. Edgar Hoover: Sex, Lies & Political History
**Maroney Theater, 7th floor** Claire Potter (History, The New School) on J. Edgar Hoover: Sex, Lies & Political History
Claire Potter is a Professor of History in the School of Public Engagement at The New School for Social Research, and the Executive Editor of Public Seminar, and Director of the Digital Humanities Initiative, which (among other projects) hosts OutHIstory.org, a digital history platform devoted to supporting research on LGBTQ history. Her research and teaching areas are in United States history after 1970, political history, the histories of gender and sexuality, mass culture, media and Internet Studies. She is the author of War on Crime: Bandits, G-men, and the Politics of Mass Culture (1998), the first book to show that the FBI's militarization of popular culture in the 1930s helped to create the strong New Deal state in the public mind. Her other works include: Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back (2012), and Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back (2012). She was the author of the blog and column "Tenured Radical" (now her Twitter handle) at The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as the author of articles for Dissent, The Village Voice, Inside Higher Education, and Jacobin.
October 30 - They Said No to Nixon: The Heroes in the Nixon Administration Who Took Him Down
Michael Koncewicz on They Said No to Nixon: The Heroes in the Nixon Administration Who Took Him Down
Michael Koncewicz teaches History at St. Francis College and directs the Cold War archival collections at the Tamiment Library. He received his Ph.D. in History at UC Irvine (2014), his M.A. in History at UMass Amherst (2008), and B.A. from Central Connecticut State University (2006). He is the author of They Said No to Nixon: Republicans Who Stood Up to the President's Abuses of Power (University of California Press, 2018).
November 6 - Transitions in the Women's Movement: From Sexual Liberation to Carceral Feminism
Judith Levine on Transitions in the Women's Movement: From Sexual Liberation to Carceral Feminism
Judith Levine is the author of four books and countless articles exploring politics, policy, and public emotion, especially at the intersection of sex and justice. Levine is best known for her 2002 book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, winner of 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and named by SIECUS, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, as one of history's most influential books about sexuality. She is also the author of Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping (2015), a witty journal in which she examines consumerism and anti-consumerist movements. Not Buying It has been translated into five languages.
November 13 - Film Screening: Riker's An American Jail
Screening of Riker's and Q & A with Post-Prison Students - Mass Incarceration and The New Jim Crow
RIKERS: AN AMERICAN JAIL, a riveting new award-winning documentary from Bill Moyers, brings you face to face with men and women who have endured incarceration at Rikers Island. The United States is facing a crisis of mass incarceration with over 2.2 million people packed into its jails and prisons. To understand the human toll of this crisis, Rikers Island is a good place to start. Of the more than 7,500 people detained at Rikers Island on any given day, almost 80% have not yet been found guilty or innocent of the charges they face. All are at risk in the pervasive culture of violence that forces people to come to terms with what they must do for their own survival. Their stories, told directly to camera, vividly describe the cruel arc of the Rikers experience-from the shock of entry, to the extortion and control exercised by other inmates, the oppressive interaction with corrections officers, the beatings and stabbings, the torture of solitary confinement and the many challenges of returning to the outside world.
**Wednesday, November 14** - St. Francis College Inaugural Conference Prison, Punishment, & Possibilities
2:30pm Callahan Center
Welcome and Introduction by President Martinez-Saenz & Elected Officials
3:00pm Founders Hall
Documentary Screening -- COOLER BANDITS //Q & A w/Director JOHN LUCAS + Subjects/President Martinez-Saenz
From Indiewire: In 1991, four African-American teenagers made the choice to engage in a series of robberies without considering how the consequences of their actions would irrevocably alter their lives. Although no one was physically injured these young men received sentences of up to 500 years. COOLER BANDITS documents these men in their respective stages of incarceration as they fight to maintain relationships...and reintegrate into society after spending their adult lives incarcerated."
**Thursday, November 15** - St. Francis College Inaugural Conference Prison, Punishment, & Possibilities
9:35am Maroney Forum
An Interfaith dialogue on forgiveness and redemption: Religious perspectives on helping currently and formerly incarcerated men and women
11:10am Founders Hall
Theater for Social Change Performance
Theater for Social Change is a performance ensemble that uses theater to raise awareness about the impact of mass incarceration on women, families, and communities. TSC's original performances are based on ensemble members' life stories and experiences with the criminal justice system and as returning citizens, with a focus on eliminating barriers to higher education and advocating for reform.
1:20pm Maroney Forum
Reimagining Re-entry: The St. Francis Post-Prison Program
2:45pm Maroney Forum
Revitalizing Prison Programs: Innovative Programming at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center
Coordinated by Dr. Michelle Gantt, Supervisor of Education, Metropolitan Detention Center, Federal Bureau of Prisons
November 20 - Film Screening: What Happened Miss Simone?
What Happened Miss Simone? Directed by Liz Garbus, chronicles the life of American singer Nina Simone, who became a civil rights activist and moved to Liberia following the turbulence of the 1960s. The documentary combines previously unreleased archival footage and interviews with Simone's daughter and friends. We will follow the screening with a conversation led by St. Francis College history professor Sara Rzeszutek, author of James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement (University of Kentucky Press, 2015).
November 27 - Film Screening: Strong Island
Screening of STRONG ISLAND (Directed by Yance Ford, 2017)
STRONG ISLAND (film screening). From The New Yorker: "In Yance Ford's powerful, disturbing, and very personal documentary, details are important. What happened in 1992 was the murder of Yance's own brother, William Ford, Jr., who grew up in the black enclave of Central Islip. He was shot in the chest with a rifle by Mark Reilly, a young white man. The shop's owner had a record of running a shady business. William Ford had no record and was about to take the entrance exam to be a corrections officer. Ford's mother, Barbara Dunmore Ford, an educator who founded Rosewood, a school for women on Rikers Island, says in "Strong Island" that she will believe until her dying day that the grand jury of twenty-three white people did not return a true bill because her son was a black man. As the documentary makes plain, the grand jury didn't care to find out what really happened." Strong Island was nominated for an Academy Award.
November 29 - Q&A with Yance Ford, Director of Strong Island
**Thursday**
Q & A + Discussion with Yance Ford
Yance Ford -- From IMDB: "Yance Ford is director of Strong Island, winner of the Special Jury Award for Storytelling at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Ford is Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program a MacDowell Colony fellow, a Creative Capital Grantee (Theo Westenberger Award) and has been featured in Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film. He is a former Series Producer of POV, a graduate of Hamilton College and the Production Workshop at Third World Newsreel. The Guardian said of his directorial debut "There's something different about Strong Island, however, a film characterized by raw emotion and calm anger, which must surely be considered one of the finest documentaries of 2017 already."
*All events in Lecture Hall 4202 unless otherwise stated