Engaged Transregional Thought Track, 2022
Thai Trade Union Pro-Migrant Protest
PACIE Conference, Sept 29-Oct 1, Haverford College
File archive for Track presentations
Thursday, 29 September, 5:45pm-7:20pm Eastern, Stokes 014
PLENARY: “Whose Dignity Can Ground Solidarity against Injustice? Engaged Approaches to Transitional Justice for Race, Caste, & Exile”
How might Pennsylvania and the world center long-excluded voices? Especially those of marginalized racial groups, of people lacking in caste, or of exiles? This plenary session engages these voices, both locally and globally. It considers their ideas about how to transition to a world less wracked by these exclusions. So, for example, it studies their answers to whether BLM reveals that Black dignity is the true human dignity, whether those excluded by the Indian diaspora’s caste system should replace dignity with inner worth as the basis for anti-injustice organizing, whether exile communities deserve a voice in transitional justice processes back in the homeland, and how solidarity economy efforts around the Philly region deal with racial capitalism’s divides.
–Ashwini Vasanthakumar, Queen’s Law School, Kingston, Ontario: “Transitional Justice as Transnational Justice: Why Exile Communities Should Have a Voice in Restorative Processes in the Homeland”
–Craig Borowiak, Political Science, Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania: “Grassroots Economies and Cartographies of Solidarity”
–Vincent Lloyd, Theology & Religious Studies, Villanova U, Villanova, Pennsylvania: “Black Dignity: Between Social Movement and Moral Imagination”
–Luis Cabrera, Govt and Intl Relations, Griffith U, Brisbane, Queensland: “Ambedkar on Dignity vs. Innate Moral Worth”
Chair: Tom Donahue-Ochoa, Haverford College
*
Friday, 30 September, 10:30-11:40am Eastern, Stokes 014
CONCURRENT SESSION: “Engaged Thinking and Historical Practice: The Ideas of South Asian Diasporas”
Among the diasporas shaping our region and the world, the South Asian ones loom large. In the Philly region alone, about 1 in 50 residents has roots in the Subcontinent. And of migrants worldwide, 1 out of every 4 shares this heritage. Hence we all interweave with these diasporas and their members. How then shall we address the ideas they create? This session takes an engaged approach, studying these notions as expressed in political struggles and in the most public-facing registers. Thus it considers the ideas of cross-regional anti-imperial organizing held by South Asian and Irish migrant-activists in Philadelphia in the Roaring 20s, of migrants who saw the Mexican Revolution as a model for overthrowing British rule back in the Subcontinent, of revolutionaries who used public-facing media to challenge that rule, and of subversive thinkers challenging the exclusionary nationalisms stoked by European partitions.
–Michael Rabinder James, Political Science, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: “The Obligations of Cross-Peripheral Post-Imperial Migration”
–Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, International Educational Development Program, UPenn Grad School of Education, Philadelphia: “Connecting the Past to the Present: Transnational Solidarity Movements in 1920s Philadelphia”
–Daniel Kent-Carrasco, Institute for Historical Research, National Autonomous U of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City: “”Internationalism avant la lettre: Pandurang Khankhoje in Mexico“
-Inder Marwah, Political Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario: “Anticolonial Archives in/and the History of Political Thought”
Chair: Tom Donahue-Ochoa, Haverford College
*
Friday, 30 September, 11:45-1:15pm Eastern, Founders Great Hall
LUNCH PLENARY: “What do Sustainability and Sustainable Development Goals have to do with Global Learning and Local Action?“
–Lindsey Lyons, Center for Sustainability Education, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania
–Suzanne Willever, Outreach and Academic Initiatives, Temple U, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
–Breena Holland, Political Science, Lehigh U, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: “The Global Benefits of Community-Engaged Research on Local Air Pollution”
–Kate Manni, Education Abroad, Penn State U, University Park, Pennsylvania
*
Friday, 30 September, 1:30-4pm Eastern, Stokes 014
CONCURRENT SESSION: “Movement-requested Research: Updating Higher Ed’s and Government’s Methods of Listening and Learning from Struggles against Domination”
How would we, as educators and citizens, act if the research enterprise centered the questions put by social movements? What if scholars prioritized investigating those questions? And took pains to share the movements’ assumptions about them? What if they then published their findings in a language accessible to the movements and their members? This session examines different approaches to such movement-requested research. It studies the impacts they would have on how higher education and government learn from struggles for social change. Hence it ponders how movement-driven research and teaching based in Ardmore, Pennsylvania is transforming ideas of how rituals create borders and borders, rituals; how the California Truth and Healing Council is updating the historical record in light of the public testimonies given by members of indigenous peoples in the state; how a movement-centered approach to legal research might hear indigenous voices through the judicial archive; and how examining the problems set by Chief Levi General’s petitions to the League of Nations would reshape prevailing assumptions about Haudenosaunee-settler relations.
–Jill Stauffer, Peace, Justice, and Human Rights, Haverford College: “Land-based governance, decolonial hearing, and learning to listen to difficult stories”
–Catherine Lu, Political Science and Lin Center for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders, McGill U, Montréal, Quebec: “Deparochializing (Global) Justice: Hearing Chief Levi General’s Petition to the League of Nations”
[30-minute break]
–Kouslaa Kessler-Mata, California Truth and Healing Council and Politics, U San Francisco*: “What is important about “Indigenous”? Recentering place-based politics, histories, and futures”
–Molly Farneth, Religion, Haverford College: “Rethinking Campus Borders: Democratic Organizing and/as Pedagogy”
Chair: Tom Donahue-Ochoa, Haverford College
*
Friday, 30 September, 6:30-9pm Eastern, Stokes Auditorium
PLENARY: “Local and Global Participatory Approaches to Challenging Intergenerational Injustices”
What would things be like if those most affected by an injustice partnered with research into it? Currently, academic studies of oppression give the most affected only a subordinate voice in directing their inquiries. What if, instead, the affected took the co-director’s chair? That is the promise of participatory research into injustices. This plenary session explores several participatory takes on intergenerational injustice. It begins with a viewing of a participatory documentary on the intergenerational legacies of the mass internment of Japanese American families during World War II. It then hosts a Q&A with the film’s locally-based producer and writer, examining how its interviews transform prevailing notions about racial inheritance of harm. It then examines a participatory approach to injustice in the Mexican War on Drugs and the US deportation campaign against that country’s members. And it also reflects on learning from students and colleagues at a minority-serving institution. How does that experience transform one’s approach to the injustices done to that minority?
–Juan Espíndola, Institute for Philosophical Research, National Autonomous U of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City: “Forgetting the Forgotten? Amnesties for Members of Indigenous Groups in Mexico’s War on Drugs”
–Andrew Valls, Political Science, Oregon State U, Corvallis, OR: “How working with students at Morehouse College** shaped my conception of racial justice”
–Jerry Miller, Philosophy, Haverford College, and producer and writer, “80 Years Later“: “Q&A: The film interviews and ideas of racial inheritance”
Chair: Tom Donahue-Ochoa, Haverford College
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*= Minority-Serving Institution (Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving)
**= Minority-Serving Institution (Historically Black College or University)