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This is a record of ISHA's past events and activities, including our annual ISHA Lecture, as well as speakers and colloquia. Click on the quick links below for further information. • ISHA Lecture 2001: Dominick La Capra • ISHA Lecture 2002: Vandana Shiva • Colloquia and Speakers: Sindiwe Magona • Colloquia and Speakers: Malcolm Purkey • Speakers and Colloquia: Peter Taylor Annual ISHA Lecture ISHA Lecture 2001: Dominick LaCapra Dominick LaCapra, Director of the School of
Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, gave a talk entitled
‘Trauma and its Vicissitudes’ at the University of Massachusetts
on May 6 2002. Dominick LaCapra is Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor
of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University, where he also serves
as director of the Society for the Humanities, one of the foremost
humanities centers in the United States. He is author of eleven
books including History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998) and Writing
History, Writing Trauma (2001). His most recent work deals with
trauma and psychoanalysis as a tool for reformulating historical
enquiry, particularly in the area of Holocaust studies. While always affirming the importance of careful critical enquiry, including archival research, LaCapra has insisted that historians must confront critically and constructively the challenges posed to established historical forms of investigation by recent critical currents, such as poststructuralism and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. Along with his role in the historical profession, LaCapra has also had considerable influence in other humanistic and socio-scientific disciplines, especially in terms of the need to generate a mutually informative relation between history and critical theory. In addition to Holocaust studies, he has also made contributions to French studies, the history of philosophy, the history of social theory and psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and comparative literature. ISHA Lecture 2002: Vandana Shiva Internationally renowned environmentalist Vandana Shiva will give a talk entitled ‘Earth Democracy: The World Beyond Globalization’ on November 21, 2002 at 7:30 p.m. in Memorial Hall, University of Massachusetts. The lecture is free and open to the public. Dr. Shiva’s visit is the Second Annual ISHA (Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities and Fine Arts) Lecture, and her topic pertains to the current seminar’s theme of Stewardship and Sustainability. Dr. Shiva is the Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy, a network of researchers specializing in sustainable agriculture and development. She is also Ecology Adviser to the Third World Network, which aims to bring about a greater voice for people in the Third World along with fair and ecologically sustainable distribution of world resources. Vandana Shiva received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Western Ontario. She later shifted her focus to interdisciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy, subjects she studied at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. In 1982, she founded The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, an independent institute to help further local community action and assist broader social movements. Located in DehraDun, the foundation is dedicated to high quality and independent research to address significant ecological and social issues. In 1991, she founded Navdanya, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seeds. Shiva has contributed in fundamental ways to changing the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food. Her books, The Violence of Green Revolution and Monocultures of the Mind have become basic challenges to the dominant paradigm of non-sustainable agriculture. Her most recent publication is Water Wars. Furthermore, Shiva’s contributions to gender issues are nationally and internationally recognized. Her book, Staying Alive dramatically shifted he perception of third world women. In 1990 she wrote a report for the FAO on women and agriculture entitled, Most Farmers in India are Women. She founded the gender unit at the International Center for Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu. More recently, she has initiated an international movement of women working for food, agriculture, patents, and biotechnology called Diverse Women for Diversity. Shiva has been a visiting professor and lectured at the Universities of Oslo, Norway, Schumacher College (UK), Mt. Holyoke College. She currently lectures at York University, Canada, University of Lulea, Sweden, University of Victoria, Canada, and at organizations and institutions worldwide on the environment, feminism and economic development; recently, she spoke at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa. Besides her academic and research contributions, Shiva has also served as an adviser to governments in India and abroad as well as NGOs such as the International Forum on Globalization, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, and the Third World Network. South African writer and activist Sindiwe Magona gave a talk entitled ‘South Africa Now: What the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Left Out’ on Wednesday, April 10, 2002. Magona was born in 1943 in the Transkei region of South Africa and was raised in the brutal conditions of the black townships of Cape Flats in Cape Town. She has written two autobiographical works, To My Children’s Children and Forced to Grow. To My Children’s Children (1991) won the NOMA Award, a prestigious publishing award in Africa. She has also published two collections of short stories, Living, Loving, and Lying Awake at Night (1994) and Push-push! and Other Stories (1996). Magona’s most recent work, a novel entitled Mother to Mother (1998), is based on the real life murder of Amy Biehl, an American Fulbright scholar who was killed while helping to organize democratic elections in South Africa. Biehl’s death in 1993, mere months before the end of the apartheid regime, received international attention, sparked many to mourn her loss, sympathize with her parents, and call for the punishment of her killers. In Mother to Mother, Magona explores the murder from the perspective of the fictionalized mother of one of Biehl’s four black, South African killers. Without rationalizing of attempting to justify the killing, Magona’s novel depicts the social circumstances that lead to Biehl’s death. The novel aligns two mothers, one white American and one black South African, by showing that in the context of this murder, both women lose a child to the institutionalized racism of apartheid. Magona attended the University of London, and she earned her B.A. in psychology and history from the University of South Africa in Pretoria. In her twenties and thirties, Magona worked for change in the South African townships by speaking via women’s, youth, and church groups. She began writing in the 1980s after coming to New York in 1981 to attend Columbia University and pursue a degree in social work. She was later hired by the United Nations where, until the end of apartheid in 1994, she hosted a UN radio program. Magona currently lives in the United States and is employed by the United Nations’ Department of Public Information. Sindiwe Magona’s visit was co-sponsored by Chancellor Marcellette Williams; Lee Edwards, Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts; ISHA (the Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities and Fine Arts); and the departments of anthropology, history, and English. Malcolm Purkey Residency: April 2001 For two weeks, from April 2nd to April 12th 2001, the noted South African theater director, Malcolm Purkey, will be Artist in Residence in the Five College Area, hosted by Mount Holyoke College (Department of English), the University of Massachusetts (Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities and Fine Arts), and Smith College (Department of Theatre). Purkey was a founding member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa, one of the most innovative and inspiring companies active through the apartheid years and into the post-apartheid era. Performing plays such as Sophiatown in the ‘liberated space’ of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, Junction Avenue pushed the limits of the possible under apartheid. The Workshop was an inter-racial, democratic theater company, and it worked through humor and Brechtian maneouvre as much as through direct politics. Sophiatown was a tremendous success not only in South Africa, but across the globe, being performed in venues such as the Edinburgh Festival as well as in Europe and the United States. More recently, the Workshop has been active again, its new play, Love, Crime and Johannesburg, testing the realities of post-apartheid South Africa. For more than two decades, Malcolm Purkey has been a driving force for South African theater, a director/collaborator of tremendous energy and vision, and his residency will be inspirational for Five College undergraduate and graduate students of theater, literature, and African studies, as well as for faculty in these fields. Purkey’s appearances ranged from being open to the public at large, to being targeted towards undergraduate students, or graduate students and faculty. The key events were as follows. * April 2nd: Malcolm Purkey, lecture, ‘The Junction Avenue Theatre Company and the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Johannesburg’, free and open to the public, 7.30 p.m., Hooker Auditorium, Mt Holyoke College. * April 5th and April 12th: two-part graduate/faculty seminar, hosted by the Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities and Fine Arts, UMass, 4-6 p.m., office of Lee Edwards, Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, South College, UMass. * April 11th: directing workshop for students from UMass Theater Department, New World Theater, Smith College and Mt Holyoke College, and other students from the Five-College area, 1.30-4.30p.m., Rand Theater, UMass * In addition, Malcolm Purkey’s wife, Pippa Stein, an authority on multiliteracies in cross-race, cross-class settings, gave a talk entitled ‘Rights, Representation and Resources’, Wed, April 11th, 4 p.m., Bartlett 316. Sponsors for Malcolm Purkey’s residency include the following: Five Colleges Inc Lecture Fund; Dean of Faculty, Mt Holyoke College; Dean, College of Humanities and Fine Arts, University of Massachusetts; Department of Theatre, Smith College; Department of English, Mt Holyoke College; Department of Theatre, University of Massachusetts; Department of English, University of Massachusetts; New World Theater, University of Massachusetts. Professor Peter Taylor of the University of Massachusetts, Boston gave a talk entitled ‘Diagrams and Unruly Complexity, Ecology and Reflective Practitioners’ on Friday, November 1 from 12:30 – 2:30 in the office of Lee Edwards, Dean, CHFA, South College. Taylor describes his project as follows: ‘My interest as a scientist in making sense of the complexity of natural and social processes led me to sociological questions about interpreting what researchers actually do in making their science. This, in turn, opened up questions about how researchers could reflect on the complexity of their own social situatedness in order to enhance their studies of the complexity of ecological and enviromental situations. In this talk, I analyze a number of diagrams depicting nature and society. My intention is to provoke discussion of ways that people attempt to address or suppress intersections among these three realms: science; social studies of science; and critical, reflective collaboration.’ |