Past Events

Dror Ladin, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the leading civil liberties lawyers in the United States, will give a talk and lead a discussion at AUP. Most recently, Dror's work was instrumental to the release of Mohamedou Slahi, who was held without charge or trial at Guantanamo Bay for 13 years and endured psychological and physical torture. 

Currently, Dror is suing two psychologists contracted by the CIA, and paid 81 million dollars, to design, implement, and oversee the agency's torture program. Filed on behalf of three plaintiffs — Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and the family of Gul Rahman — the closely watched lawsuit alleges that all three were kidnapped, tortured, and experimented upon according to the psychologists' protocols. The torture methods include exposure to extreme temperatures, starvation, stuffing in boxes, and infliction of various kinds of water torture. 

Dror's work also includes the successful challenge to an Arizona state law that criminalized the provision of shelter and transportation to immigrants, as well as cases on behalf of immigrants challenging the lack of court review over their detention and deportation. Beyond these cases, Dror has written amicus briefs in support of Chelsea Manning's release and on behalf of victims of torture at Abu Ghraib. 

Previously, Dror worked as a Skadden Fellow at the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project and clerked for the Honorable Kim McLane Wardlaw of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He has also worked as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College, and received his J.D. from Yale Law School.

As our university searches for ways to think about Trump's election, this event can shed light on the work that people have done in protecting civil liberties, and point us towards strategies for future battles.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Critical Democracy and the Democracy Firstbridge. 

External guests should contact Michelle Kuo (mkuo [at] aup.edu (mkuo[at]aup[dot]edu)). This event will take place on Monday evening, December 5 at 6:30 PM in Combes 102.

The Center for Critical Democracy Studies is pleased to announce that Justice Stephen Breyer will be returning to AUP on May 3 to speak about his new book on international law, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities.

The timing of his visit could not be more opportune. The recent death of Justice Scalia and the current battle between the US Senate and the President over the nomination of a new Justice in the context of an unusually heated presidential primary has raised essential questions about the relationship between branches of government in contemporary American democracy. Justice Breyer has consistently been engaged with questions about the politics of certain decisions and his most recent book places these decisions in the global context of the Supreme Court and American law. These questions promise to be even more critical as the Court will be taking on a number of difficult cases in the months ahead, even without a tie-breaker.

This event will also afford AUP the opportunity to bestow Justice Breyer’s honorary degree. 

For many admirers Foucault's thought provides recourses for resisting neoliberalism incursions that have dismantled or attacked the welfare state since the 1980s. Some of Foucault's critics, however, suggest just this opposite: Foucault's thinking on governmentality and anti-humanism led him by the late 1970s to political views eerily similar to those held by neoliberals. This conference brings together a number of leading Foucault scholars to discuss the debate over Foucault's relationship to neoliberalism.

Registration required at criticaldemocracy [at] aup.edu (criticaldemocracy[at]aup[dot]edu)

Professor Jeannie Whayne of the University of Arkansas will give a talk entitled, "Forging a New South Empire: The Consequences of the Plantation Model of Development."

This lecture will examine the implications of the plantation model of development by focusing on one planter in the environmentally challenging Lower Mississippi River Valley in the post-Civil War era.  Wilson’s plantation empire began under the auspices of his father in 1848 and remained in the hands of the Wilson family until 2010 when it was sold to a wealthy Financier. It passed through various stages of plantation organization: (1) the antebellum plantation that relied on slave labor; (2) the post-Civil War plantation that relied on impoverished sharecroppers; (3) the post-World War II neo-plantation that reduced its labor needs dramatically by means of mechanization; and (4) the portfolio plantation of the twenty-first century that maximizes profits for the sake of investors.  Throughout all these versions of the system, three things remained constant: the concentration of wealth in a few hands to the detriment of the larger community; the exploitation and impoverishment of labor; and the manipulation of the environment.  It concludes with a few thoughts about the new “portfolio” model of plantation that is emerging around the world in the 21st century.  

Jeannie Whayne (Ph.D University of California, San Diego, 1989) is University Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and a specialist is agricultural, Arkansas, and southern history.  Her research focuses on the lower Mississippi River Valley and the interplay of social and economic history with environmental change, agricultural development, and race relations. Her most recent book, Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agricultural in the New South, explored the transformation of the plantation system in the twentieth century South, concluding with some observations about the emergence of portfolio plantations in the early 21st century.  She is past-president of the Agricultural History Society and is currently a member of the executive board of the Southern Historical Association and a distinguished lecturer with the Organization of American Historians. 

This February AUP is celebrating Black History Month with an excellent line-up of guest speakers and events! Join us for the fifth event of this incredible program for "An Evening with Ta-Nehisi Coates," author of Between the World and Me, a #1 New York Times Bestseller & Winner of the National Book Award. This event is sponsored by AUP's Centre For Critical Democracy Studies and professors Stephen Sawyer and Michelle Kuo will be conducting the Q & A session.

Biography:

"An Atlantic National Correspondent, Coates has written many influential articles, including “The Case for Reparations,” which reignited the long-dormant conversation of how to repay African-Americans for a system of institutional racism that’s robbed them of wealth and success for generations. New York called the George Polk Award-winning cover story “probably the most discussed magazine piece of the Obama era.” Between the World and Me is written by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the form of a letter to his teenage son, Samori. In 160 pages, it moves from Baltimore to Howard University to New York City to Paris, France, addressing what it means to be black in America. Slate calls it, “a book destined to remain on store shelves, bedside tables, and high school and college syllabi long after its author or any of us have left this Earth.” Coates’s debut book, The Beautiful Struggle, is a tough and touching memoir of growing up in Baltimore during the age of crack. In 2012, Coates was awarded the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism. Judge Hendrik Hertzberg, of The New Yorker, wrote, “Coates is one of the most elegant and sharp observers of race in America. He is an upholder of universal values, a brave and compassionate writer who challenges his readers to transcend narrow self-definitions and focus on shared humanity.” A former Village Voice writer, Coates is the Journalist in Residence at the School of Journalism at CUNY. He was previously the Martin Luther King Visiting Associate Professor at MIT, and has been awarded the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism. He is the winner of a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship."

The sign-up for this event has now been closed for external guests. 

This February AUP is celebrating Black History Month with an excellent line-up of guest speakers and events! Join us for the fourth event of this incredible program for "An Evening with Thomas Chatterton Williams." This event is sponsored by AUP's Centre For Critical Democracy Studies and professors Stephen Sawyer and Michelle Kuo will be conducting the Q & A session.

Biography:

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of a memoir, Losing My Cool: Love, Literature and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd (Penguin Press, 2010). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Le Monde, the Atlantic, n+1, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper's, the London Review of Books, Smithsonian Journeys, the American Scholar and many other places. He currently lives in Paris, where he is an associate editor at Purple Fashion Magazine and a regular book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

This February AUP is celebrating Black History Month with an excellent line-up of guest speakers and events! Join us for the third event of this incredible program for "A Book Forum on Gary Wilder's "Freedom Time: A  Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke, 2015) at Reid Hall. This event is sponsored by the AUP Center for Critical Democracy Studies and Columbia’s Global Center in Paris.

Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.

FORUM PARTICIPANTS (in French and in English)

GARY WILDER
Professor in the Ph.D. Programs of Anthropology and History and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) and of The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
MICHEL GIRAUD
Research sociologist at CNRS specializing on Antillean identity and the problem of assimilation. He is associated with the Centre de Recherche sur les Pouvoirs Locaux dans la Caraïbe (CRPLC) at the University of the Antilles-Guyane.
SILYANE LARCHER
Political scientist, fellow at the CNRS, attached to the research group Recherches Migrations et Société (URMIS) at University of Paris 7-Denis Diderot. She is the author of L’autre citoyen. L’idéal républicain et les Antilles après l’esclavage (Armand Colin, 2014).
MIRANDA SPIELER (moderator).  Associate Professor in the Department of History at the American University of Paris. She is the author of Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (2012), forthcoming in French as Liberté, Liberté Trahie (Alma, 2016).

For more information about this event, please contact Miranda Spieler (mspieler [at] aup.edu (mspieler[at]aup[dot]edu)). 

The Center for Critical Democracy Studies invites you to a conference with Thomas Piketty and Arthur Goldhammer.

Thomas Piketty—whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century pushed inequality to the forefront of public debate—wrote The Economics of Inequality as an introduction to the conceptual and factual background necessary for interpreting changes in economic inequality over time. This concise text has established itself as an indispensable guide for students and general readers in France, where it has been regularly updated and revised. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, The Economics of Inequality now appears in English for the first time.

The Center for Critical Democracy Studies presents "Decoding the COP21" with expert speakers from UNEP, the French Senate and the Fondation Nicolas Hulot.

A bilingual discussion about what the COP 21 accomplished, or didn't, from a french perspective. ALL ATTENDEES must RSVP through our webform below or write to criticaldemocracy [at] aup.edu (criticaldemocracy[at]aup[dot]edu).

The Center for Critical Democracy Studies presents :
What is Critical Democracy? And why is it so important?
 

Professors Cynthia Fleury and Stephen Sawyer will discuss Critical Democracy and answer students’ questions.
Submit your questions before the event! Email them to: a92292 [at] aup.edu (a92292[at]aup[dot]edu)

Read more about Critical Democracy in the The Toqueville Review / La Revue Tocqueville. This semi-annual publication is available online through the AUP Library. Search for ‘Tocqueville Review’ under ‘Journals’!

Look for more events from The Center for Critical Democracy Studies in Spring 2016 on our website.