RSS FeedUpcoming EventsGrant Farred | Diaspora-in-Place, April 2https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/236103-grant-farred-diaspora-in-place

This project stands as the mark of a previous insufficiency. In my recent monograph, The Perversity of Gratitude: An Apartheid Education, one of the concepts on offer is diaspora-in-place. The concept was, however, not brought into its fullness – it remained as a provocation, a provocation demanding address. Thus, this writing – this still provisional – rendering of the diaspora-in-place. The recognition that the diaspora, much as it turns on departure, leaving, the dream of returning, making a place in an unfamiliar locale, also possesses a different dimension. Contains within it a mobility-in-stasis. To leave without departing. To be gone while remaining in place. That is the condition that this presentation subjects to thinking.

 

Please Note: For the pre-circulated paper, please write to Patty Dunlap at pattydunlap@berkeley.edu

 

Speaker Biography

Grant Farred is a Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University and the author of Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football and T he Burden of Over-representation: Race, Sport, and Philosophy , and the editor of Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures (all Temple University Press), among several other books and pamphlets in theory, postcolonial studies, race, intellectuals, sport, and cultural and literary studies.

Sponsors

In generous collaboration with the Center for African Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of English, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Department of Geography, the Department of Political Science, the Department of Rhetoric, the Department of Sociology, the Institute for International Studies, the Irving Stone Chair in Literature, the Marion E. Koshland Chair in the Humanities, the Office of the Dean of the Social Science Division, the Rachel Anderson Stageberg Chair in English, the Social Science Matrix, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

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Šumit Ganguly & Marianne Riddervold | Comparing EU and India Perspectives on Russia’s War in Ukraine, April 4https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/237009-umit-ganguly-marianne-riddervold-comparing-eu-and-ind

As Russia’s war in Ukraine nears the two year milestone, distinctive approaches between governments in the Global North and Global South have come into focus. On the one hand, the EU has voiced strong rebuke of the Russian invasion, embargoed trade and diplomatic relations in an effort to isolate Russia while extending military aid and EU membership to Ukraine. On the other hand, India has maintained a deafening silence on the Russian invasion of Ukraine largely because of its acute dependence on Russian weaponry and to a lesser degree, Russian petroleum. Some within India’s foreign policy establishment also believe that avoiding public criticism of Russia might prevent it from aligning too closely with the People’s Republic of China, India’s long-term adversary. Join us for a discussion with Professor Marianne Riddervold and Professor Sumit Ganguly to explore the geopolitical interests at stake in EU and India’s stances on Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Šumit Ganguly is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and holds the Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author, co-author editor or co-editor of over twenty books on contemporary South Asian politics. His most recent book with Manjeet Pardesi and William R. Thompson is, The Sino-Indian Rivalry: Implications for Global Order. (Cambridge University Press, 2023) Professor Ganguly is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Marianne Riddervold is Professor of Political Science at Innlandet University Norway, research professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, and a senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley. She has published extensively on European integration, European foreign and security policy, EU crises, transatlantic relations and international relations in the global commons. Recent publications include special issues in International Relations and Politics and Governance (with Akasemi Newsome), and the Palgrave Handbook on EU crises (with Akasemi Newsome and Jarle Trondal).

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Ray Savord at rsavord@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-4555 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

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The Gender of Capital, April 4https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/237686-the-gender-of-capital

Why do women in different social classes accumulate less wealth than men? Why do marital separations impoverish women while they do not prevent men from maintaining or increasing their wealth? In this lecture, Céline Bessière will discuss her new co-authored book, The Gender of Capital, which reconsiders the effectiveness of legal reforms that legislate formal equality between men and women, while permitting inequality to persist in practice.

Registration is required. This event is in person and on Zoom. Space is limited. Register today

The Annual Stone Lecture is presented by the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley, a research hub for campus and beyond enabling UC Berkeley’s world-leading scholars to deepen our understanding of the inequality in society and formulate new approaches to address the challenge of creating a more equitable society. The Center serves as the primary convening point at UC Berkeley for research, teaching and data development concerning the causes, nature, and consequences of wealth and income inequalities with a special emphasis on the concentration of wealth at the very top. Learn more

About the book: The Gender of Capital, by Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac

Drawing on research spanning twenty years, the authors analyze what they call family wealth arrangements. They break with the common understanding of the family as an emotional haven of peace in a brutal capitalist world. Spouses and partners, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers do not play the same part in family strategies of social reproduction, nor do they reap the same profits from them. The family is an economic institution that plays a central role in the production, circulation, control and evaluation of wealth. The meaning of this economic institution is revealed, in particular, in moments of marital breakdown and inheritance.

From the single mothers of the French “Yellow Vest” movement to the divorce of Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos, from the legacy of family businesses to the estate of the Trump family, the mechanisms of control and distribution of capital vary according to social class, yet they always result in the dispossession of women. Capital is gendered. This book describes how class society is perpetuated through the masculine appropriation of capital.


About the speaker:
Céline Bessière is a Professor of sociology at Paris Dauphine University (PSL University) and a senior member at the Institut Universitaire de France. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Institute of French Studies at New York University. She studies the material, economic and legal dimensions of family, in particular through the analysis of inheritance and marital breakdown. Her new project is about gender and wealth accumulation in Europe. Her research is at the crossroads of several fields: economic sociology, sociology of law and justice, sociology of gender, class and family. Her most recent book, The Gender of Capital, was recently adapted into a graphic novel with Jeanne Puchol. Read more

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APHS: Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century, April 5https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/aphs-catastrophic-diplomacy-us-foreign-disaster-assis

The American Political History Seminar seeks to enrich the study of politics by increasing knowledge and understanding of important topics in American history. Over the last several years, IGS has invited both well-established and junior scholars, as well as a number of journalists, to speak on a recent publication relevant to the seminar series. Faculty and graduate student participants are drawn from disciplines such as history, political science, journalism, public policy, law, and business. To maximize the benefit from the visit of each author, copies of the work to be discussed are distributed in advance to participants. The APHS is open to graduate students and faculty only (but not the general public). Faculty and graduate students interested in participating should contact the seminar coordinator, Hidetaka Hirota, Associate Professor of History, hhirota@berkeley.edu

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Hendrik Simon | A Century of Anarchy? War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order, April 8https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/237674-hendrik-simon-a-century-of-anarchy-war-normativity-an

The nineteenth century has been understood as an age in which states could wage war against each other if they deemed it politically necessary. According to this narrative, it was not until the establishment of the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the UN Charter that the “free right to go to war” (liberum ius ad bellum) was gradually outlawed. Better times dawned as this anarchy of waging war ended, resulting in radical transformations of international law and politics.

However, as a “free right to go to war” has never been empirically proven, this story of progress is puzzling. In his forthcoming book A Century of Anarchy?: War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order (Oxford University Press, 2024), Hendrik Simon challenges this narrative by outlining a genealogy of modern war justifications and drawing on scientific, political, and public discourses. He argues that liberum ius ad bellum is an invention created by realist legal scholars in Imperial Germany who argued against the mainstream of European liberalism and, paradoxically, that the now forgotten Sonderweg reading was universalized in international historiographies after the World Wars.

In his book presentation, Simon will not only deconstruct the myth of liberum ius ad bellum but also trace the political and theoretical roots of the modern prohibition of war to the long nineteenth century (1789-1918).

Dr. Hendrik Simon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and Lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt. He was Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Advanced International Theory/University of Sussex (2017), at the University of Vienna (2018, 2016), at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History Frankfurt (2015-16) and at the Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” (2011-12). Publications include The Justification of War and International Order. From Past to Present (Oxford University Press, 2021; co-edited with Lothar Brock); and “The Myth of Liberum Ius ad Bellum. Justifying War in 19th-Century International Legal Theory and Political Practice”, 29 European Journal of International Law (2018).

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Ray Savord at rsavord@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-4555 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

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Sarah Wolff | Secular Power Europe: insights on decentring international relations, April 9https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/223910-secular-power-europe-insights-on-decentring-internati

Based on her award winning book (European Union Studies Association Best Book award 2023) Secular Power Europe and Islam and through an exploration of Europe’s secular identity, an identity that is seen erroneously as normative, Professor Wolff shows will explain how Islam confronts the EU’s existential anxieties about its security and its secular identity. Islam disrupts Eurocentric assumptions about democracy and revolution and human rights. She will document how EU’s diplomats are trying to address that issue and to conduct some ‘religious engagement’. She will also discuss the avenues provided by the decentring agenda, which involves provincialising Europe, engaging with the perspective of the others and reconstructing EU’s agency as a global actor.

Sarah Wolff is Professor in International Studies and Global Politics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She holds until January 2024 a Professor position in European Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London where she also leads the Centre for European Research (2017-2023), led the NEXTEUK Jean Monnet Chair of Excellence (2020-2023) on the future of EU-UK relations. She was the Director of the QMUL MA in International Relations in Paris (2021-2023). Her research concentrates on EU-UK foreign and security cooperation, EU migration and asylum policies, EU-Middle East and North Africa, as well as EU’s policies on gender and religion abroad. She is on the Editorial Board of the journal Mediterranean Politics. Her book Michigan University Press on ‘Secular Power Europe and Islam: Identity and foreign policy’(summer 2021) was conducted thanks to a Fulbright-Schuman and a Leverhulme research grants. She is Visiting Professor at the College of Europe and on the steering committee of UACES and of ECPR SGEU.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Ray Savord at rsavord@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-4555 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

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Iyiola Solanke | Solidarity across time and place: towards a decolonial narrative of refugees and asylum seekers in EU law, April 11https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/237677-iyiola-solanke-solidarity-across-time-and-place-towar

‘there are so many silences to be broken’ (Audrey Lorde)

War in Ukraine is an opportunity for the EU to show solidarity with the people of Ukraine, not only through the supply of armaments and military support, but also through providing refuge to those fleeing war and helping them to continue with their lives to the greatest extent possible.

It is also an opportune time for the EU to show solidarity with those fleeing war in Ukraine who are not nationals of that country: the over 76,000 foreign students from 155 countries who were studying in Ukraine at the time of the invasion. The majority of these came from India, Morocco and Nigeria, but large numbers also came from elsewhere in Africa and Asia, such as Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya and Uganda. These students, who were stranded in Ukraine and are now stranded across Europe, were subjected to a ‘racialised refugee hierarchy’ (ODI) as they sought to leave Ukraine and enter other countries: border guards enacted a ‘Ukrainians first’ policy.

In this paper, I suggest that this has happened due to pan-European mis-education in the 21 st century on the mis-adventures of 19 th century European imperialism. The 200-year silencing of the latter has facilitated the perpetuation of a general environment of ignorance across Europe within which racism and xenophobia towards Black people can be embedded in institutions and enacted by individuals.

I argue that the logic of solidarity in 21 st century EU should incorporate this 19 th century imperialism - solidarity in the EU needs to be built across time and place. A de-colonial approach to solidarity would recognize the many ways in which the peoples of the Global South have contributed to the construction of present-day Europe, for example through participation in European wars and post-war reconstruction.

It is to be hoped that a corrected understanding of the contribution of the peoples of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean to Europe will shift the public narrative to focus on ensuring that African and Asian students fleeing war in Ukraine receive the help that they need. In addition, such thinking would also provide a general refresh of EU debates on the legal framework for refugees and asylum seekers.

I will begin by describing what is meant by a ‘decolonial’ approach in general, before setting out what this offers in relation to EU law. I will then outline some of the challenges faced by African and Asian students fleeing war in Ukraine, before reflecting upon the contribution of colonised people to European colonial wars. I end by suggesting some ways in which this approach can help us to rethink the European approach to supporting and caring for refugees and asylum seekers regardless of race.

Iyiola Solanke is Jacques Delors Professor of European Union Law at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Somerville College.

She was previously Professor of European Union Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds Law School and the Dean for EDI for the University. She is a Visiting Professor at Wake Forest University School of Law and Harvard University School of Public Health and a former Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute. Professor Solanke is also an Academic Bencher of the Inner Temple.

Her research focuses on institutional change, in relation to both law and organisations. Her work adopts socio-legal, historical and comparative methodologies. She is the author of ‘EU Law’ (CUP 2022), ‘Making Anti-Racial Discrimination Law’ (Routledge 2011) and ‘Discrimination as Stigma - A Theory of Anti- Discrimination Law’ (Hart 2017), as well as many articles in peer reviewed journals.

She founded the Black Female Professors Forum to promote visibility of women professors of colour, and the Temple Women’s Forum North to promote engagement between legal professionals and students in and around Yorkshire. In 2018 she chaired the Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL. From 2019 – 2022 she led Co-POWeR, an ESRC-funded project looking into the impact of COVID on practices for wellbeing and resilience in Black, Asian and minority ethnic families and communities. She is currently Co-I on Generation Delta, a RE/OfS-funded project promoting access to PGR study for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) women.

Current projects focus on weight discrimination and law as well as decolonising European Union law.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Ray Savord at rsavord@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-4555 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

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Joyce De Coninck | EU Transnational Cooperative Governance and the EU’s Human Rights Responsibility Gap, April 11https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/237675-joyce-de-coninck-eu-transnational-cooperative-governa

When a private corporation cooperates with States as well as international organizations and conduct stemming from this cooperation results in international human rights violations, who can be held legally responsible?

 

During this lecture, systemic deficiencies in the traditionally state- centric human rights regime will be discussed and we will challenge its inadequacies when dealing with contemporary forms of EU transnational cooperative governance. Transnational cooperative governance refers to modes of cooperation in which States, and different Non-State Actors work together in addressing transnational concerns that cannot be adequately regulated by any one of these actors alone.

 

Using border management cooperation between HawkEye 360, the EU, and its Member States as an illustration, it will be demonstratedthat in situations of cooperative governance – involving private corporations, the EU, and States – legal responsibility for unlawful human rights conduct under the contemporary human rights regime, cannot be apportioned effectively among the implicated parties. The diffusion of unlawful conduct between the implicated parties blurs the line between primary human rights violations and secondary rules on responsibility, making it hard to establish which entity committed a wrong capable of triggering an obligation of reparations for individual victims under international human rights law. For this reason, individual victims are ultimately left without an effective judicial remedy and ensuing reparations.

 

Dr. DeConinck’s will be assisted in her presentation by Prof. Violeta Moreno-Lax (Queen Mary University, London) and Prof. Liliane Tsourdi (the University of Maastricht, Netherlands)

 

Dr. Joyce De Coninck is an FWO post-doctoral researcher affiliated with Ghent University and an adjunct professor of EU law at NYU Law School. She is currently working on developing a model of relational human rights responsibility, to effectively apportion human rights responsibility stemming from hybrid forms of cooperation involving state actors and non-state actors such as international organizations and private entities.

 

Joyce De Coninck holds a Master of Laws from Ghent University (2013, Magna Cum Laude) and an LLM in International and European Law from the Institute for European Studies – Free University of Brussels (2015, Summa Cum Laude). She obtained her doctoral degree at Ghent University (2021) titled “Catch-22 in the Law of Responsibility of International Organizations – Systemic Deficiencies in the EU Responsibility Paradigm for Unlawful Human Rights Conduct in Integrated Border Management”. Joyce was subsequently selected as an Emile Noël Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center of New York University (2021-2022), and a Scholar in Residence at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (2022 – 2024).

 

Prior thereto, Joyce was an academic assistant at UGent, an adjunct professor at Minnesota Law School, the University of Amsterdam, and Leiden University, and has provided ad hoc lectures at various institutions, including the College of Europe.

 

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Ray Savord at rsavord@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-4555 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

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26th Annual Travers Conference on Ethics & Accountability in Government- The State of Elections in 2024: Problems, Potential Reforms, and Prospects, April 12https://events.berkeley.edu/Polisci/event/243273-26th-annual-travers-conference-on-ethics-accountabili

The 2024 Travers Conference will bring together experts from around the country to assess a series of questions related to the electoral system in the United States as it stands in 2024. It will include three panels: Is the Electoral System in the US Broken?; Evaluating Possibilities and Prospects for Reform; and The 2024 Elections: How did we get here? What to expect in November?

Travers Conference Flyer

https://events.berkeley.edu/Polisci/event/243273-26th-annual-travers-conference-on-ethics-accountabili
Worker Power and the New Class War, April 18https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/243955-worker-power-and-the-new-class-war

Citrin Center Flyer

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Nicole Eaton | German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad, April 26https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/237683-nicole-eaton-german-blood-slavic-soil-how-nazi-knigsb

In the wake of the Second World War, the German city Königsberg, once the easternmost territory of the Third Reich, became the Russian city Kaliningrad, the westernmost region of the Soviet Union. Königsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own—in both wartime occupation and as integral territory of the two regimes. During the war, this single city became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between Nazism and Stalinism.

Eaton’s book German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe’s two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. Drawing on archival documents, diaries, letters, and memoirs from both sides, this talk presents an intimate look into the Nazi-Soviet encounter during World War II and shows how this outpost city, far from the centers of power in Moscow and Berlin, became a closed-off space where Nazis and Stalinists each staged radical experiments in societal transformation and were forced to reimagine their utopias in dialogue with the encounter between the victims and proponents of the two regimes.

Nicole Eaton received her PhD at UC Berkeley is now Associate Professor of History at Boston College. She teaches courses on the Soviet Union, Imperial Russia, modern Europe, authoritarianism, and mass violence. Her research interests include nationalism, communism, fascism, ethnic cleansing, borderlands, urban history, the Second World War, environmental history and the history of medicine in East-Central Europe and Eurasia. German Blood, Slavic Soil is her first book.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Ray Savord at rsavord@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-4555 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

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