Sunday |
Monday |
Tuesday |
Wednesday |
Thursday |
Friday |
Saturday |
UW-Madison Classes Begin
"After Chernobyl" Photography Exhibit Opens
Michael Forster Rothbart
Labor Day
Date: September 3 at 4:00 P.M.
Location: 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive
Sponsor: CREECA
About the speaker: Azra Hromadzic is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. She received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. Her dissertation provides an ethnographic investigation of the internationally directed peace-building interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the response of local people, especially youth, to these efforts.
About the lecture: The policies and processes of peacebuilding and democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) were instituted on December 14, 1995 by the Dayton Peace Agreement, which brought the end to the Bosnian war. While claiming its objectives to be reconciliation, democracy, and ethnic pluralism, the Agreement inscribed in law the ethnic partition among Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. The externally regulated policies of democratization and reconciliation have granted rights to people based on their identification as “ethnic collectivities,” reinforcing the social divisions at the heart of the conflict. This powerful paradox enshrined in the democratization policy has been central to what has transpired over the past 14 years. My account documents how the ethnic emphasis of the international integration policies and programs is working in practice to undermine the possibility for the emergence of common, cross-ethnic association in the B&H state.
The International Community has made the integration of schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina a crucial element of its peacebuilding policy and practical efforts. Due to the unique link between education, nation-building and citizen-making in this post-socialist and post-conflict context, education and youth are among the most productive domains within which to examine the working out of the paradox of democratization. I conducted 12 months of ethnographic research in the first reintegrated school in B&H, the Mostar Gymnasium, which has become one of the most important symbols of reconciliation and democratization in the country. In my presentation I consider the multiple and conflicting layers of reunification that were taking place in the school and the practices of both cooperation and resistance involved in the processes of its integration. More specifically, here I focus on practices of “mixing” among the youth of different ethnic backgrounds at the school and beyond. This ethnographic case study provides in-depth insight into international policies and their implementation and transformation locally.
Dates: September 3 through October 30, 2009
Exhibition Hours: Monday-Friday 7:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M., Saturday 8:00 A.M. - Noon
Location: Madison Municipal Building ARTspace Gallery, 215 Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.
Sponsor: CREECA, Madison Arts Commission, FOCCUS, Meuer Art & Picture Frame Co.
About the exhibit: If you lived near Chernobyl, would you stay?
Madison photographer Michael Forster Rothbart has just returned from a year in Chernobyl. He received a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship to photograph and interview Ukrainians who remain in villages near Chernobyl a generation after the 1986 accident.
The exhibit reveals daily life for Chernobylites, including residents who chose to stay in the Chernobyl-affected region and liquidators, veterans of the massive Soviet clean-up after the accident.
“Most visitors think Chernobyl is a place of danger and despair, and so this is what they photograph. For me, however, Chernobyl tells a story about endurance and hope,” says Forster Rothbart. “I created this exhibit because I want the world to know what I know: the people of Chernobyl are not victims, mutants and orphans. They are simply people living their lives, with their own joys and sorrows, hopes and fears. Like you. Like me.”
Forster Rothbart was a staff photographer for University of Wisconsin-Madison for six years and worked previously as an Associated Press photographer in Kazakhstan. During the past year, he lived in Sukachi, Ukraine, a small farming village just outside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. He also spent time in Slavutych, Ukraine, the city built after the accident to house evacuated Chernobyl plant personnel.
Forster Rothbart worked closely with FOCCUS, founded by UW-Madison professor Norma Berkowitz in 1996. A FOCCUS fundraiser on Oct. 22, 2009 will coincide with the exhibit. Details will be available at www.friendsofchernobylcenters.org.
A second exhibit of Forster Rothbart’s work, "Inside Chernobyl," documents the lives of nine of the 3,800 people who continue to work inside the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. This second exhibit premiered in Kyiv, Ukraine, last April and will travel to Washington D.C. in 2010. Forster Rothbart is working with media partner Voicethread.com to create interactive online versions of both exhibits.
For information about the Madison exhibit, contact:
Robert Schuettpelz
FOCCUS Executive Director
608-438-4892
rob.foccus@gmail.com
www.friendsofchernobylcenters.org
For interviews, contact:
Michael Forster Rothbart
607-267-4893
info@mfrphoto.com
Date: September 10 at 4:00 P.M.
Location: 22 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive
Sponsors: The Center for East Asian Studies, the Department of Political Science, the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy, CREECA, the China Initiative, and the University Lectures Committee at UW-Madison
About the speaker: David Bachman is a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. His teaching specializations include Chinese domestic and foreign politics and U.S. – China relations. Professor Bachman received a Ph. D. from Stanford University in political science. His latest book, “Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System” is a biography of one of the PRC’s most influential economic leaders. He is also the author of the “Bureaucracy, Economy, and Leadership: The Institutional Origins of the Great Leap” and the “Global Challenges and Local Stasis: Counter Democratization vs. Democratization in China’s Post-Olympics Agenda.”
Date: September 17 at 4:00 P.M.
Location: 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive
Sponsors: CREECA and the Madison World Music Festival
See festival schedule
About the event: Presenting a combination lecture and musical performance, the traditional Roma band Parno Grazst will discuss their origins and background and will offer a brief sample of their music.
About the band: Parno Graszt ("white horse" in Romani) is an authentic Hungarian gypsy music group. The group performs traditional songs in a specific Romani dialect from the Hungarian northeast. Their music incorporates guitars, bass, accordion, percussion, spoons, cans of milk, and vocal improvisation of the percussionist ("oral bass").
Visit Parno Graszt's Myspace page here.
Date: September 24 at 4:00 P.M.
Location: 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive
Sponsors: CREECA, the Political Economy Colloquium (PEC), Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE), Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER)
About the speaker: Rawi Abdelal is the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. His primary expertise is international political economy, and his research focuses on the politics of globalization and the political economy of Eurasia. Professor Abdelal is a faculty associate of Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and serves on the executive committee of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Abdelal currently runs the required first-year course on the political economy of globalization at HBS.
Professor Abdelal's first book, National Purpose in the World Economy, won the 2002 Shulman Prize as the outstanding book on the international relations of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He recently completed his second book, Capital Rules, which explains the evolution of the social norms and legal rules of the international financial system. Abdelal is currently at work on The Price of Power, a book that explores the relationships among political leadership, state-building, foreign investment, and geopolitics in the Russian energy sector.
In 1999 Abdelal earned a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University, where he had received an M.A. in 1997. At Cornell Abdelal's dissertation won the Kahin Prize in International Relations and the Esman Prize. He was a President's Scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he received a B.S. with highest honors in Economics in 1993. Recent honors include Harvard Business School's Robert F. Greenhill Award and the Student Association's Faculty Award for outstanding teaching in the Required Curriculum.
About the lecture: Gazprom is by any measure Russia's largest, most important, and most influential firm. Gazprom could soon be, by market capitalization, the largest firm in the world, and the Russian state owns 50 percent plus one of its shares. Is Gazprom an instrument of the Russian state? Or is the Russian state an instrument of Gazprom? Based on a Harvard Business School case study of Gazprom's export strategy in Europe and Asia and ongoing research, this seminar explores the balance of commercial and political motives -- and means -- in the rise of Gazprom as a major player in world energy markets.
Dates: September 25 through November 10, 2009
Location: Porter Butts Gallery, Memorial Union, 800 Langdon Street
Sponsors: UW-Madison Russian Student Association, Central Asian
Student Association, WUD Art Committee and CREECA with the financial support of the Anonymous Fund of the
College of Letters & Sciences and the Alice D.
Mortenson-Michael B. Petrovich Chair in Russian
History
About the exhibit: “Satellites” is the culmination of Jonas Bendiksen’s fascinating seven-year photographic journey through unrecognized countries, enclaves, and isolated communities on the periphery of the former Soviet Union. From Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus and Siberia, he takes us into little known places where the stark legacy of the Soviet collapse continues to evolve: Transdniester, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh, the Ferghana Valley, the Jewish Autonomous Region, and the spaceship crash zones on the Kazakh steppes. Bendiksen’s haunting photographs and text explore these restless territories’ search for historical, religious and ideological identity, and form a timely look into unfinished chapters of Soviet history.
CREECA is also holding a reception in honor of Jonas Bendiksen's exhibit on October 9.
For more on Jonas Bendiksen, check out his personal website at http://www.jonasbendiksen.com.
