Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies and founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton University, investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. On March 24 at 7 p.m., Benjamin will give a webinar lecture on her award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. According to the publisher, Race After Technology “cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce white supremacy and …shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity.” Her lecture is presented by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series and co-sponsored by the Lowell Humanities Series and the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society. Visit the Humanities Series website to register.
Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
Claudia Rankine @ BC
During a two-day residency at Boston College, award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, one of America’s premier thinkers on race and interiority, met with students and faculty and shared an intimate look at the experience of racism. She read from her book, Citizen: An American Lyric, and took part in a Q&A via the Lowell Humanities Series. The next day, Rankine participated in an Artist-Meets-Critic discussion on media, racism, and belonging in America. Read more on BC News.
Posted in Guest Authors, Lowell Humanities Series
Tagged African and African Diaspora Studies, poetry, racism
Leave a comment
Roots of Central American migration
Salem State University Professor of History Avi Chomsky will present from her recent book, Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration (Beacon Press, 2021), at a Boston College event on March 17 at 12 noon in McElroy Commons, room 237. In Central America’s Forgotten History, Chomsky traces the roots of displacement and migration in Central America from the Spanish conquest to the present day, concluding that the more immediate roots of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras lie in the wars and in the U.S. interventions of the 1980s and the peace accords of the 1990s. This will be a hybrid event with in-person and online options. Sponsor: Boston College’s Center for Human Rights and International Justice. RSVP for in-person or online (Zoom) option at tinyurl.com/chomsky0317.
Posted in Guest Authors
Tagged Central America, colonialism, foreign policy, history, migration
Leave a comment
Dead duck
Boston College graduate Colleen Shogan is back with another murder mystery for congressional staffer Kit Marshall to solve. In her latest novel, Dead as a Duck (Camel Press, 2021), the mayor of Duck, North Carolina, an upscale beach town in the Outer Banks, is found dead and Kit’s brother is a suspect. Kit Marshall is the protagonist of Shogan’s award-winning cozy mysteries series, which includes Stabbing in the Senate, Homicide in the House, and Larceny at the Library, among other titles. A former legislative staffer and executive at the Library of Congress, Shogan is the senior vice president of the White House Historical Association. Shogan earned a bachelor’s degree from BC in 1997.
Unidentified flying objects
On June 24, 1947, a private pilot reported numerous dazzling objects rushing through the sky above Mount Rainier in Washington state. Within a few weeks, hundreds of sightings of flying saucers were reported to news media, followed by reports of a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico. Boston College graduate Gordon Arnold cuts through decades of mystique and confusion and offers an account of what is known and unknown about the happenings in the skies over mid-century America. Flying Saucers Over America: The UFO Craze of 1947 (McFarland & Company Publishers, 2021) is based on many sources, including previously classified government records. As Arnold writes in the book’s introduction, whether you are a believer or skeptic, UFOs are “innately interesting as a historical and cultural phenomenon.” An educator, Arnold earned a doctorate in 1994 from Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development.
Harnessing disruption
Forward-thinking leaders must ready their organizations to respond to disruptions— such as the COVID-19 pandemic—if they hope to be successful, according to Carroll School Information Systems Professor Gerald C. Kane, co-author of The Transformation Myth: Leading Your Organization through Uncertain Times (MIT Press, 2021). Kane and co-authors Rich Nanda, Anh Nguyen Phillips, and Jonathan R. Copulsky have written a guide for surviving future disruptions—which are inevitable—and parlaying the lessons learned into greater growth. The authors identify and describe the traits that characterize successful organizations and the characteristics of their leaders, with examples from real-world organizations. According to Kane and his co-authors, the companies that emerge stronger because of disruption are those that used it as an opportunity for innovation. Read more from Carroll School News.
The way of the Franciscans
A new Lent devotional, written by Boston College graduate Daniel P. Horan, O.F.M., offers readers ways to revitalize their prayer life during Lent as well as to increase their understanding of Franciscan spirituality. The Way of the Franciscans: A Prayer Journey through Lent (SPCK Publishing, 2021) is split into six chapters, each focusing on a key Franciscan spiritual master and their way of prayer. The Way of the Franciscans explores the history of the different Franciscan spiritual traditions and how they are united in their focus on living according to the Gospels. A well-known author and public speaker, Fr. Horan is the Duns Scotus Professor of Spirituality at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. He earned a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston College. His other publications include The Franciscan Heart of Thomas Merton and Catholicity and Emerging Personhood.
Posted in Alumni Authors
Tagged Lent, Saint Francis, spirituality, Theology Department
Leave a comment
Social scientists on global crises
According to Carroll School Ferris Professor of Management and Organization Jean Bartunek, experts in the natural sciences aren’t the only ones who have vital perspectives on crises such as climate change and COVID. Social scientists understand how such global crises are intertwined with us as individual human beings, in our relationships, our groups, our organizations, our communities, our institutions, and how we collaborate with each other and how we compete with each other. Bartunek is editor of the new book, Social Scientists Confronting Global Crises (Routledge, 2021), which presents contributions from some 20 respected social scientists that deepen understanding of social phenomena associated with global crises. Through the cases and stories presented, readers learn what social scientists who are involved in both research and practice “can do to address and mitigate (if not prevent) global crises confronting us now and predictably . . . in the future.” Read more in Carroll School News.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Carroll School of Management, climate change, COVID, social sciences
Leave a comment
Poet Claudia Rankine
The Lowell Humanities Series presents award-winning poet Claudia Rankine who will give a reading from her poetry collection Citizen: An American Lyric, followed by an audience Q&A, at a webinar on Mar. 2 at 7.p.m. Citizen: An American Lyric recounts “mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st-century daily life and in the media,” according to her website. “In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen interrogates the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named ‘post-race’ society.” The author of six collections of poetry, Rankine is Yale University’s Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She also is a playwright and co-editor of several anthologies. Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. Her appearance is co-sponsored by the American Studies Program; the African and African Diaspora Studies Program; the English, History, Sociology departments; and the PULSE Program, with the support of an Institute for the Liberal Arts Major Grant Award. Details and registration here.
Policing the American city
Rosa Brooks, the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law Center and founder of Georgetown’s Innovative Policing Program, will deliver the Winston Center’s Chambers Lecture on March 1 at 6 p.m. in Gasson 100. Brooks is an expert on national security, international law, constitutional law, and criminal justice. She is the author of Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City (Penguin Books, 2021), in which she recounts her four years of experience as a sworn, armed reserve police officer with Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, and argues that a nation increasingly divided by race, class, ethnicity, geography, and ideology needs a truly transformative approach to policing. The program she leads at Georgetown rethinks the role police should play in today’s society and helps communities, police, and the broader legal system to work together to address the legacy of racial discrimination and over-criminalization. Brooks is also the author of the book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, and a frequent guest on MSNBC, Fox, CNN, and NPR.
BC Bookmarks 