Past Events

This photo installation by Chhachhi and Sonia Jabbar invites viewers to enter the private life of war, to hear voices often obscured by the clamor of stereotypes—the unheard voices of ordinary women of the Kashmir Valley. Testimonies gathered over six years break through the homogenizing divide of “Muslims” versus “Hindus.” Despite many differences, the women have one overwhelming thing in common: a rejection of the gun as a solution to political issues.

This exhibition relocates the mythological figure of Neelkanth, in the contemporary Indian city, where each of the five elements (earth, fire, water, air, and ether), the five senses (smell, sight, taste, touch, and hearing), and the power of the word itself is poisoned. The exhibit asks if we, like the archetypal Neelkanth, can find means of containment and transformation; if we can make nectar from poison.

A roundtable with Mary Louise Pratt and Berkeley faculty.

Panel Discussants: Mary Louise Pratt, Claire Kramsch (Berkeley Language Center), Bharati Mukherjee (English), Geoffrey Nunberg (Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University) and José David Saldívar (English, Ethnic Studies)

Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University.

Panelists: Donna Haraway, Chris Chafe, Greg Niemeyer, Charis Thompson, and Alla Efimova.

Donna Haraway is a prominent theorist of the relationships between people and machines, and her work has incited debate in fields as varied as primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto, first published in 1985, is now taught in undergraduate classes at countless universities and has been reprinted or translated in numerous anthologies in North America, Japan, and Europe.

Panel Discussants: Frederick Wiseman, Laura Nader (Anthropology), Candace Slater (Spanish & Portuguese) and Loïc Wacquant (Sociology)

Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman uses the “direct cinema” tradition of documentary filmmaking—continued filming of human conversation and the routines of everyday life with no music, interviews, or voice-over narration—to powerfully examine social institutions in America.

Panel Discussants: Michael Pollan, Catherine Gallagher (English), Ignacio Chapela (Environmental Science, Policy and Management) and Patricia Unterman (restaurant critic, the San Francisco Examiner)