LECTURE SERIES PLANTING THE SEEDS
J
erry Carlson, Professor, Director of the Cinema Studies Program in the Department of Media and Communication Arts at The City College and member of the faculty of Film, French, and Comparative
Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center as well as Alessandra Benedicty, Assistant Professor, Caribbean and Francophone Literature, Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education were awarded a City SEEDS grant from the Office of the President at the City College of New York. Their research project, “Aesthetic and Cultural Expressions of African-Derived Religions,” sought to reveal how Vodou, Santería and Candomblé heavily inform cultural practices in major urban spaces across the Western hemisphere, especially along the Atlantic. Their project hinged on breaking down the binary that opposes the ‘religious’ to the ‘secular.’ In so doing, their work contributed to the creation of new discursive spaces through which to consider and study the under-theorized interpenetration of European and African thought systems in the Hemispheric Atlantic. As part of the grant, in the Fall semester of 2011, thanks to support from the City SEEDS, Dean Juan Carlos Mercado, and the Center for Worker Education faculty and staff, they organized and hosted an extremely successful semester-long lecture series that created not only a dialogue, but a community. Through nine lectures hosted mostly at CCNY’s downtown campus at the Center for Worker Education, Benedicty and Carlson created a community, that sought to carve out new epistemologies to theorize the importance of African-derived traditions in urban spaces. At each lecture they had between 40 and 110 attendees, from the beginning to the end of the semester. The community that they created included academics from throughout the tri-state area, public intellectuals, respected community leaders, and performers. The lecture series enabled them to create bridges with researchers at the Graduate Center, notably the Center for the Humanities and the Caribbean Epistemologies Seminar, as well as Barnard College, Columbia University. For more information, visit www.transcarib.org .
(Left Row, Top to Bottom) Mama Lola and Donald Cosentino, Ned Sublette, Stephen Selka, Berta Jottar, Román Diaz, Carlyle Van Thompson (Right Column, Top to Bottom) Yvonne Daniel, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Alexander LaSalle, Lyn Di Iorio, Colin Dayan, Rachael Miller Benavidez
Book Talk Lecture Series Continues to Grow The Fall 2011 lecture series was the seventh in a series titled “Book
opportunities to explore issues such as poverty, education, physical
Talks” pioneered by Dean Juan Carlos Mercado to feature the work of
design of children’s spaces, the role of media and the institutionaliza-
authors both from CCNY and from other universities. The next lecture
tion of young children. Students will be able to attend a series of lec-
series will take place in the Fall 2012 semester and is titled Book Talk:
tures by authors in the field of the studies of childhood and use these
The Child. In this hybrid course taught by Professor Elizabeth Mathews,
talks as a spring board for class discussions. The culminating project
students interested in the interdisciplinary study of the child will have
for the class will be an analysis of an issue impacting children.
16 - CENTER FOR WORKER EDUCATION 2011/12 ANNUAL REPORT Photo: Cel Garay - Xcel Photo