Pol Program

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Keynote Roundtable Participants:Hamid Dabashi Columbia UniversityHamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies andComparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. He haswritten 20 books, edited 4, and contributed chapters to many more. He isalso the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews in majorscholarly and peer reviewed journals on subjects ranging from Iranian

Studies, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cin-ema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). A selected sample ofhis writing is co-edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, TheWorld is my Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader (Transaction 2010). A com-mitted teacher in the past three decades, Hamid Dabashi is also a publicspeaker around the globe, a current affairs essayist, and a staunch anti-war activist.

Todd Gitlin Columbia UniversityTodd Gitlin, an American writer, sociologist, communications scholar,novelist, poet, and not very private intellectual, is the author of fifteenbooks, including Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promiseof Occupy Wall Street. He was the third president of Students for a De-mocratic Society, in 1963-64, and coordinator of the SDS Peace Researchand Education Project in 1964-65, during which time he helped organizethe first national demonstration against the Vietnam War and the first

American demonstrations against corporate aid to the apartheid regimein South Africa. During 1968-69, he was an editor and writer for the SanFrancisco Express Times, and through 1970 wrote widely for the under-ground press. He is now a professor of journalism and sociology and chairof the Ph.D. program in Communications at Columbia University.

Drucilla Cornell Rutgers UniversityDrucilla Cornell is a professor of law, women's studies and political sci-ence at Rutgers University. Prior to beginning her academic life, she was

a union organizer for a number of years, working for the U.A.W., theU.E., and the I.U.E. in California, New Jersey, and New York. Cornellplayed a key role in organizing the conferences on Deconstruction andJustice with Jacques Derrida, held at Cardozo Law School in 1989, 1990and 1993. She has authored several books and numerous articles on criti-cal theory, feminism and postmodern theories of ethics. She is also a pro-duced playwright; productions of her plays The Dream Cure and Back-ground Interference have been performed in New York and Los Angeles.

Conference Committee: Laura Cheung, Samarjit Ghosh, Camila Gripp, Maximillian Lockie,

Gabriel Salgado, Stephanie dArc Taylor, and Tomer Zeigerman.


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Friday, April 20th

3:30 pm 5:00 pmResistance in Latin America

Discussant: Marina Sitrin CUNY Graduate CenterKelly Bauer George Washington UniversitySetting An Example: The Chilean Governments Experience

Processing Mapuche Land RequestsLeslie Finger Harvard UniversityExploring the Roots of the Chilean Winter: How Salient Issue

Discontent Shapes Political ParticipationCristian-Alarcon FerrariCornell University, Swedish University of

Agricultural SciencesCrises of Capitalism and the Historical Making of Social-EcologicalMovements: Labor, Ecology, Peasants Prefigurative Politics and

Contemporary Struggles in the South American Countryside Mariana AssisNew School for Social ResearchFraming the Right to Housing: A Social Movement Confronts the

StateEloy Fisher New School for Social ResearchMarco Gandasegui Justo Arosemena Center for Latin AmericanStudiesThe Energy and Commodity Politics of Indigenous Resistance in

Latin America: The Ngabe-Bugles' Struggle in Panama

5:30 pm 7:30 pmKeynote Roundtable

Moderator - Tarak Barkawi New School for Social Research Hamid Dabashi Columbia UniversityDepartment of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies

Drucilla Cornell Rutgers UniversityDepartment of Womens and Gender Studies

Todd Gitlin Columbia UniversityChair, Ph.D. Program in Communications

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Room 1009, 6 East 16th Street


VIPerhaps now is a good time to consider what are the physiognomicaltraits of a revolutionary square a young woman from Cairo I know oncetold me that Tahrir Square was a natural destination because it couldnot easily be sealed off by police and military but it's cold on LibertySquare and perhaps if its granite benches had heating not so many peo-ple would have gone home for the winter leaving the message

revolution delayed we will be back in spring I heard rumors that OneChase Manhattan Plaza was initially intended to be occupied but itwas closed off on that day and so instead Zucotti Park became the siteof memory and it changes everything because as the activists say at themeeting at Liberty Square from where they were evicted a few monthsago if we are not allowed to occupy parks we will have to occupy other

thingsVIISome people have referred to the Flower Scented Revolutions thatswept the MENA region as expressions of square-ocracy that is thetransfer of power from governments to masses of demonstrators but isit only about that is the power transferred to the humans or to the

square or is it as Bruno Latour probably would suggest transferred tothe hybridagent square-people think about it without the protestors itwould still be Zucotti Park and without Liberty Square the protestorswouldn't have a place to meet and perhaps it is exactly because whatwe are talking about here is not a square or people but square-peoplethat Liberty Square need people to come back

* The obituarist of this piece has been unable to verify the exact time ofdeath of Zucotti Park, but it is assumed that it occurred sometime inthe fall of 2011.

By Kathrine Tschemerinsky

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IIIA mad man yells out loud and two punks listen to a tape recorder theseare the people people told me about this I why I don't think it will have

an effect there is too much summer of 69' atmosphere going on there

people say because it is the wrong people wearing the wrong clothes thatare there and there is no message and there is no leader but then I takea closer look and there are more people than those I first saw because

there are also freezing students with hoodies old women in furs a manin a burberry coat and they are standing there in the cold discussingpassionately below the One Liberty Plaza neon sign what to do next tooccupy a new place or get people back and a man dressed in cashmeresays you better watch out because Bloomberg is gonna run for

president so keep your eyes on the American Party a strategic meeting

among strangers half-strangers and friends is actually going on andthey take it seriously and you can just join between eleven and threeand then they wrap upIVThere is a woman in shades serving dal and rice they got from an Indianrestaurant who donates leftovers to the cold protestors are you in the

media she asks because we really need publicity because at home infront of our computers we are not strong people have to come back toLiberty Square what was that you said I ask a square yes now it is

a square she says we took back the name from those who took the park

and now it is a square like that in Egypt VSo you see this is a eulogy after all because Zucotti Park is no longerZucotti Park but Liberty Square and there are all the other square'sTahrir Square Place de la Revolution Piaa Revoluiei Plaza de la

Revolucin and Mohammad Bouazizi Square named after the street ven-dor in Tunis whose self-immolation helped topple the regime but we alsoshouldn't forget the squares of failed revolutions like Tiananmen Squareand most recently Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain where people gatheredlast spring to protest against their Regime but the uprising in Bahrainwas crushed and Pearl Roundabout demolished a procedure thataccording to reports from the Bahraini authorities was done in order toset up traffic lights that could ease the problems of car jams in thefinancial district I wonder what is it about squares and revolutions thatgoes so well together do revolutions require squares or do squares affordrevolutions

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Saturday, April 21st10:30 am 12:00 pm

Organizing Across the North AmericanPolitical Spectrum

Discussant - David Plotke New School for Social ResearchBryan CarterNew School for Social ResearchPrivilege By Another Name: A Critical Race Theory Critique of the

Kony 2012 MovementEdward Colin RuggeroNew School for Social ResearchA City and Its Occupation: Occupy Philly, Punk Participation and

the Importance of Context and Content in Social Movement Studies H Howell Williams New School for Social ResearchStanding Athwart the Tea Party, Yelling Stop: Gauging the Tea

Party through the National Review

12:15 pm 1:45 pmRoundtable: Activism on the GroundModerator - Deva Woodly New School for Social Research

Melissa Gira Grant - journalist and former sex worker who writes onsex and the Internet and has most recently written a book on OWS'sPeople's Library at Liberty Square.

Nicolas Grau - Economics Ph.D. student at UPenn who was a promi-nent university leader in the Chilean student uprising of 2006 andhas served on Chile's Presidential Advisory Council onEducation.

Steve Lambert - artist and professor at the School of Museum of FineArts in Boston, who uses and studies art as a tool for radical politics.

Yotam Marom - political organizer, activist, educator, musician,writer, and founding member of the Organization for a Free Society.

8:00 pm 10:00 pmReception - Dinner and drinks

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2:45 pm 4:15 pmTheorizing Revolutionary MovementsDiscussant - Richard Bernstein New School for Social Research

Jordanco Jovanoski New School for Social ResearchRevolution and Repetition: Theoretical Remarks on Revolution as an

IdeaRichard RobertsNew School for Social ResearchOccupation: An Act of CitizenshipRobert GlassBinghamton UniversityRevolution on Whose Terms? The Role of the Academy in Defining

Revolution in Light of the Arab Spring, Ali Shariati and

Jalal Al-e Ahmad

Brendan Flynn Occupy University of MichiganRevolt, Revolution and the Leftist Imaginary

4:30 pm 6:00 pmImages and Actors in MENA Revolts

Discussant - Cathy Schneider American Un iversityAnshul JainBoston UniversityPamphlets, Cassettes and Smartphones: Civil Society, PoliticalOpposition and the Incarnations of New Media in Iran Lara-Zuzan Golesorkhi New School for Public EngagementEnough is Enough: A Case Study of Womens Activism in Iran Stephanie dArc TaylorNew School for Social ResearchEgyptian Pan-Arabism?: From Nasser to the Revolution of the

YouthWilliam Cotter Georgia State UniversitySilence in the Wake of an Arab Spring

Olivia StranskySampsonia Way MagazineThe Stage Is My Gun: The Cultural Intifada of Juliano Mer-Khamis

Break

1:45 pm 2:45 pm

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Roundtable: Perspectives on the StudentOccupations

Moderator - Jeremy Varon New School for Social ResearchDan Boscov-Ellen New School for Social Research

Sophie Lewis New School for Social ResearchCecily McMillan New School for Social Research

Richard Roberts New School for Social Research

Adrian Totten New School for Social Research

6:15 pm 8:00 pm

Depunctualization Eulogy for Zucotti Park2006-2011*The jug is not a vessel because it was made; rather, the jug had to be

made because it is holding vessel(Martin Heidegger)

It is when the machine breaks down you see how it works(Michael Taussig)I

This was going to be a eulogy for Zucotti Park and in some ways it isbut not in the ways I imagined it to be because people had told menobody's there anymore so I went there with an expectation to see

the debris not that of 9/11 but that of 20-12 Occupy Wall Street RestIn Peace but that didn't happen because when I came up from the redline that I normally take up north to the moon every day there weretourists in front of the Museum of American Finance and in ZucottiPark there were people too although not many but it was also a coldday and I was holding on to my Starbucks ToGo while trying to hideits logoIIZucotti Park is the fold between the fingers of Mr. Invisible Hand aplane of granite with bands of light and flower beds and it sort oflooks like the Holocaust monument in Berlin but of course ZucottiPark was also used as a memorial site after 9/11 back when it wasstill Liberty Plaza Park created in 68 in return for a height bonusgranted one of the adjacent buildings but debris from the twins hadmade the park look a mess and mr Zucotti used private money to

renovate it hence the name

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