This symposium features two speakers, Dr. Thomas Abt and Dr. Jaclyn Schildkraut, who will present their research surrounding mass shootings,

public and legislative responses to these events, and the theoretical approaches to understanding and preventing these tragedies.

Speakers:

Thomas Abt is the Founding Director of Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction and an associate research professor in UMD’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Abt teaches, studies, and advises on the use of evidence-informed approaches for reducing violence. He is the author of Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence - and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets. Abt’s work is cited in academic journals and featured in media outlets including the Atlantic, Economist, New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, CNN, PBS, and NPR. His TED talk on community violence has been viewed more than 225,000 times.

Abt also serves as a Senior Fellow with the Council on Criminal Justice. Prior to that, he worked as a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy and Law Schools. Before Harvard, Abt served as Deputy Secretary for Public Safety in New York, where he oversaw all criminal justice, homeland security, and emergency management agencies. Before New York, Abt served as Chief of Staff to the Office of Justice Programs at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked with the nation’s criminal justice grant-making agencies to integrate evidence, policy, and practice."

Talk title: Saving Lives by Stopping Violence, Using Science

Thomas Abt will discuss how evidence-informed programs, practices, and policies can reduce rates of gun-related and other violence now, without resorting to new laws or big budgets, provided we can put politics aside. Abt's pragmatic, science-based approach focuses on solving concrete problems, not winning abstract arguments.

Jaclyn Schildkraut, PhD is the Executive Director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Prior to this appointment, she served as an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego. Her research interests include mass/school shootings, school safety, violence prevention, and media effects.  Since 2018, Dr. Schildkraut has led the largest research study, to date, on the impact of lockdown drills, working with more than 20,000 students and 4,300 educators and community partners in New York’s fifth largest school district. She is the co-author/editor of six books, including Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities (Praeger, 2016), Columbine, 20 Years Later and Beyond: Lessons from Tragedy (Praeger, 2019), and Lockdown Drills: Connecting Research and Best Practices for School Administrators, Teachers, and Parents (MIT Press, 2022). Dr. Schildkraut has published more than 50 research articles, book chapters, and policy briefs assessing different facets of school and mass shootings. A nationally recognized expert on mass shootings and school safety, her research is regularly cited by the local, national, and international media.

Talk Title: 

Mass Shootings through the Public and Legislative Lenses: How Do We Make Sense of Tragedy? 

Mass shootings, although statistically rare events, have generated widespread concern and a demand to do something to prevent the next tragedy. Public reactions to these events, particularly those that are more high profile – and more lethal – in nature, drive legislative responses. Despite widespread outcry, however, little has been done legislatively, particularly at the federal level, to prevent these tragedies from occurring. This talk will highlight what is known about mass shootings and how the public have responded with a demand to do something. Legislative responses at both the state and federal levels will be examined, highlighting where inaction has led to missed opportunities to prevent future tragedies or improve responses if they do occur. Finally, this talk will provide insight into how the public can better understand mass shootings, including their root causes, and how we can collectively work together to prevent future tragedies from occurring.

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This Event will be held in a hybrid format both in-person and online

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About:

The Level of Human Rights: Malcolm X and the Dilemmas of Black Internationalism, Then and Now

In the early 1960s, Malcolm X challenged the focus of the civil rights movement, urging African Americans to shift from seeking justice through “civil rights” and U.S. institutions and instead frame their struggle as one for "human rights" on the global stage. Central to Malcolm’s idea was a call for involvement from the United Nations. This lecture explores both the opportunities and contradictions in Malcolm’s ideas of global politics by examining how they compare to earlier but lesser known African American efforts to engage with the United Nations, like those of W.E.B. Du Bois and William Patterson. By considering the competing philosophies of global justice advocated by Black intellectuals, the lecture will explore how these still under appreciated ideas might inform today’s controversial and contentious struggles for both peace and racial justice.

Speaker :

Brandon M. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. For 2024-2025, he is the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Born in Baltimore, Terry earned a PhD with distinction in Political Science and African American Studies from Yale University, an MSc in Political Theory Research at the University of Oxford, and an AB, magna cum laude, in Government and African and African American Studies from Harvard College.

An award-winning scholar of African American political thought, political theory, and the politics of race and inequality, Brandon is the editor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 2018) and the editor of Fifty Years Since MLK (MIT Press, 2018). His forthcoming book, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement (Harvard University Press) interrogates the moral and political significance of different narratives of civil rights history in political philosophy and public life. He is currently at work on a study of the political thought and judgment of Malcolm X, tentatively titled Home to Roost: Malcolm X Between Prophecy and Peril (Penguin/Random House). He has also published work in Modern Intellectual History, Political Theory, The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Dissent, The Point, and New Labor Forum and been interviewed by The Ezra Klein Show, Vox, the New York Times, and other media outlets.

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This Event will be held in a hybrid format both in-person and online:

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Abstract:

The conversation will be moderated by Professor John Drabinski, and will include brief presentations from Professor Olufemi Taiwo, Professor of African Political Thought at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A, and Professor Jean-Michel Mabeko-Tali, Professor of African History at Howard University, in Washington, DC. The presentations will be followed by a moderated panel discussion and audience Q&A. 

Speakers:

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This event features two of the contributors to the recent volume Infrastructure, Wellbeing, and the Measurement of Happiness, Professor June Thomas and Professor Carol Ryff. The discussion will explore the questions raised in the volume around current thinking and strategies around wellbeing, the measurement of happiness, and how infrastructure design and construction impacts on these. The discussion will be moderated by Professor Hoda Mahmoudi and Dr. Kate Seaman, two of the editors of the volume.

Speakers :

June Manning Thomas is the Centennial Professor Emerita of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she also is the Mary Frances Berry Distinguished University Professor of Urban Planning. In 2003, she was inducted as a fellow in the American Institute of Certified Planners.

Thomas served as president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning from 2013 to 2015 and was immediate past president from 2015 to 2016. Thomas writes about diversification of the planning profession, planning history, and social equity in neighborhoods and urban revitalization. Recent research explored the relationship between the concept of social equity and the civil rights movement, and examined the land-use reactions of community organizations to vacant land in Detroit. Her books include the co-edited Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows (Sage, 1996); Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997; second edition, Wayne State University Press, 2013); Planning Progress: Lessons from Shoghi Effendi (Association for Baha’i Studies, 1999); he co-edited The City after Abandonment (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); and the co-edited Mapping Detroit: Evolving Land Use Patterns and Connections (Wayne State University Press, 2015). Her latest book is the semi-autobiographical Struggling to Learn: An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina (University of So. Carolina Press, 2022).

Carol D. Ryff is Director of the Institute on Aging and Hilldale Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Dr. Ryff is Principal Investigator of the MIDUS (Midlife in the U.S.) national longitudinal study, which is widely used by researchers around the world.  She also directed MIDJA (Midlife in Japan), for which she received an NIH Merit Award.  A major objective of these studies is biopsychosocial integration – i.e., understanding pathways to health or illness via linkage of sociodemographic factors (age, gender, race, socioeconomic status) with behavioral, psychological, and social factors, including stress exposures and contextual influences.  Her own research focused on a model of psychological well-being she developed decades ago, which has been translated to 40 languages and is used across diverse scientific fields.  Dr. Ryff studies how psychological well-being varies by age, educational status and cultural context as well as by the challenges and transitions of adult life. Whether well-being is protective of good physical health is a major interest, with numerous findings linking different aspects of well-being to morbidity and mortality, diverse biomarkers (neuroendocrine, immune, cardiovascular) and neural circuitry.  A guiding theme is resilience – how some are able to maintain, or regain, well-being in the face of adversity and what neurobiology underlies this capacity. Increasingly, she is interested in how encounters with nature, which can occur in urban environments, matter for well-being and health.

Moderators: 

Hoda Mahmoudi has held The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland, College Park since 2012. As director of this endowed academic program, Professor Mahmoudi collaborates with a wide range of scholars, researchers, and practitioners to advance interdisciplinary analysis and open discourse on global peace. Before joining the University of Maryland faculty, Professor Mahmoudi served as the coordinator of the Research Department at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel. Prior to that, Dr. Mahmoudi was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northeastern Illinois University, where she was also a faculty member in the Department of Sociology. Professor Mahmoudi is co-editor of Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Dignity and Human Rights (Emerald, 2019) and of Children and Globalization; Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). Professor Mahmoudi is also co-author of A World Without War (Bahá’í Publishing, 2020), co-editor of The Changing Ethos of Human Rights (Elgar, 2021), and most recently co-editor of Fundamental Challenges to Peace and Security: The Future of Humanity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), and co-editor of Systemic Racism in America: Sociological Theory, Education Inequality, and Social Change (Routledge, 2022)

Dr. Kate Seaman is Assistant Director of The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland. Dr. Seaman previously held positions at the University of Baltimore, the University of Bath and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Dr. Seaman received her Ph.D. from Lancaster University. She is the author of UN-tied Nations; The UN, Peacekeeping and the development of global security governance (Ashgate, 2014).  Dr. Seaman is the co-editor of The Changing Ethos of Human Rights (Elgar, 2021), co-editor of Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security: The Future of Humanity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and co-editor of Infrastructure, Wellbeing and the Measurement of Happiness’ (Routledge, 2022). Her research has also been published in Global Governance and Politics and Governance.

Abstract:

Violence worldwide has prompted forced migration on an unprecedented scale, creating complex challenges for education, particularly in the Global South, where most of the world’s refugees reside. The widespread endorsement of education as a universal human right has given rise to a burgeoning field of global engagement in education to meet the needs of refugee learners. However, growing attention to longstanding issues linked to racism and coloniality in humanitarian assistance has impelled important conversations in recent years. This talk offers insights into the near-absent attention to structural racism and White supremacy in global education circles—meaning spaces of global governance, policymaking, and advocacy in international education development and humanitarian response. Drawing on over a decade of research on Syria refugee education, the talk engages in timely conversations about power inequities in humanitarianism and explores the notion of “ordinary solidarities” as an anticolonial mandate for rights-based humanitarian interventions. Intertwining humanitarian discourse and one school’s practices, the talk considers implications for ongoing efforts to reconfigure humanitarian relations and structures, and our own roles in forging reparative futures.

Speaker

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Abstract:

More than 150 years ago, Horace Mann, the 19th century champion of publicly funded universal education, argued that education is “is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery.” While his words were shaped by the context of the time, Mann’s recognition that an educated and engaged populous is essential for our individual and collective well-being remains true today. The central idea behind Mann’s balance wheel metaphor is that equal opportunity to acquire a quality education is a prerequisite for equal opportunity to participate in our political, civic, and economic institutions—and that the welfare of a democratic society depends on broad participation in those institutions. While much progress has been made in establishing and supporting a universal educational system in the U.S., substantial disparities in educational resources, opportunities, and outcomes persist.  These educational disparities – too often correlated with race, ethnicity, and economic background – continue to undermine the potential of education to serve as “the great equalizer.” In fact, our system of public education has often functioned as a fundamental source of structural inequality in the U.S., with impacts felt by individuals, communities, and our society as a whole.  This lecture focuses on why our educational systems perpetuate inequality, how disparities in educational opportunities negatively impact individuals and the collective good, and what policies and resources are required to ensure equal opportunity for all. The estimated returns on investing in education—and the estimated costs of not doing so—provide strong evidence supporting public investment in universal education. Perhaps even more compelling are the implications for democracy—and the moral and ethical imperatives of a just society. 

Speaker:

PROVOST JENNIFER KING RICE

Jennifer King Rice began her appointment as senior vice president and provost in July 2021.

She was previously dean of the College of Education, where she focused her efforts to align educational resources with initiatives to advance excellence, equity and social justice in preschool through graduate school. Rice has served on the faculty and in college leadership roles at UMD for more than 25 years, and has been recognized as a UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.

Before coming to Maryland, she was a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research in Washington, D.C. Rice’s research draws on the discipline of economics to study policy questions concerning excellence and equity in K-12 education systems. An expert on school finance and teacher policy, she regularly advises state and federal agencies.

A prolific scholar, she has served on the editorial boards of American Educational Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and Education Finance and Policy. In addition to positions as a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellow and a visiting fellow at the Urban Institute, she is a past president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy.

She completed her B.S. in mathematics and English at Marquette University and earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in educational administration and social foundations from Cornell University.

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Abstract:

Ralph Ellison famously characterized ensemble jazz improvisation as “antagonistic cooperation.” Both collaborative and competitive, musicians play with and against one another to create art and community. In Antagonistic Cooperation, Robert G. O’Meally shows how this idea runs throughout twentieth-century African American culture to provide a new history of Black creativity and aesthetics.

From the collages of Romare Bearden and paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat to the fiction of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison to the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, O’Meally explores how the worlds of African American jazz, art, and literature have informed one another. He argues that these artists drew on the improvisatory nature of jazz and the techniques of collage not as a way to depict a fractured or broken sense of Blackness but rather to see the Black self as beautifully layered and complex. They developed a shared set of methods and motives driven by the belief that art must involve a sense of community. O’Meally’s readings of these artists and their work emphasize how they have not only contributed to understanding of Black history and culture but also provided hope for fulfilling the broken promises of American democracy.

Speaker:

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Abstract:

This event features a discussion on how conflicts such as the current one in Israel/Palestine should be handled by campus communities, and the need for a different approach with a focus on ensuring a deeper, more educated understanding of the conflict, how to continue constructive dialogue, and build a supportive community.

Speakers:

Moderators:

Abstract:

This event features some of the editors and contributors of the edited volume Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security: The Future of Humanity. The discussion will explore the challenges raised in the volume around current thinking and strategies in the field of global peace and security. 

Speaker Bios:

About:

Conflict, whether political or personal, can escalate and become toxic, as we keep seeing in the news, on social media, in politics. At this level, known as "high conflict," we start sorting the world into good and evil, us and them. Things become suddenly very clear. Our brains behave differently. We tend to exaggerate the differences between ourselves and the other political party or racial or religious group (or sibling or co-worker), without realizing we are doing it. We believe the other side cannot change, even when it can. Eventually, everyone suffers, to varying degrees. To try to understand how people get bewitched by high conflict--and how they get out--Amanda spent four years following a politician in California, a former gang leader in Chicago, a divided synagogue in New York City and other conflict survivors all over the world. She discovered that the secret is not to get out of conflict; conflict itself is essential, and it can be healthy and good. The key is to get out of high conflict. From the stories and the science of conflict, Amanda has identified the "fire-starter" forces that tend to cause high conflict--as well as the practical but counterintuitive rules of "good conflict." This work is surprising and ultimately hopeful, and it has transformed how Amanda operates as a journalist. 

Speaker:

Parking

Free parking is available on campus after 4pm in Lot 1 and Lot Z

The Map below highlights where the free parking is available, and also where the event will be held in the Stamp Student Union.

Because of ongoing construction there are interruptions to the normal flow of traffic and pedestrian walkways.

On the map below the blue dotted line illustrates the walking route from Lot 1 and Lot Z to the Stamp Student Union.

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About:

This collaborative discussion will explore the idea of land and place as the foundations of public discourses and in turn, democracy. Beginning with an inquiry into the role of the Agora as a place of debate, discussion, and dissent, we will then consider how the land on which we make public places shapes and is shaped by the engagements of democratic discourses. Turning to the 20th century and the role of feminism and practices of intersectionality, the discussion will interrogate how such public places have both grounded the expansion of democracy while in other places been used to exclude practices of democracy. While much has been made of the practices of democracy as a political and social/ cultural set of practices, and others  have explored the role of architecture, less has been explored in terms of the ground, the landscapes of democratic practice. Where do communities come together to practice democracy, where do communities engage in debate and dissent? How does the place shape public discourse, the content and the community of participants? This discussion will not necessarily answer such complex questions, but are intended to raise questions that are essential in efforts to create a more robust democracy here and around the globe. 

Speakers:

Samantha L. Martin is an associate professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy at University College Dublin. Her main research and teaching interests lie in Classical antiquity and the phenomenology of landscapes. She is the editor of Food and Architecture: At the Table (Bloomsbury, 2016) and co-editor of Mobs & Microbes: Market Halls, Civic Order & Public Health (Leuven, 2023). Her other book projects include New Directions in Ancient Urban Planning in the Mediterranean (Routledge, 2018) and a forthcoming monograph on the urban order of ancient Athens. She is presently the editor-in-chief of Architectural Histories, the field journal of the European Architectural History Network. Martin has long worked on archaeological excavations, beginning in 1999 in the Athenian Agora, and later at the Lofkënd Archaeological Project in Albania. Most recently she has served as the architectural historian for the Methone Archaeological Project in northern Greece. Martin has won many awards for her teaching, including the 2019 College Teaching Award at University College Dublin. In 2021 she was a Mellon Teaching Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. She has also received grants from the GAHTC, and in 2019 she established a STEAM learning initiative in Samburu, northern Kenya in 2019. An exhibition based on this initiative was named a flagship project by the Irish Research Council in 2020. She is currently a Senior Associate Member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Martin completed her PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge in 2007. Before that she received an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Architecture, also from Cambridge (2003). She is a graduate of Smith College.

Thaisa Way FASLA, FAAR is the Director for Garden & Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, a Harvard University research institution located in Washington DC. She is the PI for a Mellon Initiative, “Democracy and the Urban Landscape: Race, Identity, and Difference.” As a landscape historian, she teaches history, theory, and design in at the College of Built Environments, University of Washington. She was awarded the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome in 2016. Dr. Way served as the founding Director of Urban@UW, an initiative of the University of Washington. Her publications foreground questions of history, gender, and shaping the landscape. Her book, Unbounded Practices: Women, Landscape Architecture, and Early Twentieth Century Design (UVa Press, 2009/2013) was awarded the J.B. Jackson Book Award.   From Modern Space to Urban Ecological Design: the Landscape Architecture of Richard Haag (UW Press 2015) explores the narrative of post-industrial cities and practices of landscape architecture. River Cities/ City Rivers (Harvard Press 2018) contributes to urban and environmental history. GGN 1999-2018 (Timber Press, 2018) is a foray into descriptions of design as a process. Her most recent book is co-edited with Eric Avila, Segregation and Resistance in the Urban Landscape.

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Abstract:

Technology is often designed and deployed without critical reflection of the values that it embodies.  Value trade-offs—between security and privacy, free speech and dignity, autonomy and human agency, and different conceptions of fairness—abound in many technologies that are now achieving great scale in commonly used tech platforms.  The decisions made by the people inside the companies deploying those technologies impose their value choices upon millions of users, often with negative externalities that are now on full display. 

In our new book, System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot, we provide a multidisciplinary view—the perspectives of a philosopher, a political scientist, and a computer scientist, respectively—to disentangle the systematic drivers that we believe have led to the ethical reckoning that Big Tech is now facing.  We examine the value trade-offs arising in systems for algorithmic decision-making, questions related to data gathering and privacy, the impacts of AI and automation, and the power of private platforms to control our information eco-system.  We then discuss the ways we can all play a role in helping to shape technology and the policies that govern it with an eye toward achieving better outcomes for society.

Speakers:

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Abstract:

What if we saw the end of property relations, settler colonialism and racial capitalism in our lifetime? What if we were called to return to (or begin again) a different kind of living in our ‘now’? Could we answer that call? Would we be ready to bring, or bring back into existence these otherwise futures? I want to consider such questions as central to theories and practices of mothering, other-mothering and caretaking that unfold within totalizing atmospheres of anti-blackness. They chart what Eve Tuck calls the “desire-based research” that is just as needed as the more “damage-centered” work of critiquing/resisting the constellation of world-ending systems that make for the impossibility of black life. In other words, these are questions that orient our imaginative energies toward the worlds we seek to build, even as an atmosphere of antiblackness (and its accompanying settler conquest and capital accumulation) says that there is no other alternative. My claim, here, is that the work of black mothering, other-mothering and caretaking have these generative orientations at its center, exceeding mere resistance against white supremacy and its futurity. In this excess, caretaking for black life rehearses in the ‘now’ what is ‘not yet’, inserts variant and otherwise futurities into a machinery of black death-making. As such, this work of mothering, other-mothering and caretaking always unfolds as if a different future is now.

Kris F Sealey is Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University, where she also serves as Department Chair. In Fall 2023, she joins the Department of Philosophy at the University Park campus of Penn State University. Dr. Sealey graduated from Spelman College in 2001 with a B.Sc. in Mathematics, and received both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from The University of Memphis. Her areas of research include Continental Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, Caribbean Philosophy, and decolonial theory. Her first book, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre and the Question of Transcendence, was published in December 2013 with SUNY Press. Dr. Sealey’s second book, Creolizing the Nation, published in September 2020 with Northwestern University Press, was awarded the Guillén Batista book award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2022.

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SPEAKERS:

PROFESSOR HODA MAHMOUDI

Hoda Mahmoudi has held The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland, College Park since 2012. As director of this endowed academic program, Professor Mahmoudi collaborates with a wide range of scholars, researchers, and practitioners to advance interdisciplinary analysis and open discourse on global peace. Before joining the University of Maryland faculty, Professor Mahmoudi served as the coordinator of the Research Department at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel. Prior to that, Dr. Mahmoudi was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northeastern Illinois University, where she was also a faculty member in the Department of Sociology. Professor Mahmoudi is co-editor of Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Dignity and Human Rights (Emerald, 2019) and of Children and Globalization; Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). Professor Mahmoudi is also co-author of A World Without War (Bahá’í Publishing, 2020), co-editor of The Changing Ethos of Human Rights (Elgar, 2021), and most recently co-editor of Fundamental Challenges to Peace and Security: The Future of Humanity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

PROFESSOR JENNY ROE

Education: School of the Built Environment, Heriot Watt University UK, PhD; University of Greenwich UK, PG Diploma in Landscape Architecture; University of Nottingham UK, BA (Joint Hons) English and American Studies

Jenny Roe is Professor and Director of the Center for Design & Health in the School of Architecture, University of Virginia. An environmental psychologist and former head of Landscape Architecture for an international architectural practice, she writes, lectures, and consults for a wide range of academic and public audiences on human health-centered design for the built environment. She is an expert in restorative environments that support mental health including an important role for public parks and urban green space.  Her book on this subject, Restorative Cities: Urban Design for Mental Health and Wellbeing (Roe and McCay, 2021) explores a new way of designing cities that puts mental health at the forefront. A new co-edited book continues this theme by exploring ‘Infrastructure, Wellbeing and the Measurement of Happiness’ (Mahmoudi, Roe & Seaman, Routledge, 2022)

Roe has won numerous awards and research grants exploring a rich variety of architectural and landscape contexts and their psychological impact on people.   Her scholarly outputs include over fifty-five peer review publications including for the World Health Organization and the Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal.  She acts as expert advisor to the UK’s Design Council and advises various community organizations and foundations on strategies for promoting and implementing health-centered design.  She serves as a mentor and coach to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Scholars Program.

DR KATE SEAMAN

Kate Seaman is Assistant Director of The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland. Dr. Seaman previously held positions at the University of Baltimore, the University of Bath and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Dr. Seaman received her Ph.D. from Lancaster University. She is the author of UN-tied Nations; The UN, Peacekeeping and the development of global security governance (Ashgate, 2014).  Dr. Seaman is the co-editor of The Changing Ethos of Human Rights (Elgar, 2021), and co-editor of Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security: The Future of Humanity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Her research has been published in Global Governance and Politics and Governance.

Moderator:

STELLA HOLLADAY HUDSON

Stella is a Masters of Library and Information Science Student and a Graduate and Teaching Assistant with the Bahá'í Chair for World Peace, in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. She earned her BA from the College of William and Mary, where she majored in English and minored in Classical Studies.

Please join us for an Open Mic night in support of earthquake relief this Wednesday, February 15, 5-7pm in the first floor atrium of H.J. Patterson Hall.

Bring your favorite poem or song, and join us for a meaningful gathering and fundraiser.  

Can't make the event but would still like to participate? You can make donations via Venmo (@UMD-charity-night) or Cashap ($UMDcharitynight).

All proceeds will be sent to Doctors Without Borders.

We cordially invite you to celebrate 30 years of the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland, College Park.

More details on the program, and the following reception will be released soon.

You can RSVP using the button below.

Dinner

There will be a free buffet dinner provided before the event, this will be served from 5.30pm - 6.45pm in the Grand Ballroom, Stamp Student Union, University of Maryland College Park.

Program Details

The event program is being held in the Colony Ballroom, Stamp Student Union, University of Maryland College Park.

The event begins at 7pm, for security reasons there will be a bag check to enter the Colony ballroom so please arrive in plenty of time.

The program will feature remarks from Provost Jennifer King Rice, Provost of the University of Maryland, former students, alumni, and faculty, as well as a presentation from Professor Hoda Mahmoudi.

The presentations will be followed by a dessert reception in the Colony Ballroom.

Check back soon for more details.

Parking

Free parking is available on campus after 4pm in Lot 1 and Lot Z

The Map below highlights where the free parking is available, and also where the event will be held in the Stamp Student Union

Because of ongoing construction there are interruptions to the normal flow of traffic and pedestrian walkways.

On the map below the blue dotted line illustrates the walking route from Lot 1 and Lot Z to the Stamp Student Union.

Hotel Accommodation is available at the links below:

The Hotel at the University of Maryland

College Park Marriott Hotel

Cambria Hotel College Park

About:

Antisemitism has extraordinary longevity and global reach, able to adhere to political positions of the Left and the Right and expand from verbal denigration to visual symbols, from physical assault to mass murder. Exploring the tenacity of antisemitism and its ability to elude destruction, the lecture will also examine the strategies of antisemitic propaganda, especially the efforts to devise antisemitic emotional appeal from medieval Christian rhetoric to Hitler’s Mein Kampf to the internet. The expansiveness of antisemitism to include Blacks, Asians, trans, LGBTQ, feminists, and leftists makes its danger relevant to all, particularly in an era of democratic fragility. How should we respond?

This event will be held in-person in The Prince George’s Room, Stamp Student Union, University of Maryland College Park.

It will also be streamed online via Zoom.

You can register to attend the event using the register now button at the end of the page.

Speaker:

This event is co-sponsored by:

About:

Chief Curator Elsa Smithgall moderates a conversation exploring art’s role in addressing nuclear war abolition, peace and reconciliation. Panelists include Leslie King Hammond, Mel Hardy, and Smriti Keshari. The program includes poignant musical reflection​s performed by pianist Ryo Yanagitani, cellist Char Prescott, and members of the All Souls Church, Unitarian, Washington, DC choir.

The Artist of Conscience panel brings together figures from the arts, policy, and scientific communities to discuss how the arts can be an impetus for action. The panel focuses on the power of artists as advocates for change and how policy makers and artists have and can collaborate effectively.

These events are in collaboration with The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace (umd.edu) and All Souls Church. 

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This event features a virtual film screening of the bomb, a film that explores the immense power of nuclear weapons, the perverse appeal they have, and the profound death wish at the very heart of them. The 61-minute film takes viewers through the strange, compelling, and unsettling reality of nuclear weapons today. Following the screening, the Artist Smriti Keshari will take questions from the audience. 

This event is part of a larger program co-sponsored with All Soul’s Church and, The Phillips Collection, Artists of Conscience Series.

On October 27, 2022 at 6pm, Chief Curator Elsa Smithgall moderates a conversation exploring art’s role in addressing nuclear war abolition, peace and reconciliation. Panelists include Leslie King Hammond, Mel Hardy, and Smriti Yeshari. The program includes poignant musical reflections performed by pianist Ryo Yanagitani, cellist Char Prescott, and members of the All Souls Church, Unitarian, Washington, DC choir.

You can find out more and register to attend the panel at The Phillips Collection here.

The Artist of Conscience panel brings together figures from the arts, policy, and scientific communities to discuss how the arts can be an impetus for action. The panel focuses on the power of artists as advocates for change and how policy makers and artists have and can collaborate effectively.

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We are at a crossroads in the history of humanity, where the choices we make will have exceptionally big impacts on the future of human life on this planet. Climate change has now arrived at a critical stage, where we must act swiftly and make profound changes to how we live, if we want to avert really bad outcomes. Yet this critical test for humanity, which requires us to act together and put the collective before our individual interests, also takes place at a time of growing economic inequalities. Those inequalities cause further problems, such as endangering democracy, weakening social cohesion, and overall a lower level of human flourishing compared with what less unequal societies could give us.

Against this critical background, I want to propose that we take seriously what the idea of ‘limitarianism’ could bring to this discussion. In its most general formulation, limitarianism is the idea that there should be limits to how much each of us should be allowed to appropriate valuable scarce resources. Economic resources (in particular, wealth and income), and ecological resources (in particular, how much we take from the global carbon budget with the emissions we cause), are clear candidates for limitarian thinking. Economic limitarianism implies that we arrange societies in such a way that there is a cap on how much money a person could hold; this would limit inequalities in money. Ecological limitarianism implies that we arrange our social institutions and practices in such a way that we limit the emissions each person causes. I will argue for both forms of limitarianism, and also show how they are related and reinforce each other.

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Feminisms are multiple yet all of them have in common to conceive of society as being organized by what is called “gender.” This gendered social organization entails that women and men are educated, incentivized, and asked to behave differently from each other. As a consequence, women’s experiences are deeply shaped by gender hierarchies and in many ways differ from men’s experiences. One of the commitments of the philosophy is to seek to analyze human lived experience yet only a few philosophers have endeavored to study how gender hierarchies shape women’s experiences. This talk will aim to shed light on this phenomenon through a philosophical analysis of submission and (sexual) consent.

This event will be held in-person in The Prince George’s Room, Stamp Student Union, University of Maryland College Park.

It will also be streamed online via Zoom.

You can register to attend the event using the register now button at the end of the page.

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At the core of democracy in the United States is a long debate over voting rights. Martin Luther King, Jr. echoed abolitionist Theodore Parker when he adopted the metaphor of the arc, as in "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Barack Obama, borrowing from the U.S. Constitution, anticipated progress for a nation that was on "the path to a more perfect union." What these framings elide is how, across our past as a nearly 250-year-old nation, debate rather than progress has best characterized American democracy. Contests over voting rights troubled the United States from its very start. And, today this foundational facet of our democracy continue to generate debate—and change—in our own time. Black women's leadership on the right to vote reveals how contests over the character of the body politic have challenged every generation. History strongly suggests that our future will include much more of the same.

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This roundtable discussion features the editors, and two contributors, to the volume Systemic Racism in America: Sociological Theory, Education Inequality, and Social Change. The volume situates our contemporary moment within a historical framework and works to identify forms, occurrences, and consequences of racism as well as argue for concrete solutions to address it.

Please note that this event will be held both in-person and online.

For the in-person event we are requesting that attendees wear masks.

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Join us for a discussion with Professor June Thomas about her new book, Struggling to Learn An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina. 

The battle for equality in education during the civil rights era came at a cost to Black Americans on the frontlines. In 1964 when fourteen-year-old June Manning Thomas walked into Orangeburg High School as one of thirteen Black students selected to integrate the all-White school, her classmates mocked, shunned, and yelled racial epithets at her. The trauma she experienced made her wonder if the slow-moving progress was worth the emotional sacrifice. In Struggling to Learn, Thomas, revisits her life growing up in the midst of the civil rights movement before, during, and after desegregation and offers an intimate look at what she and other members of her community endured as they worked to achieve equality for Black students in K-12 schools and higher education.

The discussion will be moderated by Professor Hoda Mahmoudi and Professor Julius Fleming.

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This presentation offers a conversation about racism and coloniality in past and present-day ideas, practices and discourses on solidarity beyond borders. Rather than as glitches or occasional aberrations enacted by actors of ill-will, they are understood as constitutive features of the global order, including the aid industrial complex. The aim of this talk is to collectively think through the implications of engaging decolonial, antiracist and abolitionist thought to the politics and practices of solidarity. I engage epistemic Blackness as a methodology, i.e. I engage knowledges from experiences and sense-makings from peoples of African descent, and end up centering the concepts of dignity, retreat and repair radically rethink what solidarity beyond borders, coloniality and racism could look like.

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Antisemitism has been on the rise again. Antisemitic worldviews have been developed over thousands of years. They have been reformulated again and again. Today, antisemitism can be related to religious, nationalistic, or political views. It can even be formulated in the language of human rights. This makes it often difficult to address, because some forms of antisemitism are very close to home.

In my presentation. I will go over recent trends and statistics of antisemitic incidents and discuss some of the main ideological sources.

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COVID-19 has brought to the fore once more that violence, direct and structural, disproportionately affects Black, indigenous, and other marginalized peoples. Discourses, deliberations, and policy documents that speak about “crisis” and “disasters” have proliferated in the last two decades. Ranging from neoliberals to the most conservative thinkers we seem to be reaching a consensus that the world is reaching its end.  Many are rushing to design new “Leviathan contracts” that expand coloniality and imperial projects to other planets. In this presentation, I examine the entwinement of time, coloniality, enslavement and global racial capital. Inspired by radical decolonial visions and experiments and from the vantage point of black, indigenous, and anti-capitalist feminists I argue that it is key to grapple with contemporary fatalisms that come in the form of critical environmentalisms, reproductive fascisms and innovative technoscientific capitalism. Crucial to this conversation are the dominant ways that time, coloniality, and value are sutured together to co-constitute fatal notions, imaginations, and projects about species and the planetary. I conclude with some experimental orientations.  In conversation with several radical and decolonial experiments, I point to literacies and imaginations which focus on the possibilities for thriving and multispecies relationalities and planetary futures beyond global racial capitalism.

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In this presentation, Dr. Yohuru Williams explores the history of the struggle for racial equality in the United States from the Civil Rights era through the contemporary Black Lives Matter Movement with an exploration of key episodes and moments in U.S. History.

Dr. Williams has appeared on a variety of local and national radio and television programs most notably  ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Aljazeera America, BET, CSPAN, EBRU Today, Fox Business News, Fresh Outlook, Huff  Post Live, and NPR. He was featured in the Ken Burns PBS Documentary "Jackie Robinson" and the  Stanley Nelson PBS Documentary "The Black Panthers." He is also one of the hosts of the History  Channel’s Web show "Sound Smart." A regular political commentator on the Cliff Kelly Show on WVON,  Chicago, Dr. Williams also blogs regularly for the Huffington Post and is a contributor to the Progressive  Magazine. 

Dr. Williams' scholarly articles have appeared in the American Bar Association’s Insights on Law and  Society, The Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, The Black Scholar, The Journal of  Black Studies, Pennsylvania History, Delaware History, the Journal of Civil and Human Rights and the  Black History Bulletin. Dr. Williams is also presently finishing a new book entitled In the Shadow of the  Whipping Post: Lynching, Capital Punishment, and Jim Crow Justice in Delaware 1865-1965 under  contract with Cambridge University Press.

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Using a unique dataset, this paper examines the extent to which streets named after prominent Confederate generals reflect an area’s racial animus toward blacks and are related to black-white labor market differentials. The analysis shows that Confederate streets are positively associated with a proxy for historical racial animus. Specifically, I show that areas that experienced more historical lynchings have more streets named after prominent Confederate generals today. Examining individual-level data show that blacks who reside in areas that have a relatively higher number of Confederate streets are less likely to be employed, more likely to be employed in low-status occupations, and have lower wages compared to whites. This relationship holds after accounting for levels of educational attainment and race-specific quality of education. I find no evidence that geographic sorting explains these results. Investigating whether these results extend to other groups show that Confederate streets are associated with employment, occupational status, and wage differentials between other minorities and whites.

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