Monthly Archives: October 2013

Editorial on Roma in the Times

excerpted from the Times:

THE OPINION PAGES | EDITORIAL

Scapegoating the Roma, Again

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD OCT. 17, 2013

The Roma, sometimes called Gypsies, have been part of the European cultural landscape for centuries. They have also suffered greatly from discrimination and prejudice, particularly in times of economic crisis, when they become scapegoats.

That is happening now. Faced with stubbornly high unemployment and strained budgets, some European Union members are finding it easier to stigmatize and expel Roma than to provide them with the education, housing and employment they seek.

In London, a Roma camp was dismantled over the summer and most of its residents sent back to Romania. In the Czech Republic, Roma children are still routinely segregated in schools. In Sweden, revelations that the police kept a secret registry of Roma families touched off a national storm.

Continue reading the full Times editorial

and come join the conversation with the Narrating Change Seminar @The Graduate Center

Narrating Reform: Roma Educators Narrate Social Inclusion in Europe

Oct 22, 2013, 6:30pm
The Skylight Room (9100)

Tünde Kovacs-CerovicJordan NaidooColette Daiute

And

Discussion of the Report: “Roma Educators Narrate Reform”

@The Graduate Center,  October 23, 2:00 – 4:00

Please write to cdaiute@gc.cuny.edu for the report and the room number.

 

Károly BARI, Autobiography of a Cherub
Károly BARI, Autobiography of a Cherub

repost from The Center for the Humanities:

“Social inclusion” is a promise and issue of heated negotiation across Europe, where dramatically changing populations are the result of economic migration, displacement by war and revolution, poverty, and other exclusions. Eleven million Roma in diverse communities are living in marginalized conditions that are central to policies and politics of social inclusion. The Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005-2015, declared by 13 countries across Eastern Europe to provide an agenda and resources has prompted an education reform (among reforms in health and housing). The Pedagogical Assistant Program in Serbia is a dynamic effort revolving around self-determination by Roma through professional participation in education.  Join us for a presentation and discussion of goals, activities, and tensions in this education reform, with examples from research highlighting perspectives of the Roma teaching assistants.

 

tinda
Tünde Kovacs-Cerovic, Professor of Educational Psychology & Education Policy at Belgrade University
Jordan Naidoo, Senior Education Advisor at UNICEF
Jordan Naidoo, Senior Education Advisor at UNICEF
Colette Daiute, Professor of Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Colette Daiute, Professor of Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cosponsored by the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities.

 

 

 

When Mother Comes Home for Christmas

When Mother Comes Home for Christmas

Oct 9, 2013, 7:00pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre

Sujatha Fernandes, Nilita Vachani

Join film director Nilita Vachani for a screening and discussion of her documentary film, “When Mother Comes Home for Christmas,” which tells the story of a Josephine Perera, abandoned by her husband with three small children, who is one of thousands of Sri Lankan women who have left their country to earn salaries as domestic workers abroad.Sujatha Fernandes will moderate a discussion with the filmmaker following the screening.

This event emerged from Narrating Labor Struggles: Storytelling and Social Change, which can be viewed in our archive.

When Mother Comes Home

Cosponsored by The Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities

Notes from “Emerging Narratives: Illuminating Breakthrough Experiences of Community,” 9/27

The opening meeting of the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities was designed as a way to begin our discussion of narrating community, within our larger focus on narrative and social change. It also functioned as the beginning of a community-building process for us, as the hope for the coming academic year is to move away from a focus on one-off events (as valuable as these can be) and to move towards the developing of working groups that can collaborate and support members of the seminar in developing ongoing work. We are working towards a final conference at the end of the spring where much of this ongoing work can be presented, and have also begun to discuss other possible outlets for disseminating the work of the seminar.

Concretely, we decided to form two working groups that will work on specific projects (both of these are working titles for the groups): 1) a community narrative archive team, which will work on bringing together existing CUNY reports (task force findings, student- and faculty-initiated reports, and other documents) with an eye towards questions of narrating community; and 2) a cross-CUNY writing team, which will work on developing a writing prompt focusing on analyzing notions of community that could be assigned across a spectrum of classes throughout the CUNY colleges, from two-year campuses to the GC (as part of the process of working towards the idea of more direct collaborative work to be carried out between classes across these different campuses and colleges). Separate pages for each working group have been set up on the Narrating Change blog, to provide a space for online collaboration. There was also a discussion of ideas for planning towards the conference in May, as well as other working group possibilities, including working towards identifying forms of research support for those teaching at the two-year campuses, and developing alternative pedagogical spaces for the discussion of community and social change, including the ongoing work of the Free University.

We decided to meet again on Friday, November 1 at 10am at LaGuardia Community College, English Department Conference Room (E Building, Room 103); this would be a meeting for working groups to come back together and follow up, as well as a chance to continue some of the discussions we began at the first meeting, and to bring in new participants and new ideas as well. There are also several events related to the seminar that are coming up in October: a film screening on Wednesday, October 9 at 7:00pm (Screening of When Mother Comes Homes for Christmas, followed by a conversation with filmmaker Nilita Vachani, moderated by Sujatha Fernandes), co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities, at the Graduate Center, Martin E. Segal Theater; an event on Tuesday, October 22 at 6:30pm (Narrating Reform: Roma Educators Narrate Social Inclusion in Europe, featuring Tünde Kovacs-Cerovic, Jordan Naidoo, and Colette Daiute), at the Graduate Center, The Skylight Room (Room 9100); and two panel discussions on Wednesday, October 23 at 2:00pm – 4:00pm Discussion of the Report: “Roma Educators Narrate Reform” Graduate Center, Please write to cdaiute@gc.cuny.edu for the report and the room number.

For more info, check out our blog at https://changeblog.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ or go to http://centerforthehumanities.org/seminars/narrating-change.

Tentative Schedule of Meetings and Events, Fall 2013

Meeting 1: Friday, September 27, 10:00am
Emerging Narratives: Illuminating Breakthrough Experiences of Community
Organizer: Tony Alessandrini
Graduate Center, Room 8106

Co-Sponsored Event: Wednesday, October 9, 7:00pm
Screening of When Mother Comes Homes for Christmas, followed by conversation with filmmaker Nilita Vachani, moderated by Sujatha Fernandes
Co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities
Graduate Center, Martin E. Segal Theater

Event: Tuesday, October 22, 6:30pm
Narrating Reform: Roma Educators Narrate Social Inclusion in Europe
Featuring Tünde Kovacs-Cerovic, Jordan Naidoo, and Colette Daiute
Graduate Center, The Skylight Room (Room 9100)

Meeting 2: Wednesday October 23, 2:00pm – 4:00pm
Discussion of the Report: “Roma Educators Narrate Reform”
Organizer: Colette Daiute
Graduate Center, Please write to cdaiute@gc.cuny.edu for the report and the room number.

Meeting 3: Friday, November 1, 10:00am

Follow-Up on Narrating Change Working Groups: The Community Narrative Archive Team and The Cross-CUNY Writing Team
LaGuardia Community College, English Department Conference Room, E Building, Room 103

Meeting 4: Friday, December 6, 3:00pm
Possibility and Hegemony in Contemporary Writing, With and in Spite of Social Media
Organizer: Svetlana Jovic
Location TBA

For more information on the seminar, go to http://centerforthehumanities.org/seminars/narrating-change.