Division of Social Studies

Recent News

• Pavlina Tcherneva Writes Levy Policy Note on Election Outcome
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  Pavlina Tcherneva Writes Levy Policy Note on Election Outcome

  

  Pavlina Tcherneva. 
  

  Pavlina Tcherneva, president of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, professor of economics, and director of OSUN’s Economic Democracy Initiative, posted a policy note on the outcome of the US presidential election and how many Americans voted for progressive policies, such as state ballot measures to increase minimum wage and require paid sick leave, despite Donald Trump having won the presidential bid. She addresses how numerous issues, including economic concerns, wages, immigration policy, and reproductive health rights, among many other factors, affected the way voters responded, particularly in states that voted Republican. “All polls—whatever one’s feelings about their reliability—kept pointing to the same defining issue in this (as in every other) election: the economy,” writes Tcherneva. “Critical issues of democracy, abortion, and immigration filled the airwaves and political speeches, but the economy remained once again more powerful than any one of them.”
  

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  Post Date: 11-12-2024
  
• Omar G. Encarnación Published in History Today
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  Omar G. Encarnación Published in History Today

  

  Omar G. Encarnación.
  

  Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics in the Division of Social Studies at Bard, contributed to “Is It Possible to Forgive and Forget,” a group article published in History Today that examines how policies of remembrance and education, versus those that actively promote forgetting problematic pasts, have been used in approaching how countries grapple with their own fraught national histories. In his excerpt, Encarnación explores how Spain’s decision to enact the Pact of Forgetting from 1975 to 2007, intended to avoid confronting directly the authoritarian legacy of Francoism, meant adopting practices that promoted political amnesia. “Spain’s experience suggests that forgetting need not mean condemning the past to eternal oblivion, but rather setting it aside until society is ready to deal with it,” he writes.
  

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  Post Date: 11-05-2024
  
• Bard College Students Attend HBCU Democracy Day at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro as Part of Course on Student Voting
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  Bard College Students Attend HBCU Democracy Day at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro as Part of Course on Student Voting

  

  Students and faculty from Bard College, North Carolina A&T, and Tuskegee University stand in front of a statue of the A&T (Greensboro) Four on North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Photo by Seamus Heady
  

  A group of Bard students, enrolled in a course titled Student Voting: Power, Politics and Race in the Fight for American Democracy, attended HBCU Democracy Day at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (North Carolina A&T) on Wednesday, October 16 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The course on student voting, which is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Open Society University Network (OSUN), is collaboratively taught by faculty from Bard College, North Carolina A&T, Prairie View A&M University, and Tuskegee University. Students meet virtually every week to discuss issues in the course, including case studies which explore histories of student voting at each institution. Students from each of the campuses attended the HBCU Democracy Day conference.
  
  The conference featured a panel with five of the professors who teach the course: Jelani Favors (North Carolina A&T) who organized Democracy Day and heads North Carolina A&T’s Center of Excellence for Social Justice; Jonathan Becker (Bard College); Melanye Price (Prairie View A&M University); Lisa Bratton (Tuskegee University); and Yael Bromberg, who is a senior fellow at the Bard Center for Civic Engagement and a leading scholar on the history of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.
  
  The conference also included an array of distinguished speakers, including: David Dennis Sr., author and civil rights movement veteran; Martha Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, professor of history and director of graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University; and Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at Ohio State University.
  
  North Carolina A&T Henry E. Frye Distinguished Professor of History Jelani Favors said: “It was great to see the inaugural HBCU Democracy Day come into fruition at North Carolina A&T State University and to have visiting students join us from Bard, Wesleyan, Tuskegee, Prairie View A&M, and High Point University. Black colleges have been critical incubators for idealism and civic engagement since their inceptions in 1837, and the purpose of this program was to lean into that tradition and to foster healthy discourse and dialogue that will inspire students to continue the fight in interrogating, defending, and expanding democracy for the next generation. We look forward to hosting this program again next year and hopefully encouraging HBCUs across the country to implement similar programming.”
  
  Bard College Professor of Political Studies and Vice President for Academic Affairs Jonathan Becker said: “It was an incredible educational experience for Bard students to be able to meet and engage in lively discussions with professors and students from some of the nation’s leading HBCUs on critical issues facing the country on the eve of the presidential election. It was even more meaningful, because the conference was held at North Carolina A&T, the home of the A&T (Greensboro) Four and so many other distinguished figures from the civil rights movement.”
  
  The attending Bard students expressed tremendous enthusiasm about their experience. “It was amazing to see faculty and students that were so connected to their local community and to witness their pride in the role of their institution in the fight for civil rights,” said Emily O’Rourke ’25, a senior majoring in anthropology who is pursuing a certificate in civic engagement. “It was incredibly meaningful to meet face-to-face with students from the other campuses and together to participate in these necessary and important conversations about the history and future of democracy.”
  
  Panhavotey Chea ’28, a first-year student, said: “Everyone on campus at North Carolina A&T was very welcoming, and Democracy Day was extremely informative. As an international student, I found it particularly interesting because I had the opportunity to be exposed to different perspectives on issues of voting and democracy.”
  
  Kay Bell ’26, a junior global and international studies major, said, “It was an amazing experience to be able to go to an HBCU, to be able collaborate with students from other schools like North Carolina A&T, Tuskegee, and Prairie View A&M, and to hear firsthand about their efforts to support voting and democracy. It makes me hopeful for the future of the country knowing that there are so many students involved in the fight for democracy.”
  
  The student voting course includes both written and video-documentary case studies about each of the participating campuses. Seamus Heady, a digital media specialist at OSUN who directed short documentary films on each of the participating campuses for the course, said: “Democracy Day made tangible the legacy of HBCU students’ participation in the process of democracy and gave a glimmer of hope for the future.”
  
  Masha Pankova, a graduate of Bard’s Center Human Rights and the Arts Master’s program who helped produce the documentary films, said: “It was incredibly fulfilling to see the illustrious campus of North Carolina A &T and to visit Greensboro’s International Civil Rights Museum, which exposed me to the history that changed the nation. It’s one thing to read about it and another thing to see it firsthand.”
  
  Post Date: 10-22-2024
  
• Roger Berkowitz Joins Other Arendt Center Conference Speakers on WAMC’s Roundtable to Discuss Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism
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  Roger Berkowitz Joins Other Arendt Center Conference Speakers on WAMC’s Roundtable to Discuss Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism

  

  L–R: Joe Donahue, JP Miller, Mike Spain, and Professor Roger Berkowitz.
  

  Roger Berkowitz, professor of political studies and human rights, and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Bard College, joins other Hannah Arendt Center conference speakers Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center Uday Singh Mehta, Arendtian scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University Shai Lavi, among other panelists, on WAMC’s Roundtable to discuss tribalism and cosmopolitanism. Opening up the discussion, Lavi asks: “Is there a way to talk about belonging to a community, belonging to a group, or belonging to a people without using the term ‘tribalism’? Are there other ways of belonging that are not tribal? Similarly, what the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ is trying to get at is the question of our shared humanity. So is cosmopolitanism, which is an abstraction, the best way to talk about our shared humanity?” The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College will host its 16th annual international conference on “Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics?” on October 17–18, 2024.
  
  Learn more and register here.
  

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  Post Date: 10-08-2024
  
• Bard Welcome Corps Scholarships Awarded to Two OSUN RhEAP Students for 2025
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  Bard Welcome Corps Scholarships Awarded to Two OSUN RhEAP Students for 2025

  

  L–R: Grace George Kharthum and Ruot Wichar Duop will attend Bard College in New York in 2025 after being accepted into Welcome Corps on Campus program.
  

  Bard College’s Welcome Corps on Campus (WCC) program has accepted two students from OSUN’s Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives in Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya, to attend Bard in the 2025-26 academic year. Grace George Kharthum and Ruot Wichar Duop, originally from Sudan, secured the highly coveted scholarships from WCC, a refugee sponsorship program supported by US governmental agencies and higher education institutions, after completing the Hubs’ Realizing Higher Education Access Program (RhEAP) program. At Bard, Duop plans to study computer science and English literature, with a focus on developing data, software, and machine learning to provide innovative solutions to challenges in healthcare, education, and governance. Kharthum will pursue a degree in sociology, focusing on gender, education, and global development. “My journey from a refugee camp in Kenya to Bard College in New York is a testament to the power of education and support from dedicated individuals and organizations,” said Kharthum.
  

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  Post Date: 10-07-2024
  
• Pavlina Tcherneva Joins WAMC’s Roundtable Panel on the State of the US Economy and How it Impacts Voters
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  Pavlina Tcherneva Joins WAMC’s Roundtable Panel on the State of the US Economy and How it Impacts Voters

  Bard Professor of Economics and President of the Levy Economics Institute Pavlina Tcherneva joined a panel of economists on WAMC’s Roundtable to discuss the economic issues that matter to voters and how each of the two presidential candidates’ policy proposals address them. “If you compare the two proposals, it’s very clear where they are directed. Trump’s proposals tend to favor corporations, high income earners, and they deal with a lot of dismantling of public institutions. ‘Defund, deport, deregulate, destroy.’ His message plays on economic fears and anxieties,” said Tcherneva. “In terms of the direction of her policies, Kamala Harris looks like she is trying to address housing issues, food prices, and drug prices but we don’t have concrete details yet.” Tcherneva also points to how deficit rhetoric is weaponized during election cycles as a tactic to scare people. 
  

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  Post Date: 09-26-2024