Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University

Harpur College Dean’s Workshops, 2007-08

Built Environments of Atlantic Slavery

Coordinator: Dale Tomich, Sociology and FBC

This workshop is intended to open a discussion of slavery through a comparative inquiry into housing patterns on slave plantations throughout the Atlantic world. It is particularly concerned with examining the European and African origins of American building traditions, the spatial organization of the built environment and the patterns of interaction within and between social groups resident on the plantations, material conditions of life, and symbolic representations of social hierarchy.

Organizational meeting, Tuesday, October 9, 2007, 4:30 pm, Fernand Braudel Center, Academic A 330

Workshop, April 12-13, 2008 Program

Science Studies

Coordinators: Gerald Kutcher, History, and Richard E. Lee, Sociology and FBC

This workshop provides a forum where various disciplines within Harpur College can be brought together to articulate ideas and approaches to issues in science and society: The Public Uptake of Knowledge; Medical Constructs of the Body and Mind; Science, the Military and the University; and Science and Institutionalized Knowledge Production.

Oct. 11, 2007, Kapil Raj, EHESS, Paris, discussion of his book Relocating Modern Science, 4:30 pm, Fernand Braudel Center, Academic A 330

Nov. 1, 2007, meeting, 4:30 pm, Fernand Braudel Center, Academic A 330.

Feb. 28, 2008, Elliott Shore, History, Bryn Mawr College, "History and the Neuroscience of Memory", 4:30 pm, Fernand Braudel Center, Academic A 330 Paper to be posted in mid February.

April 29, 2008, Sarah Tracy, Visiting Assoc. Prof. of the History of Science, Harvard, "Fasting for Freedom and Science: Ancel Keys and the Minnesota Starvation Study," 5 pm, Fernand Braudel Center, Academic A 330.

Utopistics

Coordinator: Richard E. Lee, Sociology and FBC

This workshop will address the question of the large-scale future of the modern world (“utopistics” is Immanuel Wallerstein’s term for possible rather than impossible utopias). On the one hand, the processes of the modern world-system are reaching their asymptotes and thus the present conjuncture is one of transition, of fundamental change. On the other hand, we do not know whether that change will result in a more substantively rational or egalitarian world. This workshop will investigate what alternative futures are actually possible, what choices they implicate, and what relationship between intellectual work and social practice is involved.

Oct. 26, 2007, Roundtable discussion “The Zapatistas and the World,” Carwil James, Anthropology, CUNY and Kolya Abramsky, Sociology, Binghamton University, 4:30 pm, Fernand Braudel Center, Academic A 330

The Contemporary State

Coordinator: Tom Wilson, Anthropology

April 8, 2008, Richard Lackmann, Sociology, University at Albany, “How Hegemons Decline: Early Modern Europe and the Contemporary United States,” 4:30 pm, Fernand Braudel Center.

Richard Lachmann (Ph.D. Harvard 1983) has been a professor of sociology at the University at Albany since 1990. His research is concentrated in the areas of comparative historical sociology and the sociology of culture. His book, Capitalists In Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 2000) is the winner of the 2003 American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award. He currently is researching state fiscal crises and the private appropriation of public resources and writing a comparative study of the decline of dominant economic and military powers in early modern Europe and the contemporary United States. The first results of that project were published as “Elite Self-Interest and Economic Decline in Early Modern Europe” in the June 2003 American Sociological Review. He also is examining the fate of democracy during eras of economic and geo-political decline and comparing media coverage of war deaths in the United States and Israel in the 1960s and the 2000s.

Links to previous years’ workshops: 2005-06, 2006-07

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