For seven seasons, award-winning Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has uncovered the ancestral stories of celebrity guests on his hit-television series, Finding Your Roots. In this program, Gates will be joined by Dr. Gregg Hecimovich to discuss the process of unearthing the histories of formerly enslaved people. The focus will be on Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jim, and Renty, seven Black men and women who were photographed against their will in Columbia, South Carolina in 1850. These controversial photographs are the subject of a new book, To Make Their Own...
Join us for a virtual panel discussion with some of Harvard’s sports leaders as they share lessons about the importance of diversity, the impact of inclusion, and their journey to successful leaders.
Panelists:
Tari Cash, Founder & CEO at City Swing Golf, Harvard Business School, MBA 2005
Allison Feaster, Vice President Player Development & Organizational Growth, Boston Celtics, Harvard University, BA 1998
Traci Green, The Sheila Kelly Palandjian Head Coach for Harvard Women’s Tennis
Designer and activist Bryan C. Lee, Jr will convene with the founders of The Black School for a conversation about Black radical pedagogical experiments, past, present, and future. GSD community members Toshiko Mori and Tara Oluwafemi will join for the second half of the program.
This program brings together three unique perspectives on the idea of “Small Town Urbanism”: Andrew Freear, Director of Rural Studio at Auburn University; Faranak Miraftab, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and Todd Okolichany, Director of Planning and Urban Design for the City of Asheville, North Carolina.
Climate change, the pandemic, telecommuting, and accelerating land costs in large cities have fueled a slow but noticeable relocation of people and services to ex-urban locales. The retreat from large cities...
How do we confront the history and legacy of Louis Agassiz’s extensive archive of images of African and Indigenous Brazilians made in Manaus, Brazil in 1865 and housed at Harvard’s Peabody Museum?
Four distinguished panelists reflect on the historical moment when these pictures were taken, discuss racist displays of Indigenous people in Brazil and elsewhere, and, by bringing to light respect for different epistemologies, explore ways to contend with them today. Panelists will be writer and historian Christoph Irmscher (contributor to the recent Peabody Museum Press book about...
On November 5, 2018, a pair of dilapidated buildings in central Marseille collapsed, taking the lives of eight people, many of them from immigrant origin. This toll of urban decay reflects both the diversity of the district and the hardship of living in Marseille, a city marked for centuries by migration, poverty, and social inequality. Divided along ethnic and class lines, with wealthy conservatives dominating the south and an energetic but pauperized community of immigrant origins in the north, Marseille highlights the tensions stemming from discriminatory governance, lack of housing-...
In this conversation, architectural historians Ana María León and Torsten Lange consider the labor of organizing around issues of gender in architecture. Based on three precedents, they will reflect on their work and practice and highlight how the present has allowed scholars and practitioners to revise architectural historiography. Building on intersectional feminist theory, the discussion considers architecture and urban space as well as architectural discourse as forums where white heteronormative systems of planning can become subverted by empowered labor and living practices....
"A terrible mechanism [is] on the march, its gears multiplying." So begins the first essay of the 48th issue of Harvard Design Magazine, guest edited by Mark Lee, chair of the department of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Florencia Rodriguez, editorial director of -Ness Magazine. The issue takes as its theme the slippery and ambiguous figure of "America," seen through the lens of the built and unbuilt environment. Americanization—once the "terrible mechanism" bent on pressing capitalist values on emerging economies everywhere—is now in...
This seminar series will consider the ethical, legal, regulatory, and broader social and institutional impacts that COVID-19 has had, as well as the longer-lasting effects it may have on our society. This fifth seminar in the series will focus on how the health care system has reacted and evolved during the pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected almost all aspects of life in the United States and around the world, disrupting the global economy as well as countless institutions. The issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic present a critical juncture for the U.S. and other...
Following the inaugural MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship–a collaboration between the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) and Harvard GSD's Just City Lab–the seven inaugural MICD Just City Mayoral Fellows discuss how to tackle racial injustices in each of their cities through planning and design interventions.
Join the Harvard Law School Library for a live screening and panel discussion of “Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem,” a new documentary about the racial history and modern discrimination of the American misdemeanor system. The film, produced by Brave New Films and directed by Robert Greenwald, was inspired by HLS Professor Alexandra Natapoff’s book, “Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal.”
Beech leaf disease (BLD) affects and kills both native and ornamental beech tree species. It is associated with a nematode, Litylenchus crenatae mccannii. This disease has only been discovered in recent years and much about it, including the full cause and how it spreads, is still unknown. Experts from The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, Drs. James LaMondia and Robert Marra, will share what is known of this recently discovered disease and discuss ongoing research to control spread of BLD. This free Zoom webinar is co-hosted by Bartlett Arboretum & Gardens and the Arnold...
Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies—Online
The 21st century Central European illiberal transformation is a process deeply reliant on gender politics. A feminist analysis is central to understanding the current regime changes, both in terms of their ideological underpinnings, and with respect to their modus operandi. Key aspects of this phenomenon are: 1. opposition to the liberal equality paradigm has become a key ideological space where the illiberal alternative to the post-1989 (neo)liberal project is being forged; 2. family mainstreaming and anti-gender policies have been one of the main pillars on which the illiberal state...
In celebration of International Women’s Day 2021, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan joins the Center for International Development, Belfer Center’s Middle East Initiative, Women and Public Policy Program, and the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School to discuss women’s empowerment, cross-cultural dialogue, and innovative solutions to global challenges. The conversation will be moderated by Melani Cammett, Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs at Harvard.
History is a manner of thinking about the world, grounded in the places we design, construct, and inhabit. Design offers the opportunity to re-imagine the world around us, today and for the future. We might draw from history, or draw upon it; certainly, it is to be hoped that we are drawn to it, as designers and historians. The purpose of landscape history—not reducible to memory nor timelines nor styles—is to produce and share knowledge of how we have come to be who and where we are. We will gather across studios we collectively inhabit to draw attention to and lessons from the...
Join us to celebrate the launch of Pairs, a new student-led journal at the GSD. The founding editors will introduce the inaugural issue, which will be followed by a conversation with Giovanna Borasi, Director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, on beginnings in curation and publishing.
Pairs is a journal dedicated to conversations about design that are down to earth and unguarded. Each issue is conceptualized by an editorial team that proposes guests and objects to be in dialogue with one another. Pairs is non-thematic, meant instead for provisional thoughts and ideas in...
Buddhism is a way of life, a philosophy, a psychology, a set of ethics, a religion, or a combination thereof. Central to the many ways Buddhism is understood is the achievement of emotional, mental, and psychological wellness. African Americans are at perpetual risk of psychological imbalance and trauma due to the social realities of racism in the United States. The authors engage the question, What can Buddhism offer African Americans who want to be emotionally resilient in a context they cannot...
To what extent is our future with COVID-19 knowable? As new information about the transmission, demographics, and treatment of COVID-19 emerge, epidemiologists continue to address complex data and generate new predictive models to better understand the dynamics of the virus. Join leading epidemiologists for a panel discussion as they assess the current and future state of the epidemic.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Too often, the story of women’s suffrage unfolds in a vacuum, seemingly unconnected from the general contours of American history. This panel discussion looks back from the present, asking experts working in a variety of disciplines and organizations to briefly unfold, TED-talk style, a single “big idea” that captures the significance of the 19th Amendment for voting rights, citizenship, and democracy today.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Some contend that at the heart of safe communities are strong partnerships between community members and the police that are founded on trust. From this partnership, community safety is co-produced. We have invited Dr. Tracie Keesee, Senior Vice President of Justice Initiatives and Co-Founder of the Center For Policing Equity (CPE), to explain what conditions are needed to allow for such partnerships to develop and co-production of safety to emerge, to the benefit of all communities, including those that have historically been marginalized.