This fall Ohio University hosts the Global Solidarities Lecture Series—four lectures that highlight various social justice struggles, with emphasis on how activists working in and scholars writing about a particular context learn from and teach those from another context.
All events are free and open to the public.
The Global Solidarities Lecture Series is organized by Cutler Scholars in partnership with Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies and the Middle East & North Africa Studies Certificate at Ohio University. Co-sponsors for individual lectures include the OHIO the Geography Department, the Center for Law, Justice, and Culture, the Center for International Studies, the Institute for Applied and Professional Ethics, and the LGBT Center.
Ryan Thoreson
‘LGBT Human Rights in A Populist Era’
Wednesday, Oct. 10 | 4-5:30 p.m. | Scripps 111
Lecture by Ryan Thoreson, Yale University
Ryan Thoreson is a Clinical Lecturer in Law, Associate Research Scholar in Law, and Robert M. Cover-Allard K. Lowenstein Fellow in International Human Rights at Yale Law School. He is also a researcher in the LGBT rights program at Human Rights Watch. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Thoreson clerked for the Honorable Scott M. Matheson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and was a research fellow at OutRight Action International. He is the author of Transnational LGBT Activism: Working for Sexual Rights Worldwide (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Dr. Leila Harris
‘Implementing, Narrating, and Resisting the Human Right to Water’
Thursday, Oct. 25 | 4:30-6 p.m. | Scripps 111
Lecture by Leila Harris, University of British Columbia
Leila Harris is an Associate Professor at the Institute on Resources Environment and Sustainability and in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. She also serves as Co-Director for UBC’s Program on Water Governance. Harris’s current research focuses on the intersection of environmental issues and inequality / social difference, water governance shifts, in addition to a range of water governance challenges important for the Canadian context (e.g., First Nations water governance). Her current projects include a SSHRC-funded project on everyday access and governance of water in underserved areas of Cape Town, South Africa and Accra, Ghana. She is also principal investigator for the SSHRC funded International WaTERS Research and Training Network focused on water governance, equity and resilience in the global South. Harris has published in Antipode, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Political Geography, and World Development, among others. She is co-editor of Contemporary Water Governance in the Global South: Scarcity, Marketization, and Participation (Routledge, 2015).
Professor Noura Erakat
‘Contemporary Renewals of Black-Palestinian Solidarity’
Tuesday, Nov. 27 | 4:30-6 p.m. | Schoonover 145
Lecture by Noura Erakat, George Mason University
This lecture will explore the historical and contemporary manifestations of Black-Palestinian solidarity. In particular, it explores the ways in which 2014 was a generative moment of renewal, anchored by the concurrent bombardment of Gaza and occupation of Ferguson. The lecture also identifies the ways in which such renewal of solidarities is resonate with, but independent of, the previous apex of Black-Palestinian solidarity of the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Exploring such difference takes into account a number of global, regional, and local transformations that are at the heart of an emergent transnational politics from North America.
Erakat is a human rights attorney and Assistant Professor at George Mason University, where she teaches in the legal studies, international studies and human rights concentrations of the School of Integrative Studies. Her research interests include humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, and critical race theory. She is a co-founding editor of Jadaliyyae-zine and servers on the editorial committee of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Erakat is director of Gaza In Context, a pedagogical and documentary project on the Gaza Strip and Palestine. She is also the producer of the short video, Black Palestinian Solidarity. Erakat’s media appearances include CNN, MSNBC, CBSN, Fox News, PBS NewsHour, BBC World Service, NPR, Democracy Now!, and Al Jazeera. She has published in the Nation, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jezebel, IntlLawGrrls, The Hill, and Foreign Policy, among others. Erakat is the author of Justice for Some: Law in the Question of Palestine (forthcoming Stanford University Press, 2019).
Panel with Mona Than, Ather Zia, and Haley Duschinski
Thursday, Nov. 29 | 4-5:30 p.m. | Scripps 111
Resisting Occupation in Kashmir
The three panelists–Mona Bhan (Associate Professor of Anthropology at DePauw University), Ather Zia (Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Northern Colorado University) and Haley Duschinski (Associate Professor of Anthropology and CLJC Director at Ohio University)–are co-founders of the Critical Kashmir Studies scholarly collective. The panel addresses the social and legal logic of India’s occupation of Kashmir in relation to colonialism, militarization, power, democracy, and sovereignty. It foregrounds the intensification of state violence and repression since 2016, which has transformed the nature of resistance in Kashmir and strengthened global civil society initiatives that challenge India’s illegal occupation of Kashmir. All three panelists are co-editors of the edited volume Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
Comments