Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

Joseph Priestley Award Celebration Lecture

Misinformation in the Age of AI

Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Sciences

The intentional (disinformation) or unintentional (misinformation) spread of false information is not new, but with the advent of social media and the growth of narrowly-directed communication channels the problem has reached epidemic proportions. Prominent examples of disinformation include the intentional efforts of the tobacco industry to discount the impact of smoking on lung cancer and the campaign of the fossil fuel industry to question whether climate change is even happening and its role in warming the climate. Even misinformation can be deadly, as seen in resistance to childhood vaccines and the excess death toll during the COVID-19 pandemic caused by false rumors about the RNA vaccine. Coupled with the erosion in public trust in the efforts of our government and prominent institutions, including colleges and universities, it is difficult to craft simple solutions for the benefit of public health and safety. AI raises the stakes by making it easier to create and spread false information and more difficult to detect truth from fiction. Fortunately, there are promising approaches, but success will depend Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

This program will not be livestreamed. It will, however, be recorded for future viewing via Dickinson login on our website.

Rainbows and Mud: Pathways to Queer Thriving in a Marginalizing Society

Nic Weststrate, Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois Chicago

The over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced to state legislatures in 2024 are a painful reminder that circumstances framing LGBTQ+ lives haven’t gotten much better despite promises of progress and no shortage of hope. A subset of these bills concern LGBTQ+ curriculum censorship and book bans—bans that threaten LGBTQ+ people’s access to knowledge necessary for surviving and thriving in a marginalizing and increasingly hostile society. Such limitations around access to knowledge are conceptualized here as an epistemic injustice. Drawing from six years of research, this lecture will explore the ways that LGBTQ+ communities counter epistemic injustice by coming together across generations for social connection, storytelling, and wisdom-sharing. The studies leverage multiple methods, including an innovative letter-writing paradigm, close observations of intergenerational dyadic storytelling exchanges, and a multi-year community-engaged ethnographic experiment. By shining a light on the joys and challenges of LGBTQ+ intergenerational engagement, glimmers of a better future for LGBTQ+ Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

This event is in-person only. It will not be livestreamed or recorded.

Breaking Issue

A World Transformed? Foreign Policy in the Current Moment

Dickinson Faculty Participants

Russell Bova, Professor of Political Science and International Studies
Magda Siekert, Senior Lecturer in Middle East Studies
Fatou Thioune, Assistant Professor of International Studies
Andrew T. Wolff, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies

The current administration’s approach to world politics appears to represent a radical departure from eighty years of US foreign policy consensus on a range of issues. In just two months, crucial US relationships to the outside world, including to Russia, NATO, the Middle East, Greenland, Canada, and many more, has been transformed dramatically. This panel will attempt to help us understand the causes, consequences, and durability of these dizzying changes in the US global role.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.

Biographies (provided by the participants)

Russ Bova is professor of political science and the J. William Stuart & Helen Stuart Chair in International Studies. Professor Bova is the editor of Russia and Western Civilization: Cultural and Historical Encounters and the author of the international relations textbook How Read more

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Althouse 106, 4 p.m.

Film Screening of Call Me by Your Name

The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and the Italian and Italian Studies department are hosting a film screening of the movie Call Me by Your Name. There will be a Q&A session following the film screening with André Aciman, the author of the book (of the same title) which inspired the screenplay.

Monday,  March 24, 2025

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

On Being from Elsewhere

André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name

I have been a foreigner in many countries but never a local. As a writer of memoirs, I have given the matter much thought. Although all memoirs tell the story of what happened, what a memoir is not always able to do is narrate what was desired to happen but never did happen. To write what happened is one thing—that’s what autobiographies are supposed to do—but to probe the psychological intricacies of desire, fear, heartache, disappointment, etc., is usually the domain of novels, not even of memoirs. But then here is the paradox: a memoir can borrow the conventions of fiction, even wants to sound novelistic, but without Read more

Carlisle Theatre, 7 p.m.

Film Screening of Counted Out

In our current information economy, math is everywhere. The people we date, the news we see, the influence of our votes, the candidates who win elections, the education we have access to, the jobs we get—all of it is underwritten by an invisible layer of math that few of us understand, or even notice. But whether we know it or not, our numeric literacy—whether we can speak the language of math—is a critical determinant of social and economic power.

The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, the LGBTQ+ Center, the Office of Diversity Equity & Inclusion, the Women’s & Gender Resource Center, and the departments of data analytics, economics, environmental studies & environmental science, and mathematics & computer science together with the Carlisle Theatre are co-hosting this screening.

Please see the film’s website https://www.countedoutfilm.com/ for further information about the film.

  Read more

Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Love Your Body Week Keynote

Out of Time: Fatness, Disability, and Fat Crip Time

April Herndon,  Winona State University

This talk explores the ways fat and/or disabled bodies are often depicted as being part of the past but not of a collective future because they are deemed too expensive, too much a reminder of vulnerability, too much in general. As a result, those of us living in fat and/or disabled bodies are often disciplined and pushed to pursue imagined futures—where many of us do not exist—through “treatments” and “cures,” robbing us of the present. Using my personal experiences as a fat and disabled woman and an intersectional Fat Studies and Disability Studies lens, I’ll explain how fat and/or disabled bodies challenge normative concepts of time. I’ll also suggest that Fat Crip Time, which acknowledges that fatness and disability can mean a person experiences time differently, can help us live in the present, know fat and disabled bodies as potential sites of joy rather than only hardship, and offer a framework for justice and liberation.

The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and by the Women’s & Gender Resource Center and Read more

Stern Center, Great Room, 12:00 p.m.

***Lunch provided, please RSVP to clarkeforum@dickinson.edu by noon on 11/13/24.

International Perspectives on 2024 Election

Panelists

Willibroad Dze-Ngwa, representing Yaoundé, Cameroon
Mario Guerrero, representing Mendoza, Argentina
Hilary Sanders, representing Toulouse, France
Konstantin Sonin, representing Moscow, Russia
Neil van Siclen, representing Bremen, Germany
Sarah Niebler (moderator), Dickinson College

The US presidential election is being watched closely throughout the world. Colleagues from Dickinson’s global programs will discuss the effects the results have for their countries and beyond.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.

Topic overview written by Bella Lapp ’26

Biographies (provided by the panelists)

Willibroad Dze-Ngwa is full professor and permanent faculty of political history, global issues and political sciences at the University of Yaoundé I, Cameroon. He studied political history and international relations in Cameroon and moved on to study political sciences at the Donahue Institute of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA with a focus on peace and security studies. Professor Dze-Ngwa is senior fellow and consultant on terrorism and violent extremism with the New York-based Global Center on Cooperative Security. He is visiting professor of Universite d’Artois, France; and founding president of the Heritage University Institute Read more

Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

The Molly and Wayne Borges Memorial Lecture

Danger, Purity and the Holy Land Past and Present

Robin Darling Young, Catholic University of America

To the holy city of Jerusalem and the land that surrounds it, three new and distinct assemblies laid claims of territorial and devotional holiness. This lecture explores the expression of those claims in discourse, in construction, and in demolition.

This joint event is sponsored by St. John’s Episcopal Church in Carlisle and the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Department of Religion.

Topic overview written by Sarah Ruschak ’27

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Robin Darling Young is Ordinary (Full) Professor of Church History at the Catholic University of America, and affiliated faculty of the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages. Her most recent publications are (as editor in chief) an annotated commentary and translation, from Greek and Syriac, of the Gnostic Trilogy of Evagrius of Pontus, and a translation of the Armenian Letters of Evagrius (CSCO, 2023) with Hovsep Karapetyan. She is at work on an interpretive study of that author as a philosopher in the Alexandrian tradition, and is co-translating the Contra Celsum Read more

Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

This event is in-person only. It will not be livestreamed or recorded.

Open Forum on the 2024 Election

Dickinson Community Forum with Faculty Panel

Russell Bova, political science & international studies
Katie Marchetti, political science
Ed Webb, political science & international studies
Sarah Niebler, political science (will also serve as moderator)

Dickinson Faculty will discuss observations and analyses of the recent US Presidential election and take questions.

The program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.

Topic overview written by Kylie De La Cruz ’27

Biographies (provided by the panelists)

Russell Bova is professor of political science and the J. William Stuart & Helen D. Stuart ’32 Chair in International Studies. Bova teaches a variety of courses on international relations and comparative politics. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on Russian politics and comparative democratization. He is also the author of How the World Works, an introductory international relations textbook.

Katie Marchetti is associate professor of political science. Professor Marchetti’s teaching interests focus on gender and U.S. politics, interest groups, intersectionality, political representation, and political methodology. Her research on these and other topics has been published in Politics Read more

Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Livestream Link

Puerto Rico – The 51st State? Explaining the Diminished Prospects for Puerto Rico Statehood

Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Director for Public Policy, External and Media Relations, and Development at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College

This lecture discusses the territorial condition of Puerto Rico in relation to the United States and the unlikely prospects in the near future that Puerto Rico will be admitted into the Union as member on equal standing with other states. In order to address this narrower topic, I will address more broadly the nature of the relation of Puerto Rico and the United States, the historical process of incorporation of the U.S. territories into the Union, the partisan reasons why Congress may not want to incorporate Puerto Rico as a state, the political reasons why a solid majority of residents of Puerto Rico may still not want Puerto Rico  to become a U.S. state, the economic, racial and cultural obstacles for Congress to admit Puerto Rico as a state, and the international context that provides little incentive for Puerto Rico’s decolonization.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the departments Read more