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about
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Twelve years after launching
its imaginative program for the creation of a post-apartheid society,
economy, and state, South Africa provides an exceptionally stimulating
setting for study and debate on democratic transitions and consolidation.
The Democracy & Diversity Institute is designed and organized
by the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at the New
School for Social Research in partnership with collaborating scholars
and public intellectuals from the region, under the auspices of the
Political Information and Monitoring Service (PIMS) at the Institute
for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA). The program brought together
42 young scholars and civic leaders, primarily from the countries of
Sub-Saharan Africa but also from the United States, Latin America, Southeast
Asia, and Central & Eastern Europe. "A Living Experiment in Crossing Cultural Borders" Tuesday, February 7th, 2006, 7:00 pm at Location One, Gallery, 26 Greene Street, between Canal and Grand Subway: Canal Street stop on N,R,6,A,C,E About Czyzewski, Gail Kimberling
of the New York Times has written that he “has based his life’s
work on pushing the limits of borders, whether it involves going beyond
the acceptable, bringing the past to the present, or bridging one country
or culture with another.” At the end of our journey
we arrived in a place full of unresolved matters from the past: conflicts
and taboos. Trying to come closer to the present reality time and time
again we had to refer back to the memory, which turned out to be crucial
part of the contemporary world. But we were not creating a museum or
a memorial. We worked with young people in order to shape our future
and our own place in Europe. The unsealing of the place in which we
lived rewarded us all - the organizers, children, their parents and
grandparents, with greater understanding and love of people who once
lived here. Of course it was not entirely a painless process and some
tensions and grudges do remain. Transregional Center for
Democratic Studies, The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang
College, The New School for Liberal Arts present Michal P. Markowski,
Professor of Humanities, Jagiellonian University, Krakow to speak on
"Modernity's Dark Waters: Gombrowicz, Life, Literature"
Tuesday, February 14, 6:00 PM Wolff Conference Room, 65 Fifth Ave. (2nd
floor). Witold Gombrowicz, an emblematic diasporic writer and playwright, has been described as "probably the most important novelist most Western readers have never heard of, which is to say that he is the kind of writer whose following consists largely of other writers, whose faith in Gombrowicz's under-recognized genius has led them to shower him with superlatives.... Milan Kundera ranks him among Joyce and Proust as one of the seminal figures in modern literature. His writings are beloved in France, where they have long been available in competent translations, and where Gombrowicz himself spent the last years of his life. And in his native Poland, Gombrowicz remains something of a cultural legend almost thirty-five years after his death." (Benjamin Paloff, "Witold Gombrowicz, and to Hell with Culture", in Words without Borders) Please note that the Eugene Lang 20th-Anniversary Production this spring will be a performance of Gombrowicz's Operetta - directed by Zishan Ugurlu, with music by Stefania de Kenessey - to be presented in mid-March at La MaMa's Annex Theater. ________________________________________________________________
The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies conducted its 15th annual Democracy & Diversity Institute in Krakow, Poland in July 2006. The Institute brought together an international group of civic-minded young scholars and postgraduate students who worked closely together with expert faculty addressing social, political, and cultural challenges to democracy and democratization in the host region and beyond. In its continuous examination of democracy and processes and institutions that further or impede democratization, this year's institute explored the increasingly critical relationship between democratic politics and processes of representation, mediations and communication. The seminars and evening workshops considered the issues of theory and politics of symbolic representation, mediated social interaction, media structure and policy, media assistance, and public memory and memorialization. For more information on either of these Institutes, or for a copy of our narrative report, please contact TCDS@newschool.edu. ________________________________________________________________ New
School Alumnus Faces Death Penalty: Dr. Berhanu Nega was arrested along with six other prominent members of the political opposition following protests over Ethiopian election irregularities in which 46 people were killed and hundreds were wounded. Dr. Nega and his colleagues are being held on charges of treason, which is punishable by death under Ethiopian law. Dr. Nega received his master's degree from The New School, as well as his PhD in economics in 1991. He is a leading member of Ethiopia's main opposition party. He has taught at the University of Addis Ababa and was elected mayor of Addis Ababa earlier in 2005. He has served as president of the Ethiopian Economic Association, founded the Ethiopian Economic Policy Research Institute, and served as a consultant for the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Friends of
TCDS from all over the world have joined this campaigne by sending out
letters to Condoleezza Rice and the Ethiopian ambassador to the United
Nations, demanding the immediate release of Dr. Berhanu Nega. ________________________________________________________________
A simple exercise of tracing democratic performance during the process of EU enlargement (based on Freedom House Nations in Transit scores) shows that accession countries progressed in absolute terms less than Albania in the same interval, and that their important positive achievements (why they remain more democratic than Albania) date from before the start of negotiations with the European Union. In this paper, Ms. Mungiu-Pippidi argues that it is Europe as an incentive, and not EU enlargement itself, which has a catalyst effect on democratic development. Quite to the contrary, enlargement, with its focus on formal institutions, fails to bring about deep changes in the modus operandi of the state apparatus, with the result that it achieves only superficial Europeanization. Examples used in the paper are mostly from Romania and Bulgaria, but other accession countries are discussed as well. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is
currently working on state building in central and eastern Europe as
a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.
She is director of the Romanian Academic Society, a think tank in Bucharest,
a Professor of Political Psychology at the National School of Government
(SNSPA), and was director in charge of the reform of Romanian Public
Television. She is coeditor, with Ivan Krastev, of Nationalism After
Communism: Lessons Learned (2003). "Yuyanapaq: To Remember"
In conjunction with a guest lecture by Dr. Salomon Lerner, former president of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, who spoke on "Evil, Justice, and Responsibility: How the Peruvian Truth Commission Examined a Legacy of Violence," the exhibit adds an important dimension to Peru's efforts to heal the country's wounds by remembering the past in order to learn valuable lessons for the future. The
images on display were selected from an archive of over 2,000 photographs
taken during the two decades of violence in Peru, between 1980 and 2000,
which claimed the lives of over 60,000 people. TCDS co-sponsors FoTAC-NS On
February 26, 2004, the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies and
the Students of Color Network at the New School University will come
together to form a community coalition of the New York Friends of Treatment
Action Campaign at the New School (FoTAC-NS). TCDS Associate Martin Butora runs for Presidency of Slovakia
Dr. Butora, who will run as an independent, recently completed an extraordinarily creative and successful tour as Slovakia's Ambassador in Washington. Dr.
Butora's connection to the Graduate Faculty dates back to the Spring
of 1990, when he chaired the Slovak chapter of the GF-coordinated Democracy
Seminars. At that time, he was a human rights advisor to Vaclav Havel.
He and his wife, the well-known sociologist Dr. Zora Butorova, were
also leaders in the grass-roots movement that eventually defeated former
Primer Minister Vladimir Meciar - described by some as having an autocratic
style of administration, and who allegedly was involved in the kidnapping
of a former president's son. Martin and Zora have frequently guest-lectured
at the GF. They live in Bratislava.
TCDS
to launch a University Partnership Program with Kazakhstan The Partnership project at New School is co-directed by Jonathon Veitch, Dean of Eugene Lang College, and Elzbieta Matynia, Director of TCDS. The
Freedom Support Educational Partnership project is funded by the Bureau
of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. Toward the Union of Europe-Cultural and Legal Ramification Conference
Following a keynote address by Professor Gesine Schwan, European University Viadrina, Professor Matynia is scheduled to open the panel on the European Political Culture with her presentation A Kidnapped Europe - The Odds of Rescue. The conference is organized by Professor Sigrid Meuschel, New School University and Professor Detlef Pollack, New York University. Sigrid Meuschel, is Theodor Heuss Visiting Professor of Sociology at New School University; and Professor of Political Science, at Leipzig University. Detlef Pollack is Max Weber Visiting Professor, at New York University, and Professor of Comparative Sociology of Culture, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt-Oder. Other
participants and presenters will include Professor Andrew Arato, New
School University; Professor Volker Berghahn, Columbia University; Adam
Michnik, Editor-in-Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Warsaw; and John
Richardson, Ambassador of the European Union to the United Nations. The
Faces of Courage: Women in Iran
Kar, an Iranian Lawyer, human rights activists and writer is author of several books, including Angel of Justice and Patches of Hell, a collection of essays that explores the status and position of women in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. Kar is also a former political prisoner, breast cancer survivor and a former editor of the now banned literary review, Zan. She was also awarded the Ludovic Trarieux International Human Rights Prize in 2002. Wolff Conference Room is located at 65 Fifth Avenue (between 13th and 14th Streets). Please RSVP to 212-229-5580 or denisium@newschool.edu. TCDS Announces Agata Sypniewska Memorial Fellowship
This May, TCDS announced its new Agata Sypniewska Memorial Fellowship
program. The Agata Sypniewska Memorial Fellowship will be awarded annually
to up to two postgraduate students from the University of Wroclaw, Poland,
to fully support their participation in the TCDS Democracy &
Diversity Summer Institute in Cracow and in the New Social Science
Training follow-up program at the New School's Graduate Faculty. A Cape of Good Hope A Cape of Good Hope, a half-hour film impression of the January 2003 Democracy & Diversity Insitute in Cape Town South Africa, was screened in University Hall at New School University on October 21. Sponsored by TCDS, and produced by Richard W. Adams, A Cape of Good Hope is a film that complements the Cape Town Democracy & Diversity Institute by doing what a film can do best - providing a vivid, experiential sense of the intellectual and, ultimately, the emotional intensity and innovative approach to transregional learning. The Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Insitute is an intensive three-week program that offers the equivalent of semester-long study in an American graduate program. For the last five years, 50 civically engaged junior scholars and activists from Sub-Saharan Africa, the United States, Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe have come together to jointly examine critical issues of democracy and democratization as they manifest themselves in the host region and beyond. A Cape of Good Hope, which was filmed during the Insitute's fifth annual session (January 8-26, 2003), caught evocative moments of the interaction in seminar classes that are interwoven with excursions into the "real" world. The
Democracy & Diversity Institute, launched in Cape Town in
1999, is designed and organized jointly by TCDS and The
EDGE Institute in Johannesburg, South Africa. TCDS Welcomes Fall 2003 New Social Science Training Fellows Following from the tradition that began five years ago, this fall TCDS invited five Graduate Faculty and five international graduate students to participate in its 2003 New Social Science Training Fellowship program. The Fellowship, which is a four-month-long intense research and study program at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, New School University, was offered to select alumni of TCDS Democracy & Diversity Institutes in Krakow or Cape Town alumni who demonstrated serious commitment to the comparative study of current social, political, and economic transitions taking place in TCDS's target regions. This year, participants come from Chile, Ghana, Mexico, Serbia and Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, and the United States. During their stay at the Graduate Faculty, the TCDS Fellows will enroll in a course that addresses their area of interest, conduct their work with a small group of other fellows in a research team meeting weekly, work closely with departmental faculty on their projects, and participate in the TCDS Work-in-Progress Workshop to discuss their ongoing projects. At the end of the program, Fellows will present their research papers at the program's Concluding Conference and publish them as part of the TCDS Working Paper Series. The program covers the travel expenses for international participants and offers them a monthy living stipend. Participants from the Graduate Faculty receive a tuition scholarship. The New Social Sceince Training Program is funded by the Ford Foundation.
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