Walls Symposium @Trinity
Posted by thomas-cummins on 12 Feb 2009 at 01:10 am | Tagged as: upcoming events
| Sun, Feb 15 | ||
| 5:30 pm | to | 7:30 pm |
SCHEDULE
The Walls Symposium is free and open to the public.http://1.salsa.net/peace/walls/
Unless otherwise noted, events will take place at the Holt Conference Center, Trinity University.OPENING CONVERSATION
Sunday, February 15, 5:30 – 7:30 pm.
THEATER ARTS & WALLS performance pieces coordinated Dr. Robert Prestigiacomo of AtticRep and the Trinity University Speech and Drama Department.
FASHION & WALLS by the students of the International School of Design and Technology who, in their designs, will illustrate aspects of walls, including peace/war; liberalism/intolerance; unity/anarchy; surrender/hope; freedom/conformity and love/hate. Produced by Jackie Benavides and Rejeana Williams; fashions designed by Ashley Shoemo, Rey Aguillon, Meagan Cantu, Monico Vitela, Taryn Lauber and Biastelie Orosco. On the front path runway, 5:30 – 6:30 pm.
ATRAVÉS, a performance and video exhibit by Ana Carillo Baer and Dr. Susanna Morrow, explores the alienating effects of walls on the basic human need for connection. Using video footage from Mexico and dance/theater performance, the artists will create a textured offering for contemplation on the first night of the Walls symposium. (7 pm.)
RIVERBANK, an assemblage of clothes, plastic bags, and personal items collected from the United States bank of the Rio Grande. The objects, strewn beyond a wall and beneath a skylight, present the muddied attire worn by individuals as they navigated the river’s waters. Shed hastily to avoid detection on American soil, these garments stand as molted shells of unknowns. Guadalajara artist Luz María Sánchez originally produced this installation for Artpace San Antonio, while an International Artist-In-Residence in 2006.
EL OTRO LADO a video installation by Anne Wallace will be shown during the entire opening. “The voices seem to arise like mirages in the desert. They are the voices of the border itself which address the spectator not with the voice of the journalist but with the voice of the artist who communicates with symbols and metaphors.” Gabriel Rodriguez-Nava, RUMBO. In 2004, artist Anne Wallace drove the 2000-mile U.S./Mexico border, crossing back and forth to record interviews, film the dividing line and document nature sounds in wildlife sanctuaries. In the experimental documentary, El otro lado, sounds of the changing landscape track the international boundary from the Rio Grande in the East to the western deserts of Arizona and California. As the eye follows the hypnotic rhythm of a seemingly endless steel wall, voices reveal the controversial border fence as a projection of our fears and desires.
PHOTO EXHIBIT
Photographs by San Diego poet-photographer Maria Teresa Fernández focus on the fence along the U.S.-Mexico border that begins a couple of hundred feet out in the Pacific and ends about 60 miles inland, near El Centro, Calif. Fernández immigrated to the United States from Mexico in 1991, the same year construction of the border fence began. She has documented life and death along its edges since 2001, when work on the physical barrier between the two countries intensified following 9/11. She told the Imperial Valley News, “This border fence has been both the witness and the cause of so many deaths of people filled with ambitions. (It) has become a handkerchief of tears, a canvas where family members, artists and activists paint their emotions and their frustrations. This way, their respect is made evident for all the deceased. Here, at the border fence, they are remembered.” Fernández� photography has been recognized by institutions such as Nikon, Canon, Photographer�s Forum, Red Pl�stica and the magazine Artes de M�xico. (You can read a review of a much larger exhibit of Maria Teresa’s photographs in the LA Times.) A selection of photographs is on display throughout the symposium and all 45 are on display during the rest of February at VIVA! Bookstore and Galleria, 8407 Broadway in San Antonio. Call for hours and driving directions.
WALL VIDEO INTERVIEWS
AtticRep will be videotaping personal stories about walls as background for Borders and Walls, a play that will be created by a group of San Antonio theatre artists, Trinity University students and community members. The piece will be formed and presented in the style of Augusto Boal’s community-based theatre and audience discussion is part of the production on March 12-14, 2009 at the Attic Theater at Trinity University.
Monday, February 16 and Tuesday February 17, noon-3:00 pm., 2nd floor office.
MONDAY & TUESDAY — EDUCATION ANTHROPOLOGY & WALLS:
When Humans Build Walls
Drs. John Donahue, Jennifer Mathews, and Richard Reed, Trinity University.
Walls, be they physical or virtual, are cultural constructions as evidence in state formation (Donahue), Ancient ideology and cosmology (Mathews) or ethnic identity (Reed).
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 12 noon, 3rd floor.
ARCHITECTURE & WALLS:
Physical Properties & Their Effects
Gabriel Durand-Hollis, FAIA, Principal with DHR Architects
Starting with a review of what walls do, don’t do, and what they can look like, important properties affect human behavior. Cost, time, endurance, environment, ideas, traffic, transmission — each aspect has literal and figurative implications.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 9 am., 1st floor.
ART & WALLS I
Sound as Wall
Luz Maria Sanchez, Universidad de Guadalajara
Sound as wall. Words as wall. Silence as wall. Even if sound as an acoustical phenomenon is able to travel through different mediums —solid, liquid or gas—, sound within the social environment, behaves differently. Words (language) as tools for communication are transformed in to the opposite: silence. Within this talk, there will be some examples of artworks using sound as media.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 12:30 pm, 1st floor
ART & WALLS II:
Wall and Piece
Art of Walls: Walls as a Demonstration of Power
Joseph M. Bravo, and Kristen Alejandra Supik: University of the Incarnate Word
Walls have traditionally been constructed to keep others out but they invariably have the unintended consequence of keeping us in. In fact, they tend to be far more effective at the latter purpose than the former. Wherever walls have been built throughout history they become a canvas for personal and political expression. The very presence of a wall is an open invitation to comment on its existence. Whether in Berlin or Palestine, Rome or on the Texas border graffiti artists are inclined to make their marks. Sometimes these marks are to tag or identify local territory. Other times the graffito is an opportunity for more personal or aesthetic expressions. But perhaps the universal function of painting on walls is as an act of resistance: resistance to confinement, resistance to segregation, resistance to imperialism. The very act of appropriation of the space is itself a form of resistance. This presentation will examine this phenomenon through the works of Banksy, a graffiti artist who has traveled throughout the world making his marks of resistance on walls from London to Palestine. His works are graphic, provocative and quite beautiful and demonstrate how graffiti can transcend its caricature of vandalism and rise to the level of high art and political expression.
Tuesday, 17 February at 11:00 am. 1st floor.
ART & WALLS III:
Wall as Arena
Chris Sauter, San Antonio artist
“Wall as Arena” is a presentation about a series of works by the artist Chris Sauter that use architecture as a raw material. In these works, walls are carved to retrieve material needed to build other objects. This action makes literal the metaphoric connection between the architecture and that which is being represented by the wall-constructed object, revealing aspects of their respective natures. Sauter will discuss how these works physically interact with architecture, exploring the literal, metaphorical, and conceptual function of walls.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 5 pm., 1st floor.
CIVIL RIGHTS & WALLS:
From Bull Connor to Border Walls
Dr. David Spener, Trinity University
In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham , Ala. for protesting segregation and the repression of civil rights activists by the city’s police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor. While in jail, the Rev. King penned his famous letter, in which he laid out a powerful set of moral and sociological arguments against segregation based on race. Today, the United States faces new challenges involving race relations and civil rights related to immigration from Latin America and Asia. David Spener, associate professor of sociology and anthropology, will discuss the ways in which the arguments that the Rev. King made about segregation in Letter from Birmingham Jail are relevant to today’s debate about the status of immigrants in our society.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 11:45 am., 2nd floor.
COMMUNICATION & WALLS Compassionate and Nonviolent
Phil Schulman
Many walls can’t be seen. Some walls exist inside of us in the form of enemy images, stories and judgements that keep us from being able to connect heart to heart. This workshop is an introduction to “Compassionate Conversations,” based on Marshal Rosenberg’s book “Nonviolent Communication; a Language of Life.” Participants will be introduced to a practice that applies principles of nonviolence to communication in order to encourage empathy and honesty, and relationships based on support and cooperation.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 1:30 pm, 1st floor.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE & WALLS:
Walling, Fear Based Policies & Questions of Justice
Drs. Milo Colton, St. Mary’s University and Michael Gilbert, University of Texas San Antonio
Since ancient times people have built walls around towns and villages or along borders of nations (such as China ) to control entry and provide security for citizenry. This concept of “Walling” as a public safety response carries over to today’s in tangible and intangible ways. We see tangible barriers in gated communities and now along the border between the US and Mexico and between Israel and the Palastinian West Bank and Gaza . Tangible walls are also used to isolate and warehouse undesirables in prisons, jails and mental hospitals. Social barriers of inequality, discrimination, differential treatment and isolation are invisible barriers — walls of injustice. Too often walls of injustice are created or enforced by justice policy and the criminal justice system our of fear to separate “us” from “them”. They separate the law abiding from the criminal, the wealthy from the poor, straight from gay, majority from minority, and citizen from ex-offender. Walling” undercuts the rights, values on which a free democratic society are founded, sows seeds of hatred and violence rather than mutual understanding and peace.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 9:00 am., 3rd floor.
ENVIRONMENT & WALLS
Reconfigurations & New Geographies
Juanita Sundberg, Dept. of Geography, University of British Columbia & Wayne Bartholomew, Frontera Audubon
Walls create sharply defined boundaries between geographical spaces. In contrast to ecological boundaries, which often are characterized by porous transitional areas that promote mobility, walls are impervious, limit movement, and create divisions based on political motivations. Our presentation examines how walls reconfigure environments to create new geographies characterized by opportunities and obstacles for their inhabitants. In particular, we focus on the construction of walls between the United States and Mexico using illustrations based on research experiences in Arizona and Texas.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 3:00 pm, 3rd floor..
FEDERALISM vs STATE CONTROL & WALLS:
A Debate
Dr. Jarrod Atchison, Trinity University
The doctrine of federalism is central to the discussion of walls. This session will involve members of the award-winning Trinity University debate team engaging in a public debate over the power of the federal government to create, protect, and secure walls in the face of state and local opposition.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 10:00 am., 3rd floor.
FLASH WALL
Human Wall
All the participants of the Walls Symposium are invited to create a human wall that extends from the Magic Stones to the Miller Fountain at Trinity University. The Flash Wall will be initiated at 11:25 AM and it will dissolve five minutes later as the bell tower strikes 11:30 AM. Please convene in front of the Coates Library at 11:20 AM. Don’t know where any of this is? Here’s a map.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 11:25 am.
FILM & WALLS
Talking Throuugh Walls, a documentary
Discussion facilitated by Narjis Pierre and Sylvia Maddox
Talking Through Walls is an hour-long documentary about the struggles of Vorhees, New Jersey Muslims to build a mosque in a middle class Philadelphia suburb in the wake of 9/11.
Tuesday, February 17 2009 at 9 am., 1st floor.
LGBT & WALLS:
A Panel Discussion Dee Villarrubia, ProSA moderator, along with panelists — Bill Goodman (Probate Attorney), Julia DeGrace (Transgender Activist/Speaker), Roberto Flores (Co-founder/Co-chair Stonewall Democrats, SA), Mick Henson (Pastor MCC)
Walls, borders that define, confine the LGBT Community are conceptual: SOCIAL/LEGAL: Family, mother, spouse, next-of-kin, adoption; PSYCHIATRIC: deviance, perverted; RELIGIOUS: sin, priest, deacon; SEXUAL/GENDER: male/female, masculine/feminine, Gender Dysphoria, etc.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 11:00 am., 3rd floor.
GEOGRAPHY & WALLS
Breaking Down Walls in Africa
Mark Rockymore, Northwest Vista College
Walls of religion and politics divide us. Physical Walls confront us. The geography of walls is both mental and material. One example of these walls lies in the realm of human spirituality. Christianity as a religion has spread across the world. Aspects of its appeal manifest in world politics and culture. Africa�s movement toward to breaking down and building of walls is a microcosm of the diffusionary aspects of a spiritual system of broad appeal across the world.
Tuesday, February 17 at 1:00 pm, 3rd floor.
HIJAAB & WALLS
Narjis Pierre, Sana Husain & Nazneen Husain
San Antonio Muslim Women’s Association
Hijaab derives from the Arabic word hajaba, to conceal or hide from view. The panel will explore Scriptural meaning of hijaab; discuss the concept of “protection” in societal interactions; and facilitate a cross-cultural discussion on whether hijaab is a separating and oppressing barrier binding women and girls to societal norms of ignorance and servitude, or a liberating emancipation of societal norms defining womanhood according to marketing values.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 5 pm., 1st floor.
HISTORY & WALLS
Imaginary Walls in the Northern Frontier
Spanish explorers, missionaries, government officials and settlers encountered natural barriers upon the landscape. They usually oercame those barriers, modified them, identified them. Other barriers they respected but did not enter. Such was life in the sixteenth, seventeenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The nineteenth century introduced boundaries, borders and barriers which became inconveniences but did not eliminate migration, legal or otherwise.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 4:00 pm., 2nd floor.
HUMAN RIGHTS & WALLS:
International Migration and Human Rights Dr. Jorge Bustamante, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, and Eugene Conley, Professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame
In his lecture, Dr. Bustamante will discuss the relationship between human rights and international migration. The analytical concept that will guide this examination is that of migrant vulnerability, a concept that Dr. Bustamante has developed in a number of his scholarly publications and that remains one of his principal concerns in his work with the United Nations. The lecture will address migration policies and the treatment of migrants in Mexico, the United States, Spain, and Argentina. It will pay special attention to the question of labor migration and the failure of any major migrant-receiving nation in the world to ratify the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, which was approved by the United Nations nearly two decades ago. The refusal of migrant-receiving nations to ratify this convention, Bustamante will argue, represents a failure on their part to recognize the economic benefits they receive from the labor of migrants.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 7:30 pm, CHAPMAN AUDITORIUM
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS & WALLS
Dr. Larry Hufford, St. Mary’s University
Panel Discussion
Personal/international storytelling to illustrate Walls and their impact on people’s lives.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 7:30pm., 1st floor.
LAW & WALLS:
Martha McCabe, General Counsel, Alamo Community College District
Description pending
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 10:30 am., 3rd floor.
LITERATURE & WALLS:
Tearing Down Walls through Literature for Children & Young Adults
Dr. Patricia Lonchar & Ms Letitia Harding, University of the Incarnate Word
How is it that writers for children & young adults promote justice and peace without being, well, “preachy”? Simply by using words and knowing their audience. This interactive panel of two literature professors and a few of their university students will be exploring how children and young adult authors promote a world without walls through their careful use of words.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 1:30 pm, 3rd floor.
MEDIA & WALLS:
Under, Around and Over
John Kelley, editor, We The People News (Corpus Christi) along with panelists, Mark Rathbun (We The People News), Zanto Peabody (We The People News), and Matt Tedrow (New Texas Radical
Structuring the activist media organization to overcome competitive disadvantages with mainstream media. How to use editorial decision making, marketing and multiple platform technology to break down traditional market barriers to alternative media. A short presentation on barriers faced by alternative media will be followed by a panel discussion with audience participation of methods used to overcome those barriers. The last 30 minutes will be used for networking and establishing continuing cooperative efforts.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 3:00 pm., 3rd floor.
PHILOSOPHY & WALLS
Undermining walls with service learning Dr. Stephen A. Calogero, St. Mary’s University
This session will begin with an exploration of philosophical and ethical meaning of walls, what they do and what their purpose is. We will then inquire about why walls “come down.” What dynamic explains the undermining of walls? One answer, of course, is that walls are breached by a stronger force, as in the medieval days when siege machines were rolled up to the castle walls and made to hurl boulders at them or again when a crowd of demonstrators marches on a capital and overruns the barricades thrown up by the police. However, another proposal argues that walls come down when those besieged behind the walls encounter those kept outside and in that encounter discover their own obligation to the excluded. Perhaps this second proposal is less plausible, but in service-learning education we find that interpersonal experience can have a powerful educational impact. So the session develops into a discussion of how service-learning works as a component of undergraduate education and what its possibilities are for undermining walls the that divide our own society.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 3:00 pm., 1st floor.
POETICS & WALLS:
Considering US Mexico Borderlands
Dr. Kamala Platt, independent scholar/cultural worker
From Robert Frost to Pink Floyd to Barack Obama to Rachel Corrie, from Berlin to Palestine to China�, the poetics of wall-building are evoked in poetry, song, sermon, email and other genres, and from narratives from many parts of the globe. This is currently the case in the struggle against building a wall (or in Homeland Security parlance, “a border-fence”) in the Texas Mexico Borderland. We will examine a few of those cultural texts and the movement against a border wall in order to better understand the roles and rhetoric of physical barriers and the destruction of land and cultural artifact.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 10:30 am., 1st floor.
PSYCHOLOGY & WALLS:
Human Walls as We Feel & Relate
Dr. Brenya Twumasi, MA., JD, Northwest Vista College
Human walls develop as a means of protection and security. Human walls are permeable through active listening and deciphering the culture behind the language. This presentation gives a brief overview of some dynamics related to human walls through the use of deciphering what the presenter has coined as ‘Tatoos on Walls’.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 11:00 am., 2nd floor.
REFUGE & WALLS
Journey Stories of Refugees
Rachel Brownlee, Trinity University Chapter of Amnesty International & Guests
Oftentimes refugees must overcome cultural and social walls in addition to physical and legal boundaries when seeking out and settling in their new homes. Guests will speak about their own journey stories, and all will be invited to discuss both the process of fitting into a new home and ways to welcome neighbors from around the world.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 5:00 pm., 3rd floor.
RELIGION & WALLS:
God Blesses Us on “Our Side of the Wall”
Sr. Martha Ann Kirk, ThD & UIW Arts for Christian Worship Class
Are the Abrahamic religions essentially based on the “we-they” mentality? God is one and we are the ones called by God. Examples of ideas, actions, arts, and story in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam will lead us into reflection. What are the challenges and the opportunities in the revelations of the universal love of the Holy One? Compassion and creativity are the nature of the Divine and the invitations to humanity. “Cum passio,” that is, feeling with the other starts to dismantle the walls. Creativity starts to use the stones to build bridges.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 3:00 pm., 1st floor.
THEOLOGY & WALLS:
Hindus, Jews, Christians, and Muslims Together
Dr. Norm Beck, Texas Lutheran University
Since Hindus, Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in one God, ideally they would build bridges and move freely over them to visit one another and joyously to serve God and all of the people in the world. Some are, but the walls formed by their past record of selfishness, arrogance, and greed continue to hinder their efforts. Fortunately, there are signs of hope that in the coming decades their oneness in God will result in a decrease of nationalism and an increase in economic cooperation in major geographical areas of the earth. A panel discussion among inter-faith leaders.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 7:00 pm., 3rd floor.
URBAN STUDIES & WALLS
The Political Spaces of School Districts
Dr. Christine Drennon, Dir., Urban Studies Program, Trinity University<
Over 160 court cases were filed between 1970 and 2008 arguing that unacceptable and unconstitutional funding disparities exist between school districts in most states. In those arguments, stories, statistics, and maps are used to compare various school districts to prove that conditions are indeed unequal. In fact, both sides (both plaintiff and defendant) use such information to disprove each other�s contentions. In so doing, each assumes that the political spaces of the school districts are absolute, timeless, and independent — that they are, in fact, legitimate walls cordoning groups of students off from one another. Failure to recognize that the spaces (the districts) are not objective and are in fact constitutive of the class and race relations actually being argued and debated in court further legitimates our local geographies of privilege and deprivation.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009, at 9:00 am., 2nd floor..
WOMEN & WALLS:
Care and Crossings
Drs. Martha Ann Kirk & Jessica Kimmel, University of the Incarnate Word
Women have experienced walls in many ways throughout history. Women have also found ways around these walls that are traditionally vested in the female experience: email visits, shared photos via the internet, written stories and plays, sung songs from one side to the other, floated balloons over walls with messages of hope and peace; smuggled in desperately needed medicines and food supplies, stood in silence and solidarity with others, and more! This session will highlight the stories, photographs, and artifacts of some of the women making these crossings.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 1:30 pm, 3rd floor..
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