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Institute of Education for Social Justice Film Series (Fall 2008) The Institute of Education for Social Justice Film series is designed to encourage participants to address problems of inequality and social justice affecting the human community depicted both in popular and alternative cinema. Using film as a medium for the exploration of human problems impacting social justice in society and across the disciplines and as a means to provoke dialogue and debate over issues ranging from social justice policy issues to individual moral decision-making, the series aims to advance the theoretical understanding and practical application of social justice in common, everyday situations. Following the screening of each film, participants are invited to take part in an open discussion of the social problems and/or controversial issues it raises. Darfur Diaries: Message from Home Crash Hotel Rwanda The Motorcycle Diaries Honors Conference Panel: Literature as Creative History As a medium for providing an alternative vision of history and imagining new possibilities for organizing human society, literature can play a role in reflecting upon social and economic injustice and presenting creative solutions human problems. With its capacity to create fictive universes that draw upon real historical events, literature provides a vehicle for social and political thought. A panel of professors from the English department will focus on specific authors who exemplify the tradition of using fictional narratives to rewrite and revise history or challenge dominant historical models. Panel participants: Dr. Pahl will discuss how Melville and other American literary artists self-consciously examine the act of making history as well as the way in which history-writing silences or gives voice to those situated within the margins of society’s power structures. Not only Melville, but also Hawthorne, Twain, Crane, and Morrison have all engaged the question of how the past is invented in ways that both expose history’s unevenness, its “ragged edges,” and that make the past relevant to present-day politics. Dr. John Scheckter, Professor of English, “The Case of Mabo v. Queensland” Dr. Scheckter will examine the case of Mabo v. Queensland. In 1992, the High Court of Australia vacated the policy of terra nullius, the assumption that the continent was uninhabited before the arrival of Europeans, which for two centuries had denied legal, civil, and even human rights to the Aboriginal peoples. Naturally, the Mabo decision generated immense controversy, but many Australians immediately recognized an immense opportunity: in the late twentieth century, with all of the critical tools which allow social consciousness to be more flexible and generous than at any other time and place in modern history, a nation was in a position to re-create itself. Australian writers such as David Malouf, Alexis Wright, and Kate Grenville have placed themselves at the vanguard of this ongoing effort. Dr. John Lutz, Assistant Professor of English, “Salman Rushdie’s Peepshow: Fiction-Writing and the Tyranny of Facts in Midnight’s Children” Dr. Lutz will discuss how Rushdie explores the relationship between storytelling and recorded history in order to bear witness to the unofficial or unrecorded histories of those victimized by Western imperialism. In Rushdie’s hands, history becomes a kaleidoscope of conflicting events, an ever-shifting landscape of stories testifying to a plurality of human experiences that challenge any monolithic conception of history that might reduce it to a set of simple self-evident facts or a single meaning. Respondent: |
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