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PANEL DISCUSSION: Gandhi, MLK, Mandela & Beyond: Is Nonviolence Evolving?
Sept 10, 2020 @ 5:30pm PT / 8:30pm EDT
How can we be guided by these pillars of nonviolence in the face of the pandemic, BLM, the election and #MeToo? Is the Nonviolence movement evolving?
Michael Nagler Ph.D is the founder and president of the Metta Center for Nonviolence. He is also Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature at UC, Berkeley, where he co-founded the popular Peace and Conflict Studies Program. Michael is the author of The Search for a Nonviolent Future: A Promise of Peace for Ourselves, Our Families, and Our World; The Nonviolence Handbook: A Guide for Practical Action; and The Third Harmony: Nonviolence and the New Story of Human Nature (Berrett-Koehler, 2020).
Clayborne Carson has devoted most of his professional life to the study of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the movements King inspired. During his undergraduate years at UCLA, Dr. Carson participated in civil rights and antiwar protests, and many of his subsequent writings reflect these experiences by stressing the importance of grassroots organizing and nonviolent resistance to injustice within the African-American freedom struggle. Since receiving his doctorate from UCLA in 1975, Dr. Carson has taught at Stanford University. In 1985 the late Coretta Scott King invited Dr. Carson to direct a long-term project to edit and publish an authoritative edition of King's speeches, sermons, correspondence, publications, and unpublished writings. Under Carson's direction, the King Papers Project has produced seven volumes of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. In 2005 Carson founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute to endow and expand the work of the King Papers Project. Dr. Carson currently serves as Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of History and Ronnie Lott Founding Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, Stanford University.
Dr. Carson also teaches an online open enrollment course, American Prophet: The Inner Life and Global Vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. and produces a podcast, The World House.
To read more about Dr. Carson, go to https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/news/clayborne-carson-full-bio-0
Erica Chenoweth is the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. Chenoweth is core faculty at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where she directs the Nonviolent Action Lab. She studies political violence and its alternatives, and Foreign Policy magazine ranked her among the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013 for her efforts to promote the empirical study of nonviolent resistance.
Chenoweth's forthcoming book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2020), explores what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance. Her next book with Zoe Marks, Rebel XXX: Women on the Frontlines of Revolution, explores the impact of women's participation on the outcomes of mass movements. In addition to exploring why women's participation makes movements more likely to succeed, Marks and Chenoweth explore how frontline women's participation leads to progress in women's empowerment in some cases and reversals in others, as well as how gender-inclusive movements impact the quality of egalitarian democracy more generally.
Chenoweth's research has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR's Morning Edition, TEDxBoulder, and elsewhere. She co-hosts the award-winning blog Political Violence @ a Glance, hosts the blog Rational Insurgent, and blogs occasionally at The Monkey Cage. Along with Jeremy Pressman, she co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium, a public interest project that documents political mobilization in the U.S. during the Trump Administration.
Before coming to Harvard, Chenoweth taught at the University of Denver and Wesleyan University. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in political science from the University of Colorado and a B.A. in political science and German from the University of Dayton.
Professor Rajmohan Gandhi, whose latest publication (December 2018) was Modern South India: A History from the 17th Century to Our Times (Aleph, New Delhi) is a historian, journalist, and biographer interested in human rights and reconciliation.
Rajmohan Gandhi divides his time between India and the United States, where he currently serves as Research Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. When possible, he assists with trust-building and reconciliation efforts at Asia Plateau, a conference and training center of Initiatives of Change located in Panchgani in the hills of western India. Rajmohan has been teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1997. In 2007, he received the Indian History Congress's prestigious biennial award for his biography of his grandfather, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Gandhi: A True Story of a Man, his People, and the Empire (2006). In December 2017, Rajmohan served as president, Contemporary History, at the 78th session of the Indian History Congress, held in Kolkata.
MODERATOR
Anna Darrah is an experienced film buyer, having licensed over 800 films in her years working for Gaiam and Spiritual Cinema Circle. She has been an active player in the film festival circuit, jurying, and moderating panels and workshops, and consults with filmmakers on distribution. Anna is also a filmmaker, and has taught producing and distribution on the university level. She co-produced the recently released feature documentary MEOW WOLF: ORIGIN STORY. Anna authored a chapter in Swimming Upstream: A Lifesaving Guide to Short Film Distribution, and is completing her first book, Watch This: Using Our Screens instead of Them Using Us.
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