Guest Lecturer Bennett Gilbert, Senior Instructor in University Studies, Portland State University, and author, A Personalist Philosophy of History (Routledge, 2019): “Two Ways to Think in Two Directions at the Same Time”

Susan Cohen is Founding Chair of Immigration Practice at the Boston firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, where she oversees the work of 12 attorneys and 18 immigration specialists, and President of the Board of the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project, which since 1989, provides free legal services to asylum seekers and promotes the rights of detained immigrants.  She has chaired and co-chaired a wide range of committees of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), including the National Planning Committee for AILA’s Annual Immigration Law Conference.  She has served as a member of the review board for AILA periodicals as well as the American Bar Association’s liaison to the Department of Labor on immigration-related issues.  She is a frequent panelist at AILA, ABA, and other immigration-related conferences, and a contributor to numerous immigration-related publications.  Among her many accomplishments are contributions to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) regulations implementing the Immigration Act of 1990, the Department of Labor regulations implementing changes to the H-1B visa category as a result of the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act of 1998, the Department of Labor PERM labor certification regulations issued in 2004, the drafting of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts legislation that resulted in the Massachusetts Global Entrepreneur in Residence (GEIR) program in 2014, and the temporary restraining order on the 2017 Travel Ban obtained by the ACLU of Massachusetts and other organizations.  She is the recipient of numerous awards for her political asylum work, including awards from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation (PAIR) Project, and the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.  She writes for and appears frequently in the media, from Bloomberg to the PBS NewHour to the Washington Post.  In addition to her legal work, she is also a songwriter and the founder of White Dove Projects.  Two of her songs have been performed by students and alumni of the Berklee College of Music in Boston—“Beyond the Borders,” which concerns the plight of a Syrian refugee family, and “Looking for the Angels,” her second music video about an Honduran teenager bidding farewell to his grandmother, as he leaves to escape the brutal violence in their country."  Many students who participated were from countries affected by the travel ban, including lead singer Nano Raies, the first Syrian woman to study at Berklee.  

Michael W. Klein is William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.  His research and teaching focus on international macroeconomics.  Trained at Brandeis and Columbia Universities, he is the author of three books and over two dozen articles on a range of topics, including exchange rate policy, international capital flows, the impact of trade on the U.S. labor market, and the determinants of foreign direct investment.  From 2010-2011, he served as the chief economist in the Office of International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury.  He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Founder, Research Director, and Co-executive Editor of EconoFact, a website that provides economic analysis on timely policy issues (econofact.org).  He has been a Visiting Scholar at the International Monetary Fund, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Dallas.  

Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa (b. 1960, Barcelona, Spain) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and philosopher based in New York.  Her new media works have been exhibited internationally, and her writing, influenced by both Continental philosophy and feminism, addresses questions of language and the feminine, the act of reading and writing, and “ethics as first philosophy.”  She is the author of a study on G. W. F. Hegel and Emmanuel Levinas, Total History, Anti-History, and the Face That Is Other (Atropos Press), and co-editor, with Lenart Škof, of Bodily Proximity (Ljubljana: Nova revija).  Her critical essays have appeared in Breathing with Luce Irigaray, edited by L. Škof & E. Holmes (Bloomsbury Press), and in a special issue on Julia Kristeva in the Cincinnati Romance Review 35, among other publications.  Her artwork has been featured at the Museo Laboratorio Di Arte Contemporanea, Universita degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza; Museum of Image and Sound, Sao Paolo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Aperto '93, and XLV Venice Biennale.  Hackenberg y Almansa grew up in Spain, Germany, Japan, Canada, and the United States.  She was awarded a B.A. from San Francisco State University, an M.A. from New York University, and a Ph.D. in Media and Communications from the European Graduate School (EGS), Switzerland.  She has taught Media Art, Installation, and Performative Practices at New York University (NYU) and Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, and Aesthetics at the European Graduate School (EGS).  She has been a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Critical Theory and Creative Research Program (CT+CR), Portland, OR.  Currently, she is a Dissertation and Independent Study Director at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA), Portland, Maine.

Sebastian Matthews is the author of the memoir In My Father’s Footsteps (W.W. Norton & Co.) as well as two collections of poetry, We Generous and Miracle Day, both published by Red Hen Press.  A third collection, Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision, was published by Red Hen in 2017.  His poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Blackbird, The Common, From the Fishouse, Georgia Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Poets & Writers, storySouth, The Sun, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Writer’s Almanac, and Writer’s Chronicle, among others.  He earned an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan, and has taught in the Undergraduate Writing Program, Warren Wilson College; Great Smokies Writing Program, University of North Carolina, Asheville; and the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing, Queen’s University of Charlotte as well as serving as a Visiting Writer at a host of institutions, including Franklin and Marshall, Institute of American Indian Arts, Pitzer College, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (Meacham Conference), UNC-Wilmington’s Writers Week, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others.  

He is the recipient of fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center, and Asheville Area Arts Council, as well being awarded a Bernard DeVoto Fellowship in Nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.  Formerly the editor of Rivendell, a place-based literary journal, he now serves on the editorial board of Q Avenue Press, where he designs, edits, and produces collaborative chapbooks and letterpress broadsides.  In addition, he has served as poetry editor for Ecotone: Re-Imagining Place and as guest editor at the Asheville Poetry Review, working with editor Keith Flynn on its jazz issue.  His collages have been exhibited at Asheville Book Works and William King Museum’s Contemporary Regional Gallery and featured in Asheville Poetry Review, Café Review, and Iron Horse Review.  He curated the show From BMC to NYC: The Tutelary Years of Ray Johnson (1943-1967) for the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center as well as edited the exhibition catalogue.  He is a member of the Advisory Board for Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters. 

Brazilian writer, journalist, and screenwriter Flávia Rocha holds an M.F.A. in Writing/Poetry from Columbia University and for thirteen years was an editor for the New York-based multimedia literary magazine Rattapallax. She is the author of three books of poetry—A Casa Azul ao Meio-Dia (Travessa dos Editores, 2005), Quartos Habitáveis (Confraria do Vento, 2009) and Um País (Confraria do Vento, 2015), all published in Brazil—and her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in magazines across the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Australia, Italy, and Romania. She has worked as a reporter for the Brazilian magazines Casa Vogue, Carta Capital, República, and Bravo! and is a contributor to numerous other publications. A founder of Academia Internacional de Cinema, a film school with branches in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, she is co-writer of the feature film Birds of Neptune (2015), and is currently collaborating on the features Anatomy of the Sun and White Sky Night as well as the series The Stags.

“Wild Objects" is a conversation about the power of duende, feral poetry, surrealism, . . . when to let go and when to take control.

left: Ryan Wilson Paulsen; right: Paulsen and Anna Gray

Given the devastating effects of global capitalism on our planet and growing consciousness of the oppression and inequality that characterize our social world and history, many are at a loss as to how to make a future without massive waves of violence.  Anxiety, despair, confusion, and depression are widespread; trauma is a fact not an exception.  How can we build practices centered on care for ourselves and our world?  How can art be a mode for accomplishing this work?  As social beings, self-care is more than an individual imperative to live healthier; it is a social process as well as a personal one.  Throughout the history of art, we find many examples of artists expressing the unspeakable, the internal, and the invisible, using visual expression as a process to care for themselves and to connect to others.  Contemporary artists have engaged with issues of mental health and self-care from many perspectives as well, utilizing therapeutic or advocacy practices, working therapeutically and empathically.  This talk and workshop explore and problematize representations of mental health and self-care in our contemporary world, using examples from art and music to begin suggesting a way forward.