Video / Audio  Columbia

A discussion focusing on "Innovation and the Problem of Institutionalization."

About forty years ago, historians of women began to claim a place for their subject as a distinct scholarly field. This movement emerged particularly powerfully in Britain, its early preoccupations and questions shaped by the feminist movement, the New Left, and especially by Thompsonian social history. Today, that moment of ‘women’s history’ seems both present and a long way off. The field’s founders and pioneers are now retiring. They leave impressive accomplishments – an academic landscape in which ‘women’ as subjects of study and ‘gender’ as a ‘useful category’ are taken for granted; positions, programs and professorial chairs in the UK and US alike; rich scholarship stretching across three generations. How does this field now look to some of its early pioneers? How has mentorship and ‘school-formation’ worked? What have successive generations taken from earlier generations’ work, and how have they transformed it? What happened to those early institution and networks? What has been gained and lost through the process of institutionalization? What has happened both to the ‘place’ of the feminist imperative within history, and to the relatively privileged place of Britain within that scholarship?

This is a highlight from the panel Value and Labor, part of The Discipline Series, that took place on February 4, 2013. Many economists and philosophers, ranging from Aquinas and Ibn Khaldun to Adam Smith and Marx, have declared deep connections between value and labor.  Is there such a connection?  And if so, what form does it take? Two of the most prominent economists on the Left—Prabhat Patnaik and John Roemer--responded to these questions and their relevance to the global political economy today. This event was made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Kathryn Bolkovac discussed her story on Thursday, January 31, 2013, on human trafficking, and other topics with Tanya Domi, whose reporting broke this story. When former Nebraska police officer Kathryn Bolkovac was recruited by DynCorp International to support the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, she thought she was signing up to help rebuild a war-torn country.  But once she arrived in Sarajevo, as a human rights investigator heading the gender affairs unit, she discovered military officers involved in human trafficking and forced prostitution, with links to private mercenary contractors, the UN, and the U.S. State Department. After bringing this evidence to light, Bolkovac was successively demoted, threatened with bodily harm, fired, and ultimately forced to flee the country under cover of darkness—bringing the incriminating documents with her. Thanks to the evidence she collected, she won a lawsuit against DynCorp, publicly exposing their human rights violations.  Her story, recounted in the book The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors, and One Woman's Fight for Justice, later become the Hollywood feature film The Whistleblower.

This discussion, held on Tuesday October 19, 2010, focused on Eric Foner's new book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. The panel included Ira Berlin, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, and Robin Blackburn, Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, UK.

Salman Rushdie, David Ignatius, Michael Schudson, and Lee C. Bollinger spoke on issues related to President Bollinger's recent book, Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century, on Wednesday, April 14, 2010. Michael Doyle chaired. 

This talk addressed the question "Marx or Keynes?" on March 31, 2010. It featured David Harvey, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY); Prabhat Patnaik, Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Duncan Foley, Leo Model Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research; and Perry Mehrling, Professor of Economics at Barnard College. Serving as discussant was Sanjay Reddy, Professor of Economics, Barnard College.

This talk on "Taking Stock of the Financial Crisis" on March 25, 2010 featured Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laurette and University Professor at Columbia University; Prabhat Patnaik, Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Founder and Chair of International Development Economics Associates and Board member of the United Nations Research Institute on Social Development, Geneva, and Justin Yifu Lin, Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank.