'TRANSPARENT WINDOWS' FILM EVENT
A film-and-discussion session with the title 'Created Equal?: Negotiating the Social Contract' will be offered on Friday April 1st, 2016, by Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, Fulbright Scholar (Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Coordinator of American Studies, Salem State University, Salem, MA, USA).
This workshop is going to take place at School of English Library (New Philosophy Building 3rd floor) between 18:00-20:00.
**A certificate of attendance will be provided**
The places available for this workshop are limited. So If you're interested in attending, please forward your emails to:
This event is organized by the School of English Book Club 'Transparent Windows.' For more information about our group please click on the following link: http://www.enl.auth.gr/trans_windows_en.html
ÅVENT ABSTRACT
In this workshop modelled on a
successful series of public events in the United States in 2014, Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello will lead a two hour
film-and-discussion session about the hard but important work of negotiating,
sustaining, challenging and even transforming the social contract in a democracy.
The discussions will be motivated by selections from three impressive
documentary films about the 1960s in the US—The Loving Story,
Freedom
Riders and The
Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers—and
are designed to engage urgent questions such as, What do we owe each other?;
How can we deliver on the promise of equality that animates our democracy?; and
How can we, as individuals, make meaningful contributions to it? While the
focus of the films is the United States, the issues they raise are crucial in
many places today. What does the social contract mean, who creates it, and what
responsibility does each of us have to enact, police, protect or change it? The
need for such questions and the need to speak and listen to one another’s
answers could not be more pressing. Racial violence in the U.S., migrant crises
in Europe, economic inequality fueling a widening gap between the “haves” and
the “have nots,” war in so many part so the world. These, and other issues
bubble up over coffee, heat up workplaces and can tear families, friends, and
communities apart. And yet, we cannot look away, for to look away is to
abdicate our responsibility, in a democracy, to the work of caretaking the
social contract. To converse around these questions is to participate in the
complex and ongoing work of making and remaking a society that serves the
“common good”—even as that concept itself is interrogated. As part of our time
together participants will be encouraged to think about the ways in which the
questions and products of the humanities can be employed in public forums and
non-university settings to engage populations often far removed from “the
academy” in humanities discourse and civil-society building.
BIO
Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello is a publicly-engaged interdisciplinary scholar/social-justice activist with nearly twenty years of experience in the higher education, museum, social service, K-12, service-learning and cultural sectors in both the US and Europe. She is currently an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Coordinator of American Studies and an affiliated Faculty with the Center for Economic Development and Sustainability at Salem State University (Salem, MA) where she served as the founding Fellow for Service-Learning from 2011-2015. At Salem State she has developed and taught numerous interdisciplinary courses for students in general education, history, literature, art history and American Studies programs. Many of these courses include service-learning or transnational/global emphases. Since 2010 has led numerous university-wide change initiatives related to General Education revision, Civic Engagement, Strategic Planning and Comprehensive Internationalization. Her scholarly work—much of it public-facing—relates to the intersections of gender, ethnicity, immigration, religion, place-making and the cultural construction of community. Recent publications and grant-funded work explore Catholic women’s activism, the concept of shared authority in community-based museum work, and the construction of Franco-American gender identity in contemporary drama. She is currently at work on a book titled Bonds of Fellowship: Redefining Community in Modernizing America. In addition to Salem State she has taught at Harvard University, The University of Luxembourg and Boston University. In addition, she has worked as an advocate for survivors of domestic violence, a museum educator, a writing and theater instructor, and as Director of complex federally-funded projects to train K-12 educators using museums and historic sites as texts. She is a sought after consultant to museums and historic sites, is a two-time Fulbright Scholar (Luxembourg 2010; Greece 2016), and a Whiting Fellow (Cote D’Ivoire 2015). In 2015 she was inducted into Salem State University’s Civic Engagement Hall of Fame for her commitment to social justice and engagement in her teaching, scholarship and service. She sits on the Board of Trustees of a number of community groups, among others, the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, the North Shore CDC and previously, the House of the Seven Gables. She regularly blogs about and offers public testimony regarding the value of the humanities for civil society. Between 2011-2014 she chaired the American Studies Association’s (ASA) Committee on Departments, Programs and Centers and she currently chairs the ASA’s Taskforce on American Studies in Higher Education which she has chaired since 2015. She holds a BA in History and Sociology and a Ph.D. in American Studies.
