Rights and Responsibilities
(Asynchronous Session - Online)
Picasso Presents Gernika: How Participation in Embodied Performance and Fact-Based Theatre Contribute to Critical Understanding of Humanistic Crises View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Begona Echeveria, Annika Speer
This paper analyzes focus group interviews of participants in an embodied performance workshop of Echeverria’s play Picasso Presents Gernika, curated by Speer, taking place in Spring, 2021. This event is part of the University of California Riverside’s Center for Ideas & Society initiative on “Being Human” which integrates humanistic perspectives into the sciences. The script, which explores the child refugee crisis resulting from Hitler’s 1937 bombing of the Basque town Gernika and Picasso’s artistic response (Guernica), operates as a through-line for engaging human rights crises today. The script will be the gateway to fact-based, embodied storytelling, i.e. the connections participants draw between the 1937 Gernika bombing and contemporary refugee and human rights crises abetted by scientific “progress” (e.g. advances in warfare). Embodied performance offers invaluable epistemological and pedagogical insights to cultural and community studies; engaging in the physicality of performance explores the connection between external modes of meaning making (speech and action) and internal modes (thought, imagination, and empathy). We will record the event and conduct focus groups examining how pedagogical performance can inform critical understanding of humanistic crises including refugee displacement, xenophobia, and recovering histories in an age of evidence deniers. The workshop will be interdisciplinary, including students enrolled in the course, “Beyond Science: Being Humane Amid Human Rights Crises,” and those in the University Honors program, whose pillars include “Promoting Creativity and Innovation” and “Celebrating Diversity and Global Citizenship.” This paper has particular relevance for this conference, given its setting in the same city that houses Guernica.
Centuries of Voices Denied: Classical Music as a Forum for Social Justice View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rose Grace, Terrance Lane
The core issues in the fight for social justice addressing religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and political regimes are as old as humankind. Exploring the experiences of marginalized composers throughout the ages, offers a way to contextualize social injustices still plaguing today’s modern societies. From its inception, music, as a multidisciplinary field, has served as a form of expression and communication, preserving a cultural record keeping of societal structure and function. This paper addresses social activism by exploring important, published literary and musical works through textual and compositional analysis. Furthermore, the study draws attention to an important concept of inter-sectionalism, which is essential to both social justice discipline and musical process. The literary writings by such individuals as James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois, Elie Wiesel, Isabel Wilkerson and others, are used as the foundation to introduce musical works, whose diverse compositional techniques aim to use classical music as a universal call to action. The paper demonstrates how societies viewed these marginalized individuals, and in turn, how the composers responded through their musical voice. The social injustices experienced in societies, past and present, represented through musical arts, may elicit social conscience among the modern world to build more inclusive and equitable societies.
Persian School in Tbilisi − Ettefaq-e Iraniyan View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nani Gelovani
Georgia always had close links with Iran. For centuries, Tbilisi had played a significant role in the Georgian-Iranian relations and was an important political, commercial, and cultural centre in Transcaucasia. Historically, the Iranians were one of the most significant and influential segments of the Muslim community of Tbilisi. As the general census of 1897 of the Russian Empire suggest, there were 81.700 Muslims living in Georgia (the total population of the country was 1.867.000). This period was marked by an increasing number of the Iranians in Tbilisi amounting to 6,000 people. A consulate-general of Persia acted in the capital and there were some charity, cultural, and educational centres operation in Tbilisi as well. In 1907, Persian school (madrasa) Ettefaq-e Iraniyan (“Iranian’s union”) was established in Tbilisi. The school was located in “Muslim district” of Tbilisi called “Sheytan Bazaar” (“Devil’s Bazaar”) and was sometimes called a Sheytan Bazaar’s school. The school was established in Tbilisi by Iranian charity organization Ettefaq with under the assistance of Iran's Consulate-General in Tbilisi and ambassador of Iran in Russia Mirza Hasan Khan Moshir od-Dowleh. The pupils at the Persian school studied the Persian, Arabian, Turkish, Georgian, French and Russian languages, as well as Sharia, geography, music, and other subjects. The school had many problems and was closed in 1931. Data about the Persian school in Tbilisi given in the report were taken from Persian literary sources (Ali Javaher Kalam’s memories, Yahya Dowlatabadi and his book of memories) and National Archives of Georgia.
Navigating and Challenging Whiteness in Education: An AsianCrit Autoethnographic Account about the Possibilities of Reorienting Race Talk in a White Australian School as a Non-indigenous ‘Asian’ Teacher View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Aaron Teo
In the Australian education context, a growing body of Critical Race Theory (CRT) work has interrogated the political dimensions of equity for Indigenous student populations; however, much less progress has been made with other racial minorities. Specifically, the voices of migrant teachers from Asian backgrounds like myself, who have become an increasingly important stakeholder in Australian education, are a rarity in the academy. On this basis, in this paper I foreground a racial solidarity against Whiteness by using Asian CRT to present an autoethnographic account of a migrant ‘Asian’ Australian teacher’s attempts at addressing racial inequity through reorienting race talk in a White Australian high school.
