Robert A. Jones '59 Conference Room
148 Hillcrest Road
Middlebury, VT 05753
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Open to the Public

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The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs Program for Global Health and Medicine, in collaboration with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, the Jan Knippers Black Fund, and Middlebury College Departments and Programs of Anthropology, Global Health, Black Studies, Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, and the Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity warmly invite you to a public lecture by Professor Kamari Maxine Clarke.

The twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of conflict zones characterized by ongoing mass violence, disappearances, and large-scale displacement. In a range of locations today, frequent conflicts, forced disappearances, and mass violence have led to large-scale destruction of human life. However, existing responses have been beset by challenges. This talk explores how citizens are moving beyond state solutions and collaborating with non-state human rights actors to find technological solutions to violence. It analyzes a set of approaches that focus on empowering community members to serve as peacebuilders trained in early detection and early response to conflict. However, it shows how these technologies also bring with them a set of challenges: in particular, the bias written into their algorithms. The talk explores what is occluded by these technologies and offers new possibilities for understanding the nature of violence at the center of such forms of human rights work.

Kamari Maxine Clarke is the Distinguished Professor of Transnational Justice and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto at the Centre for Criminology and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. She is also an adjunct professor at the University of California Los Angeles. For more than 20 years, Professor Clarke has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, international legal domains, religious nationalism, and the politics of globalization and race. She has spent her career exploring questions of culture and power and, in the field of law and anthropology, as well as evidence, forensics and science, detailing the relationship between new transnational formations and contemporary problems. She is the author of nine books and over sixty peer reviewed articles and book chapters, including her 2009 publication of Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Affective Justice (with Duke University Press, 2019), which won the 2019 Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Book Prize and finalist for the Elliot Skinner Book Prize. She is the 2021 recipient of the Guggenheim award for career excellence in anthropology.

In-person: Robert A. Jones ‘59 House conference room, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT with refreshments and discussion following.
To join via Zoom:  Please use this Zoom link or visit the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs events.

Sponsored by:
Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs; Center for Comparative Study of Race & Ethnicity; Gender, Sexuality, & Fem Studies; Global Health Minor Program; Anthropology; Black Studies

Contact Organizer

DeFoor, Margaret
mdefoor@middlebury.edu
(802) 443-5324