Show Notes
We think of citizenship as a binary category: you’re either a citizen or you’re not. But the levels of membership can be complex. Refugees and asylum seekers often find that the criteria for acceptance change, as states devise rationales to exclude them. Three Weatherhead Center sociologists reveal the motivations behind various immigration policies, from the colonial past to the present, and discuss the ethics and impact of open borders.
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Aluminum, steel, and concrete are some of the most carbon-intensive industries, and many countries already have a tax on them. But not the United States. That fact hasn’t stopped the social scientists in the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Climate Policy from spearheading worldwide cooperation on carbon pricing.
Sven Beckert, a history professor at Harvard, has written an epic book about the history of capitalism over roughly a millennium: it’s called Capitalism: A Global History. Beckert believes the only way to understand one’s place in the world is through understanding how we arrived at the system we currently live in: global capitalism.
When a war ends, the work of mending a society begins. Groups who were sworn enemies for decades, even generations, must find ways to live together in peace. The process of reconciliation takes a long time, and involves all levels of society: civilians, government institutions, political elites.
We don’t think about commodities very much. They’re all around us: cotton, sugar, oil, gas, chickens, cattle, and so many other things we take for granted. But a closer look at the history of commodities tells a revealing story about the expansion of capitalism and its profound impacts on land, labor, economics, and human rights. In this episode, we talk to four scholars who study commodity frontiers—with case studies in soybeans, honey bees, renewable energy, and more—to learn how commodities have literally altered the planet and society.
One room. One locked-down camera. One roll of film. A group of famous directors from the 1960s took the challenge: they would make a short film with these parameters plus one more—their dialogue must include the sentence “I Miss Sonia Henie.” The result was a bawdy, ludicrous compilation that became an international classic. It’s featured in a new film retrospective called The Yugoslav Junction: Internationalism in the SFRY: 1958–1988. The Weatherhead Center is cosponsoring this program of short and long films from socialist Yugoslavia, which takes place at the Harvard Film Archive beginning November 9. Today we’re talking to the curator of the series along with two Weatherhead fellows from Bosnia and Herzegovina who will set up the political and cultural background for these rare films, and they’ll discuss three of them— one each from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.