Ideas Matter
Ideas Matter, a joint project of Boston Review and
MIT’s Political Science Department, is a lecture series that
brings our writers together with other experts and practitioners for
substantive debate on the challenges of our times. The series, free and
open to the public, will offer four events in the 2011–12
academic year. Return to this page for dates and information on
forthcoming events on the responsibility of intellectuals, ethical consumption, and more.
Upcoming Events
The Future of Black Politics, March 8, 2012
Revisiting Port Huron, April 11, 2012
Islam in America, May 15, 2012
The Future of Black Politics
East Maclaurin Building, MIT 4-237
182 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Thursday, March 8, 2012, 4–5:30 p.m.
Black movements have historically been at the forefront of progressive change for all Americans. But, these days, black civil society is in retreat. How can we rebuild black politics, to ensure both racial justice and economic justice for all?
Michael Dawson is is John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and author of Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics.
Andra Gillespie is Associate Professor of Political Science at Emory University and author of The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America.
J. Phillip Thompson is Associate Professor of Urban Politics at MIT and author of Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities, and the Call for a Deep Democracy.
Melissa Nobles is
Professor of Political Science at MIT and author of The Politics of Official
Apologies.
• • •
Revisting Port Huron
Thursday, April 11, 2012, 7:00 p.m., location TBD.
Tom Hayden is a political activist, politician, and author. His most recent book is The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics at MIT (emeritus).
• • •
Islam in America
Bartos Theater, MIT E15 Atrium level
20 Ames Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Thursday, May 15, 2012, 4–5:30 p.m.
John Bowen is Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and author of Blaming Islam.
Feisal Abdul Rauf is a Sufi imam and author, most recently, of What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America.
Past Events
2011–2012
The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the 21st Century, September 22, 2011
The Promise of Ethical Consumption, November 3, 2011
2010–2011
Democracy After Citizens United, September 30, 2010
Iraq and Beyond, October 28, 2010
Immigrants and the Right to Stay, November 18,
2010
Can Technology Solve Global Poverty?,
December 2, 2010
Internet Freedom and American Power, February 3,
2011
The Path To Full Employment, February 24, 2011
Debating the Future of Marriage, March 30,
2011
Government’s Place In the Market,
April 26, 2011
2011–2012
The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the 21st Century
Thursday, September 22, 2011, 4:30–6 p.m., MIT Wong
Auditorium (in the Tang Center)
In 1967, as the Vietnam War escalated, Noam Chomsky penned The Responsibility of Intellectuals, a stunning rebuke to scientists and scholars for their subservience to political power. Today we face a similar array of crises, from wars to escalating debt. What are the obligations of intellectuals in this day and age?
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics at MIT (emeritus).
• • •
The Promise of Ethical Consumption
Thursday, November 3, 2011, 4–5:30 p.m., MIT Wong
Auditorium (in the Tang Center)
“Buy local,” “buy green,” “buy organic” . . . we cannot buy anything without considering its moral implications. How has consumption become suffused with right and wrong? How effective has the ethical-consumption movement been in changing market behavior?
Dara O’Rourke,
Associate Professor of Environmental and Labor Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is co-founder and Chairman of GoodGuide, Inc. He is author of Community-Driven Regulation and co-author of Can We Put an End to Sweatshops?
Scott Nova is Executive Director of the Worker Rights Consortium.
Richard Locke is the Department Head of Political Science and Class of 1922 Professor of Political Science and Management at MIT, and co-author of Working in America: A Blueprint for the New Labor Market.
Jens Hainmueller is Assistant Professor of Political Science at MIT and Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.
Archon Fung is Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy
and Citizenship at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and coauthor
of Full Disclosure: The
Perils and Promise of Transparency in
Government.
2010–2011
Democracy After Citizens United
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Lawrence Lessig argues that the Supreme Court’s decision in
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission will lead to
further corruption of Congress by making legislators more dependent on
special interests rather than on voters. Allison R. Hayward, John
Bonifaz, and Gabriel Lenz join the discussion. Moderated by Stephen
Ansolabehere, Professor of Political Science at Harvard
University.
Lawrence Lessig is
Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Director of the Edmond J.
Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.
Allison R.
Hayward is Vice President of Policy at the Center for Competitive
Politics and a member of the Board of the Office of Congressional
Ethics.
John Bonifaz is Legal
Director of Voter Action, founder of the National Voting Rights
Institute, and Director of the Free Speech for the People
Campaign.
Gabriel Lenz is
Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT.
• • •
Iraq and Beyond
October 28, 2010
The United States recently reduced its Iraq commitment to
50,000 “non-combat” troops. What is next for Iraq,
Afghanistan, and U.S. grand strategy? With Nir Rosen, Andrew J.
Bacevich, and Barry R. Posen. Moderated by Fotini
Christia.
Nir Rosen has covered
Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and other areas of the Middle East and
Central Asia for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and
The Nation. His new book is Aftermath: Following the
Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim
World.
Andrew J.
Bacevich is Professor of International Relations and History at Boston
University and a retired U.S. Army colonel. His most recent book is Washington Rules:
America’s Path to Permanent War.
Barry R. Posen, Ford
International Professor of Political Science at MIT and Director of the
MIT Security Studies Program, is author of The Sources of Military
Doctrine.
Fotini Christia is
Assistant Professor of Political Science at MIT.
• • •
Immigrants and the Right to Stay
November 18, 2010
In his new book, Immigrants and the Right to Stay, Joseph
H. Carens makes the moral case for amnesty: over time, even immigrants
who enter a country unlawfully become members of a society, deserving of
official recognition. With Carol M. Swain and Jennifer Hochschild.
Moderated by Melissa Nobles.
Joseph H. Carens is
Professor of Political Science at the University of
Toronto.
Carol M. Swain is
Professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt University, and
editor of Debating
Immigration.
Jennifer
Hochschild is Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor
of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and
co-editor of Bringing Outsiders In:
TransAtlantic Perspectives on Immigrant Political
Incorporation.
Mathias Risse is
Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
His book
The Grounds of Justice is
forthcoming.
Melissa Nobles is
Professor of Political Science at MIT and author of The Politics of Official
Apologies.
• • •
Can Technology Solve Global Poverty?
December 2, 2010
The media and international-development advocates can’t stop
trumpeting information and communications technology for development
(“ICT4D”). But, drawing on his field work in India, Kentaro
Toyama argues that cell phones and the Web can take us only so far.
Human capacity remains the foundation of economic growth. Joining the
debate are Nicholas Negroponte, Rachel Glennerster, and José
Gómez-Márquez. Archon Fung moderates.
Kentaro Toyama is a
researcher at the School of Information at the University of California,
Berkeley, and former Assistant Managing Director of Microsoft Research
India. (See his November 2010 lecture "(Some of the)Ten Myths of ICT for
International Development".)
Nicholas
Negroponte is founder and Chairman of the OLPC Foundation and Jerome B.
Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at the MIT Media Lab, which he
cofounded. (See his 2006
TED lecture on One Laptop per Child.)
Rachel
Glennerster is Executive Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty
Action Lab at MIT and coauthor of Strong Medicine: Creating
Incentives for Pharmaceutical Research on Neglected
Diseases.
José Gómez-Márquez is Program
Director for the Innovations in International Health initiative at
MIT. He was named Humanitarian of the Year by Technology Review
in 2009.
Archon Fung is Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy
and Citizenship at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and coauthor
of Full Disclosure: The
Perils and Promise of Transparency in
Government.
• • •
Internet Freedom and American Power
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Conventional wisdom holds that the Internet is a powerful tool for
advancing democracy and overthrowing oppressive regimes. But Evgeny
Morozov argues that just as activisits can take advantage of the Web, so
can states whose goals have nothing to do with freedom and
democracy. Moderated by John Tirman.
Evgeny
Morozov is a visiting scholar at Stanford University and author of The Net Delusion.
Maxim
Trudolubov is Editorial Page Editor of the Russian daily
Vedomosti and has written about new media and Russian politics
for New York Review of Books and The New York
Times. He is currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
Guobin Yang is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College and author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.
Daniel Drezner is Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and author of All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes.
John Tirman is Executive Director of the MIT Center for International Studies and author of the forthcoming The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars.
• • •
E14-633 (in
the MIT Media Lab Complex)The Path to Full Employment
75 Amherst Street
Cambridge,
Massachusetts
Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 4:30 p.m.
The global economy continues to reel from the financial and housing
crises, and unemployment remains rampant in the United States. What is
the solution? A government-supported push for full employment, says
economist Robert Pollin, reviving a critical but long-dormant debate.
Moderated by Richard Locke.
Robert Pollin is
Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and
coauthor of A Measure of Fairness: The
Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United
States.
David Autor is
Professor of Economics at MIT and Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of
Economic Perspectives.
Ron Blackwell is
Chief Economist at the AFL-CIO and former Academic Dean at the New
School.
Thomas A. Kochan is
George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management at MIT and author of Restoring the American Dream:
A Working Families’ Agenda for
America.
Richard Locke is the
Class of 1922 Professor of Political Science and Management at MIT, and
coauthor of Working in America: A
Blueprint for the New Labor Market.
• • •
Debating the Future of Marriage
Bartos Theater, MIT E15 Atrium level
20 Ames Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 5:00 p.m.
As the fate of marriage equality hurtles toward the Supreme Court, legal
thinkers and queer theorists step back to examine the arguments. What
does the history of American marriage law tell us about its future? Is it a viable and just social institution? Moderated by Mary Lyndon Shanley.
Nancy F.
Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard
University, is author of Public Vows: A History of
Marriage and the Nation.
Michael Bronski, Senior Lecturer in the Women’s
and Gender Studies Program and in the Jewish Studies Program at
Dartmouth College, is author of the forthcoming A Queer History of the United
States.
Nancy Polikoff is Professor of Law at American University and author of Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families Under the Law.
Scott T. Fitzgibbon is Professor of Law at Boston College and coeditor of The Jurisprudence of Marriage and Other Intimate Relationships.
Mary Bonuato is Civil Rights project director at Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders. She was lead counsel in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, which resulted in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling that prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying is unconstitutional.
Mary Lyndon Shanley is Professor of Political Science at Vassar College and author of Feminism, Marriage, and the Law In Victorian England and Making Babies, Making Famlies.
• • •
Government’s Place In the Market
MIT Wong
Auditorium (in the Tang Center)
70 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 4:00
p.m.
In the few short years since Wall Street took down the U.S. economy, popular sentiment has turned against government regulation. But in his new book from Boston Review and MIT Press, Government’s Place in the Market, legendary prosecutor and former Governor Eliot Spitzer contends that markets run more effectively with government intervention, and that unregulated capitalism tramples our core values. In the aftermath of the crisis, he writes, “We have had too much debate about credit swaps and not enough about basic decency, common sense, and which outcomes the market is supposed to produce.”
He’ll be introduced at the talk by MIT Professor and coauthor of the best-selling book 13 Bankers, Simon Johnson. Q&A with the audience will follow. This event is free and open to the public. Following the talk, light refreshments will be served and signed copies of the book will be available for purchase.
Eliot
Spitzer is the former governor of New York and cohost of CNN’s
In the Arena. His first book is the forthcoming Government’s Place In the
Market.
Simon Johnson is Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management. He is coauthor of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown and blogs at The Baseline Scenario.
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