Brown Bag Session - Elisabeth D Lasch-Quinn and Azra Hromadžić

The Maxwell Citizenship Initiative, Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs present: 

The Brown Bag Sessions

Elisabeth D Lasch-Quinn,  Professor, History

Beautiful Citizens: The Return of Ancient Philosophies of the Good Life in a Fractured Age

This talk gives an overview of work in progress on a book project charting some modern manifestations in cultural, intellectual, and public life of a return of ancient Greco-Roman philosophies of the art of living and suggests some of its implications for new ways of approaching the demands of civic life today. Critiques of the fraying of community and the self-centered individualism of the late-20th therapeutic culture and “ecstatic capitalism” call for a move beyond rights alone to responsibilities. Yet civic life suffers when we give up on aiming even higher. Even the good (as in virtuous) life requires something more.

Azra Hromadžić, Associate Professor, Anthropology and O'Hanley Scholar

“We Will Not Give Up Una!” Hydraulic Citizenship in Bosnia and Herzegovina

In June 2015, thousands of people in Bihać, a small town in Bosnia-Herzegovina got together— mostly digitally but also directly—to object to the city’s recent decision to give a concession to a joint Russian and Bosnian Energy Company to build a dam on the city’s river Una. Armed with political agency that emerged from human and non-human forces and relations, the 2015 protest led to a politically and socially significant outcome—the city’s government reversed its decision to grant the concession. This was the first and only reversal of a city government’s decision, on any matter, in its postwar history. Building on ethnographic observations and interview data about the moment when the political rule stumbled, this talk examines how love and care for the river become central to the new political imaginings and terrains of political struggle in the Balkans and beyond.

Lunch will be provided.

For more information contact Havva Karakas-keles, hkarakas@syr.edu

For information on accessibility, or to request accommodation, please contact Marc Albert 315-443-9248. 

Sponsored by the The Maxwell Citizenship Initiative and the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs