26 August 2024 Fisher Center Announces Fall 2024 Series

This year’s Fisher Center speaker series welcomes authors who will discuss a range of topics centered on the theme of Walls.

The Fisher Center speaker series will host three talks this fall that will explore the broadly defined theme of walls and barriers in discussions about physical borders, the carceral system, academic freedom, book bans and more. The Fisher Center series will also discuss how people navigate barriers limiting their freedom and movement such as through migration, organizing and art.

The guest speaker events, held at 7 p.m. in Demarest 212, include: 

  • Wednesday, Sept. 25: Author and Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Rochester Joshua Dubler will offer a talk “Walls Are Not Real.” Dubler founded and directs the Rochester Education Justice Initiative and is the author of Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison (FSG, 2013), co-author of Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons (Oxford, 2019) and co-editor of Religion, Law, USA (NYU, 2019). Currently, Dubler is writing a cultural history of the concept of guilt in the United States.  
  • Wednesday, Oct. 23: Isaac Kamola, Director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity College. Kamola recently worked on the book project Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (Duke, 2019), which examines how the relationships among universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial institutions created the conditions that made it possible to imagine the world as global.
  • Wednesday, Nov. 13: Harsha Walia is a Canadian activist and writer involved with the No One Is Illegal campaign. A voice in immigration politics, indigenous rights, feminist, anti-racist and anti-statist movements, Walia is the author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013) and Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2021). Walia is co-author of Never Home: Legislating Discrimination in Canadian Immigration (2015) and Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (2019). 

Since its founding in 1998, the Fisher Center for the Study of Gender and Justice has brought hundreds of national and international experts in gender-related fields to campus in the arts, humanities and social and natural sciences. The Fisher Center fosters mutual understanding and social justice in our contemporary society. 

Top: In the photo above, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University Aaron Benanav speaks about automation and the future of work to kick off the Fisher Center’s speaker series last year.