Torture and the Future

Perspectives from the Humanities

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"TEACHING HUMAN RIGHTS:
TORTURE AND AMERICA'S FUTURE" (Part I)

Free and open to the public.

UCSB Faculty Panel with Lisa Hajjar, Kaia Stern, Avery Gordon, Richard Falk, and Russell Samolsky

Lisa Hajjar is the chair of the Law and Society Program at the University of California Santa Barbara. In 2003, she received the Harold J. Plous award, given annually to one of UCSB's top assistant professors. Her book, Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza, was published in 2005 by the University of California Press. She has published in "The Nation", in Amnesty International's periodical "Amnesty Now", and in many other journals and collections. She also serves on the editorial committee of "Middle East Report". Currently, she is working on a book about american torture and the role of lawyers.

Kaia Stern's work focuses on the intersections between religious ideology, the U.S. penal system and liberatory education in the prison context. She is currently a doctoral student in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University, where she is completing her dissertation, "Seven Voices on Prison: Transforming the Spirit of Punishment." Kaia has taught at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, New York Theological Seminary, Sing Sing Prison and the University of California, Santa Barbara (where she is presently a lecturer in the department of Black Studies). She has served as a consultant with the U.S. Justice Fund of the Open Society Institute’s After Prison Initiative as well as Project Coordinator of the Interfaith Justice Project at the Riverside Church in New York City. She
holds a Bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Kaia is also in the process of being ordained as an interfaith minister.

Avery Gordon is a Professor of Sociology and Law and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Visiting Faculty at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, and the editor of Mapping Multiculturalism and Body Politics, among other works. Her most recent articles on imprisonment and the war on terror were published in "Race & Class" and "Le Monde Diplomatique". Her current writing aims to comparatively understand the nature of captivity and confinement today, its means of dispossession, and what is required to abolish it. Since 1997, she has co-hosted "No Alibis", a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB 91.9 FM, Santa Barbara.

Richard Falk is Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus at Princeton University and since 2002, Distinguished Visiting Professor in Global Studies at UCSB. He is Chair of the Board for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board for "The Nation". His most recent books are The Declining World Order (2004) and Iraq: Crimes of War (co-edited with Robert Jay Lifton and Irene Gendzier) (2006).

Russell Samolsky is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he teaches courses in literary theory and twentieth-century Anglophone literature. He has published articles on Derrida, J. M. Coetzee, Kafka, Shakespeare, and on the teaching of South
African literature in the age of terror. He is currently completing a book entitled Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in 20th Century Culture. His work on torture focuses on South African writing and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and he is currently attempting to think through what the TRC might have to teach the U.S. with regard to torture and its future.