New York Contributors

Ted Byfield - Information
Ted Byfield is a professor at Parsons the New School for Design and visiting fellow at Yale Law School (Information Society project). He has served for several years as moderator of the well-regarded Nettime mailing list. His current research centers on the problem of developing a coherent curriculum oriented toward analyzing and designing the invisible "spaces," systems, networks, and protocols that increasingly define the fabric of everyday life.

Tony Conrad - Annexpression
Tony Conrad is an American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer, sound artist, teacher and writer. Conrad (b. 1940) was among the earliest minimal composer/performers; his "Day of Niagara" (1965, with John Cale, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela) is at last being released this summer. He was also among the first structural filmmakers (The Flicker, 1966). He has exhibited widely in video, film, sound, and performance, and teaches in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo.

Susan Crile - Explosion Implosion: War in our time
Susan Crile is a visual artist who lives and works in New York City.  Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States as well as in Europe; it is in many museums collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Solomn R. Guggenheim Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and the Phillips Collection.  Crile is a professor of art at Hunter College, CUNY and is represented by Michael Steinberg Fine Arts in New York City. Website: susancrile.com

Ashley Dawson - War Games
Ashley Dawson is associate professor of English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. He is the author of Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Michigan, 2007) and co-editor of three essay collections: Democracy, the State, and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge, 2009); Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (Michigan, 2009); and Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (Duke, 2007).

James Der Derian - Virtuous War
James Der Derian is Watson Institute Research Professor of International Studies, at Brown Unversity, He is author of On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement, and Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War; editor of International Theory: Critical Investigations and The Virilio Reader; and co-editor with Michael Shapiro of International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics. His articles on international relations have appeared in the Review of International Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, International Affairs, Brown Journal of World Affairs, Harvard Internatinoal Review, Millennium, Alternatives, Cultural Values, boundary 2, Angelaki, and Samtiden. He has produced three film documentaries, VY2K, After 9/11, and Cultural Warriors. His most recent book is Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.

Fiona Jeffries - Re-appropriating the city of fear
Fiona Jeffries is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her current research explores the circulation of social struggles against the political use of fear in contested spaces of production, consumption and differentiation. Her published work includes essays on contemporary urban social movements and the role of communication practices in the production of alternative globalizations.

Danny Kaplan - Marketing War
Danny Kaplan specializes in the anthropology of emotions through the prism of friendship and nationalism. His current interests focus on media and the representation of emergency. He is the author of Brothers and Others in Arms: The Making of Love and War in Israeli Combat Units (Haworth Press 2003) and The Men We Loved: Male Friendship and Nationalism in Israeli Culture (Berghahn Books 2006). His recent articles include: The Songs of the Siren: Engineering National Time on Israeli Radio. Cultural Anthropology 24(2),313-345. Kaplan heads the masculinity track of the Gender Studies Program at Bar Ilan University, Israel. 

Jennifer S. Light - Cold War Planning
Jennifer S. Light is Associate Professor of Communication Studies, History, and Sociology and a Faculty Associate at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Light has a BA in history and literature from Harvard, an MPhil in history and the philosophy of science from Cambridge University, and a PhD in the history of science from Harvard. Light's research investigates the work of technical experts in the political process, with special interest in these figures' influences on US urban history. She is the author of From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (2003) and The Nature of Cities: Ecological Visions and the American Urban Professions (2009), both published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Suketu Mehta - When a riot becomes a war
Suketu Mehta is Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, and winner of the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award. Maximum City was also a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and the Lettre Ulysses Prize. In addition, Mehta is a recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta's work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harpers Magazine, Time, and Condé Nast Traveler. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. Mehta is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Rosalind C. Morris - Not-not-war
Rosalind C. Morris is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She was Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender between 1999 and 2004, and Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia between 2003 and 2009.  A scholar of both mainland Southeast Asia and South Africa, she has published widely on topics concerning the politics of representation, the mass media, the relationship between violence and value, gender and sexuality, and the changing forms of modernity in the global South. Her most recent book is Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia (Duke 2009).  Other books include In the Place of Origins: Modernity and its Mediums in Northern Thailand (Duke 2000) and New Worlds from Fragments: Film, Ethnography, and the Representation of Northwest Coast Cultures (Westview 1994).  Forthcoming in 2010 are an edited volume, Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea (Columbia) and a collection of essays entitled Wars I Have (not) Seen (Seagull Books).

Ida Susser and Jane Schneider - Wounded Cities
Ida Susser Ph.D., is Acting Chair of anthropology at Hunter College and professor at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as adjunct professor of Socio-Medical Sciences at the HIV Center, Columbia University. Susser has conducted ethnographic research with respect to urban social movements in the United States and challenges for women in the AIDS epidemic in New York City, Puerto Rico and southern Africa. She was President of the American Ethnological Society from 2005 to 2007. Her most recent books are AIDS, Sex and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa (2009 Wiley-Blackwell), Rethinking America: The Imperial Homeland in the 21st Century (2009 Paradigm Press, edited with Jeff Maskovsky). ----Jane Schneider is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Graduate Center, CUNY; conducted several decades of research in Sicily, encompassing transformations of both the Mafia and Antimafia interventions; also worked on a broader comparative study of global trafficking and organized crime formations. Recent publications (co-authored with Peter Schneider) include Reversible Destiny; Mafia, Antimafia, and the Struggle for Palermo (Univ. of California Press, 2003), and "The Anthropology of Crime and Criminalization" Annual Review of Anthropology 2008.

Richard Sennett - The Wall
Richard Sennett trained at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, receiving his PhD in sociology in 1969. A point of departure for Sennett's work has been the contemplation of personal consequences for workers as the nature of work changed with the altering face of modern capitalism. In the 1970's Sennett became one of the founders of The New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. He has also served as an advisor to UNESCO and as president of the American Council on Work. Mr. Sennett divides his time between New York University and the London School of Economics. His publications include: The Corrosion of Character (W.W. Norton, 1998), Respect in a World of Inequality (2002), and The Culture of the New Capitalism (Yale, 2006). Most recently, Mr. Sennett has explored more positive aspects of labor in The Craftsman (Yale, 2008).

Gar Smith - Urban Warfare
Gar Smith, the former editor of Earth Island Journal, currently edits the weekly eco-zine The-Edge. He also is a co-founder of Environmentalists Against War - a group that, according to Smith, is "not [only] opposed to this one [Iraq] war, [but is] opposed to all wars," regardless of the circumstances. Smith previously worked for Friends of the Earth, a group whose stated goal is to pursue "smart, effective strategies to protect the planet from one of the greatest threats ever to our environmental laws - the Bush administration."

Gediminas Urbonas - Pigeon
Gediminas Urbonas is an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Program at MIT who, along with his partner Nomeda, has established an international reputation for socially interactive and interdisciplinary practice exploring the conflicts and contradictions posed by the economic, social, and political conditions in the former Soviet countries. Combining the tools of new and traditional media, Nomeda and Urbonas's work frequently involves collective activities such as workshops, lectures, debates, TV programs, Internet chat-rooms and public protests that stand at the intersection of art, technology and social criticism. Urbonas is the cofounder of JUTEMPUS interdisciplinary art program, VILMA (Vilnius Interdisciplinary Lab for Media Art), and VOICE, a net based publication on media culture. He and his partner have exhibited at the San Paulo, Berlin, Moscow and Gwangju Biennales – and at Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt/Main – among numerous other international shows, including a solo show at the Venice Biennale and MACBA in Barcelona. They have been awarded a number of high level grants and residency awards, including the Lithuanian National Prize for achievements in the arts and culture (2007); a fellowship at the Montalvo Arts Center in California (2007/08); and a Prize for the Best International Artist at the Gwangju Biennale (2006).

The New York Program

11:00 Cold war planning - Jennifer S. Light (Northwestern University)
11:30 Information - Ted Byfield (Parsons, The New School for Design)
12:00 Not-not-war - Rosalind C. Morris (Columbia University)
13:00 Pigeon - Gediminas Urbonas (MIT, Visual Arts Program)
13:30 Re-appropriating the city of fear - Fiona Jeffries (CUNY, Graduate Center)
14:00 Marketing War - Danny Kaplan (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
14:30 Annexpression - Tony Conrad (University of Buffalo, New York)
15:00 The Wall - Richard Sennett (New York University and London School of Economics)
15:30 Urban Warfare – Gar Smith (Environmentalists Against War)
16:00 Virtuous War - James Der Derian (Brown University)
16.30 War Games - Ashley Dawson (CUNY Graduate School)
17:00 Explosion Implosion: war in our time - Susan Crile (Artist, New York)
17.30 When a riot becomes a war - Suketu Mehta (New York University)
18:00 Wounded Cities - Ida Susser and Jan Schneider (CUNY Graduate Center)