Upcoming Events, Upcoming Forums
Ford Hall Forum at Suffolk University presents:
An evening with Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD, acclaimed physician and sociologist upon the publication of his groundbreaking new book, What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms. The evening’s moderator is Gary Firemen, Ph.D., associate provost and professor, Psychology Department, Suffolk University.
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
7:00 p.m. Live via Zoom
This program is free and open to the public.
Click here to register via zoom
Long at the forefront of a movement advocating for gun reform as a matter of public health, Nashville-based physician and gun policy scholar Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl has been on constant media call in the aftermath of fatal shootings. But as he came to understand it, public health is a hard sell in a nation that fundamentally disagrees about what it means to be safe, healthy, or free. In his book What We’ve Become, Metzl reckons both with the long history of distrust of public health and the larger forces—social, ideological, historical, racial, and political—that allow mass shootings to occur on a near daily basis in America.
This brilliant, piercing analysis points to mass shootings as a symptom of our most unresolved national conflicts, and ultimately sets us on the path of alliance forging, racial reckoning, and political power brokering we must take to put things right.
Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of several acclaimed books that challenge the ways we think about illness and health— author of several acclaimed books that challenge the ways we think about illness and health—including Dying of Whiteness, The Protest Psychosis, Prozac on the Couch, and Against Health.
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Upcoming Events, Upcoming Forums
Suffolk University’s Ford Hall Forum; Moakley Archive & Institute; Office of Diversity, Access, and Inclusion; GBH Forum Network; and The Boston Desegregation & Busing Initiative present:
Upward Mobility in Boston: 50 Years After Busing
Suffolk University’s Ford Hall Forum and Moakley Archive & Institute, The Boston Desegregation and Busing Initiative, and GBH Forum Network, continue a series of programs examining the lasting impacts of the l974 landmark decision to desegregate Boston’s Public Schools. On May 6, the panel will discuss upward mobility in Boston, exploring the city’s historic institutional roadblocks that have hindered progress for people of color fifty years after busing. The panel will explore solutions to address these persistent issues such as enhancing educational opportunities, closing the wealth gap, increasing home ownership, and broadening access to job opportunities.
May 6, 2024
6:00 p.m.
Live via Zoom
Register Here to Join the Conversation
This program is free and open to the public.
The evening’s panelists are Ron Bell, longtime community activist and founder of Dunk the Vote, and alumnus of Boston Latin School; Karilyn Crockett, Ph.D., assistant professor, Urban History, Public Policy & Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Tatiana M. F. Cruz, Ph.D., assistant professor and interdisciplinary program director of Africana Studies, Department of Critical Race, Gender and Cultural Studies, Simmons University. The program’s moderator is Kris Hooks, editor-in-chief of The Boston Globe’s newsroom team, Money, Power, Inequality: Closing the Racial Wealth Gap, which focuses on addressing the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston.
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Upcoming Events, Upcoming Forums
Suffolk University’s Ford Hall Forum, History, Language & Global Culture and Communication, Journalism, & Media Departments, and the Women’s & Gender Studies Program present:
Barbara Abrams, Ph.D., author of the new book, ReSisters: Forensic Storytelling and the Literary Roots of Early Modern Feminism, and Laura Levitt, Ph.D., author of The Objects That Remain, join in a conversation about women’s stories of trauma and transcendence. This talk weaves together several stories of survival both chronologically and thematically and emphasizes the significance of the use of objects in women’s storytelling, from 18th Century France to the Holocaust, to the present. The afternoon’s moderator is Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, Ph.D., chair and associate professor, Communication, Journalism & Media Department, Suffolk University.
Barbara Abrams is Chair and Professor in the History, Language, & Global Culture Department at Suffolk University. Her academic work focuses on French literature of the Enlightenment, Women’s, and Gender Studies, and Global and Cultural Studies. She is the author of numerous books, including Reframing Rousseau’s Le Lévite d’Ephraïm: The Hebrew Bible, Hospitality, and Modern Identity and Le Bizarre and Le Décousu in the Novels and Theoretical Works of Denis Diderot: How the Idea of Marginality Originated in Eighteenth-Century France.
Laura Levitt is Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Gender at Temple University where she has chaired the Religion Department and directed both the Jewish Studies and the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Programs. She is currently the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor of Religion at Carleton College. Levitt is the author of The Objects that Remain (2020); American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (2007); and Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (1997) and a co-editor of Impossible Images: Contemporary Art After the Holocaust (2003); and Judaism Since Gender (1997).
Thursday, March 21, 2024
Sargent Hall, 120 Tremont Street, Boston, MA
Room 235, Second Floor
12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
In-person and live via ZOOM
Lunch will be provided.
This program is free and open to the public.
Upcoming Events, Upcoming Forums
Join us for a screening of the award-winning film In the Whale, by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Abel. The screening will be followed by a post-screening discussion with Abel.
IN THE WHALE is an award-winning feature-length film about arguably the greatest fish story ever told, though this one is true. It’s the account of a man who survived to tell the tale of being swallowed by a whale, and what happened after he escaped.
In the shark-filled waters off Cape Cod, Michael Packard has long tempted fate. For several months a year, Packard and his longtime mate, Josiah Mayo, cast off nearly every morning around dawn and navigate through the half-light to their diving grounds off Provincetown, the idiosyncratic, isolated community where they grew up at the tip of the Cape. Packard buckles on his scuba tank and plunges into the cold waters to hunt on the seafloor.
As the region’s last-remaining commercial lobster diver, the 57-year-old father has had his share of harrowing experiences, which include close encounters with great whites, nearly drowning, and having to pull up the body of a fellow diver. He even survived a plane crash in the jungles of Costa Rica, where he ran a charter fishing business. But what happened to him on a routine dive during a clear June morning was something he never imagined possible, and many around the world refused to believe.
In an experience of biblical proportions, Packard was engulfed by a humpback whale, caught in the watery cavity of its massive mouth. After some 30 seconds of pitch-black captivity, in which he expected to die, he was spit out, fins first, to the surface, where Mayo and another fisherman rescued him.
The publicity was similarly dizzying for the reclusive fisherman, whose survival story spread around the world in news dispatches. But what came after the limelight dimmed was even more significant for Packard, who overcame another big whale, his depression, through the love of the sea and his family.
Friday, April 26, 2024
Modern Theatre
525 Washington Street, Boston, MA
7:00 p.m.
This event is free and open to the public.
Upcoming Events, Upcoming Forums
Join us for a book talk with author Nancy A. Nichols upon the publication of her latest book
From the adolescent thrill of getting a driver’s license to the dreaded commutes of adulthood, from vintage muscle cars to electric vehicles, this groundbreaking book reveals the outsized impact the car has had—and will continue to have—on the lives of women. Since their inception, cars have defined American culture, but until quite recently car histories were largely written by and about men—with little attention given to the fascinating story of women and cars.
In this engaging non-fiction narrative, Nancy A. Nichols, the daughter of a used car salesman, uses the cars her father sold and the ones her family drove to tell a larger story about how the car helped to define modern womanhood. From her sister’s classic Mustang to her mother’s Chevy Convertible to her own Honda minivan, Nichols tells a personal story in order to shed light on a universal one. Cars helped women secure the right to vote, changed the nature of romance, and influenced both fashion and child-rearing customs. In just over 100 years since their inception, cars have created possibilities for commerce and romance, even as they exposed women to new kinds of danger.
Women Behind the Wheel explores the uniquely gendered landscape of the automobile, detailing the many reasons why cars are both more expensive and more dangerous for women drivers.
The automobile is on the cusp of momentous change. As we advance into the era of electric, connected, and autonomous vehicles, Nichols shows us why we should hit the brakes and look back in the rear-view mirror at this long and fascinating history.
What is the role of the car in our lives? Should we be more skeptical of technology in our society? In Women Behind the Wheel, Nichols argues convincingly that only by understanding the many ways the car has changed us, can we hope to prepare ourselves for this brave new era.
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Modern Theatre
525 Washington Street
Boston, MA
6:00 p.m. In-person and Live via Zoom
This event is free and open to the public.
