During the past 25 years, when our societal use of psychiatric drugs has dramatically increased, the burden of mental illness in our society has soared. Do we, as a society, need to rethink our use of these drugs?
This lecture takes us on a journey through the Nazi’s Aktion T-4 project, a project that “euthanized” (officially) over 70,000 people with disabilities in six psychiatric institutions throughout Germany and Austria in 1940 and 1941, and then more covertly killed approximately 270,000 people in these same institutions during WWII. In July 2013, Brueggemann traveled to the Hartheim institution site, a converted castle in Austria, where the most patients were killed. In 2001 disturbing excavations took place at Hartheim, and in 2001 a major memorial was constructed at the site. In her lecture, Brueggemann outlines her educational and interactive blog that […]
Independent migration to Hanoi has surged dramatically over two decades of deepening market reforms, blurring the distinctions between urban and rural lives once maintained so carefully by the Communist Party of Vietnam. Yet many migrants face ongoing legal and social discrimination in Hanoi, tied to an outmoded system of household registration (ho khau), and widespread anxieties about the ‘floating population’ threatening to overwhelm the city. This talk explores how one group of “unofficial” Hanoians’—migrant motorbike taxi drivers from Nam Dinh Province—navigates a system of differentiated urban citizenship by forging communities and mutual assistance networks around shared ‘native places’ (que huong) […]
Traditional music creation in contemporary Vietnam borders on the frenetic. Music practitioners and consumers involve themselves in many different performance types within Vietnam, in Asia and among communities of Vietnamese in diaspora. Traveling from Long Xuyên to Hồ Chí Minh City and then flying to Bangkok, Taipei and Kiev, musicians interact with a greater number of musical types, media and ideas than in previous decades. In the process, certain memories of the past fade and conflict with those held by others, forcing delicate negotiations of so-called “authentic” and appropriately “developed” performance practices. New communities sprout to make sense of these […]
Diane Nash led some of the civil rights movement’s most influential and successful campaigns, including the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins and the Freedom Riders. She co-founded the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and served on a national committee that helped bring about passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.