Food for Thought Books - Events Feed

FLOODLINES: The Community and Resistance Tour

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:15:35 -0400

Start: September 14, 2010 - 6:00pm

End: September 14, 2010 - 8:00pm

Please join us at the Amherst College Stirn Auditorium as Food For Thought Books Collective and Amherst College American Studies, Black Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Center for Community Engagement and the Lucius Root Eastman Fund co-sponsor FLOODLINES: The Community and Resistance Tour, an exciting movement-building national tour featuring speakers, images, short videos, and inspiration which seeks to communicate about current struggles for justice and liberation, from the current BP Oil Drilling Disaster devastating the Gulf Coast to nooses hung in the northern Louisiana town of Jena. In Amherst, the tour will feature Jordan Flaherty, Jesse Muhammad and Victoria Law as they explore topics ranging from women organizing inside prisons to cultural resistance.

Permaculture for Ecological & Social Transformation: an introduction

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:25:31 -0400

Start: September 22, 2010 - 7:00pm

End: September 22, 2010 - 9:00pm

Join Lisa DePiano, local farmer, activist and educator, for an
introductory conversation about the transformative power of
permaculture.

Permaculture is a design system that provides for human needs while increasing the health of the ecosystem. It gives us a lens to observe and assess what is happening in the natural landscape and use those principles
to design food, buildings and communities that work together to use less energy and produce higher yields. Students will walk away with a framework for understanding the connection between social and ecological health as well as a process for designing solutions that come from being able to "read" a landscape.

Poetics of Resistance: a reading and booksigning

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:41:23 -0400

Start: September 29, 2010 - 7:00pm

End: September 29, 2010 - 9:00pm

Join us for an evening with writer and activist Jeff Conant, who will be talking about his recently published book A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency.

The Zapatistas' famous "Ya basta!"—enough already!—was the first uttering of a new story: a story about unbinding the ties of official history, uncovering buried seeds of popular resistance, and revealing the glimmerings of a truly insurgent modernity. Combining narrative history, literary criticism, ethnography, and media analysis, A Poetics of Resistance provides a refreshing take on Mexico's Zapatista movement by examining the means, meanings, and mythos behind the Zapatista image.

The first "postmodern revolution" presented itself to the world through a complex web of propaganda in every available medium: the colorful communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos, the ski masks, uniforms, dolls, murals, songs, and weapons both symbolic and real. By proliferating a profound and resonant set of myths, symbols, and grand historical gestures calculated to reflect their ideologies, organizing methodologies, and cultural values, the Zapatistas helped set into motion a global uprising, and the awareness that behind this uprising is a renewed vision of history.

Jeff Conant's engaging and innovative examination of the Zapatistas' communication strategies will be an important tool for movements everywhere engaged in creating a world where many worlds fit; in demolishing History in order to construct histories; and in unseating not only the powerful, but Power itself.

From Brooklyn to Mexico: The Making of a Graphic Novel with Christopher Cardinale

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:20:14 -0400

Start: October 2, 2010 - 11:00am

End: October 2, 2010 - 1:00pm

How does an artist take an 11-page work of fiction, re-imagine it visually, and turn it into a 60-page graphic novel?

Artist Christopher Cardinale presents a two-part program that brings to life the process of creating, a new graphic novel for young readers based on a short story by award-winning author Luis Alberto Urrea. Using slides of sketches and photographs made during a research trip to the Mexican town where the story was set, Christopher presents a fascinating inside view of how visual books are created. He then presents an excerpt from the book, using slides and a reading of the text by Luis Alberto Urrea himself. This program is sure to be fun and informative both for children 10 and older and their parents, as well as for artists and illustrators.

Christopher Cardinale is a painter, illustrator, cartoonist, and community muralist with a social justice message. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.