These three events are open to the public.

1. Discussion with 2011 Tisch Research Prize winner John Gaventa

2. “Determinants of Health Among Caribbean Latinos” with Flavia Peréa and Linda Sprague Martinez

3. “Development of Korean Civil Society” with Prof. Sang-Il Han

1. John Gaventa, April 14, 2011 at Tisch College, 4:30-6 pm

Dr. Gaventa has combined rigorous scholarship with various forms of collaboration with communities. Such collaboration was the hallmark of his work at the Highlander Research and Education Center, which led to his being granted a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981. It has also been central to his 10 years of leadership at the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability, a global network facilitated by the Institute of Development Studies. Among many other products, the Center has produced an eight-volume books series of case studies on civic action from around the world, most of whose authors write from the Global South. Meanwhile, Gaventa chairs the board of Britain’s largest overseas NGO, Oxfam Great Britain, and plays other leadership roles in civil society. Gaventa will accept the Tisch Research award and discuss his work with Tisch research director Peter Levine on April 14, 2011 at Tisch College (4:30-6 pm). Appropriate for students as well as faculty, staff, and community partners. Please register through this page if you are interested in attending.

2. “Determinants of Health Among Caribbean Latinos”

Dr. Flavia Peréa and Dr. Linda Sprague Martinez

A faculty discussion co-sponsored by Peace and Justice Studies and the Tisch College.

Friday, April 15, noon-1:30

Mayer Campus Center room 112, Zamparelli Room

Lunch provided Please RSVP to Peter Levine (peter.levine@tufts.edu), who will reply with menu options for the lunch.

Drs. Flavia Peréa and Linda Sprague Martinez will discuss their research and present on their current projects in Jamaica Plain (funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities) and Lawrence (funded by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation). Their work is community- and youth-engaged and focused on the socio-environmental determinants of health among urban Caribbean Latinos. They will discuss their collaborative, partnership approach to community based research, which emphasizes community leadership, youth development, and civic engagement. Linda Sprague Martinez is a Lecturer in the Community Health Program at the School of Arts and Sciences, and Flavia Peréa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at the Medical School.

3. “Development of Korean Democracy and Civil Society”

Dr. Sang-Il Han, visiting scholar in residence at Tisch College.

May 5, Noon-1:15 pm, Mayer Campus Center room 112, Zamparelli Room

Tisch College will provide light lunch, so please RSVP Peter Levine (peter.levine@tufts.edu) if you plan to attend.

Dr. Han has been chair of the Division of Social Science and chair of Public Administration at Yonsei University in Korea, where he is a professor. The topic will be “The Development of Korean Democracy and Civil Society” (a broad introduction). There will be time for discussion.

Bad Things Happen by Harry Dolan is a neatly constructed mystery with elements of noir, police procedural, and a drawing-room detective story. The author, a very clever guy with a philosophy degree, plays with some interesting ideas as he introduces a plot about mystery writers who may be killers. The two detectives–not exactly partners, but potential friends–are, respectively, a single mom and a tough guy with a fake name and an unknown past. Everyone except the killer is described with affection.

The Death Instinct by Jed Rubenfeld is even cleverer, weaving together such ideas as Freud’s reaction to World War I, the capacity of radium to kill and to cure, and America’s response to terrorism. A surprising proportion of the unbelievable events in the novel actually occurred, as the afterward explains. Freud and Madame Curie are among the historical figures who make appearances in this mystery/spy novel. I only wish that the two heroes weren’t perfectly competent, physically courageous, and handsome (possessing between them many languages and scientific disciplines), while the chief female character is so beautiful that she literally turns the heads of whole regiments.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell is in a whole different category, literature rather than genre fiction, but I mention it with these two works because it is equally suspenseful. Russell is an aphoristic writer, capable of passages like this: “Some things you know right away to be final–when you lose your last baby tooth, or when you go to sleep for the ultimate time as a twelve-year-old on the night before your thirteenth birthday. Other times, you have to work out the milestone later via subtraction, a math you do to assign significance, like when I figured out that I’d just blown though my last-ever Wednesday with Mom on the day after she died.” She is a self-conscious writer, MFA-style, an echoer of diverse American voices and dialects and describer of remarkable places. I feared that her plot would veer off into some kind of unbelievable fantasy, but it remained compelling to the end. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend reading it unless you can handle some truly bad things happening to innocent youth. Overall, it’s a powerful study of what it means to leave the family for the big, cruel world–in this case, symbolized by the urban mainland of South Florida.

Montpelier, VA: I am staying at an almost-literal shrine to the United States Constitution, James Madison’s own house, where they (rightly) preserve an ink stain on the floor that may be some of the ink with which Mr. Madison took his notes on ancient constitutions, preparing for the Philadelphia convention. My fellow visitors are all civic educators who teach American history or government at the high school or college level or in museums and other public institutions. They are diverse, and I would hesitate to characterize even the individuals politically, but there is a right-of-center median. Some participants worked in the Bush White House or clerked for conservative Supreme Court Justices. For some, deep respect for the Constitution in its original form is an important civic virtue.

I don’t personally think that the United States Constitution, as a document, is a particularly strong example of such an instrument in the 21st century. If you made a serious and open-minded comparison between our constitution and those of other successful and stable contemporary republics, ours would look significantly flawed. I know this sounds like heresy at a time when all the Republican presidential hopefuls agree: “America is stupendously great, awesomely great, so great that ‘great’ doesn’t begin to describe its greatness–and Obama just doesn’t get it.” But the way the Constitution frustrates accountability by dividing power seems highly problematic, not to mention the unequal representation in the Senate, lack of basic positive rights, and so on.

And yet here is a way in which I am quite conservative. Regimes or polities are organic wholes that develop slowly but can quickly go bad. One idiosyncratic but well-established aspect of the American polity is our veneration for the written text of the Constitution, which extends to piety about its authors and even the locations where they lived and wrote. This civic religion could not be transplanted to other democracies. But neither can all aspects of their political orders be imported here.

We could have a constitutional convention and rewrite the whole text, but the results would not necessarily be better; I fear they would be worse. The Constitution that we have frustrates some forms of good government but also prevents many forms of tyranny. Our polity, taken as a whole, has strengths and much potential for gradual improvement. For those reasons, a degree of reverence for the Constitution may be healthy–although I wouldn’t hide any of its flaws from students.

Montpelier, VA–I am getting ready to sleep on the property of Montpelier, James Madison’s house. His Georgian/Federalist mansion is at the top of the nearby hill, overlooking horse fields and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Past his Greek temple “folly” and through some old-growth woods, you get to the guest house where I am staying. Tomorrow, colleagues and I will be discussing civic education in the very place where the Constitution was conceived–and about 100 field and household slaves labored to support the man who wrote it. On this spring night early in the 21st century, all is quiet.