Join the Glenn Room for a wonderful Opening Conversation with Camille Love, Executive Director of the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, and Gaëtan Bruel, Director of Villa Albertine and Cultural Counselor of the French Embassy in the US, to kick off Night of Ideas Atlanta 2023. This conversation is moderated by James Richards, Director of Communications of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
Join the Glenn Room for an outstanding first panel featuring Dr. Bernice A. King, CEO of the King Center, National Center of Civil and Human Rights CEO Jill Savit, and Valérie Baud-Candau, Deputy Director of the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg (France). What do these three women who head major institutions think about the current state of civil and human rights in the United States and Europe? What vision and dream do their respective institutions hold for today and tomorrow? The discussion will be moderated by curator Ashley Woods, notably of “A Right to Freedom”, a major exhibit on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We all must work. That is life. And the pressure of that imperative can feel soul crushing. And yet, there is still a sweetness in work – that in everything that we are called to do, whether out of necessity or desire, there is a quality that connects us to each other and to something greater than ourselves.
That is not to suggest that work is without tedium, drudgery, compromises or even exploitation that can often challenge what we believe or to whom we belong. Even so, whether laboring towards an effort that seems impossible, or pushing against a culture that is reluctant to change, work gives us a sweet opportunity to explore, claim, and become a refined version of ourselves that we only sense is there.
The American Civil Rights Movement has influenced nonviolent movements for social, political, and economic change around the world. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom as well as a significant milestone for the 1983 French March for Equality and Against Racism from Marseille to Paris. Considering these two landmark events, historian Vicki Crawford brings together civil rights activist Charles Black and French activist Nadia Chérif-Raguibi to explore the common threads and lessons for today in mobilizing, organizing, and inspiring a younger generation to carry on the struggle for civil and human rights.
Atlanta has a remarkable history of social and cultural imagination that has inspired generations and produced iconic figures and movements that are still relevant today. However, as new innovations, ideas, and opportunities foster new generations of success, there are yet new challenges around equity, access, and justice.
In this 1-on-1 conversation, Adlia Halim, curator at the Trap Music Museum, and Floyd Hall, director of Science Gallery Atlanta, will discuss how Atlanta’s creative ecosystem can channel its cultural influence into social, economic, and political change that reflects the needs of Atlanta’s legacy communities.
we all have to eat. how? when? what? why? These are some of the questions and considerations that we face daily during our time here. Mama Earth is the source of health and wealth. we have the responsibility to sustain ourselves, the charge to provide for our families, and the opportunity to be stewards and change agents that usher in and solidify truly equitable, just, beloved, and thriving communities for all who desire it. a collective movement that acknowledges and learns from past and current harms, uplifts the talents and voices of the disenfranchised, celebrates the sustainable victories, honours multi-cultural ancestral wisdom and practices, and creates community-rooted visionary foodways will improve our outcomes and opportunity to chew, taste, digest, absorb, see, smell, touch, and hear the goodness needed to fully live.
Join the Night of Ideas DREAM SPACE to share your dreams and listen to the dreams of others committed to transforming society and continuing MLK’s legacy.
In April of 1965, a small group of refugee law specialists gathered in the Rockefeller Villa Serbelloni, in Bellagio, to negotiate a new treaty. Refugee Law was governed by a universal treaty known as the Convention, but it only covered refugee situations preceding 1951. The UNHCR hope was to negotiate a new refugee treaty, which culminated with the 1967 “Protocol”, the fundamental instrument that provides status to refugees all around the world. This talk will discuss French and American input to this process, and the extraordinary stakes of doing so in the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and the war in Vietnam. Professor and writer Robert Barsky will also discuss the massive implications of assembling the Travaux préparatoires, as they can be used to determine state obligations towards refugees, worldwide, and to challenge restrictions to refugees and the asylum process.
As an immigrant to the US (who learned as much about history, politics, and pop culture as possible to navigate lunch room conversations), as a graduate of Atlanta Public Schools, and a human and voting rights worker, I considered myself familiar with MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, an expert even.
However, after having led a 9 year campaign that resulted in the registration of nearly 700,000 Georgia voters of color, and activated millions of voters, at a time where the right to vote and other pieces of democratic infrastructure are under attack, I revisited the text of the speech. While the speech is most often cited for the vision of a future, just, America laid out by Dr. King, I would like to argue that the bounced check metaphor and other parts of the speech are equally, if not more instructive, for those of us who are working to build the country our families deserve to live in.
Cultural Rights have been included in French law for a few years, but they are still not being implemented in cultural centers, theaters, and other places. The questions for professionals are: How do we approach the issue of users’ participation in cultural life? How do we give a place for cultural diversities and expressions in citizens’ daily life? Does this only concern cultural actors? How can we address these rights in a digital global society where GAFAMs are designing a media and political landscape with their own rules? How can these rights help us to think and act about the digitalization of culture? How do these rights question the link between culture and democracy?
Marie Picard and Emmanuel Vergès will organize a conversation based on thoughts on digital and free cultures and thoughts about freedom and democracy, between the United States and France, and their experiences in the online and offline world.
Urban designer and writer Hannah S. Palmer Palmer founded the Atlanta Creek League. In this talk, she shares Atlanta Creek League’s dreams and vision.
Atlanta is rich in creeks. The city sprawls across three river basins—the Chattahoochee, Flint, and South Rivers—and within each basin are dozens of streams. Some creeks are famous, some obscure, and all of them are special. Atlanta’s creeks are vital to connecting, cooling, and sustaining our lives.
Atlanta Creek League helps people find, enjoy, and get involved in stewardship for the creeks in their neighborhood. Using the model of a sports league, with creek “teams,” jerseys, and friendly competition, Atlanta Creek League aims to turn neighbors into advocates, raising awareness and love these hidden treasures.
We dream of a city more meaningfully connected to its natural treasures. The dream of Atlanta Creek League is a city where all the creeks have names, fans, and active local teams. We dream of communities plugged into daily environmental stewardship, organized around the acts of restoration needed in each watershed.
Join the Night of Ideas DREAM SPACE to share your dreams and listen to the dreams of others committed to transforming society and continuing MLK’s legacy.
This talk will offer brief comments about what it was like to live during the classical civil rights era (c. 1954-1968) in a Southern town that was a hotbed of the civil rights movement, and then to help desegregate her local school under court order in 1964. June Manning Thomas will review some of the major civil rights aims of the era–open public accommodations, voting rights, and equal education–and then comment on accomplishments and shortcomings still evident today. Basis of the talk is her book Struggling to Learn: An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina (USC Press 2022). Her talk will be introduced by Ellen Basset, Dean of the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Design.
From increasing women’s representation in leadership and decision-making to expanding access to reproductive and maternal healthcare resources, progress towards a gender equal future starts with addressing historical systems of inequity. In many cases, challenges facing Black, indigenous and other women of color are often discounted, suppressed, or ignored. We will convene a panel of subject matter experts in maternal healthcare, abortion rights, and gender studies to discuss how government, civil society, and private actors can come together to defend women’s rights, confront our history, identify opportunities and provide innovative solutions for equity for women in Georgia and in the US. Moderation: Elayne DeLeo. With the support of Atlanta Design Festival.
What happens to the children of refugees when they arrive in a new country? What kind of education do they receive? Does this education take into account the fact that their schooling has been disrupted?
Elizabeth Elango is the CEO of Global Village Project, the only school in the US created to meet the specific needs of refugee girls. In this talk, she will share her dreams and vision and talk about how GVP’s curriculum and approach to education puts refugee girls and their experiences at the center of their learning journeys, ensuring that they learn in a way that is responsive, restorative, equitable and just.
Join the Night of Ideas DREAM SPACE to share your dreams and listen to the dreams of others committed to transforming society and continuing MLK’s legacy.
Join Yehimi Cambrón, artist and activist, for a conversation with Veronica Hogan, director of Atlanta Contemporary. Cambrón’s work asserts the humanity of immigrants and makes space for them within the South’s dominant racial binary. Her iconography (the monarch, chicken wire, portraiture) validates the experiences of Undocumented Americans – making the invisible, visible. Recent installations, #ChingaLaMigra (Atlanta Contemporary, 2021) and #FreeThemAll (USC Upstate Art Gallery, 2022), illustrates the violence of immigration detention. Hogan and Cambrón will explore the language of art, why art matters, the importance of museums and galleries, and why more artists, curators, and institutions must not remain neutral.
When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. voiced his dreams for America’s future at the 1963 March on Washington, the second vision he shared was of a nation in which “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” He saw the integration of public schools as key to building that mutual trust and shared common interests across racial lines. But today, American schools are still almost as racially divided as they were when Dr. King died. Why has school integration largely failed, and how can we do better today?
Join the Night of Ideas DREAM SPACE to share your dreams and listen to the dreams of others committed to transforming society and continuing MLK’s legacy.
An instrumental relationship with Nature, inherited from the mechanistic cosmology of Western modernity, has led us to violently enslave the earth, exploit the humans and non-humans who populate it, and jeopardize the very conditions that allow for the reproduction of life. The “Rights of Nature” movement advocates for ecosystems such as rivers, lakes, and mountains to bear legal rights in the same manner as human beings. This movement is striving for a paradigm shift in which Nature is placed at the center and humans are connected to it in an interdependent way, rather than a dominant one. But who is entitled to talk on the behalf of Nature? Are we projecting an anthropocentric perspective onto Nature by applying to it our juridical fictions? Are there other ways of repairing and taking care of Nature outside of the law? Join Senegalese author and thinker Felwine Sarr and Georgia Tech assistant professor and artist Brigitte Stepanov for an inspiring conversation on Rights of Nature.
In a comparative approach looking at the French and US urban education systems, French scholar Nora Nafaa looks at the neoliberalization of educational policies. As schools can be amenities, the educational sector appears as a new field of expansion of capitalism, giving rise to multiple political, economic, social and spatial processes, within contemporary urban dynamics. In major metropolises, the growth of public-private partnerships and the various plans to close public schools call into question the very maintenance of public education as an institution that belongs to and responds to citizens. While cities have experienced crises that have led to the increasing privatization of public education, other healthy and growing cities such as Atlanta or Marseille are experiencing similar processes that are redefining the right to a full public education.
Already in 2023, more than 200 bills have been proposed targeting the LGBTQ+ community, and many centered around transgender and non-binary kids. The rhetoric aligned with this legislation isn’t just innocently ideological but has created a culture where LGBTQ suicidality and depression among youth is tragically on the rise. Deeply concerned about the real harm produced by culture wars, long time educator, Poet, and Hip Hop artist Tim’m West offers a poetic and soul-filled Hip Hop and Spoken word response insisting on the critical importance of allies and advocates to humanize LGBTQ people. LGBTQ Rights ARE Civil and Human Rights.
Tim’m West serves as Executive Director of the LGBTQ Institute at the National Center of Civil and Human Rights.
Dantes Rameau is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Atlanta Music Project (AMP). AMP provides world-class music training and performances opportunities supporting youth growth and development. Operating in under-resourced communities, AMP’s mission statement is to empower youth to realize their possibilities through music. In this talk, Dantes Rameau will share his dreams and vision.
Join the Night of Ideas DREAM SPACE to share your dreams and listen to the dreams of others committed to transforming society and continuing MLK’s legacy.
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Over the last four decades, public policy has shaped societal views on homelessness, determining who is deemed worthy and deserving and who is not. The criminalization of homelessness has led to a harmful narrative that keeps those without a permanent address from being fully accepted as part of a beloved community.
This talk explores how reframing our perspectives can empower us to affirm the worth and dignity of those experiencing homelessness and work towards creating a more inclusive society that prioritizes justice and human rights.
This critical conversation will delve into the role of public policy, the value of human life and the power of dreaming about a world where belonging is extended to those without an address.
“It was all a dream” state the opening lyrics of the song “Juicy” by Notorious BIG in 1994. We can hear those words as an echo to Martin Luther King’s speech at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, hence moving and navigating through space and time: from Brooklyn in the 1990s, to Washington DC, Atlanta and the South in the 1950s and 1960s. We can also be reminded of the 1983 March for Equality and against Racism that was held on the other side of the Atlantic. What lies at the center of those artistic or political endeavors are dreams. Today, speaking from Atlanta, what can we dream about? Join associate professors and authors Maboula Soumahoro and Anne-Gaëlle Saliot for a journey into dreams on both sides of the Atlantic.
Where a person lives and works is the link between one’s dignity and one’s ability to survive in our world. Atlanta’s population has grown to more than 500,000 — up from roughly 420,000 in 2010, according to the Department of City Planning. The city has also added more than 17,500 housing units in recent years. However, less than 10% of those units are affordable for households at or below 60% AMI. This discussion will explore housing affordability and economic access in Atlanta and the need to co-create a more equitable and just society.
David Hopings is Director of Storytelling and Marketing for Soccer in the Streets, a sports-based youth development program in low-income communities. In this talk, he shares Soccer in the Streets’ dreams and vision.
Biological fact tells us that the oft-repeated trope “the children are our future” is correct. Unfortunately, our current trajectory as a society is untenable. Today’s youth are finding innovative ways to be heard, but the burden of preparing them for leadership remains with us. In a soccer game, players are free to apply their skills as they see fit and the outcome of the efforts may be a failure. This work is essential; a team thrives on empathy and collective responsibility–the job of the coach. With able leadership and instruction, our kids are developing a tool kit that can be applied to any “goal” or issue that they feel called to. Soccer culture affords a means to maintain physical and mental health as well as a community to draw strength when needed. Most importantly, in these times of gun violence and extreme societal stress, a Soccer in the Streets pitch (field) is a safe place for kids to be free from the troubles of the world.
Join the Night of Ideas DREAM SPACE to share your dreams and listen to the dreams of others committed to transforming society and continuing MLK’s legacy.
Join Glenn Room’s exceptional final panel, ‘Civil Rights and Atlanta Today’ featuring WABE acclaimed journalist Rose Scott, Georgia State University historian and author of “The Legend of the Black Mecca” Maurice Hobson, assistant professor and scientist Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, Executive Director of the Atlanta-based Policing Alternatives & Diversion Initiative Moki Macias and David Edwards, Policy Advisor for Neighborhoods for the City of Atlanta and Director of the Center of Urban Research at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Chery Finley, Director of AUC Art Collective at Spelman College, will moderate a discussion with acclaimed artist and photograph historian, Dr. Deborah Willis, and award-winning photographer, Sheila Pree Bright, about the role of photography in social justice movements, historically and today.
During the Night of Ideas, Soul Food Cypher (SFC), an Atlanta based Non-Profit organization, will bring together Atlanta’s best Freestyle Rappers for mind-blowing lyrical demonstrations and an unforgettable evening. They will close the Night with a vibrant DJ Set.
Read more about Soul Food Cypher’s performances during the Night of Ideas.