As part of the Office of Institutional Diversity’s Diversity Week offerings, the Global Awareness Forum is pleased to promote a lecture by Melissa Ifill on ethnicity, crime, and violence in Guyana. The lecture will take place at 4pm in the Alumni Center of the School of Education, Health, and Human Performance at 86 Wentworth Street.
Dr. Ifill will examine the complex historical, political and cultural dynamics underlying crime and violence in multi-ethnic states. Employing a case study of Guyana, she will argue that while ethnicity is only one part of citizens’ identity, it often becomes the constitutive part and, although complex historical, political, and cultural dynamics generate ethnic conflict, such conflict is often evaluated in a manner that is analytically causal and misses the nuances and circumstances under which conflict or violence becomes ethnicized.
Another great turn-out. Thanks to Hollis France for organizing, to Lisa Samuel for bringing her class, and to Professor Ifill for a clear and sobering lecture on inter-ethnic violence in her home country. Like Professor Southall’s lecture at the beginning of the month, this one reminded us of the value of constitutionality and of the privileged world we still live in–despite Congressional gridlock–where political disagreement does not involve the threat of physical violence, or at least where any perpetrator of such violence cannot expect impunity.