A documentary film festival featuring films speaking to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision of the World House

For the 2022 King Holiday, the World House Project will host a free, four-day webinar and virtual film festival, from the evening of January 14 through January 17, 2022. This virtual event will feature over 30 documentaries, musical performances, interviews, and panel discussions that speak to Dr. King's vision of the World House. 

The webinar will consist of daily Zoom meetings with the World House Project director Dr. Clayborne Carson who will speak with guests and webinar registrants on a range of topics, from the history of the civil rights movement to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the African American freedom struggles.

The films and performances cover a variety of themes, from the history of the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements to James Baldwin and Martin Luther King's global visions. A full list of featured films and short descriptions will be available shortly.

The festival is produced in partnership with the Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Center, California Newsreel, Clarity Films, the Camera as Witness Program (Stanford Arts), the Office for Religious & Spiritual Life at Stanford, and the Kunhardt Film Foundation.
 

The REDI Task Force invites you to the next event in our Critical Conversations: Race in Global Affairs series; an exploration of colonialism and empire.

About the Speakers:

Beatriz Magaloni is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science, FSI Senior Fellow, and affiliated faculty at the Center on Global Poverty and Development at Stanford University. She is the current Chair of the REDI Task Force.

Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006), won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association and the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations. Her second book, Strategies of Vote Buying: Democracy, Clientelism, and Poverty Relief in Mexico (co-authored with Alberto Diaz Cayeros and Federico Estévez), studies the politics of poverty relief. In 2010 she founded the Poverty, Violence and Governance Laboratory (POVGOV). The mission of  POVGOV is to develop action-oriented research through the elaboration of scientific knowledge that is anchored on state-of-the-art methodologies, multidisciplinary work, and innovative on-the-ground research and training. The Lab regularly incorporates undergraduate, masters, Ph.D. and post-doctoral students to pilot and evaluate interventions to reduce violence, combat human rights abuses and improve the accountability of law enforcement and justice systems.

Alberto Cayeros-Diaz joined the FSI faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as the director of the Center for US-Mexico studies at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C. in Mexico from 1997-1999. His work has focused on federalism, poverty and violence in Latin America, and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English. His book Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 (reprinted 2016). His latest book (with Federico Estevez and Beatriz Magaloni) is: The Political Logic of Poverty Relief Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. His work has primarily focused on federalism, poverty and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular, with more recent work addressing crime and violence, youth-at-risk, and police professionalization. 

Leonard Wantchekon is a Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, as well as Associated Faculty in Economics. A scholar with diverse interests, Wantchekon has made substantive and methodological contributions to the fields of Political Economy, Economic History and Development Economics, and has also contributed significantly to the literatures on clientelism and state capture, resource curse and democratization. Wantchekon’s research includes groundbreaking studies on the long-term effects of historical events. For example, his paper “Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa” (AER, 2011, co-authored with Nathan Nunn) links current differences in trust levels within Africa to the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade, and is widely regarded as one of the foundational papers in the emerging field of cultural economics. Similarly, his “Critical Junctures” paper (co-authored with Omar Garcia Ponce) finds that levels of democracy in post-Cold War Africa can be traced back to the nature of its anti-colonial independence movements. He is the Founder and President of the African School of Economics, which opened in Benin in 2014.

 

 

About the Seminar: Structural racism threatens the principles that undergird the American creed. A national, multiracial solidarity is the best means of mitigating racism’s effects. The sociopolitical strategies of Black America – grounded in moral claims consonant with the creed but fashioned to be in alignment with contemporary national interests – provide a model for the type of solidarity the United States desperately needs.

This argument is explored in detail in When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America. Through an examination of political science and sociological frameworks, alongside personal and historical narratives, it argues that structural racism is a crime of the state, that color-conscious policy is preferable to colorblindness, and that the American civil religion is central to national solidarity. Concluding with policy recommendations, the book offers the next step forward on the intractable issue of racism.
 

 

About the Speaker: Theodore R. Johnson is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Fellows Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, where he undertakes research on race, politics, and American identity. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, he was a National Fellow at New America and a Commander in the United States Navy, serving for twenty years in a variety of positions, including as a White House Fellow in the first Obama administration and as speechwriter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His work on race relations has appeared in prominent national publications across the political spectrum, including the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review, among others.