Postone's talk was sponsored by the President's Office, the Deans Office, the Cooper Fund, Forum for Free Speech, the Interfaith Center, and the Departments of Religion, History, Political Science, and Sociology & Anthropology.

In his book From Peace to Freedom, Carey shows how the Quakers turned against slavery in the first half of the 18th century and became the first organization to take a stand against the slave trade. Through meticulous examination of the earliest writings of the Friends, including journals and letters, Carey reveals the society's gradual transition from expressing doubt about slavery to adamant opposition.

Carey's talk was sponsored the Department of Religion and Friends Historical Library.

The film's production team came to campus largely due to a direct Swarthmore connection: John Williams '06, currently a medical student at Brown University, was an associate producer and supervising accountant, among other roles, in the movie's production. Fellow producers Dan Janvey, Matt Parker, and Michael Gottwald joined him at the event.

"I was really excited to find out from one of my students that amid all the talent that worked on this film was one of our own," says Professor of Film & Media Studies Patricia White. "I sent John an email asking him to come and he responded saying not only would he be happy to come, but he would also bring some friends, who are some of the other producers. This was something fun for them to do, too, since they bonded so much making the movie."

John Williams '06 (second from left), discussed the film with fellow producers Matt Parker, Michael Gottwald, and Dan Janvey. (photo by Elena Ruyter '14)

The team's work on the movie has been lauded since its release, winning awards such as the Grand Jury Prize in Drama at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and the Caméra D'Or Award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. It has four pending Academy Award nominations: Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Achievement in Directing, Best Writing or Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published, and Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role for Quvenzhané Wallis, who at age 9 is the youngest person nominated for this award in the Academy's history.

Williams notes that his return to Swarthmore felt surreal, yet also made him reflect on his undergraduate experience.

"Coming back here with a movie I am this proud of and with the friends I have made in the process is incredible," Williams says. "I am so happy and honored to be back here. The education here prepared me and helped me in so many ways. Swarthmore teaches you the ability to interpret and synthesize a broad amount of information and come into anything with some level of knowledge and always have something to offer."

Setting up for the event was a team effort. The Film and Media Studies Department, in addition to working with the producers to have them speak on campus, also arranged a dinner before the screening with the producers and some students. The College Movie Committee worked to promote the event with flyers and various forms of social media.

Students generally enjoyed the opportunity not only to see the acclaimed film, but also the chance to speak with the producers face-to-face and learn about how they made a vision into a reality.

"This event was great. Not only did I get a chance to watch the movie, which was not playing anywhere near my hometown, but everyone got a chance to interact with the producers and get a feel for what it was like to film it," says Lucia Luna-Victoria '15, a history major from Pembroke Pines, Fla. "They had an idea and they were true to it. One of the most interesting aspects was when they described that the camera was at Hushpuppy's [the character's] eye level, which really legitimized the intent of making the film an interpretation of what is happening in Louisiana through a child's eyes."     

The event was well attended, with over 200 people filling the seats of Science Center 101. Members of the campus community will also have the opportunity to see the producers again on Sun., Feb. 24, this time on television, when they hope to be winners at the Academy Awards.

Joining four rectangular panels, each of which depicts a different quilt pattern, Huckaby arranges the folds of the fabric so that they imply a large oval that unifies the adjacent quilts. The oval is present yet hidden, ephemeral yet preserved through the act of painting. Such works remind us of rich cultural traditions that are too often lost or overlooked. Another highlight of the exhibition is Winter, a 8-foot-tall by 20-foot-long work from Huckaby's series A Love Supreme. Combining the languages of representation and abstraction, this masterwork links African American quilt traditions, modernist formal concerns, and the improvisational colors and rhythms of jazz. 

The smaller room of list gallery features The 99%, Huckaby's installation of portraits in a quilt-like assemblage of shifting color and scale. The installation includes more than 100 lithographs Huckaby created during a recent residency at the Brandywine Print Workshop in Philadelphia. Covering two opposite walls and spanning nearly 350 square feet, his paintings, oil pastels, prints, and ink drawings on paper and Mylar represent individuals-both familiar faces and new acquaintances-that are part of his expanding circle.

Although he began his series by drawing subjects he encountered near his neighborhood in Fort Worth, Tex., Huckaby's ongoing series focuses less on locale than on the process of affirming people who might otherwise remain unseen or unimportant. Huckaby often asks his subjects to share a few words about what is most important to them and sometimes includes their words in his compositions. Connecting through both word and image, he makes each portrait session an opportunity to exchange empathy and build community. Although racial and economic biases persist within a globalized consumer culture and often reinforce stereotyping, The 99% affirms the ongoing ability of art to  affirm and extend our common humanity.

Born in 1975 in Fort Worth, Huckaby received a B.F.A. from Boston University and an M.F.A. from Yale University. Winner of numerous awards including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, his work can be found in distinguished permanent collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Huckaby is represented by Valley House Gallery, Dallas Tex.

Lightner, who earned a B.A. in economics from Swarthmore, has previously worked as director of programming for Nostalgia Network, Inc., managing director of Korn/Ferry International, and head of executive talent for idealab! in Pasadena. Currently, he is a principal at Sunset Entertainment Partners, an executive search firm dedicated to the recruitment of the next generation of leaders for the entertainment, media, and new media industries.

Quadir's research interests include Sufism, Islamic Philosophy, the Perennial Philosophy, and Islamic environmentalism. Quadir received an M.A. in Islamic studies from the George Washington University followed by an M.A. on Indo-Muslim Culture from the Harvard University. After receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham (UK) on the subject of Islamic response to the environmental crisis, he moved to Konya, Turkey, where he now works in the Rumi Research Center at the Mevlana (Rumi) University.

In addition to her B.A. in anthropology from Swarthmore, Figueres holds a master's degree in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and a certificate in Organizational Development from Georgetown University. She has been involved in climate change negotiations since 1995 and represented Latin America and the Caribbean on the Executive Board of the Clean Development Mechanism in 2007 before being elected vice president of the Bureau of the Conference of the Parties 2008-2009. Her lecture this semester is part of the Department of Biology's fall lecture series, "The Challenges of Climate Change," and was sponsored by the President's Office, the Department of Biology, and the Environmental Studies Program.

Thank you. Good afternoon to you all. It is wonderful to be back home. I'm actually quite touched to be back home because I haven't been here for such a long time. So I would like to first start by thanking President Chopp for inviting me to return to Swarthmore.

But I will be very honest with you. I have actually been waiting for this invitation for a very long time. And so I'm going to tell you what happens on the Swarthmore campus if you wait for an invitation, okay? So my freshman roommate, Madeline Barillo '78, who's sitting there. Madeline, she was and continues to be my very best friend. So Madeleine and I can both tell you the following story, because it is a true story.

When we were Swarthmore students way back in the '70s, okay, that's like the Petroglyphic age, we constantly watched fellow students who were being invited to the president's home. Everybody except us. And we thought, oh well, we have to take matters into our own hands, okay? So one early Easter morning, before sunrise of course, a group of us got dressed up as bunnies and hopped up to President Friend, who was president at that time, hopped up to his door, pounded on his door, with the wonderful excuse of a basket of chocolate eggs. Now, this poor man, at 5:30 in the morning, opened up the door in his striped pajamas, that we can still see in our head, stared at this bunny invasion in total disbelief. He was utterly shocked.  But I tell you, he never forgot us after that.

So here's the deal. I was actually thinking about that little episode when I met a couple of Swarthmore students last year in Durban at the last climate change conference. Are you here, those of you who were there? No, you're not here. All right. So, I met two or three Swarthmore students at the last conference that I directed in South Africa at the end of last year, and they said, well, have you been back to Swarthmore? Like, oh no? Well would you like to come? Yes. Yes, I would like to come back. And I didn't tell them, but I was wondering, you know, hmm, I wonder if they're working here on President Chopp's behalf, you know? Because maybe President Friend gave her a call and said, if you make her wait for an invitation, she's going to, you know, organize this little bunny invasion. So I was wondering whether President Chopp was actually concerned about having a bunny invasion in her garden. And what's even more suspicious is she's actually invited us to dinner tonight.

So let me tell you, you may think that this was actually just a fun campus prank. But I tell you this story because I would like to impress upon you that on the very critical issue of climate change, the world can no longer afford for you - for any of you - to wait for an invitation. You cannot wait for an invitation to put your knowledge to purpose, to put your passion to action. The world needs you, and it needs you now. President Chopp actually said it best in her inaugural address, and I quote her: "We must educate to set anew and set aright our relationship to the earth, to our climate, to the web of all existence. Under this canopy of trees, can there be any doubt that we must do all we can, all we can, to sustain the beauty of this good earth?"

Well, I must confess that in the idyllic setting of the Swarthmore campus, it's indeed very, very tempting to ponder global challenges from an intellectual perspective, to write fantastic papers, which I'm sure you all do, to participate in stimulating honors seminars, if you're very lucky in your professor's living room, and then leave it at that. But as I'm sure President Chopp would agree, doing all we can, which is what she said, means taking action. And it means taking action, not tomorrow but today, because when it comes to climate change, thought without action is not only empty, it is profoundly irresponsible.

And let me tell you how I come to that conclusion. So it all started when I decided to become a sociology and anthropology major here at Swarthmore. Anybody here in the room wondering, well, how does an anthropologist get to do climate? How does she get to be the head of the climate convention? Well, I must admit that way back then in the Petroglyphic age when I was here, I did not dream about one day becoming the head of the United Nations Climate Convention. In fact, I was even lucky if I had time for one dream under those very, very short sleeping hours, as you well know.

And the honest truth is that, when I graduated from Swarthmore in 1979, the global environmental movement was very much at its infancy. And I was frankly not very concerned with global environmental issues - with one exception, an important exception. I was a committed solar energy activist, and got a pan in front of Parrish Hall every time that I could get it. So if there are any anthropology majors here, or in fact any students who spent any time overseas, you may remember, or you may have heard of [Professor Emeritus of Anthropology] Steve Piker.

Does anybody remember Steve Piker? Raise your hands. Okay. Well, Steve Piker was my thesis advisor, and my inspiration on campus. And I would like to pay tribute to Steve. He opened my eyes to a simple but very, very powerful truth that still resonates with me today - that the direction, scale, and speed of change in society is determined by man. Simple, but very powerful.

Now, since I know that the science of climate change is a taboo topic in some parts of the United States, but certainly not in Swarthmore, I trust that we will all agree very, very quickly that the unprecedented atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases that are at the root of climate change are produced by the activity of man. And I say by the activity of man because it has occurred over the past 100 years, therefore not man and woman, but we can leave that discussion for later.

"What is urgently necessary is the creation of a new norm, the low-carbon norm. And that requires nothing short of a consumer rebellion against high carbon living, which is what you and I have right now."

I trust that we can also agree why addressing climate change is so darned urgent. This August, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that the extent of ice cover on the Arctic had fallen to its alltime record low, shrunk by 186,000 square miles, compared to just five years ago. That's four times the size of Pennsylvania. Now, can you imagine the impact of that on the lives of those who lived in the Arctic region, let alone the alarming consequences of that much water flowing into the ocean and affecting ocean currents circulating throughout the globe? In January, I had the opportunity, and some of you have read about this, to see the effect of warming temperature on the opposite pole, in the [Antarctica]. Huge pieces of ice breaking off, triggering a shrinking of land-based, which is different than the Arctic, land-based ice, faster than it had ever been anticipated by the glaciologists.

Now, sitting here in Swarthmore, Antarctica may seem very distant, but believe me, what happens in Antarctica does not stay in Antarctica. There is a direct and proven correlation between ice melt on that continent and sea levels all around the world. Just ask some of the 50 million people who live in low-lying island states, whose survival is directly threatened, not tomorrow but today.

On the island of Fiji, where I once traveled as a young anthropologist, the families of the village of [unintelligible] are today, today as we speak, relocating to drier and higher land because of sea level rise and constant flooding. And they're actually lucky that they have higher land on Fiji that they can relocate to, because the former president of the Maldives toured the world and was unsuccessful in finding any country that would accept the entire Maldives population as climate immigrants or as climate refugees.

Now, climate refugees - there's a term that wasn't around in 1979. But you know what? Get used to it, because current projections estimate that we could reach anywhere between 100 and 400 million climate refugees over the next 20 to 30 years. One hundred to 400 million refugees. And that tragic situation is made even more poignant by the fact that all those people are the least responsible for climate change.

Now, we don't have to go so far away. I know that you understand the urgency of climate here in the United States. January through August were the warmest eight months of any year recorded in the United States. This country just experienced one of the worst droughts on record, a heat wave extending from the Rocky Mountains to the Ohio Valley, with devastating effects on the farmers of the entire region, and today, the assessment that it will mean 1.3 percent less economic growth because of the losses in that region.

Furthermore, the U.S. is the world's largest exporter of corn, soybeans, and wheat. And because of that drought, the Department of Agriculture estimates that global food prices of these staples will jump two to three percent next year. Now, if you're a poor family, a few cents on the dollar can very quickly determine whether you eat or whether you starve. So it doesn't take a scientist to connect these dots. While none of these single events can be exclusively linked to climate change, taken together, they indicate that we're already in the midst of climate unpredictability, of a profound disruption in the earth's hydrological cycle, the effects of which are actually still unknown. So yes, Steve Piker, the direction of global change has been determined by man, but the speed may now be completely out of our control. And I'm sure Steve Piker could not possibly have imagined the scale of the change that we may already have caused.

So in the face of this calamity, is anything being done about this? Well, good news and bad news. The good news is that there is some progress, both from governments and from private sector. So at the intergovernmental level, in the last round of negotiations that we had in Durban in South Africa at the end of last year, all governments agreed to not let the rise in temperature go beyond two degrees centigrade, with a view to revising that with the most recent science to 1.5 degrees - which is actually the temperature rise that we should allow, and no more, if we want to be responsible to the most vulnerable populations of the world.

Additionally in Durban, most industrialized countries - most - agreed to continue leading in their emission reductions efforts via a second commitment period in the Kyoto Protocol. That covers only 10 to 12 percent of global emissions. So in order to increase that emission for the very first time, governments have agreed that they will negotiate a legally based, universal agreement to be applicable to all - underline, have to underline that many times, particularly when I speak in the United States - by 2015, to come into effect by 2020. So that's at the international level.

At the national level, actually, a lot of movement because of the advance of the climate convention. And there we see a number of countries with actually very serious climate initiatives. All industrialized countries, in fact, even including the United States. All industrialized countries have made voluntary - not legally binding, voluntary - pledges to reduce their own emissions by 2020. And even more impressive, 49 developing countries with no historical responsibility for climate change - future, yes, but no historical responsibility - 49 developing countries, including all emerging developing countries, have announced nationally appropriate mitigation actions to 2020 and beyond. And some of these countries actually have already passed and enacted domestically legally binding legislation, such as Mexico, Korea, and yesterday, Pakistan. Now, I know you won't read about this in the press in this country, but China has legally binding domestic legislation on climate, on renewable energy, on energy efficiency, and they are now working on their first national comprehensive climate legislation, with a view to enacting it over the next few years. And finally, 119 countries around the world have renewable energy policy targets, and nearly every country has some type of energy efficiency initiative.

So this is progress. But let me be perfectly clear. It is not enough. In fact, if fully implemented, all of the above efforts amount to about 60 percent of the global effort that we need to guarantee a two degree temperature rise, let alone a 1.5, which is, as I said, where we should be. And there is no doubt that reaching the temperature target requires, yes, decisive national action, but it also requires collective commitment in the context of an agreed global framework. And that's where Steve Piker's lesson is to be applied yet again. There is no doubt that we need to change the way we generate, transmit, and use energy. And only man - and here in this case, I'm going to rephrase, man and woman - can actually help to solve this problem, by determining the direction, the scale, and the speed of the positive change that we need.

Now, the challenge is that as things currently stand, time is not on our side, and math is clearly not in our favor. Given population growth and economic development, particularly in the emerging countries, global demand for energy will double over the next two decades. And to meet that demand, we're going to need approximately 26 trillion dollars of investment in climate responsible infrastructure, and well over half of that needs to go into developing countries. So we stand at a very, very clear fork in the road. We can either take the path of least resistance, the business as usual, path of high carbon, high emissions. And if we do that, we stand a very good chance that in 40 years, global emissions will have risen by 50 percent, as opposed to fallen by 50 percent, which is what science demands.

The other choice that we have is the green path. If those investments are focused on renewable energy, on energy efficiency, and if we improve access to sustainable energy, then we will achieve something very different, something actually truly remarkable. We will, for the first time in history, have de-linked economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions. We will increase economic growth where it's most needed, and we will decrease greenhouse gases where they are the highest. We will create new jobs, new opportunities, new direction. And that is in fact the path that many businesses are beginning to take. They're recognizing that the opportunities offered by green growth are there to be taken.

Just a few months ago, the trillionth dollar - trillionth dollar - was invested in renewable energy, cumulative, not in a year. And companies all across the world have seen the like. One example that I like to use is a company in Qatar, because it is the host of our next climate change conference this year. Well, I'm hoping you all know that Qatar is one of the world's oil and gas producing states. In Qatar, the Qatar solar technologies company recently invested more than a billion dollars in a cutting-edge, polysilicon facility, because they're aiming to produce a thousand, 800 megawatts of solar power by 2024. Other than the investment of Saudi Arabia, that would be the largest solar farm in the world. And now, right here in Pennsylvania, we're seeing how renewable energy can provide an economic boost. In 2010, the wind energy industry in Pennsylvania supported, directly and indirectly, 4,000 jobs in this state.

"Believe me, what happens in Antarctica does not stay in Antarctica. There is a direct and proven correlation between ice melt on that continent and sea levels all around the world. Just ask some of the 50 million people who live in low-lying island states, whose survival is directly threatened, not tomorrow but today."

Now, to not leave Swarthmore out of the equation - Swarthmore has also chosen the green path, and I would like to applaud Swarthmore's efforts to make this college more sustainable, certainly more sustainable than when Madeline and I were here. And I especially want to note President Chopp's leadership, because in 2010, she signed the American College and University President's Climate Commitment, and she is moving forward on delivering on that. And Swarthmore has also committed to develop a clean action plan by January 2013. You will tell me after this how far we are on that one. And Swarthmore has attracted widespread attention for concrete climate actions such as the green roofs that I have yet to see and would like to see this afternoon.

So that's the direction governments, institutions, and private companies are moving. Now the question is, is that enough? Can we leave the responsibility of the transformation to governments, institutions, and private companies? Well, my response is, absolutely not, for a very simple reason. Because what is urgently necessary is the creation of a new norm, the low-carbon norm. And that requires nothing short of a consumer rebellion against high carbon living, which is what you and I have right now. So let me explain what that means for you today, as students, and what it means for you tomorrow, as tomorrow's leaders.

You're students. It is actually very, very easy to fall into the trap of exporting responsibility. But let me tell you, this is not about others. It's not about those who we think are not doing enough, or those who you judge to be responsible. This is about you. It's about your lifestyle, your consumer choices, your energy consumption. It's about your choices and mine. To be very honest with you, my husband has grown so tired of telling me to turn off the light when I walk out of a room that he has finally put motion sensors in my house, okay? And my daughters, I travel all the time, so my daughter's always asking me, and did you take a plane, or did you take a train? Did you walk, or did you take the car? So they're on my case all the time. And the fact is, that's what it takes. That is exactly what it takes. Being responsible means being honest with ourselves.

So let me try a little honesty here. How many of you own a car? Okay. I would say three-quarters of you. How many of you know what your CO2 emissions on your car are? One. Two, three? Three and a half? Okay. So if you don't know what the CO2 emissions is, I'm assuming that when you bought the car, the carbon efficiency of the car was not a factor in buying the car. Is that a correct assumption? No, it is? It was? Okay. [Comment from audience and laughter.]

Well, you can calculate it, you know? You can calculate it by gallon. You can calculate it by average mile. The point is, this is a lot of incredibly enlightened, committed, thinking students. So if you don't know what your carbon footprint is, can you imagine the rest of the U.S. population? And here is my concern. It is your purchasing power, your purchasing power, that is your strongest voice. Your generation - excuse me, faculty, I'm not talking to you - your generation, students, is the one that is going to determine how quickly we shift to low carbon, and you're going to determine it through your choice of whatever you buy, your everyday products.

Think, every time you buy. You are determining the pace of this transformation. That's a pretty heavy responsibility to have on your shoulders, but that's the one that you have to pick up. Now, companies are actually finally, slowly realizing that sustainability is more than just a cute advertising campaign, right? It is what informed consumers (I'm sorry, on this one you just don't make it, okay? You're not informed consumers yet). But I would really ask you to join others who are letting companies know that your dollars will follow sustainability. That is the one way that you can make your voices heard today as students.

Now tomorrow, as tomorrow's leaders, let's look at some basic facts that you're going to have to address. So we're trying to get to two degrees max, hopefully 1.5, two degrees maximum temperature rise by 2050. Who knows what the average per capita emission would have to be in order to get two degrees. So is it 50? Up or down? 40? Tons, tons. Is it 50? Tell me if it's 50. 40? Down? 30? 20? 10? Dudes, it's two tons. Okay? Two tons per head per year. That's the global average that we would need to use.

Now, do you know what the average emission of every citizen in India is? Above or below two? It's one. Do you know what the average emission in China is? It's two. Do you know what the average emission in the United States is? Okay, everybody's getting uncomfortable, right? It's 20. So here's your challenge, okay? You thought getting through Swarthmore's a challenge. Forget it. Here's your real challenge: to be in line with responsible global [citizens], you, each one of you, would have to reduce your personal average emissions by 90 percent from where you are today, 20, to two tons in your lifetime. And I daresay, you're probably not even the average human citizen, because everybody who comes to school is a privileged person. And so you probably are even above 20, even above the U.S. average.

So how the heck, how the heck are you going to get from 20 to two tons per year, and meet your Chinese colleagues, because that's where they are? Well, so think about it, okay? Where are your emissions? Well, how you transport yourself, the a/c and the heater in your room. Do they even have a/c and heaters, because when we were here, they were really crappy. Maybe they're better. I hope they're certainly more energy efficient than we were here. And I'm sure you have electricity in your room. I'm sure you have lighting. I'm sure each of you has at least three iPad, iPhones, laptops, etc. etc. etc. Well, they all use electricity. So you see? If you switch off the a/c, particularly because you're not here in the summer, if you turn off the lights when you go out of a room, and if you unplug your computer at night, well you can get down a little, but it's not going to get you from 20 to two. It just is not going to do it.

So you see, the challenge is - we need a dramatic, dramatic change. And some call it transformational change. I actually quite simply just call it a revolution, because I don't use that word lightly. President Chopp introduced me as the daughter of a president, but that president was a revolutionary leader. And he led the Costa Rican revolution in 1948, and I am proud of the social change that that revolution brought.

But here we are in Swarthmore, a peace-loving Quaker college, okay, with a strong anti-war tradition, and I don't remember too many courses on how you operate a machine gun here. So I did receive values and inspiration and principles that I still live by. So I'm not calling for an armed uprising, but I am calling for something that is in fact even more challenging. I'm calling for an uprising against our own consumption patterns, which have become fatally incompatible with our vision and our responsibility for a sustainable future.

Energy is at the heart of everything that we humans do, everything. And I'm calling for a radical transformation in the way we generate, transmit, and use energy. Now, ladies and gentlemen, as tomorrow's leaders, I actually need your help. No matter what field you're going to go into, you will very likely be affected by climate change one way or the other. So I need you, I need the brightest minds to come up with real and lasting solutions in every single field. Don't think about climate as this thing over here. Climate change affects everything. It is the most transversal challenge we have ever, ever had. I need you to find solutions. I need you to discover them. I need you to articulate them. I need you to operationalize these solutions in such a way that they make sense from an environment point of view, from an economic point of view, and from an ethical point of view.

And that's what Swarthmore is all about, isn't it? It's always been about that. This college was forged in the crucible of the U.S. Civil War in a time in which some human beings literally owned other human beings. Think about that. At the time, most people thought that that paradigm was intractable. But there were people with passion, who knew that it was fundamentally wrong, and who took the firm steps to remedy that problem. Now today, it's not just the United States, but it's the entire world that is facing the challenge of addressing climate change. So some may think it's too complex to be solved, it's too far away to warrant any concerted effort now. Well, there is no doubt, and I'm the first one to admit, that the complexity of climate is unparalleled in human history. But I hope that I have shown you that we are making some progress, and above all, I hope that I have shown you that each one of you can make a difference - in fact, that each one of you must make a difference.

So dear students, please don't sit around in your dorm room waiting for an invitation. You can't wait any more. So let's get to work together; together to make a radical change required of every man and every woman; together, to meet challenges with conviction and resistance, with resiliency, regardless of the odds or opposition; together to build on the proud tradition, on the proud Quaker tradition upon which this school was founded; together to have our voices heard; together so that our lives speak. Thanks.

Rouse specializes in medical anthropology, visual anthropology, resistance, critical race theory and consciousness. She has done extensive fieldwork with African American converts to Sunni Islam, as well as with children and adolescents who have long term illnesses and/or disabilities.

Rouse is the author of Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam (2004) and Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease (2009). She is finishing a co-written book entitled Televised Redemption: The Media Production of Black Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Her current book project, Development Hubris: Adventures Trying to Save the World, examines discourses of charity and development and is tied to her project building a school in a fishing village in Ghana. In addition to being an anthropologist, Rouse is also a filmmaker. She has produced, directed, and/or edited a number of documentaries including Chicks in White Satin (1994), a film about a lesbian wedding; and Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali (1998).

Rouse's talk was co-sponsored by co-sponsored by the Economics Department, Political Science Department, Black Studies Program, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, Sociology & Anthropology Department, and the Alumni Office.

Wolff, an intellectual and cultural historian, works on the history of Eastern Europe, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Enlightenment, and on the history of childhood. He has been most interested in problems concerning East and West within Europe, whether concerning the Vatican and Poland, Venice and the Slavs, or Vienna and Galicia. He developed the argument that Eastern Europe was "invented" in the 18th century by the philosophes and travelers of the Enlightenment, who attributed meaning to a supposed division of Europe into complementary regions, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe. He has analyzed Western perspectives on Eastern Europe as a sort of "demi-Orientalism," negotiating a balance between attributed difference and acknowledged resemblance. Considering Venetian perspectives on Dalmatia and Habsburg perspectives on Galicia, he has attempted to explore the meaning of "Eastern Europe" within imperial frameworks and the ideology of empire. His research on the history of childhood has included projects on child abuse in Freud's Vienna and child abuse in Casanova's Venice. His current research concerns Turkish subjects on the European operatic stage during the long 18th century and analyzes musical and dramatic representations in the context of European-Ottoman relations. 

Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. His book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2009), was honored by both the American Historical Association and the Historical Society and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Keyssar is an authority on voting, elections, and election reform. He writes frequently for the popular press about American politics and history.

The event is sponsored by the President's Office, the Department of Political Science, the Black Studies Program, and the Center for Social and Policy Studies.

Antoinette Monsio Sayeh '79 is director of the African Department of the International Monetary Fund. As Minister of Finance in post-conflict Liberia, she led the country through its first Poverty Reduction Strategy, significantly strengthened its public finances, and championed public financial management reform. Before joining President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's Cabinet, Sayeh worked in a variety of roles in the World Bank, including country director for Benin, Niger, and Togo.

Sayeh holds a B.A. with honors in economics from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in international economic relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Tatum is the president of Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga., the country's oldest historically black college for women. She received an M.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan, as well as an M.D. in religious studies from Hartford Seminary. She has authored two books, "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" and other Conversations about Race and Assimilation Blues: Black Families in a White Community, as well as numerous articles on issues of race.

Laurie Raegan is an assistant professor and dean of the School of Chinese Classical Medicine at the National College of Natural Medicine in Portland, Ore. She majored in biology at Swarthmore and went on to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard University and an N.D. (Naturopathic Doctor) from the National College of Natural Medicine.

After graduating from Swarthmore, Brest received an LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1965. He then served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlan and practiced with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc., in Jackson, Miss., doing civil rights litigation.

In 1969, Brest joined the faculty of Stanford Law School, where he was the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law. His research and teaching focused on constitutional law and decision making. His writings in constitutional law include articles on constitutional interpretation, race discrimination, and affirmative action. He also co-authored a book, Processes of Constitutional Decision Making.

From 1987 to 1999, Brest served as the dean of Stanford Law School where he spearheaded the expansion of the school's curriculum in business, environmental law, high technology, and negotiation, and led a $115 million capital campaign. He has also served as a visiting professor at Yale Law School and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

In 1991, Swarthmore awarded Brest an honorary doctor of laws degree. He also holds an honorary degree from Northeastern Law School and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Shapiro is the author of several books on Greek art, mythology, and religion, including Art and Cult under the Tyrants in Athens and Myth Into Art: Poet and Painter in Classical Greece. In 2008-2009, he co-organized the exhibition "Worshipping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens," at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Shapiro spoke on campus for the 12th annual Helen North Lecture.

Henry Jenkins is an American media scholar and a Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the USC School of Cinematic Arts.