Past Events

How does psychology drive our political processes and decisions? Seeking allies, strategizing against enemies, protecting territory and having one group decide the distribution of power and resources for everyone else. Are we talking about politics or middle school? With just one year out from the 2020 U.S. presidential election, listen to Dr. Diana Direiter unpack the human psychology that drives some of our political processes and decisions.
Images: Event Image

Dr. Carl Hart is currently investigating the behavioral and neuropharmacological effects of psychoactive drugs in human research participants. A major focus of his laboratory-based research is to understand factors that mediate drug self-administration behavior and to develop effective treatments.

Who runs the world? Women! Celebrate and hear from some of the fearless females who are trailblazers in their fields: * Andrea Campbell, President of the Boston City Council representing District 4, was unanimously elected by her peers to be Boston City Council president. She is the first African American woman to hold this leadership position. * Susan Esper, Partner at Deloitte & Touche LLP, has over 28 years of public accounting experience and has specialized in the financial services industry. Susan has been a great mentor to women and has supported women’s efforts to gain more visibility on boards. * Jen Deaderick, historian and author of "She the People," discusses some of the local groundbreaking women throughout history who have blazed trails for women’s equality. Image: [Pexels.com](http://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-wearing-white-t-shirt-and-blue-denim-bottoms-1564149/)

In the wake of the election of 2016, words felt useless, even indulgent to John Freeman. Action was the only reasonable response. He took to the streets in protest, and the sense of community and collective conviction felt right. But the assaults continued—on citizens’ rights and long-held compacts, on the core principles of our culture and civilization, and on our language itself. Words seemed to be losing the meanings they once had and Freeman was compelled to return to their defense. The result is his his dictionary of the undoing. Freeman sits with Krysten Hill, poet and teacher of poetry at UMass Boston.

As a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Policy in 2019, Brandi Collins-Dexter examined the digital ecosystem and how it had altered the political, economic, sociological and psychological ways in which we engage with each other offline.

Credit: Official White House Photo

A forum to explore communities that were formed around the voguing scene as well as the concept of chosen family within the LGBTQIA+ communities within Worcester. Born from the nightlife of 1960s New York, vogue has been in symbiosis with the queer Latino and African American ballroom scene. Due to its popularization in the 1990s, mainly through Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990) and Madonna’s “Vogue” (1990), the practice of voguing and the scene have moved from the margins to a mainstream site of visibility and have been established as a celebration tradition in LGBTQIA+ communities worldwide.

Fredie Kay, Founder and President of Suffrage100MA, provides an overview of the suffrage movement in American history, with special attention to Massachusetts activists who paved the way for women’s suffrage, including African Americans and other marginalized groups. Image: [Pexels.com](http://www.pexels.com/photo/person-dropping-paper-on-box-1550337/) and [Suffrage100](http://suffrage100ma.org/) This program is made possible with funding from the Lowell Institute. ‍

In light of the bipartisan support and passage, three experts on race and public policy lead a conversation in the Meeting House on the present state and the future of criminal justice reform and mass incarceration.

Witmore is a scholar of Shakespeare and early modern literature as well as a pioneer in the digital analysis of Shakespeare’s texts. Based in Washington, DC, the Folger Shakespeare Library is the world’s largest Shakespeare collection. Image: “Portrait of Shakespeare” by Thomas Nast (1840-1902), from the [Folger Digital Image Collection](https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/allCollections)

Cambridge Forum and the [Revels](https://www.revels.org/) present musicians Jake Blount and Libby Weitnauer, who perform and explore the history and roots of traditional music of Appalachia. The Appalachian Mountains south of the Mason-Dixon Line, is one of the birthplaces of American music: the mountains of southern Appalachia, where Native American, African American, and European traditions combined to foster an astonishing wealth of artistic expression. The forum celebrates the quiet of the mountains in the songs passed on by Appalachian musicians from generation to generation, and examines the ideas that resonate in this music that speaks of the natural world, the hardship, the dark and light in human relationships. Image: [Cambridge Forum Event Image](http://www.cambridgeforum.org/?tag=appalachia)