CAS Events

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, this symposium returns to the bold universal promise of 1776—the claim that “all men are created equal” and endowed with “unalienable rights.” Cast at once as the rights of citizens of a new republic and as the rights of all of humankind, they also coexisted with a deep contradiction: the subjugation of Native Americans, enslaved people, and women. The principles at the heart of the U.S. founding launched a politics of rights whose origins and reverberations were transnational, even as access to them remained sharply unequal in practice.

“We Hold These Truths: 250 Years of the American Experiment at Home and Abroad” brings together a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and leading scholars of citizenship, political development, race, gender, immigration, and civil rights to reflect on this legacy. The panel will explore how America’s founding ideals have shaped struggles for inclusion at home and abroad, and how those ideals have been stretched, reinterpreted, and at times betrayed across two and a half centuries.

Refreshments will be available at 5:45pm.

Panelists:

Nick Kristoff - New York Times

Megan Ming Francis - University of Washington

Peter Spiro - Temple University

Carol Nackenoff - Swarthmore University

Moderator:

Dan Tichenor - UO Knight Chair

Presented by the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages and the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics.

Free and open to the public. No registration required.

This event will be livestreamed and recorded.  Join HERE

Guest speaker: Fernando Ortiz-Moya, Assistant Professor, Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University, Japan

Japan is shrinking. How are its cities and towns responding?

Traditionally, Japanese local governments, encouraged by national policy, have sought to halt or reverse their decline by luring urban migrants, increasing birth rates, attracting businesses, and curbing outmigration. This obsession with growth threatens to exhaust already limited resources, closing windows of opportunity for managing a soft landing.

Eventually, continuous shrinkage will force local governments to abandon growth-focused planning and redesign their communities: they must learn to shrink gracefully. Some municipalities are already charting this different course. This presentation argues that shrinking municipalities must break free from pro-growth strategies, embracing more sustainable approaches. These cities are putting socio-environmental concerns at the centre of their strategies, identifying new ways to transition successfully into smaller, sustainable communities.

Event sponsors: School of Planning, Public Policy and Management, Department of Geography, Ecological Design Center, Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Kakenhi Grant.

Professor Jason Groves (University of Washington) will be presenting his talk "'We Stones': Ecologies of Memory from Paul Celan to Otobong Nkanga."