Academics | Picker Art Gallery, Dana Arts Center, 2nd floor
A Thought Is A Thread: Contemporary Artists Reworking Textile TraditionsMetaphors using the language of textiles are part of everyday idiomatic English: we follow threads on social media; storytellers weave tales or spin fantastic yarns; friend groups might be close-knit and and we might tie ourselves in knots trying to navigate complex situations. The history of textiles is intimately tied to the development of human societies. Weaving is at the same time one of the earliest human technological advancements, the foundation upon which modern industrial nations were built, and the basis for the computing revolution.A Thought Is A Thread brings together works by leading artists who investigate what textiles can still reveal about people and their relationships to each other, to themselves, and to language, land, and the future. Artworks by Faig Ahmed, Sanford Biggers, Diedrick Brackens, Melissa Cody, Suzanne Husky, Joy Ray, and Jordan Nassar present intertwining narratives that both cherish and complicate the web of meanings that emerge when traditional textile arts are given contemporary expression.Debuting at our opening, Picker Art Gallery welcomes members of the Colgate community to partake in Yarnival, a collaborative art experience. Yarnival will be on view and available for participation during the exhibition run of A Thought is a Thread, through May 18, 2025, in the upper atrium of the Dana Arts Center. Please stay tuned to our social media channels and website for more details on how to participate.A Thought Is A Thread is partially supported by funding from The Friends of Picker Art Gallery.

Academics
April 7-11. Please see the course registration web page for schedule.

Academics | Digital Learning and Media Center (DLMC), Case-Geyer 548
Bring your designs to life with Adobe Aero! In this session, we’ll introduce the basics of augmented reality (AR) design, showing you how to create immersive experiences that blend digital elements into the real world. Learn how to craft AR projects for storytelling, presentations, or creative experimentation.

Academics | Lawrence Hall, 105
Dr. Nell Shapiro Hawley, Postdoctoral Fellow in Religion at VassarStrange languages, superpowers, and otherworldly quests are beloved tropes in coming-of-age fantasy literature. The Aru Shah novels (Disney Hyperion, 2018-22), a bestselling fantasy series written by Roshani Chokshi, repurpose these genre expectations in order to allegorize second-generation American Hindu adolescence today.Here the heroine’s discovery of her superpowers is explicitly tied to a Hindu mythological world that is both strange and familiar to her. Through Aru’s complex relationship with language—her muted ability to understand Indian languages, but her deep intimacy with the stories of Hindu myth—the novels seek to frame meaningful Hindu knowledge as subjective, emotional, and interpersonal.Nell Shapiro Hawley is a scholar of South Asian religions, primarily Hinduism. Her work addresses popular religious movements, gender and performance studies, and interactions between the classical and the contemporary. A longstanding area of focus has been the text and performance traditions of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata.

Academics | Alumni Hall, 111
Like most contemporary wars, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is enabled by the algorithmic innovations of the day. In armored bases in southern Israel, intelligence soldiers cull through user-friendly interfaces displaying automatically generated recommendations of where and when the bombs should fall. Military heads, emulating Silicon Valley founders, brag innovations in AI have allowed them to build their killing capacities to scale. How did we get here? My talk lays bare a vast algorithmic supply chain undergirding war today. I thread together ethnographic research with Israeli intelligence veterans and Silicon Valley workers to provide an anthropological portrait of the pedestrian labor driving automated warfare: from Google technicians tinkering with facial recognition algorithms determining who is detained at makeshift checkpoints in Gaza City to reservists in Tel Aviv developing the speech to text software informing targeted strikes. In meditating on those bound up in warfare’s catastrophic effects, I emphasize how many more might play a role in demanding otherwise.Sophia Goodfriend is a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. She received her doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University in June 2024. With years of experience reporting and writing from Israel/Palestine, Sophia’s academic research and journalistic writing have been published across a range of publications, including Foreign Policy, the London Review of Books, the Baffler, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and the Journal of Palestine Studies. Sophia is a regular contributor to 972 Magazine and is finishing two separate book projects on automated warfare in Israel and Palestine.This lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Computer Science and is part of the 24-25 Digital War speaker series organized by the Peace and Conflict Studies Program.

Academics
April 7-11. Please see the course registration web page for schedule.