Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on March 24, 2025 in order to attend this event.

Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Remzje Istrefi. Moderated by Tanya Domi.

Although Kosovo is not a ratifying state of the Council of Europe Convention on Prevention and Combatting of Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, known as the Istanbul Convention, and is not a member state of the Council of Europe, the Convention is directly applied in the Kosovar legal order and has priority over other laws and acts. On September 25, 2020, the Assembly of the Republic of Kosovo, through constitutional amendments, added the Istanbul Convention to a list of international instruments enshrined in Article 22 of the Constitution. Eight international instruments related to human rights have been implemented into the Kosovar legal order; they apply directly to the Republic of Kosovo and have priority, in the case of conflict, over the provisions of laws and acts of other public institutions.

Consequently, the Constitutional Court of Kosovo has issued its first cases deciding on the obligations of state authorities established in Articles 18 (General Obligations), 50 (Immediate response, prevention, and protection), and 51 (Risk assessment and risk management) of the Istanbul Convention.

Join us for an IIJS presentation with Judith Cohen titled “Entre la mar y la arena–Between the Sea and the Sand–Worlds of Judeo-Spanish Songs” on Tuesday, March 25, at noon in person at 617 Kent Hall.

An old Sephardic wedding song evokes the elusive liminal space “between the sea and the sand.” In the close to half-century Judith Cohen has been working with Judeo-Spanish/Ladino/Haketía songs as both an ethnomusicologist and a singer, they have gone from being very little known outside small circles to being a world – or, now, global – music commodity. In this short presentation, Judith offers a glimpse of the older worlds of the songs and their largely lost life contexts. We’ll explore wedding songs, where the bride is “between the sea and the sand,” narrative ballads whose words bridge centuries and whose tunes bridge continents, songs whose contrafactum tunes bridge the sacred and the profane, and others, in Sephardic cultures from Morocco, former Ottoman lands, and some of their secondary diasporas.

Judith Cohen is a Canadian ethnomusicologist, singer, storyteller, and inveterate traveller. Known internationally for her research on and traditional performances of Sephardic songs, she also works with Crypto-Jewish practices in Portugal and Brazil, medieval music and music traditions of the Sephardic diaspora in Morocco, former Ottoman lands, and their widespread diasporas. Dr. Cohen is also the editor and consultant for the Alan Lomax Spain-1952 collection. She recently returned from several weeks in Brazil, conducting fieldwork and giving concerts and talks. She teaches part-time at York University in Toronto, and, several decades ago was the secretary of Columbia’s East Asian Institute on the same floor and in the same building that IIJS occupies today.
www.judithcohen.ca

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This event was made possible by the generosity of Appel and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Digital hyperconnectivity has reshaped political life by transforming regimes of knowing, regimes of feeling, and regimes of governing. It has altered ways of knowing the public world by weakening epistemic authority, reinforcing epistemic suspicion and distrust, and eroding the foundations of a shared public world, contributing thereby to epistemic paralysis on the one hand and epistemic polarization on the other. Hyperconnectivity has altered regimes of public feeling by encouraging the expression and mobilization of moral outrage and thereby deepening partisan antipathy and affective polarization. And it has altered regimes of governing by enabling new modalities of algorithmic regulation, public and private.  The talk concludes by highlighting the tension between the technocratic premises and modalities of algorithmic governance and the populist regimes of digitally mediated knowing and feeling and by specifying how hyperconnectivity can promote both populism and its seeming antithesis, technocracy.

Rogers Brubaker is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCLA, where he holds the UCLA Foundation Chair.  He has written widely on social theory, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, religion, gender, populism, and digital hyperconnectivity. His recent books include Grounds for Difference (Harvard, 2015), Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities (Princeton, 2016), and Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents (Polity, 2022).