“A great democracy should be having debates about all aspects of its political power, its military included.”

Last Saturday evening a group of around 75 people braved Husky football traffic to attend a panel discussion about Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s new documentary series, “The Vietnam War.”  The event was organized by the Seattle chapter of Veterans for Peace and many in the audience were Vietnam vets.  Others had been conscientious objectors or anti-war activists during the Vietnam era (one attendee commented he was all three).  A number of aspects were challenged and errors critiqued, but a consensus arose:  no matter how closely the film hewed to the conventional U.S. narrative (despite the filmmakers’ claims to the contrary), its benefit lay in renewing public debate about the war and prompting discussion.  

One question the organizers asked at the outset was what the film told us about our current wars.  Army Major Clifford Pederson is currently a Southeast Asia Foreign Area Officer and a second-year MA student in the Southeast Asian Studies program at the Jackson School of International Studies. As an infantry officer, he had two combat deployments to Afghanistan where he served as a Platoon Leader and Company Commander. He agreed to share his perspective on the legacy of Vietnam in an interview conducted via email. You can read the full article here.

You can also listen to the audiorecording of the full event here.

The fantastic mockup of Jakarta Bay's future seascape

A Talk by Jennifer L. Gaynor, Research Fellow, Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, SUNY
Friday October 27th, Thomson 317, 3:30-5:00pm

Jakarta is sinking. Each year, land subsidence threatens the city's coastal residents. Rising sea levels compound the problem with the promise of further flooding. One response proposed to mitigate this environmental challenge entails a massive land reclamation project. The project, represented in striking urban planning images, aims to create a series of islands in the bay behind the protective span of a giant seawall shaped like the outstretched wings of the mythical bird Garuda, an Indonesian national symbol. This talk discusses the Jakarta Bay project, the debates over who it serves, and situates it in relation to the expansion of the global dredging industry.

Jennifer Gaynor earned her PhD in History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and prior to coming to SUNY at Buffalo held fellowships at Michigan, Cornell, and the Australian National University. Her works have been included in books and journals on Southeast Asia and its surrounding seas from the seventeenth century to the present. Her first book, Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia: Submerged Genealogy and the Legacy of Coastal Capture, was published last year.  She's currently at work on her next book project which studies contemporary history across archipelagos and ocean basins to examine land reclamation for strategic reasons and personal gain.