An AT&T New Media Fellow, Caroline Sagalchik ’13 spent this past winter and semester creating a documentary called “Of Sand and Fur” (above… and you should definitely check it out) about the Russian-Jewish immigrant community Brigthon Beach, Brooklyn. Brighton Beach is one of the largest Russian-speaking immigrant communities in the country. Through the fellowship, Caroline was able to interact with the community in Brighton Beach and reach her audience by engaging with the topic of assimilation.

The documentary was recently featured on the Watson Institute’s website.

The project was especially meaningful because she had grown up with exposure to Russian and American cultures. Here’s a bit on the experience in Caroline’s words, after the jump. [Read more →]

Experts from the Brookings Institution and MIT will come together at the Watson Institute this week to discuss political and security issues in Asia. The panel discussion, “Security Perspectives on a Rising Asia: China and India,” will take place on Friday, May 4, at 2 p.m. at Watson’s Joukowsky Forum.

The four-person panel will touch on issues including Chinese and Indian views of a desirable international system, as well as China and India’s policies towards key international players and their smaller neighbors alike. The panelists are also expected to discuss the two countries’ nuclear policies and their roles in international organizations.

The four panelists are: Stephen P. Cohen, a Brookings senior fellow in foreign policy with expertise in India, Pakistan, South Asian security, and proliferation issues; Jonathan Pollack, a Brookings senior fellow in foreign policy with expertise in Chinese political-military strategy, U.S.-China relations, the political and security dynamics of the Korean Peninsula, and U.S. strategy and policy in Asia and the Pacific; Vipin Narang, an assistant professor of political science at MIT whose research interests include nuclear proliferation, South Asian security, quantitative conflict studies, international relations theory, and general security studies; and M. Taylor Fravel, an associate professor of political science and member of the Security Studies Program at MIT.

“Security Perspectives on a Rising Asia: China and India” is part of Brown’s Year of China, a yearlong initiative examining China’s culture, history, people, geography, and neighbors, and its relation to the world. The Year of China initiative aims to explore China’s past, present, and possible future through an array of programs across disciplines.

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A  screening of “Little Town of Bethlehem,” a documentary about peace activists in Israel and Palestine, and panel discussion with the filmmaker and one of the featured activists took place in the Salomon Center last night though the Watson Institute for International Studies and the University of Rhode Island.

“Little Town of Bethlehem” sounds like the name of a Christmas special to Western ears, but in reality the town is the hub of Palestinian culture, conflict and, even more so now, reconciliation.

The American imagination also would pit Palestinian Christian Sami Awad, Palestinian Muslim Ahmad Al’Azzeh and Israeli Jew Yonatan Shapira against one another. They are members of famously warring communities. Yet they star in this documentary as peace activists. What drew them all to the film is that they believe in the lessons we all learned in preschool and later discounted as idealistic. They care about the wellbeing, security and sanity of people — all types of people. And they recognize that more violence is not the answer to violence, though they have seen it treated as such.  [Read more →]