ysu

We welcome retired YSU geography professor, Dr. Tom Maraffa to the podcast.

Tom recently conducted an analysis of the Community Reinvestment Area (CRA) program, with a special focus on the City of Columbiana's relatively new (but active) CRA program.

We talk about what a CRA is, what it tries to do, and how it works. Then Tom takes us through his analysis, the problems it presents, his conclusions, and his recommendations.

To see Dr. Maraffa's power point presentation, click here.

Conversation with My Step's Maria Karapetyan (Ep #39) - 01/08/2021

As protesters in the streets of Yerevan continue demanding the resignation of PM Nikol Pashinyan in the aftermath of the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, the ruling My Step faction seems to be firmly on the side of the prime minister. 

In the last week or so here at Groong we hosted representatives of various opposition parties and today we will host a representative from the ruling My Step faction to talk about the ongoing political crisis in Armenia.

Today we’re joined by:

Maria Karapetyan, who is a member of the National Assembly with the My Step parliamentary group and the Civic Contract party. She is a member of the Standing Committee on the Protection of Human Rights and Public Affairs, and the Armenian Delegation to Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE PA) and heads the Armenia-Italy Parliamentary Friendship Group. Maria holds degrees in Linguistics and Intercultural Communication and European Studies from Yerevan State University, as well as a Master’s degree in Peace Studies from the University of Rome Three.

TOPICS:

- Dynamics between Civil Contract and My Step

- Was Parliament aware of about the Nov. 9 Agreement?

- Thoughts on the post-Agreement political stand-off

- Electoral Code Changes My Step is working on?

- State of the Fight Against Corruption

- Health and Humanitarian crises facing Armenia

Your Host:

• 𝐇𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐤 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐮𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐲𝐚𝐧

Produced by:

• Asbed Kotchikian
• Asbed Bedrossian

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Academia and academic work, especially in the fields of humanities and social sciences, has always been instrumentalized by various ideologies and/or political regimes. Moreover, various disciplines within each of those fields such as anthropology, art history, literature, etc., have a long tradition of being the middle children of academia and are rarely considered to have a role in shaping minds and trends in society. In Armenia the roles of humanities and social science have undergone changes since soviet and immediate post-soviet times. At a time where both these fields were viewed as instruments of legitimization of Communism and later nationalism, academics in these fields had to navigate the murky waters of ideology less they were willing to be labeled “pseudo-academics” or even worse as traitors.

The challenge of having robust disciplines in humanities and social sciences in Armenia is manifold. These include encouraging critical thinking void of ideology, the role of individuals with degrees in humanities and social sciences in the larger society, challenging pre-existing paradigms and many more. 

𝐃𝐫. 𝐀𝐬𝐛𝐞𝐝 𝐊𝐨𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐤𝐢𝐚𝐧, who is a senior lecturer of political science and international relations at Bentley University in Massachusetts, discusses with:

𝐃𝐫. 𝐀𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐥𝐚 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐮𝐭𝐲𝐮𝐧𝐲𝐚𝐧, who is Associate Professor of Art History and the chair of the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut. She is founding member of BICAR (Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research) and the Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities in Yerevan, Armenia. She is editor of ARTMargins peer-reviewed journal (MIT Press). Her monograph The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real'" was published by Manchester University Press in 2017 and 2019.

Editors:
  - 𝐀𝐬𝐛𝐞𝐝 𝐁𝐞𝐝𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐚𝐧
  - 𝐇𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐤 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐮𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐲𝐚𝐧

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We sat down with recent YSU grad, Brendan Gage, for a Q&A about his virtual recital.

WATCH BRENDAN'S RECITAL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a99o0jExkeE&t=4113s

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