Who Decides What Belongs in Public Spaces?

Via Karsh Institute of Democracy

 A new exhibit from the Karsh Institute of Democracy and UVA Library uses photographs of Confederate and other monuments removed across Virginia in recent years to explore questions of history, memory, and democratic decision-making. 

By Erin Tör

September 25, 2026

For generations, Confederate monuments occupied prominent public spaces across Virginia. They stood in parks, along avenues, outside courthouses, and on the grounds of the state Capitol. 

Then, beginning in 2020, that changed. Many monuments came down across the Commonwealth, including along Richmond's Monument Avenue and in downtown Charlottesville. Some were removed through formal government processes; others were removed amid protests and direct action. In Charlottesville, years of public debate and litigation preceded the removal of the city's Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson statues in July 2021. Around the same time, other monuments that had become subjects of public debate were removed as well, including one depicting Revolutionary War military officer George Rogers Clark and another featuring Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacagawea. 

Those changes are the focus of “The Monuments: Who Should Shape Public Space?”—a new exhibition on view in Shannon Library. Featuring photographs by Sanjay Suchak, a former Karsh Institute Practitioner Fellow in Democracy (2023–24), the exhibition asks visitors to consider what those changes reveal about a broader question: Who should shape the public spaces we all share? 

Suchak was there as monuments that had defined Virginia's public spaces for decades were removed. His photographs capture the physical process of removal and the people who gathered to watch.

“As a photographer, I think anytime something historical occurs that you've watched go from a community-developed idea to legislative action, you want to document that,” Suchak said. “For me, it was a way to process the events of [the Unite the Right rally on] August 11 and 12, 2017, in Charlottesville—a direct response to these removals being planned—and to feel like I could help contribute to the record of our communities.” 

The work often meant moving quickly and quietly. “To witness it firsthand was surreal,” Suchak said. “Nobody growing up in Virginia probably would have thought these things would come down, and then to be a part of it—meeting in secret locations—there was a lot of adrenaline, and an immediate realization that this is a significant chapter being turned in the history of our Commonwealth.” 

The photographs in the exhibit span Virginia. A timeline running along the floor provides historical context, tracing each monument from its installation, in some cases in the decades after the Civil War or tied to other chapters of Virginia's history, through the debates, protests, government decisions, and legal challenges that preceded removal. 

That longer history shows how communities have decided, and continue to debate, whose history is represented in shared spaces. Those decisions have often been contested, and some removals have since been reversed. The result raises questions not only about what belongs in public space, but also about who has the final say and how competing views should be weighed. 

“Taken both individually and collectively, Suchak's deeply compelling photographs provide human-scale opportunities for reflection,” said Meg Kennedy, curator of material culture and co-chair of UVA’s Art in Library Spaces committee. “Presented within their historical context, the images invite Library visitors to encounter and explore significant themes and reactions to memorialization.” 

Now several years removed from the events themselves, Suchak sees the photographs differently. “As we look back at the entirety of the movement, I want people to see the physical scale and emotion of this change in our community,” he said. 

The exhibition does not end with the removal of the monuments. Instead, it turns toward what comes next. 

As visitors end their walk through “The Monuments,” they are invited to contribute their own answers to a challenge at the heart of the exhibit: Going forward, how should people and events be memorialized? 

There is no single, simple answer. But the question points toward a larger conversation about the future of public space, and about how history, memory, community, and civic life shape the places we share. 

“The Monuments” is now on view in the third-floor gallery of Shannon Library.

View selected photographs here

"Seized" at The Santa Fe International Film Festival

 

Balancing the absurdity of small-town politics with the gravity of a constitutional crisis, SEIZED, set in the small town of Marion, Kansas, is thrust into the international spotlight after a police raid on the Marion County Record and the death of its 98-year-old co-owner,

Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026 2pm - info & tickets

SEIZED is a gripping, stranger-than-fiction investigative thriller that plunges audiences inside the troubling police raid on the Marion County Record. What begins as a shocking small-town incident quickly spirals into a national story, exposing how corruption, politics, and decades-long tensions turned a quaint Kansas community into a battleground over the First and Fourth Amendments. The film unfolds in real time through police body-cam and surveillance footage, revealing the raid’s chaos, the bombshells that followed, and the devastating personal toll on the newsroom, including the tragic death of its 98-year-old co-owner.

Director Sharon Liese allows the story to unfold with nuance, surprises, eccentric characters, and humor. By letting each voice speak for itself, she crafts a rare documentary in which sympathies shift moment to moment, revealing how truth, ego, and fear collide in real time. Blending the juicy intrigue of a classic muckraking narrative with a clear-eyed exploration of power, politics, and the fragility of a free press, SEIZED transforms a headline-grabbing event into a deeply human story that is urgent, unsettling, and impossible to ignore.

See article in the Santa Fe New Mexican: The First, Foremost: Documentary revisits police raid on a Kansas newspaper, shining a light on press freedom

Do you need to go to journalism school?

 Via LightHouse Reports

October 13, 3036

Last month we asked two early career journalists how they got in the field. This month we take the conversation to the other side of the classroom.

We speak to two educators from two very different corners of the field who are doing their best to prepare students for a changing industry landscape.

We discuss the pros and cons of formal training and the skills journalists need to be industry-read. It’s what you need to know to thrive in today’s media landscape.

Part 2 of a two-part series.

Interviewees:

Lam Thuy Vo, Associate Professor in Data Journalism, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism (CUNY),

Investigative Reporter at Documented

Ron Haviv, Photojournalist and Co-founder of The VII Foundation

Hosts: Beatriz Ramalho da Silva, Tessa Pang

Produced by Lara Bodger

Sound design, mixing and editing: Elli Xypolitaki

Music by mobygratis

Reporting on the Health and Environmental Impacts of Data Centers: Panel With Nina Berman

 Via Tow Center for Digital Journalism

Online event

Monday, October 19  •  Starts at 10:30 AM MDT

The data center roll out to power AI is having immediate and long term health and environmental impacts

The data center roll out to power AI is having immediate and long term health and environmental impacts. To report on these impacts journalists need to understand how air, noise and water pollution impacts human health, the way those pollutants are measured and how corporations are exploiting the permitting process to get their projects approved.

Reserve a spot

Panel

Nina Berman

Evan Simon

Jamie Banks

Michael Cork

Natasha De Jarnett

Celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day with the 4th Annual Honoring Native Nations Powwow on the Santa Fe Plaza

 

On Monday, October 12th, The Santa Fe Indigenous Center invites you to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day with the 4th Annual Honoring Native Nations Powwow on the Santa Fe Plaza. This special event will hold space for tribal members from all Native Nations across Turtle Island to come together and celebrate Indigenous joy and cultural resilience on the Santa Fe Plaza beginning at 9AM through 4:30PM. 

Diné (Navajo) artist Eugene Tapahe's: ART HEALS The Jingle Dress Project and Standing Rock Movement exhibit will be on view at Monroe Gallery through November 1, 2026.

 

Stacey Patton discusses her new book "Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children" with Dean Jelani Cobb and Prof. Nina Berman

 Via Columbia Journalism School

Friday, October 9, 2026, 12:00 - 1:15pm

Registration required. Box lunch will be provided.

Columbia Journalism School, Brown Institute, 2nd Floor, Pulitzer Hall, 2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

Dr. Stacey Patton discusses her new book with Dean Jelani Cobb and Prof. Nina Berman.


Strung Up examines how the lynching of Black children became not an aberration, but a normalized feature of American racial violence. Drawing on meticulous archival research and vivid narrative storytelling, Strung Up traces how white supremacy trained itself socially, culturally, and psychologically to tolerate and ritualize the destruction of Black childhood, including the unborn.

Nationally recognized child advocate Dr. Stacey Patton locates the roots of this violence not solely in the United States, but in Europe’s long history of anti-child brutality. She reveals how centuries of public executions, corporal punishment, religious spectacle, and sanctioned cruelty exposed white children to extreme violence early and often. This violence, she argues, conditioned them to associate pain, domination, and death with moral order.

Patton traces this desensitization across the Atlantic where white children raised within these traditions became adults primed to reproduce racial terror, transforming inherited practices of child cruelty into instruments of white supremacy in the post-emancipation United States.

Blending history with developmental psychology, neuroscience, epigenetics, and research on adverse childhood experiences, Strung Up shows how violence is not only taught, but biologically and psychologically embedded across generations. Patton demonstrates how racial terror functioned as a system of socialization that shaped perception, behavior, and moral reasoning long before it produced the mob, the rope, or the fire.

This event is sponsored by the Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights at Columbia University.

"POOL POSITIONS" Exhibit Features Gallery Photographer Anna Boyiazis

Via Kunstkreis Gräfelfing e.V.

October 8 – November 1, 2026

The exhibition features site-specific works by 30 renowned international artists inside a defunct indoor swimming pool. The installations, sculptures, and paintings inherently focus on themes of bathing, water, human body culture, and spatial perception.

The exhibit includes a special installation in the water, an interactive photographic series, videos in niches and adjoining rooms, photography, painting, printmaking, sculpture and objects.

In this way, the walls, shower rooms, lockers, changing rooms, stairs and corridors of the place can be experienced by visitors as new experience spaces.

Vernissage

Thursday, 08.10.2026
From 6 p.m.
Admission is free.

Opening hours
every Thursday to Sunday from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
on Thursday, October 8, the exhibition opens with the vernissage at 6 p.m.

Exhibition Venue
Old swimming pool in the Lochham primary school
Adalbert Stifter Platz 1
82166 Gräfelfing

Anna Boyiazis is a documentary photographer working between Southern California and East Africa. Her work focuses on conservation, human rights, public health, and women and girls, drawing on long-term, community-embedded storytelling.

The Zanzibar archipelago, where the pictures were taken, is economically and spiritually closely linked to the sea. But half of its population does not dare to go into the water for fear of drowning!

While many boys acquire basic swimming skills by the age of 10, girls have so far been discouraged from learning to swim because there were no swimsuits to cover the body. Swimming lessons also challenge a patriarchal system that prevents women from engaging in activities other than domestic tasks.

Thanks to some grassroots organizations that provide full-body swimsuits and promote swimming lessons, women and girls are now taking to the water. The participants are thus empowered to teach others, creating a cycle that makes the sea accessible to all.

 

The Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture with Ron Haviv: Testimony (1989–2026)

 

Speaker

Ron Haviv, Emmy-nominated filmmaker and award-winning photojournalist. Director of The VII Foundation.

Testimony (1989–2026)

October 22, 2026

05:00PM - 06:30PM EDT

Weatherhead Center for International Affairs

Harvard University
Tsai Auditorium (Room S010), CGIS South Building
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Register here

This event is open to the public and will be recorded. Please register to attend. There will be a public viewing of the exhibition and reception before the lecture, 4:00–4:45 p.m. Please plan on being seated at 4:45 p.m. as the event will start promptly at 5:00 p.m.   

Content Advisory: This presentation includes graphic photographs and video documenting armed conflict, violence, and their aftermath. Viewer discretion is advised.

For more than thirty-five years, Ron Haviv has documented many of the defining events of our time. Through a visual presentation, he explores the realities of conflict and the ethical, practical, and personal challenges of visual journalism, from Central America and the Balkans to the Arab Spring, Ukraine, and an increasingly polarized United States. 

Throughout his career, Haviv has focused on documenting human rights abuses and the consequences of war, including three genocides. Drawing on his experiences in the field, he reflects on the role of the photographer—as witness, observer, and, at times, participant—and explores the ethical responsibilities of documenting history as it unfolds. The lecture also asks what responsibility belongs to the audience. Is witnessing enough, or does seeing create an obligation to understand, remember, and act? 

The presentation weaves together a series of short films with commentary and stories from the field, providing context for the images and an inside look at the challenges and responsibilities of visual journalism.

Take a look at the work of visual artist Ron Haviv >

Chair

Melani Cammett, Center Director; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Identity and Conflict. Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs, Department of Government, Harvard University.

Speaker Biography

Ron Haviv is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and an award-winning photojournalist. He co-founded VII Photo Agency and The VII Foundation, where he currently serves as a director. He is dedicated to documenting conflict and raising human rights issues around the globe.

Haviv’s first photography book, Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal, was called “One of the best non-fiction books of the year,” by The Los Angeles Times and “A chilling but vastly important record of a people’s suffering” by Newsweek. His other monographs are Afghanistan: The Road to Kabul, Haiti: 12 January 2010, The Lost Rolls, and Shadow of Memory.

Haviv has produced an unflinching record of the injustices of war covering over twenty-five conflicts and his photography has had singular impact. His work in the Balkans, which spanned over a decade of conflict, was used as evidence to indict and convict war criminals at the international tribunal in The Hague. President George H. W. Bush cited Haviv’s chilling photographs documenting paramilitary violence in Panama as one of the reasons for the 1989 American intervention.

His work is in the collections of The Getty, Eastman House and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston amongst others and has been seen in numerous other museums and galleries, including the Louvre, United Nations, Council on Foreign Relations, Fotografiska, and the International Center of Photography.

Haviv has co-created multi-platform projects for Doctors Without Borders’ DR Congo: The Forgotten War and Starved for Attention, Unicef’s Child Alert for Darfur and Sri Lanka and the International Committee of the Red Cross’s World at War. His commercial clients include Ad Council, American Express, BAE, Canon USA, ESPN, IBM, and Volkswagen.

Haviv is the central character in six documentary films, including National Geographic Explorer’s Freelance in a World of Risk, in which he speaks about the dangers of combat photography, including his numerous detentions and close calls. 

He has provided expert analysis and commentary on ABC World News, BBC, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, Good Morning America, and The Charlie Rose Show. He has written opinion pieces for The Washington Post and The New York Times and spoken at TEDx along with numerous other lectures at universities and conferences.

Through the Lens of a Photojournalist: Power, Fear, and Photographic Record

 Via Principles First

Thursday, September 24 • 11 AM - 12 PM MDT

Reserve a spot here

Virtual Town Hall with Nate Gowdy

Join Principles First for a different kind of virtual town hall — one told through photographs.

Seattle photojournalist Nate Gowdy will share photographs and firsthand observations from two very different events he documented on the ground: January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol and, five years later, federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis.

Gowdy photographed January 6 on assignment for Rolling Stone as a mob breached the Capitol and disrupted Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election. His book, INSURRECTION, is the only photojournalistic monograph devoted entirely to January 6, using timestamped photographs and contextual captions to chronicle the events on the ground as they unfolded.

In Minnesota this past January and February during Operation Metro Surge, Gowdy documented fear and uncertainty reaching into ordinary life—school pickups, grocery runs, work commutes—and residents organizing to observe federal agents, protest, distribute food, and care for neighbors.

These events are distinct. Having witnessed both, Gowdy will explore how power and fear take different forms—and how people respond when national events become immediate and personal.

The photographs begin the conversation. Gowdy will share what preceded and followed particular photographs, what he witnessed beyond the frames, and what he learned. Providing that context is part of his responsibility to the people he photographs and to the historical record—so the circumstances surrounding a photograph are not lost, distorted, or misrepresented.

See the photographs. Hear the stories.

Monroe Gallery Participates In Second Fall Of Freedom National Call For Creative Resistance

 

Monroe Gallery of Photography joins Fall Of Freedom with an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping the nation. On October 2,3, and 4 2026, plan to visit the exhibition Eugene Tapahe: ART HEALS, The Jingle Dress Project and Standing Rock Movement.

Additionally, in solidarity with of Fall Of Freedom, Monroe Gallery presents a Pop Up exhibition online of photographs documenting people struggling for their freedom; their right to live without fear, their right to speak and the right to protest inequities.

Tapahe documented the strength, unity, inspiration, resilience, and hope of the Indigenous-led movement that began in April 2016 to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota.  He remembers the grace and courage of Jingle Dress dancers healing the trauma inflicted on the water protectors from  police and private security forces by water cannons, LRAD sound cannons, rubber bullets, pepper spray, mace, tear gas canisters and bean bag blasts. 

When asked “Why did you go to the Oceti Sakawin camp?”, Tapahe says “It was my responsibly to be there, to help our people, our ancestors, our water, and our land. It felt as if our ancestors were physically standing with us in unity around the sacred fire – singing and dancing with us. The spiritual awakening will be with me always as I continue my creative journey to photograph and document the beauty of Mother Earth and our people.”

Years later, Art Heals: The Jingle Dress Project originated from a dream Tapahe had inspiring him to unite the land and people through the healing power of the Ojibwe jingle dress dance. The Jingle Dress Project has raised awareness of many Native American issues, such as land acknowledgment, women’s rights, and, most importantly, the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW).  

Eugene Tapahe

Strength In Unity, Tetons National Park, the native land of the Shoshone, Bannock, Gros Ventre, and Nez Perce People, 2021

Fall Of Freedom is an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping our nation. Our Democracy is under attack. Threats to free expression are rising. Dissent is being criminalized. Institutions and media have been recast as mouthpieces of propaganda.

Fall of Freedom returns for its second year — expanding the national call to creative resistance. FoF is an open instigation to artists, venues and institutions across all disciplines to put your work in the world on October 2nd, 3rd, & 4th, countering fascist repression and censorship with joyful communities of defiant creativity. Art matters. Courage is contagious.

National list of events.

Due process gutted. Universities threatened and defunded. Students kidnapped. Migrants deported. Troops deployed. Racism rampant. Cruelty celebrated. Political leaders arrested. Citizenship stripped. Health care shredded. Women's rights rescinded. Wealth concentrated. Free speech eliminated. Genocide normalized. Science undermined. Arts assaulted. Journalism targeted. Departments shuttered. Grants rescinded. Trans banned. Lawyers capitulating. Coup makers pardoned. Budgets slashed. Abortion outlawed. Courts stacked. Boards replaced. Police unleashed. Nazis emboldened. Bombs dropped.

This is why we must resist.