On Wednesday, September 13, the Dukakis Center and the US Consulate General of Thessaloniki will co-sponsor the keynote session at this year’s Reworks Agora event, a Dukakis Lecture by Elizabeth Barry on "Reports from the Frontiers of Democracy: Implications for Urban Design."

The lecture will take place at 2:15 at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall (Maurice Saltiel Hall) and will be an integral part of the 17th annual Reworks contemporary music festival.

As director of urban environment at Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, Liz Barry develops geographic tools and civic science methods for collaborative cities. She holds an undergraduate degree in landscape architecture from NCSU, and a MSA+UD from Columbia University. She teaches at Columbia University and Parsons the New School for Design. Previously, she worked at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill planning international new cities and campuses, at Durham Inner-city Gardeners (DIG) coordinating youth urban agriculture enterprise, and traveled around the country catalyzing interaction among strangers with a “Talk To Me” sign – a project that received considerable international press.

Ms Barry is also co-founder of TreeKIT, in which capacity she has launched a project to map all the trees in New York City.

We are saddened to report that Chryssa Nikoleri has passed away.

Ms Nikoleri collaborated with the Dukakis Center on multiple occasions, notably in the spring of 2014, when she conducted a masterclass in environmental portraiture for five talented young photographers, who subsequently exhibited their work at the State Museum of Modern Art, Port Annex, in an exhibition entitled "Would you vote for me?"

This past month Ms Nikoleri took and exhibited photographs of a local research project involving students and faculty from ACT and North Carolina State University, in what will surely have been one of her last public exhibitions.

I was an International Relations major at the American College of Thessaloniki from 2013 to 2017. Since my first semester at ACT I was involved at the Dukakis Center, first as a volunteer, and then as an intern. It was a life-changing experience for me because it allowed me to participate in multiple activities that I had never done before.

Initially, I started as part of the Honors program at ACT, through which I did an internship at the Navarino Network in Thessaloniki. Then, I was involved in shooting a documentary for the Dukakis Center, which allowed me to develop new skills and learn new things about filmmaking with the help of producer Christos Nikoleris.

During my second and third year at ACT, I participated in multiple projects organized by the Dukakis Center, primarily as a photographer, which contributed to the development of my self-discipline and my time management skills. Finally, during my fourth year of studies, I was nominated senior intern at the Dukakis Center, working simultaneously on four different projects, coordinating the rest of the interns of the organization, and producing and co-starring on an in-house radio program with Dr. Wisner. 

All this contributed to the positive development of my personality and played an important role in the process of becoming the person, who I am today. For this reason, I believe that the Dukakis Center is place where students learn that public service is a “must” for all of us to live in a better society and, hence, in a better world.

The Dukakis Center piloted a new project in April and May, 2017, amid sixth grade pupils at the First Elementary School of Panorama.

The pupils in Ioannis Vrettos' ΣΤ2 class deliberated and voted on a resolution to address the problem of graffiti in public spaces near their school, in such a way as to develop a common area for children to express themselves freely and take responsibility for the upkeep of this same space.

The purpose was for the pupils to learn through their petition and subsequent communications with municipal authorities the proper steps for young citizens to take in order to address concerns about, and propose solutions to, local issues that matter to them, and thereby develop a more mature relationship with the public spaces in their neighborhood. The workshop was designed to reinforce one of the pupils' lessons in their social studies class, which had to do with citizenship and civic responsibility.

The pupils eventually proposed to the Mayor of Panorama that one or both of the small out buildings next to the basketball court at Gallanou Park in Panorama be transformed into a sort of three-dimensional blackboard, on which chalk images could be drawn and then erased by users.

The project subsequently entailed being in contact with the mayor's office, with the school director, Athanasios Nikas, with the president of the Parents’ Association of the First Elementary School, Areti Valatidou.

As an interim step, the Dukakis Center procured three unused white boards from Anatolia College, which the class offered in turn to their school via the good offices of the parents association, to be affixed in covered recreational spaces at the school, in response to part of the pupils' original request.

The workshop was designed and conducted on behalf of the Dukakis Center by cultural and financial advisor Fotinie Efstratiadou, who also liaised with the Parents’ Association, the Municipality, and school authorities. Dora Psoma, a specialist in civic education projects and an elementary school teacher in Thessaloniki, provided technical assistance. In attendance during the workshop were Mesers Vrettos and Athanasios Nikas, director of the school.

The boards were mounted before the pupils’ end of year festival with the support of staff from Anatolia College.

The workshop was piloted in advance of a major event the Dukakis Center will host in Thessaloniki in October 2017 on graffiti and vandalism in public spaces, at which the outcomes of the Center’s efforts with young people in Panorama will be showcased.

The Dukakis Center at ACT has invited Scott Townsend to visit Thessaloniki to share the fruit of recent research in Greece, in the form of an exhibition entitled "Social Capital," to be hosted at the French Institute of Thessaloniki from June 21 till July 17, 2017.

Mr. Townsend is Associate Professor of Graphic Design at North Carolina State University. His work in the last thirteen years has taken the form of specific projects concentrating on issues of globalization.

"Social Capital" is actually one of a series of ongoing projects, begun in 2013, using various forms of audience and community research. The individual projects in this series have taken place in Florence, Belgrade, Kefalonia, and Corfu, as well as in Cairo, and will be exhibited in the United States at the end of 2017.

The current exhibition will consist of material drawn from community dialogue in Kefalonia in 2015-17, at a moment when global attention was focused on the prospect of "Grexit." The research tells the story of how communities have persevered through their own social capital – community resources and relationships -- while undergoing increasing hardship.

The exhibition will consist of projected animations exhibited alongside interviews and visualizations, to explore such themes as "borders and exchanges," "community," "negotiation," family at a distance," allegiances," etc. The exhibition will also serve as a venue to begin new research and engagement in Thessaloniki regarding the Malakopi Arcades as a contemporary urban space.

"Social Capital" marks the second occasion in eighteen months that the Dukakis Center and the French Institut of Thessaloniki have collaborated in a public service initiative. In November 2015 French journalist Jean Quatremer delivered a Dukakis Lecture at the Thessaloniki City Hall under the auspices of both institutions.

John Koenig, former US Ambassador to Cyprus, visited ACT and the Dukakis Center last week to deliver a Dukakis Lecture, and to visit with various constituencies at the College.

The highlight of Ambassador Koenig's visit was a Dukakis Lecture entitled "The Cyprus end-game: Unification or permanent partition?" The event was co-hosted by the Navarino Network, and took place at the Daios Hotel, on the site of the old US Consulate General. 

The Dukakis Center has had a longstanding interest in the Cyprus question going back to 2002. Guest speakers have included Van Coufoudakis (twice) and Alvaro de Soto, the latter in his capacity as Special Representative of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for Cyprus. The timing of Ambassador Koenig’s lecture was meant to coincide with the current phase of bi-communal talks on the island, in which he had played an active role as mediator.

Ambassador Koenig, who spent three years as Consul General of Thessaloniki in the early 2000s, is an Honorary Advisor of the Dukakis Center, and met with ACT Provost Karamouzis and Executive Director Wisner as follow up to the Advisory Board meeting of November 2016. During his visit he also met separately with ACT students for an informal discussion on multilateral diplomacy, and was the guest of honor at a reception at Nelson in Panorama. (He had previously participated in a round table discusion on the 2000 US Presidential election, and, more recently, in an event dedicated to the 2016 Democratic primaries.)

Ambassador Koenig was accompanied in his visit by his Greek-American wife, Natalie.

Former Greek Ambassador to the United States Alexandros Mallias spoke to ACT students on January 30 under the auspices of the Dukakis Center, on the siubject of his most recently published book, The Middle East and Pandora's Box.

Ambassador was in town to promote his book at various venues and graciously accepted an invitation to return to ACT, which he first visited for a Dukakis Lecture in 2011, following a long period of gestation dating back to 2004.

Ambassador Mallias enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the Greek foreign service, which included a stint as Director of the Department of Balkan Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. More recently he had been an active member of To Potami, the centrist political party created in 2014.

This is Ambassador Mallias' third book.

This past November 29, some 150 students and faculty from the Universities of Macedonia and Thessaloniki heard ACT instructors Lambrini Nassis and David Wisner speak at a public conference on the recent US elections, hosted by the Greek Association of Political and Economics Science Students at the University of Macedonia.

Wisner offered an overview of the US system of government, followed by some of the more unusual features of the 2016 elections. Dr. Nassis then spoke on the Electoral College and on voting behavior in 2016.

This is the third time the Dukakis Center has collaborated with the Association, more popularly known as GRAPESS, whose members are drawn from the two public universities in Thessaloniki. GRAPESS members had previously taken part in three Dukakis Center events dedicated to the 2016 election in May, in October, and again in November.

The University of Macedonia conference was also attended by Professor Theodosios Karvounarakis, while Evangelos Plakas, a journalist at TV100 and Makedonia newspaper, moderated the event.

This was the first such event co-hosted by the Dukakis Center since its transformation in 2011 from endowed chair to academic and outreach center. The current strategic plan of the Dukakis Center calls for the Center gradually to incubate and otherwise support efforts of local non-profit start-ups.

In remembrance of President Obama, and in honor of our many Greek friends who were invited to attend his legacy speech in Athens, we publish Dukakis Center Director David Wisner’s 1988 post-election remarks, delivered at the US Consulate General of Thessaloniki (below the break).

Students, interns, and staff at ACT and the Dukakis Center had been especially active during the 2008 US general election, both in Greece and in the US.

Senior Kristin Harms caucused for Barack Obama in Iowa in January 2008, in what was the beginning of President Obama’s successful campaign to gain the nomination of the Democratic Party. (Kristin told us that a fellow Iowan who had spent the Fall 2007 semester as a study abroad student at ACT caucused actively for Hillary Clinton.) Meanwhile, junior Nemanja Grgic, who has spent the fall 2008 semester studying in the US at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, attended a late-October Obama rally in Pittsburgh and eventually got within a few feet of the candidate. A smaller number of people in the ACT community supported the McCain campaign but a sturdy number of study abroad students wore their McCain-Palin campaign buttons with pride.

On campus, American citizens working or studying at ACT were encouraged both to register and to vote by absentee ballot; more than half of the study abroad cohort took advantage of this service, which was coordinated by the Office of International Programs with additional support from the Dukakis Center. The ACT community was furthermore able to take part in an interactive dialogue on the election with former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis via digital teleconference.

ACT figured prominently in election and post-election media hoopla. Lambrini Nassis, David Wisner, and a handful of US study abroad students were interviewed by local journalists in the days prior to the election. Dr. Wisner was a featured speaker at a post-election breakfast held at the US Consulate General of Thessaloniki. ACT professors Joseph Gratale and Peter Chressanthakis also attended the event.

Finally, Dr. Wisner and a group of ten ACT students, including several study abroad students, attended a post-election assessment at the Consulate in the days following the election. The featured speaker was veteran Democratic strategist Rick Ridder of RBI Associates, who campaigned for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary and for Barack Obama on behalf of environmentalist groups in Colorado in the general election.

.../...

Prepared Remarks

US Consulate General of Thessaloniki
2008 Post-election Breakfast

By David Wisner

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome you all here in turn. I think it is appropriate for me to thank Hoyt Yee, Bob King, Ioanna Koutsounanou, Costas Vassalos, and the entire team of people who work day in and day out at the US Consulate General of Thessaloniki to put on this event. And I think it is pretty well known throughout Greece that this is the place to be the morning after the election.  You guys put on a great party, so if you don't mind giving up a round of applause to Hoyt and the team here. 

I'd like to thank also a group of people who are rarely acknowledged in this type of public event, with whom I have worked in the past, actually as a wayward colleague, and that would be the press corps of the city of Thessaloniki, and in general the media and the journalists in Greece. I think what's interesting about this election, among many, many other things, is the unprecedented level of interest outside the United States in the campaign itself, in the candidates, in the platforms of the political parties, and now of course in the outcome of the election, and I'm confident when I turn on Greek TV that I actually can get very reliable and useful information, and so you guys owe it to yourself, you're not always acknowledged, but you do a great job.

I'm here representing the American College of Thessaloniki, and one of my tasks at ACT is to direct the Michael Dukakis Chair in Public Policy and Service, which now is entering its tenth season of public affairs activities. It's a non-partisan forum for debate on public issues, and one of the things we do every two years, when there is a general election, especially in the Presidential election years every four years, is to ensure that the American students who study at ACT register to vote and cast their ballot.

This semester we have over 100 American students studying at universities throughout the United States, and thanks to the work of my colleagues in the International Studies program well over 70% of those young people registered and voted. This is a number that we're seeing throughout the United States, and I'm pretty proud of that.

One of my students actually, a resident of the state of Iowa, got involved last year, volunteered to canvas for Barack Obama just prior to the primaries, caucused for Barack Obama during the Iowa primary, and stayed active even when she came back to Greece to resume her studies with the organization known as Democrats Abroad (you know both the American political parties, Republicans and Democrats, have units that operate in countries where you have American ex-patriots).

This is great. We have young people getting involved in unprecedented numbers in this particular election, and I hope its something that rubs off on young people here in Greece, and in the other countries whose students come and spend some time here in Greece with us or, as the case might be, at the public universities, represented in the person of Theo Karvounarakis.

I called the election about ten days ago. It seemed to me that the polls were indicating a fairly clear Obama victory. But the actual impact of that fact really started to sink in last night as I was looking at the Internet one last time. And I had four thoughts which I jotted down very quickly.

• I'm humbled that we have elected an American who is of African origin; I'm moved.
• I am saddened that such a great public servant as John McCain was defeated. He is a great man.  If you watched his concession speech, there has rarely been a more graceful concession of defeat in American public life. 
• I'm proud to be an Americans right now, and I don't think that is such a bad thing.  I'm proud that so many people voted, perhaps for the first time. I'm proud that a group of Americans who had been in the margins of American public life have come to the fore, as was the case in 2004, when the so-called evangelical vote emerged and helped George Bush be reelected. This is very good for American public life, that the entire population is able to express itself, in the elections, during the campaigns, and I'm very proud to be a part of that.
• I'm hopeful, too, that the bitterness and divisiveness of any campaign, but of this campaign in particular, can become very quickly a thing of the past, if a majority of American citizens, taking the lead of Senator McCain, accept the fact that they have a President, a person who perhaps they did not vote for, but who is their leader. It's constitutional, it's legal, we understand that, and hopefully we accept it.  If you're a Republican, you'll work with your party for the next round of elections; if you're a Democrat, you'll be happy, you'll celebrate, but you won't gloat, because the reality of American life is that we win sometimes, you win sometimes. And that's something we learn to live with. That's why democracy can flourish.

Well, it's been a very long, costly, and bitter campaign; you've watched some of it here.  It's also been a campaign marked by moments of humor, and I thought that perhaps at this moment we'd break some of the seriousness. Out of the thousands of video clips that I've seen on You Tube and other places, I've picked tow that show some of the lighter moments, the lighter side of the candidates, of the people that have been working with them. There is great joy in politics, and we just take a moment to look at these and then we’ll get on with our talk.

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/mccain-qvc-open/805381/

http://www.neatorama.com/2008/10/26/wazzup-eight-years-later/

Three insights I've had over the course of the last six to eight months, and I'd say, well, they have been pretty accurate. 

I read an op-ed piece by the somewhat controversial conservative commentator of the New York Times David Brooks, commenting on the primaries, back in February, and he says, well, nobody really knows what's going on here. And I think that's one of the themes we've been seeing here, you've got all the guys on TV and writing in the papers and writing in the blogs, talking at podiums like myself, and very few people would have been able to predict a year ago, let alone perhaps a couple of months ago, that Barack Obama would be elected -- that he would be nominated. You may recall four years ago I predicted we would have a race between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Guiliani; well I am a New Yorker, so that makes a little bit of sense. But this is it, this has been the election to turn punditry on its head. And I think part of the reason for that is the availability over the Internet of so much information, such that you yourself could have an expertise in American politics just by spending a few hours a day looking at sites on the Internet. 

My second thought came as I was addressing an email from one of my former American students, a young man, I think of Middle Eastern origin who studied at a very prominent American university and now has a job working at a brokerage firm -- I presume he still has his job now, I don't know! And he asked me, well, these are the things that are going on and it seems to me that this is the candidate who expresses the best solution for that particular issue, and I said, "Guys, this is about race. Are we ready to elect an individual of African descent to be President of the United States?"  And you know when a French media team goes into a truck stop in Iowa which is typically full of people, of Democrats who have voted Democrat all their life, and he asks whom are you voting for and they say we're voting for McCain; the journalist asks why, and the individual looks into the camera and says, "I don't like niggers." 

Race is a fact in American life. It's not only African-Americans, it's a fact. It's something we live with, something we try to deal with.  You've seen a lot in the news about the negative campaign tactics of the Republicans, and this maybe media bias, it may be true, the fact is there, on both sides, that people have difficulty accepting the fact that a person of color can become President of the United States. Well, I hope we've overcome that.

My third thought very briefly, when it was announced that Sarah Palin would be the Vice-Presidential pick of John McCain, I thought, that's it for the GOP. The so-called part of the Big Tent is ripping at the seams. Which direction is the Republican party going to go in. I mean, we know the Democrats have a similar problem: the Rainbow Coalition, it's sometimes called. It's a fact of American political life that the parties are decentralized; there's an enormous degree of diversity in the composition of the parties. But at this particular juncture it wasn't clear in my mind and in the mind of a lot of people watching, which direction the Republican party wanted to go in. And this has been followed up. I had this insight, what a couple of months ago, and you see now more and more moderate Republicans are questioning the wisdom of that particular move. I don't want to say whether it was good or bad, I don't want to reveal whom my choice of presidential candidate would have been, but it does appear to me that that was one of the problems that the Republicans had. Are they going to be the party of George Bush, are they going to be the party of John McCain, or are they going to try to be a little of both, because they are not the same persona. 

Now what are we going to look for in the next four years. You have a Democrat majority, or a Democratic majority – do I sound a little like George Bush there? that was a slip – in the Congress; some of the Democrats in Congress will want to go faster than Barack Obama will want to go. He does have to represent all Americans. How is he going to handle hostility in the opposition and hostility from the more radical elements of his own party. This is a big question. He himself has already hinted that he's not going to be changing a lot of things in 100 days; it may take 1000 days, it may take four years, and I think that's a responsible thing to say. He's got a lot of challenges. I would say looking at the way he managed his campaign, if there's a person in American politics who is up to that challenge it may well be Barack Obama. And I think we should all hope he is successful.

Folks, this time four years ago I was looking at the next round of elections. The political parties are doing that. They're starting with what's happening in the states – the next round of elections, the local governance, the state legislatures, the governorships.  2010 is an important year because we conduct a census. And if a particular party controls the legislature in a state that has incoming population they can change the shape of the districts such that that party stands a better chance to elect members of Congress in Washington. It's something, this is a fact of American life, it's always changing. Republicans did it very well in 2000; we'll see what happens. The indications are that while the focus in the federal government in Washington has been on a Democratic sweep – what we call a triple – it's not certain whether the Republicans will do so badly in state and local elections, and that means the next time around the Republicans could very well be competitive. Bear in mind,
this is part of the great dynamic of American politics.

Two things further that we need to watch out for, they will probably be a little less under the radar screen, particularly the first. Barack Obama is the first candidate in American history to forego public financing for his campaign. He raised an enormous amount of money, uniquely from private sources. I would think one of the first things that John McCain is going to do when he goes back to the Senate is to introduce legislation that will regulate this. He has that reputation. The one guy had a clear deficit, John McCain, because he accepted public financing, which means $84 million and that's all you get. We're expecting the total for the Presidential race alone to exceed $1 billion, for advertising, campaigning, and everything else. That's a lot of money; maybe we need to look at that.

Observers on both sides of the political spectrum of the United States are also predicting that this election will mark the death of mainstream media. You see it already, stations like MSNBC and Fox News are clearly partisan in the way they look at the election, particularly the commentary, and, you know we used to pride ourselves in the United States that journalism was done a little differently, you could have a mainstream national media that was non-partisan. And it appears now that we are looking a little bit like France, or Britain, or Greece, or European countries where the newspapers pretty much take sides. And I think this is something we need to look at. Now, there is an alternative form of journalism for which I have some hope, and that is what you see in the blogs, the web logs, in the Internet. And you often are going to see, in fact a Pew Institute study just done last week indicates, that more and more people are turning to the Internet for information about the campaigns, and I think this is a trend that will persist. But we need to worry about the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Washington Times, and some of these newspapers that seem to be taking sides a little bit more explicitly in their coverage of events. That's something which as an American I fear.

I'd like to thank you for hearing me out this afternoon... Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.