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Clifford Symposium

Clifford Symposium 2024

Wooden toy houses lined up beneath a sky blue background.

Home: Housing and Belonging in Middlebury and Beyond

Thursday, September 19–Saturday, September 21, 2024

What does it mean to have a home? How do you find it? How do you keep it? And why does the idea of “home” feel inclusive to some people and exclusive to others? The 2024 Clifford Symposium will host forums, presentations, and community partnership opportunities to explore local, national, and global practices and policies around home, housing, and homelessness. While conflicts over who lives where divide communities, responding to “the housing crisis” requires bringing together multiple perspectives. Calls for more affordable housing intersect with issues of environmental sustainability and health inequities. Political debates about where to build new homes invoke historical research on refugee resettlement as well as contemporary scholarship on the social and cultural lives of migrants. Uniting these and many more discussions of home are foundational concerns about how we live together, the desire for belonging, and the demands of justice. 

Through interdisciplinary engagement and community involvement, the 2024 Clifford Symposium will contribute to the sustained dialogue and action that is necessary to confront one of society’s most pressing issues.

Featured Events

See the events schedule for times and locations and RSVP links. Space is limited for some events! 

Keynote Address

Erica Heilman, Rumble Strip Vermont podcast host

As host of the Peabody Award-winning podcast Rumble Strip, Erica Heilman “invites herself into people’s homes to find out what they know, hate, love, what they’re afraid of, and what makes them more like you than you’d realized.” In this keynote address, Erica will discuss why her conversations with Vermonters return again and again to questions about what home is and what community means. Hear what makes a Vermont town a place where people belong rather than a collection of unconnected houses. Consider whether challenges like the housing crisis could weaken some of that feeling of place in Vermont and how that might shape our sense of who we are and where we live. This kick-off event will show why the Clifford Symposium’s themes are central to the “messy, obsessively crafted stories of the everyday” that define Rumble Strip and Erica’s work for Vermont Public.

Panel Discussions

Housing Crises in Context: Historical and Contemporary Approaches to Solutions and Activism 

Today’s housing crises intersect with many of society’s most challenging problems and makes our contemporary situation feel uniquely difficult to solve. Historically, however, housing crises have been shaped by seemingly intractable challenges like global political conflict, governmental collapse, socio-economic and racial inequality, and environmental disaster. What can we learn from individuals, activist movements, and engaged communities who used housing reform to promote social change under the most daunting of circumstances? In this discussion moderated by Professor Linus Owens, panelists will share recent and historical examples highlighting how efforts to solve housing challenges can become powerful exercises of resilience and resistance, as well as the perils of such work.

The panelists will be:

  • Dr. Davarian L. Baldwin, the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Trinity College, and
  • Dr. S.E. Eisterer, Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the School of Architecture at Princeton University and a Senior Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Munich Documentation Center.

How Did We Get Here, How Can We Get There? Housing Policy in Middlebury and Beyond

Panelists will discuss Vermont’s housing policies, the economic implications of those policies, and their impacts in communities around the state and here in Addison County. The discussion will be moderated by Makenna Janes, Middlebury Class of 2023 and Helen Gurley Brown BOLD Research Fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Panelists will be:

  • Andy Hooper, Middlebury Selectboard
  • Jubilee McGill, State Representative for Addison County District 5
  • Mike Piecak, Vermont State Treasurer
  • Elise Shanbacker, Executive Director of Addison Housing Works

Dinner and Discussion

Narratives of Home and Housing

The stories we tell about places we call home can reveal our most personal values and identities. At the same time, the stories we see and hear about our neighbors’ homes - or their challenges with securing stable housing - require empathy, trust, and a recognition of the moral responsibilities we have as members of a community. This event will feature two Vermont artists who share a talent for weaving together stories of home, housing, and belonging: novelist Kenneth Cadow (author of Gather, the 2024 Vermont Reads book of the year) and documentary filmmaker Bess O’Brien (producer of Just Getting By). Following a discussion moderated by James Calvin Davis, George Adams Ellis Professor of Liberal Arts at Middlebury College, guests - including members of the college community, local residents, and representatives from housing-related organizations throughout Vermont - will engage in guided small group conversations over dinner. Come share your stories of home and discover the role of narratives in building the partnerships that will be required to collectively tackle Vermont’s housing challenges. This event is made possible by Vermont Humanities and is part of the Good Talks series sponsored by the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation at Middlebury

Brunch for Action

Community members gather informally to connect, reflect, share,  and plan, and be energized. This event is an opportunity to enjoy good food while expanding our social justice networks and discussing innovative solutions to our community’s growing intersectional challenges of impoverishment, substance dependence, untreated mental illness, and homelessness. Food by Viva El Sabor. Facilitated by Tom Morgan, Community Minister, Champlain Valley Unitarian Universalist Society, and Jason Duquette-Hoffman, Middlebury College Center for Community Engagement.

Film Screening

Just Getting By, a documentary by Bess O’Brien and Kingdom County Productions, explores the stories of people who are unhoused and housing insecure in Vermont. Screening and discussion hosted by the filmmaker, Bess O’Brien.