2018 Presenters:

Lecture:

Contemporary Queerness: Why Queer Theory is for Everyone

What is queer? What is queer theory? Why and for whom does it matter? Academics, students, and "regular" people complain about the word queer, and about using queer theory in research and in the classroom. Many think it's too abstract to be useful or that it just doesn't apply to everyday life. But theory is an important way to understand events and experiences in the world and a great way to structure knowledge both in and outside of the classroom. I recently developed a new queer theoretical model that is useful across disciplines in academia and in "real life" because it: (1) considers gender, sexuality, family, race, ethnicity, class, ability, nationality, and time as related and essential to understanding the current social order; (2) helps us understand both privilege and oppression; and (3) accounts for individual, familial, relational, institutional, and historical change. In this interactive talk I share the model and explain why queer theory is useful for everyone, not just queer people themselves or folks working with gender and/or sexual minorities. I encourage anyone and everyone to attend – no background in gender, sexuality, or queer studies required!

Read more about Dr. Mendez' Scholarship >

Lecture:

Love Liberation: A Conversation about Black Panther Party Women, Gender, Resistance and Intersectionality

Love Liberation is the defining motto of the Intersectional Black Panther Party History Project (IPHP), a collective of four African American women historians who are also scholar-activists and filmmakers, working both within and outside of academia. This motto stems from the group’s research on women and gender in the BPP, specifically, but also in the long activist tradition of resistance rooted in love for freedom from oppression of all forms. Women played a critical role in the organization’s 15-year history. The IPHP collective’s work addresses the need to center the lives of BPP women, an approach designed to intervene and disrupt the popular stereotype of the Black Panther Party as male and chauvinist, reactionary and short-lived. The conversation will center on women in the BPP and present-day implications for resistance strategies.

Additionally, the conversation will explore the implications of IPHP’s collective work as its own form of resistance, both within and outside academia. In addition to IPHP’s own multi-media social media platforms, its work appears in scholarly blogs and journals and popular venues, such as SOULS, Spectrum, Black Perspectives, Vibe, Black Youth Project, and Colorlines. Additionally, IPHP curates a BPP Resource list aimed at K-16 educators and the general public. The collective has presented at the Schomburg Research Center, the University of Chicago, Assata’s Daughters, and Hostos Community College. Upcoming projects include a reader on Women, Gender and the Black Panther Party, a workshop presentation at UC Berkeley as well as documentary projects and academic conference presentations.

Read more about Angela's Scholarship >

Lecture:

When and Where I Entered: Intellectual Autobiography of a Japanese African Americanist

Established in my hometown Kobe, Japan in 1954, the Japan Black Studies Association (JBSA), where I now serve as Secretary-General, continues to operate as a crucial knot for Japanese scholars who are working within and across African American studies, African studies, and Caribbean studies. Why do we engage in Black studies? What comes out of this concrete engagement, both as a scholar and a teacher? What does studying the life and history of African American people mean to me, as someone often considered “a woman of color” in the United States but still a privileged member of the dominant society in Japan?

In this talk I would like to share my personal accounts of how I entered into the field of African American studies as a third-generation JBSA member, as well as the challenges and unpredictable outcomes in my experiences of studying in the United States and Japan, that is, working across cultures and disciplines. My talk will show how, first in my freshman year in Japan, a famous TV documentary series on the Civil Rights Movement eventually changed my career path. I’ll share how a Japanese female professor, who specialized in Afrodiasporic women’s literature, guided me to enter the JBSA community. I will express how a semester of course taking at Laney College in Oakland, CA inspired my focus on African American studies and Black women’s history. Lastly I’ll illustrate how my graduate years at Michigan State University, my interaction with dear professors, colleagues and friends of all hues, politicized me and turned me into what I am today. These experiences guide my story of when and where I entered into African American Studies.

Lecture:

From Invisibility to Justice: Women of Color Changing the Face of the Television and Film Industry

What is it truly like to be a mixed raced Latina, A Puerto Rican raised in the borderlands of Mexico, Female, Left of Center, Bisexual, Feminist, Buddhist, a survivor of cancer and a cult, domestic violence and sexual abuse, all while living in the borderlands and to be considered subculture…in the United States of America? Join Dr. Miranda as she discusses how her work is reshaping the film and television industries through her most current projects, which include the Go Girl Chronicles, her webseries about an immigrant Dominican girl who is cartographic and discovering her powers as she comes of age in anti-dreamer world. She’s also developing an original television show called Sangria Street —an all Latinx ensemble comedy and a feature film – Baptism by Fire about a Latinx vigilante killer of U.S government officials who continue to colonize Puerto Rico.

Read more about Dr. Miranda's Scholarship >

Lecture:

Cloud Sweeping

“Cloud Sweeping” is an interactive oral story telling experience about the contemporary history of Native America as told by Linda Levier, a Cowlitz Tribal member. This lecture will use the “Medicine Creek Treaty of 1954,” and the “Fish Wars,” Messages from Franks Landing by Charles Wilkinson, excerpts from Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains by William F. Drannon (1832-1913), The Last Indian War by Janet McCloud and Robert Casey, “The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934,” contemporary indigenous history worldwide, analogies for understanding, and of course the stories told by the stones we will be weaving.

Throughout “Cloud Sweeping” you will engage with the following: Treaty Rights, governance, economics, Native self-determination, colonization, interactions of indigenous people worldwide and self-engagement as a participant and learner.

This is an interactive lecture that involves everyone so please come prepared to actively participate. Storytelling is a casual method of passing on history, critical thinking and assessment of information while engaging in a separate activity.