Events
Engaging our communities
What We Mean When We Say Free Them All: Lessons from the Social Justice Initiative
La Vaughn Belle, Mariame Kaba, and CeCe McDonald
Join the BCRW Social Justice Institute residents La Vaughn Belle, Mariame Kaba, and CeCe McDonald for a discussion of their work as artists, organizers, scholars, and visionaries responding to histories and ongoing manifestations of state and interpersonal violence.
Read MoreEngaging the Archival Record of Danish Colonial Rule: A Conversation
La Vaughn Belle, Helle Stenum, and Tiphanie Yanique, moderated by Tami Navarro
This conversation will highlight engagements with the archival record of the Danish West Indies, the islands now known as the United States Virgin Islands, featuring speakers who work on archival practice, and who are working to address structural inequalities in the ways these documents are situated.
Read MoreA Gendered Brain? Shattering Sexist Science
Gina Rippon, Daphna Joel, and Giordana Grossi, moderated by Beck Jordan-Young
Neuroscientist Gina Rippon will discuss the historical and political conditions that produced ideas of binary gender differences in our brains, how and why these misperceptions have persisted into the 21st century, and how the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience dispel these fallacies.
Read More“If We Forget Ourselves, Who Will Be Left to Remember Us?”: A Conversation with Cherríe Moraga
Cherríe Moraga
Celebrated writer and activist Cherríe Moraga will speak to the issue of cultural amnesia in the United States and the recuperation of ancestral memory toward the radicalization of political consciousness and activism for the future.
Read MoreResisting Gendered State Violence Across Turtle Island: Cross-Border Solidarity Against Anti-Blackness
Robyn Maynard, author of best-selling Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present
Robyn Maynard will discuss similarities and differences in histories, tactics, modes, and consequences of state violence targeting Black communities in the U.S., Canada and at the border, articulating critical questions and strategies for cross-border solidarity, organizing, and resistance in the current political moment.
Read MoreThe Extraordinary 2018 Eruption of Kīlauea Volcano, Hawaii
Tina Neal
Tina Neal will describe this summer's intense volcanic unrest and eruption at one of the most active volcanoes in the world, and the highest-threat volcano in the United States, Kīlauea Volcano on the Island of Hawaii.
Read MoreRadical Black Women of Harlem: A Walking Tour
Asha Futterman and Mariame Kaba
Learn about radical Black women who contributed to making Harlem a center of cultural innovation, radical politics and sustained activism throughout the twentieth century.
Read More“Moving Mountains and Liberating Dialogues”: Creating a Black Feminist Archaeology
Whitney Battle-Baptiste
Battle-Baptiste will discuss how she approached the work of studying the material past of captive African peoples, combining inquiries into her own identity and relationship to the field of archaeology, and an intersectional approach to African Diaspora archaeology through a Black feminist theoretical lens.
Read MoreBlack Imaginaries, Scandinavian Diasporas
Jeannette Ehlers, Ellen Nyman, and La Vaughn Belle
Join Jeannette Ehlers (Denmark/West Indies), Ellen Nyman (Sweden), and La Vaughn Belle (St. Croix) for a conversation on the aesthetics of decolonization.
Read MoreWayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: A Salon in Honor of Saidiya Hartman
Saidiya Hartman with Daphne Brooks, Aimee Meredith Cox, Macarena Gomez-Barris, and Alexander G. Weheliye, moderated by Tina Campt
Saidiya Hartman’s highly anticipated new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (Norton, February 2019) wrestles with the question, “What is a free life?”
Read MoreWe Will Have Been Living Otherwise: Archiving in the Future Perfect Tense
Avery Gordon
What kind of archive safeguards or keeps company with or “summons,” to use Chimurenga Library’s words, a past that the present hasn’t yet caught up with? Can such a past or such an archive be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative?
Read MoreAfrican Diasporic Countervisualities
La Vaughn Belle, Vanessa Valdes, and Dixa Ramirez, moderated by Tina Campt
This panel challenges the overproduction of certain images of Caribbean men, women, and children that have allowed for dominant, often nationalist, narratives from the region, highlighting inconvenient histories previously ignored, erased, silenced, ghosted.
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