Events

The Black Lives Matter movement, the stark inequalities of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing racial resentment of the Trump Era made 2020 a uniquely challenging and uniquely fruitful year for Black media-makers. This symposium, organized by Professor Sarah J. Jackson, brings together Black media-makers across industries to discuss the urgency of now and best practices for media organizations covering race and racial justice issues.

Panelists include:

• Gene Demby
• Maori Karmael Holmes
• Errin Haines
• Chenjerai Kumanyika
• Stacy-Marie Ishmael
• Wesley Lowery
• Ayesha Rascoe
• Jelani Cobb
• and more!

The speaker Hana Masri, is a CARGC postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg School.  She earned her Ph.D. in rhetoric and language from the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 2020.

This presentation examines material waste’s role in shaping broader discourses about which lives have value and which, like trash itself, are deemed disposable. Addressing case studies ranging from the politics of wastewater infrastructure in Gaza to migrant communities organizing against environmental racism in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to large scale uprisings against the Lebanese government spurred by its failure to manage the country’s garbage, the presentation focuses on how embodied sensation, like smell, can both communicate human disposability and motivate collective political action. These case studies affirm the rhetorical function of matter across transnational contexts and also evidence a need to attend to the ways racial, colonial, and capitalist hierarchies of human value are embedded in and contested by nonhuman communication. By turning to the smell of waste as a communicative force that confounds traditionally upheld boundaries between material and symbolic (consequently spurring otherwise unlikely social movement coalitions), Masri argues that more-than-human material communication is constitutive of — rather than a break from — the sociopolitical and rhetorical systems that make certain groups of people less-than-human.

Native Heritage Month 2020 – Series on Contemporary Native American Issues - A virtual lecture on Native/Indigenous Art as an integral part of Native culture. This event features the work of Micah Wesley, a native American modern painter, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation of Oklahoma and Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma. Live from Indian Territory, USA.

The 2020 Honorable A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. Memorial Lecture is being given by Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Native Heritage Month 2020 – Series on Contemporary Native American Issues - Quechua Geographies: Between Indigeneity and Academia, a virtual lecture by Prof. Sandy Grande (Quechua), author of Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought.

Sandy Grande, University of Connecticut, Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut, will present on Indigenous Rights and Education.

Speaker Aaron Trammell is an assistant professor of Informatics at UC Irvine. He graduated from the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information in 2015 and spent a year at the USC Annenberg School as a postdoctoral researcher.  This presentation will argue that in order to understand the normalization of whiteness in digital culture — as Kishonna Gray,  Safiya Noble,  and Ruha Benjamin  have argued — we must better understand the people who constitute the cultures that work closely with digital technology. I look toward hobby games and hobbyists to recuperate a more complete genealogical understanding of white masculinity in geek culture. As a method, genealogy helps to reveal the complex and often counterintuitive ways that subjectivity is produced, normalized, and made invisible. My historical work shows that unlike the Irish—who cast themselves as white in order to gain social privilege in America’s racist society —hobbyists see themselves as outsiders. The denial of white male privilege established by hobbyists continues to define the socio-technical space of geek culture today.

Speaker Maria Repnikova is an Assistant Professor of Global Communication at Georgia State University - This colloquium presents the multifaceted story of China’s soft power campaigns in Africa, with a special focus on Ethiopia — one of China’s closest economic and political partners on the continent. Countering the claims of China’s authoritarian export, the analysis of China’s engagement with Ethiopian elites, youth and media audiences, showcases what Repnikova describes as a “fragmented spectacle” — a grand, but disjointed display of China’s prowess and generosity. Drawing on rich fieldwork in Ethiopia and China, the analysis illuminates the key tensions or disjunctures in China’s attempts to build recognition and solidarity in the Global South. Repnikova introduces the tensions between China’s presentation of itself as at once aspirational and inhibiting; as well as between the material and cultural modes of seduction, and between the immense scale of China’s societal engagement and its inconsistent quality when it comes to implementation on the ground. She further demonstrates the complex reactions of Ethiopian participants to Chinese campaigns, featuring a mix of performance of gratitude, negotiation and racial contestation. Overall, Sino-African solidarity is less rooted in deep bilateral affinities but rather in a shared desire to “enter” the West — as both Chinese and Ethiopian participants take advantage of these interactions to gain competitiveness in the Western-centric global order.

In these times of widespread recognition of racial injustice, The Urgent Matter of Black Lives panel will examine the urgent work that must be done in order to fight systemic racism. Penn Africana Studies faculty Mary Frances Berry, Dorothy Roberts, and Tukufu Zuberi will discuss the social, legal, economic, and political dynamics of race, nationally and internationally, in this post-Floyd America.

Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, Vasco da Gama Assistant Professor of Early Modern Portuguese History, Brown University, will present on African diaspora and Marroon communities.