Events

Penn alumni and friends are invited to join author, historian, activist, and Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History Dr. Mary Frances Berry for an interactive, virtual discussion of her newest book, HISTORY TEACHES US TO RESIST: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times.

A discussion of the documentary film “9066 to 9/11” in partnership with the Japanese American National Museum and several Penn entities including Penn Libraries, PAACH, and ASAM. The discussion will feature the producers of the film as well as ASAM Lecturer Rob Buscher.

The COVID-19 pandemic has witnessed a surge in incidents of bias, discrimination, violence and hate directed against people of Asian backgrounds. This event, the first in a discussion series sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Task Force on Providing Support to Asian and Asian-American Students and Scholars, the Penn Pan-Asian-American Community House (PAACH), and the Program on Asian-American Studies (ASAM), will feature two distinguished Penn alumni, City Councilmember Helen Gym and criminologist and community activist Cliff Akiyama, as well as Penn CAPS' Multilingual Psychologist Yuhong He. Cliff will provide some historical background and context for the challenges that Philadelphia’s Asian and Asian-American communities have faced during the pandemic, Councilmember Gym will discuss the city of Philadelphia’s response, and Yuhong will describe the impact on Penn’s student community. The dialogue and subsequent Q&A will be moderated by Penn PAACH Student Leader Shaina Zafar (C'21.)

You might be familiar with some of the more famous monuments around the globe—the Great Pyramids in Egypt; Stonehenge in England; Machu Picchu in Peru. But did you know we have our own impressive monuments right here in the United States? Some even older than the pyramids, these spectacular earthworks give us glimpses into more than 5,000 years of Native North American history. Moundbuilders explores the fascinating story of Native American moundbuilding through a variety of photographs, artifacts, archival materials, and excavation records.

PENN MEDICINE AND THE AFTERLIVES OF SLAVERY FELLOWS' MINI-SYMPOSIUM.

This exhibition explores how African American women of the late twentieth century authored books across multiple genres as they explored Black cultural and intellectual traditions. Novels, poetry, cookbooks, children’s books, essays, biographies and autobiographies, music, sermons, folklore, and art were all employed for this purpose, and are highlighted in this exhibition. Wherever possible, lesser-known works by prominent Black women writers are exhibited, often in genres that emphasize the range of their talents.

The Daedalus Quartet, Penn’s quartet-in-residence, explores migration through music, illustrating how centuries of cultural cross-pollination has enriched our artistic and spiritual life. Music truly has no borders, unifying through the universality of the human experience. In this performance, the quartet will perform works that exhibit the richness and complexity of this cultural convergence, including a world premiere of a collaborative work by Kinan Abou-afach.

In an October 2018 article in The Guardian, Harvard lecturer Siddharth Kara describes the back-breaking work of searching for cobalt by 15-year-old Elodie, who is exposed to toxic dust in the process. Elodie sells her cobalt to Chinese distributors who export and refine the mineral in China then sell it to tech companies to power our digital devices such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets. These devices are then used to power important online activism, including disability justice work. As Elodie and 35,000 other Congolese children negotiate dangerous working conditions that impair their health, Western consumers enjoy the fruits of their debilitating labor to fight for their own rights in the ableist infrastructure of the West. What might be possible if the supply chain was no longer imagined as linear but circular? How might a new set of relations between consumers and laborers create the kind of advocacy that would force corporate entities to change their policies if they have to be accountable to both groups? I argue that closing the supply chain into a loop is essential as it effectively links Environmental, Labor, Racial, Gender, and Disability Justice movements to each other in a way that ripples beyond any one movement. Using a Black Feminist Disability Framework this project examines the debilitating impact of mineral harvesting on the Black Congolese youth who do this work, and the digital disability activism their labor enables in the West.

Professor Helg is an scholar of worldwide recognition in the field of Latin American History and Politics who has written extensively on issues of slave liberation movements and equal rights in Latin America and the Caribbean.  Her works focus on questions of social hierarchies based on race and color distinctions, and the participation process of Blacks and Mulattoes in post-independent politics and governance in Cuba, Columbia, Mexico, Argentina, and Haiti.  She also discusses issues of education and economic development in those regions in a comparative perspective. Themes such as identity, politics, social revolutions, nation building and reconstruction, and racial equality and nationalism are at the core of her scholarship.

Tsvey Brider Performance Group.
Presented by Penn’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and Wolf Humanities Center 

Performing as Tsvey Brider, Yiddish songwriting, arranging, and performing duo Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell (vocalist) and Dmitri Gaskin (accordionist) create new musical idioms by combining two distinct older ones: African American spirituals and the music of Jewish Eastern Europe. Drawing from folk songs, lullabies, art, and religious music, Children of the Ghetto + Black Shul mobilizes an array of historic genres to create a repertoire of songs authentically inhabiting the sounds and histories of two traditions.