Events

A staged adaptation addressing the trials and tribulations of being a man of color in American today. Free and open to the public. Sponsors: National Men of Color Association and Brothers of Alpha Phi Alpha. For more information contact: 267-230-0317.

A talk by Dr. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University.

A New Jim Code? Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life.

Celebrating World AIDS Day at Penn, 

Featuring Michele Andrasik, Ph.D., Director – Social & Behavioral Sciences & Community Engagement, Fred Hutchinson Institute, Assistant Professor of Global Health and the Environment, University of Washington.

Dr. Andrasik will discuss: Increasing awareness of “race-based” medicine and how it impacts current health inequities; Understanding physiological and psychological impacts of Historical Trauma; Identifying how implicit bias impacts morbidity and mortality; Developing skills to mitigate the impact of bias in medical practice.

A talk by Gail Hershatter, Distinguished Professor of History, University of California, Santa Cruz.

In the first several decades of the People’s Republic of China, ambitious state initiatives worked to reshape everything about rural communities. State authorities created powerful new gendered roles for rural women, mostly in the realm of collective labor and political action. Drawing from research in Shaanxi province, Gail Hershatter explores the sometimes surprising interactions between Woman as socialist icon and the gendered everyday of family and community life. A historian of Modern China, Hershatter was among the first Western scholars to conduct extended research in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution.

The Senegal-based artist team, Amadou Kane Sy and Muhsana Ali, Center of Africana Studies Fall 2019 Artists in Residence, will discuss their creative process in the production of their  permanent sculptural installation for the Penn Museum’s new Africa Gallery. 

A talk by Erin Moriarty Harrelson, Assistant Professor of Deaf Studies, Gallaudet University.

Tourism scholars have noted that tourists tend to seek out new, yet familiar, experiences. As a part of what Erin Harrelson calls “the deaf global circuit,” deaf tourists often want to visit deaf spaces and meet other deaf people. They make a point of seeking both to better understand differences, especially between sign languages and cultural status. Harrelson will discuss Deaf tourist practices and the moralities that have been built around the deaf global circuit, showing clips from her ethnographic film as part of her 2018 fieldwork in Bali. Reception to follow.

Penn Museum Africa Gallery Opening, Symposium & Film Screenings.

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, which will include selected literary readings voiced by KWH community members, the quartet will perform works that exhibit the richness and complexity of this cultural convergence, including the Philadelphia premiere of a new work by Gabriel Bolanos Chamorro and a world premiere by Penn graduate student composer Ania Vu. 

Sponsored by: Creative Ventures at Kelly Writers House, the Music Department, the Center for Africana Studies, the Middle East Center, the South Asia Center , the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Wolf Humanities Center - Humanities at Large

Event Speaker: Nicholas Sambanis, Presidential Distinguished Professor and Chair of Political Science.

Large waves of immigration in Europe and other economically developed parts of the world have resulted in conflict between native and immigrant populations. To what extent is that conflict due to cultural reasons or ascriptive (ethnic, racial, religious) differences? Could conflict be mitigated if immigrants demonstrate that they share the native population's norms and ideas about appropriate civic behavior? In his talk, Nicholas Sambanis, Director of the Penn Program on Identity and Conflict, will present experimental evidence from Germany on the power of civic norms to reduce discrimination against immigrants.

The 2019 Hon. A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. Memorial Lecture, co-sponsored by the Center for Africana Studies and Penn Law School features attorney and criminal justice reform advocate Brittany Barnett.