Events

#FromNO2Love is a conference, over a period of 1.5-days, commemorating the Ford Foundation-funded, acclaimed film, NO! The Rape Documentary and the October 1, 2019 publication of the edited anthology, love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse. The conference is free and open to the public and will lift the long-term and new survivor-led work that addresses, disrupts, and works to humanely end child sexual abuse and adult rape in Black and marginalized communities.  REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED. You must register for each of the events you plan to attend.

Provost Wendell Pritchett and other community voices will discuss DACA and the potential impact of the upcoming Supreme Court DACA hearing.

NO! The Rape Documentary is the 2006-released, Ford Foundation-funded, groundbreaking feature length film that explores the international atrocity of rape of cisgender women by cisgender men, and other forms of sexual assault through the first person testimonies, scholarship, spirituality, activism, and cultural work of Black people in the United States. Produced, written, and directed over a period of 12-years, by child sexual abuse and adult rape survivor Aishah Shahidah Simmons, NO! also explores how rape is used as a weapon of homophobia.

NO! The Rape Documentary is the 2006-released, Ford Foundation-funded, groundbreaking feature length film that explores the international atrocity of rape of cisgender women by cisgender men, and other forms of sexual assault through the first person testimonies, scholarship, spirituality, activism, and cultural work of Black people in the United States. Produced, written, and directed over a period of 12-years, by child sexual abuse and adult rape survivor Aishah Shahidah Simmons, NO! also explores how rape is used as a weapon of homophobia.

A talk by Deboleena Roy, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology, Emory University.

Should feminists clone? What do neurons think about? How can we learn from bacterial writing? These provocative questions have haunted neuroscientist and molecular biologist Deboleena Roy since her early days when conducting experiments on an in vitro cell line using molecular biology techniques. A natural scientist and feminist theorist, Roy takes seriously the expressive capabilities of and kinships formed between biological “objects,” such as bacteria and other human, nonhuman, organic, and inorganic actants, as ways to better understand processes of becoming. 

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. 

“And She Was Loved”: In Memory of Toni Morrison.

COMING TOGETHER TO SHARE A STORY: Finding Strength in Vulnerability

The son of a peasant farmer and charcoal seller, Shadrack Frimpong, C'15, SP2'19
Founder, Cocoa360, grew up without running water and electricity in rural Ghana and became the first person from his village to attend college in the U.S. He graduated from Penn with Penn highest honor, the President Engagement Prize. Come hear the riveting journey that led him to start Cocoa360, a non-profit organization that helps fund tuition for girls and sustain a community hospital in Ghana.

A three day conference featuring Dagmawi Woubshet.  Four hundred years ago, 20-30 Africans landed at Point Comfort, Virginia, as the first enslaved Africans to arrive in the American colonies.  What is the global significance of this historical event?

Dr. Roberto G. Gonzales, Professor of Education at Harvard University, will present the talk titled: Lives Still in Limbo: UnDACAmented and Navigating Uncertain Futures. His research centers on contemporary processes of immigration and social inequality, and stems from theoretical interests at the intersection of race and ethnicity, immigration, and policy. In particular, his research examines the effects of legal contexts on the coming of age experiences of vulnerable and hard-to-reach immigrant youth populations. His book, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America (University of California Press), is based on an in-depth study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles for twelve years.