Events

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.

Saheed Aderinto is an Associate Professor of History at Western Carolina University.

Saheed Aderinto recently completed a book-length manuscript, Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria. He has published seven books, including Guns and Society in Colonial Nigeria: Firearms, Culture, and Public Order (Indiana University Press, 2018) and When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958 (University of Illinois Press, 2015).

Teacher Research and Knowledge: A Celebration of Writing and Literacy is an annual one-day conference presented by and for Philadelphia educators.

Join local educators for a day of learning, reflection, and joy as we share promising practices and resources for supporting writing and literacy among young people!

This year's conference will focus on teacher research and knowledge and the relationship between theory and practice.​ The conference is hosted by the Philadelphia Writing Project in partnership with the Teachers Institute of Philadelphia (TIP), Mighty Writers, and PennGSE's Reading/Writing/Literacy, and Urban Teacher Apprenticeship Program.

Adia Benton is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Northwestern University, where she is affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. Her first book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development Through Disease in Sierra Leone, won the 2017 Rachel Carson Prize, which is awarded by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) to the best book in the field of Science and Technology Studies with strong social or political relevance.

Her body of work addresses transnational efforts to eliminate health disparities and inequalities, and the role of ideology in global health. In addition to ongoing research on public health responses to epidemics, including the 2013-2016 West African Ebola outbreak, she has conducted research on the growing movement to fully incorporate surgical care into commonsense notions of “global health.” Her other writing has touched on the politics of anthropological knowledge in infectious disease outbreak response, racial hierarchies in humanitarianism and development, and techniques of enumeration in gender-based violence programs. She has a PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University, an MPH in international health from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, and an AB in Human Biology from Brown University. She has held a postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College and visiting positions at Oberlin College and in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Penn Spectrum Weekend (PSW) is a weekend-long conference and celebration taking place on Penn’s Campus on October 4-6, 2019. The conference is hosted every three years and brings together alumni for dialogue centered on issues of cultural identity and the intersectionalities that may play a role, including topics specific to the Black, Latinx, Native, Asian, LGBTQ, Muslim, First-gen alumni and student communities. We welcome and invite alumni and allies from all backgrounds as well as all current Penn undergraduate and graduate students.

Join us for a monthlong series of events celebrating the 34th annual Latinx Heritage Month at Penn.

Assan Sarr is an associate professor of History and the director of graduate studies in the Department of History at Ohio University. I am also an affiliate faculty of the African Studies Program and a member of the Ohio University Press Board. In 2016, I was awarded the 2016-17 Jeanette G. Grasselli Brown Faculty Teaching Award in the Humanities. Prior to joining the Ohio University faculty, I taught African and World History at the College of Charleston in South Carolina for 3 years. My research interests covers a wide range of topics including agrarian change, land tenure and Islam in Gambia region.  I published several articles, book chapters and a 2016 book entitled Islam Power and Dependency in the Gambia River Basin: The politics of land control, 1790-1940 with the University of Rochester Press. I am now working on a book on a Tijaniyya community in the Gambia, whose role in the growth and development of the brotherhood in the Senegambia was major but not recognized in the scholarship.

A global participatory political art project that memorializes and bears witness to the thousands of migrants who have died as a result of Prevention Through Deterrence, the U.S. immigration policy between Mexico and the United States. The project is sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project, a non-profit research-art-education-media collective directed by Jason De León, Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. The pop-up installation is a 20-foot long map of the Arizona/Mexico border populated with approximately 3200 handwritten toe tags containing information about those who have died while migrating.

The Hate U Give, a movie based on a novel by Angie Thomas, follows the fallout after a high school student witnesses a police shooting and struggles navigating between two worlds.  Faciliatated by Dr. Ann Tiao and Imani Harvin.