Every year, the Anthropology Graduate Student Association (AGSA) invites an outstanding anthropologist from outside the university to give a public talk as part of our Distinguished Lecturer Series. For 2020, we are pleased to host Dr. Khiara Bridges, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and former Associate Dean of Equity, Justice, and Engagement at Boston University.

Khiara M. Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has written many articles concerning, race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared or will soon appear in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press.

In this talk Dr. Rucker-Chang explores the uses and meanings of "Blackness" in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1992) and its successor states of Serbia and Montenegro. To reflect on the mechanisms of cultural and social incorporation of “Blacks” in Yugoslavia, she highlights how, in defiance to Yugoslav narratives of ethnic and racial inclusion, post-Yugoslav identity has adopted a normative ethnic value of  "whiteness" as an inalienable, exclusive feature of belonging.

Sunnie Rucker-Chang is an Assistant Professor of Slavic and East European Studies and Director of European Studies at University of Cincinnati. Her primary interests lie in cultural and racial formation(s) in the Balkans. She is a co-editor of and contributor to the book Chinese Migrants in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2011). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Critical Romani Studies, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Her co-authored book, Roma Rights and US Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Approach, is currently in press with Cambridge University Press, and her co-edited volume Balkan Migrants: to, from, and in the Balkans: Identity, Alterity, and Culture is under contract with Liverpool University Press. For the 2019-2020 academic year Sunnie will work on her monograph focusing on racial formations and Blackness in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav space for which she has been awarded an American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship.

Sponsored by the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Department of African American and Africana Studies, Department of History, International Studies, Department of Anthropology and the College of Arts and Sciences.

In this talk Dr. Rucker-Chang explores the uses and meanings of "Blackness" in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1992) and its successor states of Serbia and Montenegro. To reflect on the mechanisms of cultural and social incorporation of “Blacks” in Yugoslavia, she highlights how, in defiance to Yugoslav narratives of ethnic and racial inclusion, post-Yugoslav identity has adopted a normative ethnic value of  "whiteness" as an inalienable, exclusive feature of belonging.

Sunnie Rucker-Chang is an Assistant Professor of Slavic and East European Studies and Director of European Studies at University of Cincinnati. Her primary interests lie in cultural and racial formation(s) in the Balkans. She is a co-editor of and contributor to the book Chinese Migrants in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2011). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Critical Romani Studies, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Her co-authored book, Roma Rights and US Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Approach, is currently in press with Cambridge University Press, and her co-edited volume Balkan Migrants: to, from, and in the Balkans: Identity, Alterity, and Culture is under contract with Liverpool University Press. For the 2019-2020 academic year Sunnie will work on her monograph focusing on racial formations and Blackness in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav space for which she has been awarded an American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship.

Sponsored by the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Department of African American and Africana Studies, Department of History, International Studies, Department of Anthropology and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Join us for free food, free t-shirts, and giveaways as we kick off a year that will feature a series of events looking at the history and the future of equity at the University of Kentucky and beyond. Our featured speaker Dr. George C. Wright, Distinguished Visiting Professor of HIstory, will explain why Lyman T. Johnson's successful desegregation lawsuit still matter today, 70 years later. 

Join us for free food, free t-shirts, and giveaways as we kick off a year that will feature a series of events looking at the history and the future of equity at the University of Kentucky and beyond. Our featured speaker Dr. George C. Wright, Distinguished Visiting Professor of HIstory, will explain why Lyman T. Johnson's successful desegregation lawsuit still matter today, 70 years later.