This hybrid event, open to students, faculty, and staff, offers the opportunity for participants to explore the concept of integration and to define what that means at the University of Kentucky. As they are prompted to think about what we can all do in our respective inter-campus communities to begin to move steps beyond inclusion and into creating equity in the classroom, residence hall, office, or even more broadly within programs and student organizations, participants will leave this lunch workshop/discussion having identified an opportunity to enhance equity in their area of work and/or with a concrete idea for implementing some action.

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.

Professor Linkhoeva will present her research on colonial policies by the Soviet and Japanese regimes on the Mongolian territories (Buriatia, Outer and Inner Mongolia). The historiographical division between the communist bloc (Russia/Buriatia/Outer Mongolia/communist China) and the anticommunist bloc (Japan/Inner Mongolia/Manchuria/Republican China) has precluded identifying strategies and policies that great powers, regardless of their ideological preferences, deploy in dealing with “small people” caught in the regional power struggles. The talk shifts away from these national/ist perspectives and places compartmentalized experiences of the borderland people, the Buriat-Mongols, in the center of a history.

Dr. Tatiana Linkhoeva is Assistant Professor of Japanese History at New York University. Her forthcoming book, Revolution Goes East. Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism will be published by Cornell University Press in March 2020. 

Native of the republic of Buriatia (Russia), Dr. Linkhoeva graduated from Moscow State University, received her MA from the University of Tokyo, and PhD in History from UC Berkeley. She has been awarded fellowships from Japan’s Ministry of Education, the Japan Foundation, UC Berkeley, and the German Excellence Initiative.

Abstract: This presentation explores how many marginalized users of digital technologies are labeled as deviant. Many women and people of color utilize digital technologies for means beyond what they were intended.  For instance, gaming technologies and their associated online environments are often used as spaces to foster community among queer gamers who are not ‘out’ in their physical spaces but have the opportunity to be ‘out online’. Social media and other technologies afford Black users the means to resist physical oppression and mobilize around social justice issues. Ethnographic observations and narrative interviews reveal this Black digital praxis uncovering what Black cyberfeminists would articulate as the liberatory potentials of digital technologies.
 

Bio: Dr. Kishonna L. Gray (@kishonnagray) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois - Chicago. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.  She also previously served as a MLK Scholar and Visiting Professor in Women and Gender Studies and Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Gray is an interdisciplinary, intersectional, digital media scholar whose areas of research include identity, performance and online environments, embodied deviance, cultural production, video games, and Black Cyberfeminism.

Dunstan is the NCSU Assistant Director of the Office of Assessment. Her research examines dialect as an element of diversity that shapes the college experience, particularly for speakers of non-standardized dialects of English. Dunstan and Jaeger (2015) found that students from rural, Southern Appalachia felt that their use of a regional dialect put them at a disadvantage in the college classroom. The students interviewed by Dunstan reported that “they had been hesitant to speak in class, felt singled out, dreaded oral presentations, tried to change the way they talked, and felt that they had to work harder to earn the respect of faculty and peers”. In addition to speaking about her work with Appalachian college students, Dunstan would accompany members of the Department of Linguistics to a meeting with the UK office of Academic and Student Affairs to discuss how to meet the needs of all UK students, regardless of linguistic background.