This talk will use a hybrid, multi-disciplinary lens to explore how Black women’s art intersects with and influences popular media through mainstream visual representation, as well as its relationship to political discourses on race, gender and embodied experience. Drawing on Black feminism, Literacy Studies and Critical Theory, I focus on the work of Kara Walker and Julie Dash as situated within the contested and politically charged narratives that animate the ways in which we understand current trends and cultural productions ranging from Beyonce’s Lemonade to #BlackGirlMagic to post-Katrina New Orleans. By theorizing these artifacts and relationships, the talk also grapples with contextualizing these works as part of a continuum wherein Black women’s experiences (through artistic production) reflect and constitute a complex network of literacies engaging with race, class, gender, sexuality and revolution. Lastly, the talk aims to mobilize these subjects for classroom practice that responds to the growing need for instructional and curricular innovations that not only include but center Black women's art and feminist theory as potential catalysts for social change.

Sponsored by Gender & Women’s Studies and the College of Arts & Sciences

Co-sponsored by Sociology, English, Social Theory, African American & Africana Studies

Often discussed as individual vulnerabilities exploited by a nefarious “other,” the blueprint for US trafficking began before the establishment of the nation-state—specifically, with the forced movement of indigenous peoples purportedly for the protection of a burgeoning citizenry.  Imagining an indigenous legal futurity, Dr. April Petillo envisions how justice more dependent on radical freedom from targeting than on capture and removal might improve anti-trafficking interventions. Blending legal ethnography, critical trafficking studies and sociolegal analysis reliant on indigenous critique/perspective, Dr. Petillo interrogates the ways that existing anti-trafficking efforts as constitutive tools of a punitive criminal system.  Using her work gathering indian country policy influencer perspectives on claims of targeted recruitment of indigenous peoples for sex trafficking, Dr. Petillo examines how trafficking discourse informed by “law-and-order” feminist rhetoric derails decolonial efforts and reifies jurisdictional coloniality. from this perspective, existing interventions are narrowly defined distractions which simultaneously divert attention from the structural violences that they represent as they increase harm and decrease justice for racialized peoples.  Dr. Petillo also addresses where this perspective shines a different light on approaches grounded in community-defined justice and decolonization than on incarceration.



Sponsored by Gender & Women’s Studies and the College of Arts & Sciences

Co-sponsored by African American & Africana studies

Watch Donna Haraway Story Telling for Earthly Survival with a discussion post movie.