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Black Women's Conference: Appalachian Mountains, Digital Valleys, and Everything in Between: Black Feminist Subjectivities

Please register for the conference at:  https://uky.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0kd-2oqjwrHNK456UpiyUVBxjL_0IVpm…;

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing the links to join the conference. 

 

27th Annual Black Women’s Conference:

Appalachian Mountains, Digital Valleys, and Everything in Between: Black Feminist Subjectivities


April 15, 2022



10-10:15 AM:  Welcome

Anastasia C. Curwood, Director, CIBS and AAAS

10:15-11:45AM:  Covid, Clapbacks, and Curation:  Blackness in the Digital Era

Kim Gallon, Purdue University,

Regina Hamilton, UK,

Kishonna Gray, UK

Moderated by TBD

12:30-1:45PM: Appalachia Ain’t White: Locating Black Feminists in the Region

Jillean McCommons, University of Virginia

Enkeshi El-Amin, University of Tennessee, Knoxville 

Moderated by Kishonna Gray, UK

2:00-3:15PM Reading Buy Black: An Author and Critics Conversation

LaKisha Simmons, University of Michigan

Oneka LaBennett, University of Southern California

Aria Halliday, UK

Moderated by DaMaris Hill, UK

3:30-4:30PM:  Keynote: Nazera Wright:  Digital Gi(rl)s: Mapping Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century

Moderated by Aria Halliday, UK

4:30-4:45PM:  Wrap Up

Gallery

 

 

Date:
Location:
Virtual- registration required

Sexual Violence and the State: A Racial History of Legal Castration

Friday, April 8th
 
Dr. Greta LaFLeur, Associate Professor of American Studies, Yale University
 
11 am, Gaines Center for the Humanities, Bingham-Davis House
Work-in-Progress Discussion with Dr. LaFleur: “Trans Feminine Histories, Piece By Piece” 
All are welcome! Download a copy of the essay to be discussed here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10-t89dqjpHiyiZxmcsPSoDHdz2Ccpzwn/view?…;
 
2pm, The Cornerstone - UKFCU Esports Theater
Keynote Address: "Sexual Violence and the State: A Racial History of Legal Castration"
 
CO-SPONSORS: English Department, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Early American Literature
 
Greta LaFleur is Associate Professor of American Studies at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on early North American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, the history of race, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer & trans studies. Her first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), reveals how eighteenth-century race science contributed to emerging sciences of sex in the colonial Atlantic world. Other publications include Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (Cornell UP, 2021) and an award-winning special issue of American Quarterly, “Origins of Biopolitics in the Americas.” Dr. LaFleur is currently at work on a new project, tentatively titled A Queer History of Sexual Violence (under contract with The University of Chicago Press), which examines the role of cultural and legal responses to sexual violence in the development of modern understandings of sexuality. Her works-in-progress discussion will be drawn from this project.
Date:
Location:
The Cornerstone - UKFCU Esports Theater

Trans Feminine Histories, Piece By Piece

Friday, April 8th
 
Dr. Greta LaFLeur, Associate Professor of American Studies, Yale University
 
11 am, Gaines Center for the Humanities, Bingham-Davis House
Work-in-Progress Discussion with Dr. LaFleur: “Trans Feminine Histories, Piece By Piece” 
All are welcome! Download a copy of the essay to be discussed here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10-t89dqjpHiyiZxmcsPSoDHdz2Ccpzwn/view?…;
 
2pm, The Cornerstone - UKFCU Esports Theater
Keynote Address: "Sexual Violence and the State: A Racial History of Legal Castration"
 
CO-SPONSORS: English Department, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Early American Literature
 

Greta LaFleur is Associate Professor of American Studies at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on early North American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, the history of race, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer & trans studies. Her first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), reveals how eighteenth-century race science contributed to emerging sciences of sex in the colonial Atlantic world. Other publications include Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (Cornell UP, 2021) and an award-winning special issue of American Quarterly, “Origins of Biopolitics in the Americas.” Dr. LaFleur is currently at work on a new project, tentatively titled A Queer History of Sexual Violence (under contract with The University of Chicago Press), which examines the role of cultural and legal responses to sexual violence in the development of modern understandings of sexuality. Her works-in-progress discussion will be drawn from this project.

 

Date:
Location:
Gaines Center for the Humanities, Bingham-Davis House

The Interviewer Asks: A Docupoetry Reading

The Lewis Honors College’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council proudly hosts The Interviewer Asks: A Docupoetry Reading with Teja Sudhakar on Tuesday, April 12th at 4:00pm either in the Lewis Hall Scholar’s Lounge or on Zoom. This event is hybrid. In-person attendees will enjoy light refreshments from Martine’s Pastries, a local immigrant women-owned business. Zoom attendees may register here to attend remotely: https://uky.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0sfuyurDkqG9AErQc97AeU4ErWxEZWLBEO  

Teja Sudhakar’s original, interdisciplinary work merges oral history and poetry and explores how immigrant women in Lexington, Kentucky conceptualize and navigate borders, homes, places, and spaces. Teja’s docupoetry amplifies women’s voices and interprets their stories gathered through her collaborative oral history project with diverse immigrant women in our community. Docupoetry, a tradition of expressing investigative research through lyrical acts, is driven by the researcher’s own positionality and process of learning alongside their data. Teja’s own negotiations of identity as a first-generation immigrant woman of color imbue the recorded stories exchanged with her narrators, women tracing their origins to Mexico, Pakistan, Canada, Syria, and France. Her poetry provides a beautiful and moving window into how women weave together memory, identity, and place. Please join us for the first public reading from Teja’s poetry chapbook Looking for Smoke

Teja is a double-major in Gender and Women's Studies and Psychology, with a minor is creative writing. She immigrated to the United States from Tamil Nadu, India when she was 5 years old. Sudhakar has received some of the University of Kentucky's highest honors, including the Singletary Scholarship, the Gaines Center for the Humanities Fellowship, and admission into the Lewis Honors College, where in 2019 she founded The Work in Progress Society--the only student-led writing workshop housed at LHC. She would go on to direct the group for the next three years. While at Gaines and Lewis, Sudhakar would also complete apprenticeships under Dr. Rebecca Gayle Howell and Dr. Zada Komara, and in 2021, she collaborated with Howell to co-moderate the Lewis Honors College keynote by the Kingsley Tufts Awarded poet, Ross Gay. Sudhakar's first language is Telugu, her second language is Tamil, and her third is English. She writes in English. Her first chapbook, hold fire (2020), a collection of poems that combines the confessional mode with feminist Hindu myth revision, received U.K.'s top prize for undergraduate creative research, The Oswald Award. Her second chapbook, Looking for Smoke (2022), presents a sequence of docu-poems that explore Kentucky women's immigration narratives, including the poet's own. In recent weeks, Sudhakar has received admission into several top ranked M.F.A. programs in the U.S., one of which she will attend upon graduation. 

 


Date:
Location:
Zoom / Lewis Hall Scholar’s Lounge

The Ground of Our Existence: Anti-Blackness and Whiteness on U.S. College Campuses

Dr. Whitehead’s talk will emphasize the significance of centering Black communities and perspectives about whiteness and whitesupremacy in anti-racist work and scholarship. In this talk, he will explore the following questions:

  • What is the relationship between whiteness and anti-blackness?Why does this relationship matter?
  • What does it mean to center Black communities in how we eventhink about whiteness?
  • What does it mean to center Black communities in how we thinkabout the purpose and usefulness of anti-racist work?

Throughout the talk, Dr. Whitehead will draw upon examples from his research on white undergraduate college students and discuss implications for practice.

Dr. Melvin A. Whitehead is an assistant professor of student affairs administration at Binghamton University. His research explores the legacies of racism on U.S. college campuses,with a focus on white college students’ dis/connections with whiteness and anti-blackness. Dr.Whitehead’s work draws upon critical theories and frameworks and centers ways of knowing within Black communities, trauma, healing, and the spirit to complicate the field’s understanding of whiteness on U.S. college campuses.

 
Date:
Location:
Virtual, via Zoom

Writing Fiction on Appalachian Culture: A Conversation with Authors Lee Mandelo and Ashley Blooms

 
Join the Cooperative for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) for a
conversation between Lee Mandelo, author of the "queer southern gothic"
Summer Sons, and Ashley Blooms, author of recently-published Appalachian novel
Where I Can't Follow, about their work as Kentucky writers. Blooms and Mandelo
will discuss their journeys through publishing, how they approach Appalachian
cultures in their fiction, and how their novels engage with topics such as gender
and trauma within these contexts
Date:
-
Location:
Zoom

Fourth Annual Kentucky Gender & Women's Studies Conference

The organizing committee of the Kentucky Gender & Women’s Studies Conference is happy to announce the Fourth Annual Kentucky GWS Conference. In 2020, the conference was canceled due to the pandemic. We are still not out of the woods, hence this year we will hold the conference virtually. This year’s theme of the conference is “Gender, Sex, and Politics: On Power, Identity and Biopolitics.” In the past decade, the world has seen a rise in the anti-gender right -wing movements. The political gains made by right-wing parties in various countries have paved the way for conservative laws that have a negative impact on bodily autonomy of women, LGBTQ+ communities, people with disability, and minority populations in multiple countries. 

The theme of the conference will address the issues faced by people all across the world in terms of bodily rights and autonomy. We invite original research papers, poster presentations and workshops on this theme. This conference aims to create an intellectually stimulating space for graduate students, activists and faculty to exchange and develop their thoughts on contemporary academic/political conversations across different disciplines, approaches, and positions. 

 

For a detailed schedule of the conference, visit: https://kygws.as.uky.edu/schedule   

To register, visit: https://kygws.as.uky.edu/registration-form-zoom

 

 

Date:
-
Location:
virtual

Keynote Talk by Dr. Carol Mason - KYGWS Conference

Dr. Mason is a Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, and English at the University of Kentucky. She is also affiliate faculty at the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies at University of California and serves on the editorial board of American Studies at University of Kansas.Her areas of interest are 20th-century American culture and literature; critical studies of whiteness; race and reproduction; theories of gender and sexuality; and Right-Wing Movements. She has published multiple scholarly articles and books on these topics.

To learn more about Dr. Mason, please visit: https://gws.as.uky.edu/users/cama239

To register for this webinar and rest of the KYGWS Conference panels, please visit: https://kygws.as.uky.edu/registration-form-zoom

For information visit: https://kygws.as.uky.edu/ or email us at kygwsconference@gmail.com.

Date:
Location:
virtual, zoom

2024 Space, Place, & Southern Grace Recipient

Congratulations to Mariana Escobedo de la Pena for being awarded the 2024 Space, Place, and Southern Grace for Feminist Studies Scholarship. 

This scholarship is made possible by Sarah Caton (B.A. GWS ’16) and provides $1,000 for a GWS major entering their junior or senior year.   The scholarship winner will also have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Sarah for professional mentorship throughout the academic year.

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