The Lewis Honors College’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council proudly hosts The Interviewer Asks: A Docupoetry Reading with Teja Sudhakar on Tuesday, April 12^th 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. 

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.

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

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.