Part of the Africana Saturday School Double Lecture Series

Dr. Steven Kniffley presents “Do You: Developing Black Masculinity in Racist Spaces”

The second hour features David Cozart's presentation, “You LOOK Just Like Yo Daddy: Fatherhood as a Vision and Social Determinant of BMoC”

A scholar of science, technology, and social inequality, Nelson is the author most recently of The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome. Her publications also include a symposium in the British Journal of Sociology on history, genealogy, and the #GU272, and the books Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination; Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History; and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. In 2002, she edited “Afrofuturism,” an influential special issue of Social Text

The Digital In/Equalities Speaker Series brings leading scholars to campus to share their research and perspectives on issues of social justice across a range of digital topics, including apps, social media, geographic information systems (GIS), big data, genomic research and coding. While each of our proposed speaks across different software, hardware, and platforms, they are bound in their interrelated concerns about inequality and justice, both online and in everyday life.

Walter Mosley is one of the most versatile and admired writers in America today. He is the author of more than 43 critically acclaimed books, including the major bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins. His work has been translated into 23 languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young adult novel. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The Nation, among other publications. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.

Free and open to the public.

Appalachian Studies Association Conference Plenary II, Black Appalachian Women: Testimonies, Environmental Justice, and Historical Reparations

Friday, March 13, 2020, 5:00pm-6:15pm in the Gatton Student Center Worsham Cinema. A panel of Black Appalachian women discuss their work in the academy, film, social justice organizations, literature, and museums.

Panelists include: Karida Brown, UCLA Associate Professor of Sociology; Kelly Navies, Museum Specialist Oral Historian at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, Co-Executive Director, Highlander Research & Education Center; and Crystal Wilkinson, UK Associate Professor of English; moderated by Jillean McCommons, UK Department of History PhD Candidate

This event is a part of the Appalachian Studies Association Conference and is a sponsored by the Year of Equity

Appalachian Studies Association Conference Plenary 1, Mixed Mesophytic Nation: Pathways to Citizenship

Friday, March 13, 2020, 11:30am-12:45pm in the Gatton Student Center Worsham Cinema. The session focuses on forest commoning in four historically and politically distinct situations: Appalachian settler commoning in relation to public lands, Appalachian settler commoning in the coalfields, Afrolachian commoning in the coalfields, and Cherokee participation in management of public forests. The panel makes connections between associated spiritual and cultural values and political implications for stewarding the Mother Forest.

Panelists include: Ruby Daniels, Incubator Farmer, Sprouting Farms; Tommy Cabe, Forest Resource Specialist, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians; & Mary Hufford, Associate Director, Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network, moderated by Kathryn Newfont, UK Associate Professor of History

This event is a part of the Appalachian Studies Association Conference and is a sponsored by the Year of Equity

You can’t address Appalachia without addressing addiction, namely the opioid epidemic. At Queer Appalachia, we try to shed light on the prevalence of this problem in the region and seek to emphasize that nobody— regardless of addiction status— is disposable.

With the disheartening and exponentially increasing rate of opioid abuse in Appalachia, there is nobody in the region who doesn’t play a role. As if being queer in rural regions isn’t isolating and ostracizing enough, the addition of trying to recover only further exacerbates these experiences. The numbers of opioid abuse in Appalachia increase significantly when you looking at folks with queer identities.

 

Queer Appalachia responds to our community's needs by offering Harm Reduction trainings and supplies.

Black women turn out to vote at higher rates than any other group of Americans. They are also incarcerated at twice the rate of white women, and have been incarcerated at higher rates than black men since 1980. This interdisciplinary panel explores black women's experiences at the intersection of citizenship and criminal justice from the perspectives of law, social science, literature, and lived experience.

Damaris Hill. Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and English literature in the Department of English at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Hill is the author of A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing, a book of poetry on black women’s incarceration, and Amazon #1 best seller in African American Poetry.

Melynda J. Price. William L. Matthews, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky and Director of the Gaines Center for the Humanities. Dr. Price’s research focus on black women’s activism and criminal justice.

Bridgett King. Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the MPA program at Auburn University. Dr. King is an expert on felony disenfranchisement and black political participation.

Tanya Fogle, Alumnus of University of Kentucky, former Lady Cat, Community activist with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.  Ms. Fogle draws on her own experiences with felony conviction and political rights restoration to advocate for the re-enfranchisement of individuals with felony convictions in Kentucky.

Liberation movements have received very little scholarly attention. While much of this research has focused on comparative analyses, of the French, Russian and Chinese revolutionary movements there has been very little cross-national comparative research from an interdisciplinary perspective about movements for national liberation in the black diaspora. This interdisciplinary panel explores the historical, cultural and political dynamics of movements of national liberation in the black diaspora as they have emerged in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. The panel will highlight similarities and differences in the organizational structures, the political strategies, and how the historical legacy of these movements motivate and inspire contemporary political strategies of social movements like Black Live Matters.

Clinton Hutton is professor of Politics in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Kingston, Jamaica. Dr. Hutton’s research focus on Jamaican oral history, Africana culture and religions, philosophy and popular culture.  His primary interest has been the persistent legacy of African political philosophical thought and its influence on the world views of Afro-Caribbean people. His body of work is a major contributor to the fields of Caribbean political philosophy and to the study of the Haitian Revolution and the Morant Bay Rebellion.  Dr. Hutton’s book entitled: The Logic and Historical Significance of the Haitian Revolution and the Cosmological Roots of Haitian Freedom (Arawak Publications, 2005) as well as his later book entitled: Colour for Colour, Skin for Skin: Marching with the Ancestral Spirits into War Oh at Morant Bay (Ian Randle Publishers, 2015), both examine the African philosophical race-based heritage that influenced the Haitian Revolution and the later Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica.

Francis Musoni is associate Professor of African History in the Department of History at the University of kentucky. Dr. Musoni’s research focuses on migrations and cross-border mobilities, borderland communities, refugees, ethnic identities and informal economies in Africa. Dr. Musoni is the author of “Contested Illegality: Border Jumping and the Control of Mobility across the Zimbabwe-South Africa Border (Indiana University Press). His current research focus on the biography of one the founding leaders of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), a nationalist movement that spearheaded the 1970s armed struggle for independence in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia). His research seeks to unpack the complex interplay of local, national, regional and global forces that shaped the struggles for liberation and democracy in Zimbabwe.

Ricky L. Jones is professor and Chair of the Pan-African Studies Department at the University of Louisville. Dr. Pack is the author of two editions of Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice, and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities ( SUNY Press, 2015), as well as the author of What’s Wrong with Obamamania?: Black America, Black Leadership, and the Death of Political Imagination (SUNY Press, 2008). Dr. Jones is the host of the award-winning "Ricky Jones Show" on The REAL 93.1 FM Louisville from iHeart Media.

Vanessa Holden is assistant professor of African American and Africana Studies History in the Department of History at the University of kentucky. Dr. Holden’s areas of research interest are the history of resistance and rebellion in the antebellum South.

Alaka Wali, Curator, North American Anthropology

in the Science and Education Division of The Field Museum

Photo Credit: Erielle Bakkum

Alaka was the founding director of the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change from 1995- 2010.  During that time, she pioneered the development of participatory social science action research and community engagement processes based in museum science to further access of museum resources for excluded communities.  Before joining the Museum, she worked with Dr. Leith Mullings to document the consequences of structural racism on black women’s reproductive and social health in Harlem, N.Y. 

Currently, she curates the North American collection, comprised largely of material culture of Native Americans from the late 19th century to the present and works closely with colleagues to implement environmental conservation programs that privilege economic and cultural autonomy for politically marginalized people in both Chicago and the Amazon regions of Peru. Her research focuses on the relationship between art and the capacity for social resilience. Alaka was born in India and maintains strong ties to her birth homeland.

The Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference—or DOPE—is organized and hosted by the Political Ecology Working Group (PEWG). PEWG is an interdisciplinary group of graduate students at the University of Kentucky. Since its inception in 2010, this student-organized conference has become one of the largest, most highly regarded international forums for critical discussions at the intersection of ecology, political economy, and science studies.

As the 2020 presidential election nears, we are facing strident and sometimes hate-filled campaign verbiage, even in the most mainstream of publications.  As was true in 2016, many observers express surprise at the coarseness of the language of the campaign. It is worthwhile to compare the rhetoric of the recent campaigns with those in 2008 and 2012 when Barack Obama and his family were also subject to outrageous accusations, although in these elections, the attacks rarely surfaced in the respectable press outlets.  As a result, many political watchers assumed that they represented fringe points of view that would never enjoy respectability. This paper will make the case that such observers were wrong.

Patricia A. Turner is the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education and a Professor in the Department of African American Studies and World Arts and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on racial dynamics as they surface in folklore and popular culture. Her fourth book, Crafted Lives: Stories and Studies of African-American Quilters was published by University of Mississippi Press in 2009. She is also the author of Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America (with Gary Alan Fine) (2004), Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (2002), I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (1994). She is currently writing a monograph on legends and beliefs about Barack and Michelle Obama.