Part of the Africana Saturday School Double Lecture Series.
Join the UK Office for Intuitional Diversity and the UK Office of Student and Academic Life for a panel discussion moderated by Mr. Theodore Berry. Mr. Berry will lead Dr. Blanche Hughes, Vice President for Student Affairs at Colorado State University, and Dr. George Wright, former President of Prairie View A&M University and current visiting scholar at the University of Kentucky, in a discussion about growing up in Lexington, Kentucky in the 1960s and 1970s. They will discuss how their early experiences in Lexington shaped them and ultimately led them to distinguished career paths in higher education.
Dr. Blanche Hughes received her bachelor’s degree from Earlham College and both a Master’s of Education degree in Student Affairs and a doctorate in Sociology from Colorado State University. She is currently in her 13th year as the Vice President for Student Affairs at CSU. She is also Lead Administrator of the Race Bias and Equity Initiative under CSU President Joyce McConnell. Before becoming Vice President, Dr. Hughes spent six years as the Associate Vice President for Student Affairs, eleven years as the Director of Black Student Services, and chaired the Sociology Department at Pikes Peak Community College.
UK alumnus and former president of Prairie View A&M University George Wright is a distinguished visiting professor at UK for the 2019-2020 academic year. A Lexington native, Wright received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UK in history and his doctoral degree in history from Duke University. In 2004, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from UK and was later inducted into the Hall of Distinguished Alumni in 2005.
This event features a lecture on the historic Tuskegee Airmen. Note: panel on the topic of women in the military has been rescheduled to April 16, time and location TBD.
Ron Spriggs, a Lexington-based historian and curator of a traveling exhibit on the Tuskegee Airmen, will present. The Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African-American military pilots and their support personnel who fought in World War II, were the first African-American military aviators in the U.S. armed forces. Spriggs focuses on two main areas that parallel the national Tuskegee Airmen organization: sustaining the legacy and history of the airmen through student lectures, speaking engagements and exhibitions; and creating programs and experiences for students to develop their knowledge about careers in aviation or their general academic studies.
Social media has become a tool used to create academic communities that literally have no boundaries. Beginning with blogs and community building websites, specifically platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr, individuals from underrepresented minority groups have collaborated with like-minded individuals for academic purposes, support, and true advocacy of neglected populations.
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.
This feature documentary explores the racially-charged controversy surrounding a 1930's Works Progress Administration mural at the University of Kentucky. It includes a discussion of public art, censorship, and student activism. Interviews with student activists, artists, an art historian, cultural geographer, and media scholar are punctuated by footage of the 2019 mural protest and images from the occupation of the UK administration building by student protestors. Produced, directed, written, and edited by John Fitch III
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.
Deborah Gray White is the Board of Governors Professor of History and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. During her twenty-six years at Rutgers, she has not only been a teacher but the codirector of "The Black Atlantic: Race, Nation and Gender" project at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (1997-99), a research professor at the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women (1999-2000), and chair of the history department (2000-03).
In November 2015, Rutgers University's Chancellor Edwards created the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Populations in Rutgers History and named White as Chair. The Committee traced the university’s early history and its relationship with local African-American and Native-American communities.With active participation from students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, faculty, staff, local historians, and librarians, the committee has conducted painstaking research to reexamine the university’s roots, including locating and studying the wills of Rutgers’ founders and benefactors and other archived documents. The result was the Scarlet and Black Project, which has produced two volumes related to Black and Native people's interaction with the university.
Professor White is the author of Ar'n't I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (Norton, 1985). A second edition, with a new introduction and additional chapter, was issued in 1999. In anticipation of its anniversary, the Southern Historical Association celebrated it at its 2003 conference; and in 2005 a conference entitled "Slave Women's Lives: Twenty Years of 'Ar'n't I A Woman?' and More" was held at the Huntington Institute in California, with the proceedings published in the 2007 Winter issue of the Journal of African American Studies; the papers presented in honor of it at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women were published in the Journal of Women's History in July 2007.
Her other monographs are Let My People Go: African-Americans, 1804-1860 (Oxford UP, 1996) and Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (Norton, 1999). Professor Gray White contributed a number of articles to the Journal of American History, Journal of Caribbean Studies, Journal of Family History, and Journal of African American History. She is also the editor of Telling Histories: Black Women Historian in the Ivory Tower (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and, with Darlene Clark Hine and others, Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Oxford UP, 2004). She received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship, the ACLS, the American Association of University Women, and the National Research Council / Ford Foundation.
Selected Publications
In progress:
“’Can’t We All Just Get Along’: The Cultural Awakenings of the 1990’s” - This book recounts the history of the 1990’s through the lens of the decade’s mass marches and gatherings. The Million Man March, the Million Woman March, the Promise Keepers, the LGBT Marches, and the Million Mom March tell us a lot about sexuality, and the state of American race, class, and gender relations. Separately, and in conversation with each other, they allow for an in-depth analysis of subjects like coalition building, intraracial and interracial faith, marriage and family relationships. In conversation with the past they speak to the continuing processes of millennialism and post-modernism. As such they are powerfully revelatory about American identity (ies) at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Mr. Zamora’s workshop will use headlines regarding immigration to lead students and other attendees in creating their own micro-poems. The workshop will conclude with an opportunity for attendees to share their work and a Q&A with the poet.
Event speaker: Javier Zamora holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied and taught in June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program and earned an MFA from New York University. His poems have been featured in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New York Times and many others. Zamora has received many honors, including a 2015 NEA fellowship, the 2016 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellowship, among other accolades. He’s a founding member of the Undocupoets, a group dedicated to promoting undocumented poets and raising awareness of the structural barriers they face in the literary community.
Scholars mix book sense with sage wisdom handed down by the people who raised them.
