Post-Spring Break Events

Here are some items of interest to mark on your post-Spring Break calendars:

Duke University’s Department of Cultural Anthropology is pleased to present:

“The Promises and Perils of Activist Anthropology”
A lecture by Jeff Maskovsky
Monday, March 14, 2011
1:30pm
Friedl Building, Room 225

Activist anthropology has become an important method for solving some of the discipline’s most vexing ethical and political problems and for increasing its public visibility.  Yet affirming a political alignment with an activist group, and then working closely with it in different phases of the research process, as activist anthropology requires, raises some significant theoretical, ethical and political challenges.  What are the politics and ethics of political alignment?  What are the limits and limitations of an activist stance? And who ultimately is activist anthropology for? I will take up these questions by critically reflecting on my experiences working with, and alongside, grassroots activists over the last twenty years.  One of activist anthropology’s most intriguing strengths, I argue, is that it can be enacted in the interstitial space between the academy and the grassroots.  It is in this kind of space — a hybrid, impure space that is neither wholly grassroots nor Ivory Tower — in which activists and academics can work together creatively to find modest ways of dealing with difficult political problems such as uncertainty, internal conflict, and defeat.

Jeff Maskovsky is Associate Professor of urban studies at Queens College and of anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY.  His research and writing focus on poverty, grassroots activism and political economic change in the urban United States. His publications include two co-edited volumes, New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics and Impoverished People in the United States (NYU Press 2001), and Rethinking America: The Imperial Homeland in the 21st Century (Paradigm 2009), as well as a  forthcoming monograph, Biosocial Urbanism: Poverty and the Fight for Life in the New Inner City.  He recently began a new fieldwork project exploring the politics of mortgage default in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Maskovsky has collaborated with AIDS activists, neighborhood groups, non-profit organizations and health policy experts to found several innovative community health and HIV treatment education programs targeting youth, sexual minorities, low-income people, and people of color.  In a former life, he also  hosted and produced “From the Left,” a talk show aired on Drexel University Television in Philadelphia, PA, from 2002 to 2006.

For more information, please contact Maria Maschauer at 684-5255. Click here (Jeff Maskovsky Flyer) for a PDF flyer.

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On Thursday, March17 from 9:45am-5pm at the FHI Garage* (C105, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse): the FHI is pleased to be a co-sponsor for the Program in Women’s Studies’ New Voices in Animal Studies, a one-day colloquium exploring the connection between gender studies and animal studies. This colloquium is part of a year-long initiative on “Animals and the Question of Species” at Duke’s Women’s Studies in 2010-11.

The colloquium schedule is as follows:

9:45 AM
Welcome – Christina Chia, Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University
Introduction – Ranjana Khanna, Women’s Studies & English, Duke University

* Session speaker introductions by Ranjana Khanna & Kathy Rudy, Women’s Studies, Duke University *

10 – 10:55 AM
Toward a Planetary Concept of Mass Death: Extinction, Species-Thinking, and the Human of Precarious Futures
Neel Ahuja, English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

11 – 11:55 AM
This Way to the Zoo: Feminist Approaches to the American Zoo Archive
Lisa Uddin, Corcoran College of Art + Design

– Lunch (Vegan) –

1 – 1:55 PM
Becoming Zoo-Curious: Reading Sexual Differences in the Field of Animal Life
Adeline Rother, French and Italian, Vanderbilt University

2 – 2:55 PM
The Gendered Process of Cattle (Re)production
Colter Ellis, Sociology, University of Colorado at Boulder

3 – 3:55 PM
Against the Flow of Time: And Say the Microorganisms Responded?
Astrid Schrader, Science, Technology & Society, Sarah Lawrence College

– Coffee Break –

4:15 – 5 PM
ResponseDonna Haraway, Emerita, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz

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Thursday-Friday, March 24-25 at the FHI Garage – C105, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse is a two-day event marking the end of the 3rd year of the Mellon HBCU Fellowship Program at the Franklin Humanities Institute. Day 1 focuses on the legacies of writer Octavia Butler. Day 2 includes a keynote address by the distinguished poet Sonia Sanchez and two panels on the impact of social movements in the US.

March 25 Program Schedule

2:00 – 3:30 PM
Keynote: Imagining Black Bodies in the Future
Gregory Hampton, Howard University

4:00 – 6:00 PM
Roundtable Discussion
William “Sandy” Darity
, Duke University
Sandra Y. Govan, Emerita, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Karla Holloway, Duke University
Tarshia Stanley, Spelman College / 2010-11 FHI Mellon HBCU Fellow

Friday, March 26 Program

(Updated 2/28/11). Keep checking this link for schedule updates.

9 – 10:30 AM
Panel: The Legacies of New Negro Activism
Jelani Favors
, Morgan State University / 2008-09 FHI Mellon HBCU Fellow
Claudrena Harold, University of Virginia
Rhonda Jones, North Carolina Central University / 2009-10 FHI Mellon HBCU Fellow

10:45 AM – 12:15 PM
Panel: Garveyism is Global
Tshepo Chéry
, University of Pennsylvania
Adam Ewing, Harvard University
Asia Leeds, University of California at Los Angeles

1:30 – 3:00 PM – Keynote (book signing to follow)
Sonia Sanchez

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