This seminar takes the phenomenon of transnational fashion week as its object of study. Once located primarily in Paris, New York, or Milan, the fashion week calendar now runs year-round and across the globe: Toronto, Dubai, Singapore, and even Phoenix, Arizona. Threading together scholarship in queer, global fashion, and American studies, we will analyze transnational fashion week’s messy and glamorous dualities and their repercussions for couture’s performance of elite global capitalism.

Organized around feminist and queer approaches to performance and unconventional archives, this event brings interdisciplinary scholars Deb Vargas(UC Riverside), Dixa Ramírez (Yale) and renown performance artist Nao Bustamante together to discuss Latina suciedad (dirtyness) and abjection as the basis for politicized aesthetics.

Moderated by Leticia Alvarado, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, Brown University.

A CSREA Faculty Grant Event.

What does it mean to talk about race across different disciplines in Asian and Asian American Studies configured as the Asias? This symposium brings together four prominent scholars to speculate on the intersection of their work in the transcolonial border zones of the Asias to lay the foundation for future conversations in history, ethnic studies, performance studies, and social movements. 

Celebrated graffiti writers will discuss the practice of painting unsanctioned graffiti-murals as well as related issues such as creative place-making, occupying public space, identity, and the role illicit, creative, and contestative aesthetics play in the process of neighborhood change.

Conversation will be followed by a live art painting and reception.

Moderated by: Stefano Bloch, Cogut Center for the Humanities and Urban Studies Program, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow 

American Promise explores the complex interplay between race, class, gender in educational opportunity. Over the course of 13 years, this 80-minute abridged documentary chronicles the experiences of two middle-class African-American parents in Brooklyn, N.Y., and their sons who are enrolled in Dalton, a prestigious private school. Detailing the boys' divergent paths from kindergarten through high school graduation, this provocative, intimate documentary presents complicated truths about America's struggle to come of age on issues of race, class and opportunity.

Education is frequently described as the civil rights issue of the 21st century, particularly by politicians calling for policy changes and reform. However, the most important civil rights issue involving education in the 20th century, school segregation, remains largely unresolved, and despite the controversy it once generated, it is rarely mentioned as an important social issue that should be addressed today.