Lectures, Discussions + Conferences

Research Seminar with Yến Lê Espiritu, "Critical Refugee Studies: The Critical and the Creative"

photo of Yến Lê Espiritu

CSREA, 96 Waterman Street, Providence RI 02912

The hyper-focus on refugee suffering, desperation, and neediness in media and social science scholarship have represented refugees as passive recipients of western generosity and increasingly as the targets of racial profiling, surveillance, and detention. This seminar invites participants to chart new approaches to refugee studies that integrate theoretical rigor and policy concerns with refugees' rich and complicated lived worlds—approaches that fuse the critical and the creative.

Critical Migration and Refugee Studies Series: Yến Lê Espiritu, "Feminist Refugee Epistemology: Reading Displacement in Vietnamese and Syrian Refugee Art"

Petteruti Lounge, Stephen Robert '62 Center, 75 Waterman Street, Providence RI 02912

Joining the fields of transnational feminist studies with critical refugee studies, this talk introduces the concept feminist refugee epistemology (FRE) to re-conceptualize war-based displacement as not only about social disorder and interruption but also about social reproduction and innovation. FRE does more than critique Western media representation of refugees; it underlines the refugees' rich and complicated lives, the ways in which they enact their hopes, beliefs, and politics, even when they live militarized lives.

Critical Migration and Refugee Studies Series: Sofian Merabet, "Strange Hospitality: Gay Syrian Refugees in Lebanon"

IBES Room 130, 85 Waterman Street, Providence RI 02912

This paper engages with the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon and, specifically, considers how queer-identified Syrians navigate an often-hostile environment in and around the Lebanese capital Beirut. Drawing on hospitality as a philosophical concept and on the sociological notion of the stranger, this paper focuses on discourses and aspirations these refugees express, in terms of language and bodily practices, in the face of what many experience as “hardened borders” within the social fabric of the host country. 

Treva Lindsey, "Building a Chocolate City: African American Women in Jim Crow Washington, D.C."

Smith-Buonanno 106, 95 Cushing Street, Providence RI 02912

Dr. Treva Lindsey is an Associate Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. explores the untold history of Black women in the nation’s capital who transformed the burgeoning city into a Black intellectual, cultural, and political center.

Building Health Equity In an Unequal World Series: Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, "The Flint Water Crisis: A Journey for Justice"

IBES Room 130 (Carmichael Auditorium), 85 Waterman Street, Providence RI

Mona Hanna-Attisha, MD, MPH, will give the presentation, "The Flint Water Crisis: A Journey for Justice" at Brown University on Thursday, March 1, 2018. This talk is part of Building Health Equity in an Unequal World, a collaborative lecture series presented by the Brown University School of Public Health and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.

Jennifer Nash, "Love Letter from a Critic, or Notes on the Intersectionality Wars"

Pembroke Hall, Room 305, 172 Meeting Street, Providence RI 02912

Jennifer Nash is an Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. Her research centers on black feminist theories; black sexual politics; race, gender, and law; race, gender, and visual culture; and women's/gender/sexuality studies' institutional histories and politics.

What I Am Thinking About Now: Emma Amador, "Organizing for Social Services: Labor Migration, Welfare Rights, and Women’s Activism in the Puerto Rican Diaspora after 1948"

CSREA, 96 Waterman Street, Providence RI

This presentation explores histories of organizing for social services and welfare rights within Puerto Rican diasporic communities in the United States. Emma Amador is an Assistant Professor of History and Latino/a, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

"What I Am Thinking About Now" is an on-going informal workshop/seminar series to which faculty and graduate students are invited to present and discuss recently published work and work in progress.

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