October 2014 - May 2015

Photographs of Brown community members sharing their experiences with racial microaggressions and microaffirmations. This exhibit is part of a broader movement to help make visible the reality and negative impact of racial microaggressions on building a just community.

We invited students, faculty, staff and other members of the Brown community to share their experiences with racial microaggressions and microaffirmations. This exhibit is part of a broader movement to help make visible the reality and negative impact of racial microaggressions on buillding a just community. 

What I Am Thinking About Now: Professor Lundy Braun (Medical Science, Africana Studies)

The spirometer is a medical device that measures lung function.  The "correction" of these measurements for race is a routine practice in medical diagnosis of lung disease.  In this workshop Braun will discuss the history of this practice, its applications, and why it is problematic.  

Events surrounding the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri have re-ignited conversations about racism, inequality, and increasingly militaristic policing practices in black and brown communities across the US. This Teach-In strives to create a space for campus dialogue; provide social and historical context for these events and consider the impact of emerging and ongoing portrayals and responses.  

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What I Am Thinking About Now: Professor Brenda Marie Osbey (Africana Studies)

In this presentation, Professor Osbey explores the ways in which New Orleans Traditional Religion provides and promotes healing, and whether it is possible or desirable to apply traditional healing to contemporary experience in the City. 

In this conversation, actress, performance artist, and motivational speaker Tracee Ellis Ross '94 shared stories about her years on the hit TV series "Girlfriends" and discussed race, her body, her career, and how she responds to images and expectations of women of color in entertainment.

Tracee Ellis Ross '94, actress, performance artist, and motivational speaker; professor Tricia Rose '93, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) at Brown University

How can you allow your artistic spirit to empower you to reach your potential, to remain flexible and open, and contribute the most to the world? This graduation weekend workshop, led by Brown alum, award winning actress and performance artist Tracee Ellis Ross '94 will enable students to tap into their creative energies. Participants will engage in fun and powerful exercises that explore some of Ross’ best practices for harnessing the elusive well of creativity.

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 

This talk is an invitation to think together about what musical details, and all their unassimilatable qualities, make possible for scholarly projects. The presentation will revisit some of the details involved in Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music, and will also surface some of the book's submerged studies that made the final copy. Alongside these details, and the critical modes they make possible, the presentation will offer a set of working, non-prohibitive credos about writing and method.