Jennifer Ho will discuss concepts relating to the ambiguity of race—the ways in which our understanding of racial categories exceeds the boundaries society places around them, particularly by looking at Asian Americans who cannot be neatly typed into boxes: those who are multiracial, transracial adoptees, and existing as an Asian body at a time when race is often talked about in black and white terms.

In her book "Good White People," philosopher Shannon Sullivan examines the attempts that liberal whites make to distance themselves from the history of white supremacy and differentiate themselves from other, ostensibly more racist, white people. This effort, while understandable, serves to distract them from focusing on efforts to end racial injustice. How might the events in Charlottesville and their aftermath heighten this focus on being "good" and perhaps undercut white anti-racist activism?

This presentation will untangle some of the complex relationships between race and class in contemporary white identity in the U.S. Beginning with an examination of how good white liberals often use intra-race class differences to establish their racial goodness, Sullivan then will challenge the false universalism built into the concept of white privilege.

This teach in will examine what DACA is, how it impacted undocumented immigrant communities, and why it was repealed. Panelists will also consider how activists and others are managing the uncertainty and attempting to impact the laws and public opinion on the issue of DACA.

Opening Remarks

Richard M. Locke, Brown University Provost

CSREA is delighted to host a lunchtime conversation with Erich Jarvis, PhD, professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurogentics of Language at The Rockefeller University. This informal discussion presents an opportunity to learn more about his research and experiences, and talk about challenges faced by historically underrepresented groups (HUGs) in STEM fields.

We will serve lunch and spaces are limited, so please RSVP to csrea@brown.edu.

Please join us for a discussion with Cathy Schlund-Vials, Professor in the Department of English and the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute at at the University of Connecticut.

This seminar will focus on recent and ongoing academic projects which repeatedly examine moments of dislocation, rupture, and movement, and reflect “global” migrations between the fields of critical Asian and comparative Asia American studies.

This talk examines the role disability plays in the making of refugee subjects; such subjects, as this presentation maintains, are necessarily situated in catastrophic environs formed in the troubling aftermaths of war, natural disaster, and economic crisis. To access the various man-made mechanisms responsible for bringing these disabled subjects "into being," this talk strategically utilizes the following schema: "prosthetic ecologies." "Prosthetic ecologies" operates as a flexible and generative analytic upon which to syncretically chart longue durée histories of state-sanctioned violence, state-authorized violation, and internationally-supported contravention during the Cold War era. 

We Still Live Here, a documentary by award-winning filmmaker Anne Makepeace, tells the story of the return of the Wampanoag language. The film interweaves the present-day story Wampanoags reclaiming their language with historical events that silenced the language for more than a century and obliterated much of their culture – epidemics, missionary pressures, land loss, and the indenture of Native children.