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.

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.

What I Am Thinking About Now: Professor Olakunle George (English)

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.