Below are some highlights from our past diversity-related events.
- International Conference of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies: The Center is proud to support this year’s conference, "Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide.” The event brings together scholars, activists, educators, and students from 15 countries to discuss origins, significance, and potential responses to official and popular genocide denial throughout the world. Given the contemporary rhetoric of “fake news” and the increasing avenues for almost anyone to share or promote stories without factual underpinning, the need to confront genocide denial is more urgent than ever. Lerna Ekmekçioğlu (MIT) will deliver the keynote address: "What Can Genocide and its Denial Do to Feminism? The Existential Paradoxes of Armenians in Post-Genocide Turkey." Henry C. Theriault, Ph.D., President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, will deliver an additional closing keynote address.
- Rebecca J. Hester, "Embodied politics: health promotion, migrant activism and neoliberalism": Using ethnographic data collected during several years of field work with an indigenous Mexican migrant organization in California, Prof. Hester (Virginia Tech), showed how migrants deploy a pragmatic politics that is attentive to both their physical and cultural survival.
- Natalie Cisneros: "How Does It Feel to be a Problem? — Racism and the 'Immigration Crisis'”: Prof. Cisneros (Seattle University) questioned the conception of immigration as a crisis that must be resolved. She posited that the program of immigration and criminalization of migrants are constructed by functions of bio-political racism, and argued that resisting racist oppression surrounding immigration means resisting bio-political racism itself.
- Tara Conley, "Hashtag Genealogies: A Black Feminist Project": By mapping prominent Black feminist hashtags from their origins to development overtime, Dr. Conley (Research Director at Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation) showed how hashtags locate our stories, document collective action, and point to infrastructures and ideologies that are often at odds with the disruption of order.
- Shaka McGlotten, “The Black Data Project”: Prof. McGlotten (they/them), of SUNY Purchase, is a social anthropologist with a background in the fine arts. They discussed “black data,” which refers to political aesthetic counter-practices, from forms of black fugitivity that seek to create alter-publics or find refuge in “the undercommons,” to the reimagining of black histories, presents, and futures through the creative lens of Afrofuturism.
- Margaret Hu, “Algorithmic Jim Crow”: Prof. Hu (Washington and Lee University) contends that immigration- and security-related vetting protocols risk promulgating an algorithmically-driven form of Jim Crow. In this system, newly developed big data vetting tools fuse biometric data with biographic data and Internet/Social Media profiling to algorithmically assess risk. Because everyone will be assessed this way, the screening appears to be equal. However, those individuals and groups negatively and disparately impacted by mandatory vetting and screening protocols will largely be the same as groups traditionally discriminated against on the basis of classifications like race, color, ethnicity, national origin, gender, and religion.