“Environmental justice” and “intersectionality” arguably have been two of the most popular buzzwords in social science research in recent years. Both concepts are rooted in radical Black traditions, environmental justice in anti-racist community organizing in the U.S.’s South, and intersectionality in Black feminist legal scholarship. Both concepts have traveled significantly from their original respective homes and have been used to examine issues ranging from fatphobia to climate change. In this discussion, Dr. Fayola Jacobs of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs traces the theoretical, methodological, geographical, and topical journeys of environmental justice and intersectionality. With a focus on how the two concepts have been taken up in research on flood-related disasters and climate change, Jacobs lays out what has been lost and what has been gained on these travels. She argues that current literature’s use of the two concepts is largely superficial, which betrays their critical origins, limits their power for historically rooted understandings of environmental issues, and undermines their ability to help imagine radical solutions.
 
 
This talk presented as part of the 2019-2020 Spotlight Series: Environmental Justice in collaboration with the University Honors Program and Northrop Presents. It is cosponsored by the Race, Indigeneity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Initiative; the Institute for Global Studies; the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society; and the Humphrey School of Public Affairs Urban and Regional Planning Area. To learn more about the series, please click here.

Join Josephine Lee and Sarah Bellamy for a conversation about the intersecting histories and contemporary dynamics of black and Asian representation in American theater. Lee will share current research on how different theatrical forms such as minstrelsy, vaudeville, and musical theater juxtaposed blackface representation and stage orientalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Bellamy will comment on how this history has affected theater practice today, and what kinds of change and collaboration we might imagine for the future. This will be a fascinating conversation about how American theater defines or moves across racial lines, understanding the persistence of racial stereotypes, and building coalitions.
 
Josephine Lee is a professor of English and Asian American Studies at UM-Twin Cities. Her most recent books are Asian American Plays for a New Generation (co-edited with R.A. Shiomi and Don Eitel, Temple University Press 2011) and The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). She is also the author of Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage and coeditor of Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History. Her research has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
 
Sarah Bellamy is Artistic Director for Penumbra Theatre Company, where she has designed several programs that engage patrons in critical thinking, dialogue, and action around issues of race and social justice. A 2015 recipient of a Bush Fellowship, she has taught at Macalester College, UMN, and United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities and has lectured across the country on the power of race and representation and the ways in which images, narratives, and media influence perception and ultimately shape lives.

Cosponsored by the Department of English and the Asian American Studies Program.

We are excited to copresent an international panel of experts giving short talks on their work, followed by a Q&A session, as part of the Memory, Trauma, and Human Rights at the Crossroads of Art and Science Interdisciplinary Conference, presented by the Memory, Trauma, and Human Rights at the Crossroads of Art and Science IAS Research and Creative Collaborative. This two-day international conference includes speakers, panels, film screenings, and opportunities for conversation.
 
PANELISTS:
 
Abigail Gewirtz (The John and Nancy Lindahl Leadership Professor in the Department of Family Social Science and the Institute of Child Development, and Director of the Institute for Translational Research in Children’s Mental Health, UofM)
Veronica Svetaz (Aquí para Ti/Here for You: Youth Development Program, Hennepin County/ UofM): "The Border is Everywhere: Tales from a Local MN Provider working with Transnational Families, while Growing One of Her Own"
Anna Miñarro (Clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, Spain): “Memory, Trauma and Disappeared Citizens After the Spanish Civil War, Dictatorship, and Transition (Pain from 1936 to 2019)”
Janet Dubinsky (Professor, Department of Neuroscience, UofM) “The Power of Neuroscience to Change Teacher Attitudes and Practice in Liberia”
 
This conference is made possible through the generous support of the College of Liberal Arts (Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop), the Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Imagine Fund, GPS Alliance, the Departments of Art, History, Neuroscience, and Spanish & Portuguese Studies, the Institute for Global Studies, the Center for German & European Studies, the Human Rights Program, and the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport.

Feminist anthropologist Dána-Ain Davis, professor of urban studies at Queens College, will give a talk about her new book, Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (NYU Press) followed by an author-meets-critics session. Davis will be joined for this conversation by Zenzele Isoke (Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, UMN), Jaime Slaughter-Acey (Center for Leadership Education in Maternal and Child Public Health, UMN), Aaron Mallory (Geography, Environment and Society, UMN), and Carly Thomsen (Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Middlebury College).

Professor Dána-Ain Davis received her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in anthropology in 2001. Before coming to Queens College in 2007, she was Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of the Global Black Studies Program at SUNY/Purchase. Davis’ areas of specialization include black studies, family and sexual violence, reproductive rights, poverty and welfare policy, and women’s studies. Her publications include the book Battered Black Women and Welfare Reform, Feminist Activist Ethnography (co-edited with Christa Craven); and Black Genders and Sexuality (co-edited with Shaka McGlotten). Davis has served as co-chair of NARAL-NY and as president of the Association of Black Anthropologists, and New York governor Andrew Cuomo appointed Davis to the Governor’s Maternal Mortality Taskforce in June 2018.
 
Cosponsored by the Departments of Anthropology and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies; the Center for Leadership Education in Maternal and Child Public Health, School of Public Heath; and the Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy.

Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) is set in a single restricted location, the Parisian apartment in which a dying, suffering woman is being cared for by her husband. The film plots an obsessive formal language of spatial increments, organizing itself around minor but crucial distances across the geography of the home. Against and within this ordered relation of objects and space, extraordinary pain and terrible violence ultimately arrive. Eugenie Brinkema, Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at MIT, explores this interrelation to suggest that figures of entrance, distance, and spatial incrementality articulate a formalized mode of work that is commuted over the course of the film to the paradoxical figure of an ethics of violence.

Dr. Brinkema will also present a workshop, Horror and the Problem of Form, from 10 a.m. - 1:30 on Friday, October 25, in Crosby Seminar Room. The workshop is free and open to the public. Workshop readings can be made available to participants; email mimsgg@umn.edu for access.
 
Eugenie Brinkema is Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at MIT. Her research in film and media studies focuses on violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics in texts ranging from the horror film to gonzo pornography, from structuralist film to the visual and temporal forms of terrorism. Her articles have appeared in the journals Angelaki, Camera Obscura, Criticism, differences, Discourse, film-philosophy, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, qui parle, and World Picture.

Copresented by the Moving Image and Media Studies Graduate Group. Cosponsored by the Center for Austrian Studies and the Center for German and European Studies and by the Departments of Art, Art History, French and Italian, and German Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch.

Richard Meyer, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University, will discuss the obscure-yet-fascinating career of the self-taught artist Morris Hirshfield (1872-1946), a former tailor and slipper manufacturer who took up painting at the age of 65. Hirshfield's wildly stylized pictures of animals, landscapes, and female nudes attracted a great degree of attention, both positive and negative, in the 1940s. Embraced by Picasso, Mondrian, and Duchamp,  Hirshfield was given a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. The exhibition was widely reviewed, though mostly reviled, by the press. In the decades after his death, Hirshfield and other folk and self-taught artists were gradually excluded from narratives of 20th-century art. Dr. Meyer considers the stakes of returning Hirshfield to the modernist context in which his art appeared and suggests what might be gained by rediscovering Hirshfield within our own moment.
 
Richard Meyer teaches courses on 20th-century American art, photography, and gender and sexuality studies at Stanford. He is the author of What was Contemporary Art (MIT Press, 2013) and co-author, with Catherine Lord, of Art and Queer Culture (Phaidon, 2013), a revised edition and updated edition of which was published in 2019 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. He is currently writing Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered; a related exhibition will open in October, 2021, at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and travel to the Berkeley Art Museum the following year.
 
This event is cosponsored by the Weisman Art Museum and the Departments of Art and Art History.

Some jobs have relationship at their core, depending upon a personal, emotional connection between practitioners and recipients. Efforts to make such “connective labor” more standardized, predictable, even automated, often depend on the premise that checklists or apps are “better than nothing.” The expansion of data needs shrinks the available time practitioners have to pursue the relationships they view as integral to their success. Yet perhaps surprisingly, low-income people sometimes prefer the alternatives. Based on 100+ interviews and 300+ hours of observation, Allison Pugh, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, argues that the contemporary degradation of connective labor, particularly for disadvantaged people, makes its automation more acceptable. She asks what connective labor has in common across fields, and how we might make that work more systematic without getting in its way.
  

Allison Pugh is Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. Her research and teaching focus on collisions of economic life and intimacy. Her current research, recently awarded NSF support, explores the rationalization – and automation – of service work that relies on relationship. Her first book, Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture, documented how children and parents manage the commercialization of childhood. It won the 2010 William J. Goode award and the 2010 Distinguished Contribution from the ASA section on children and youth. Her 2015 book The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity is a study on the broader impacts of job precariousness, specifically how gender and class inequality shape the effects job insecurity has on intimate life.
 
Cosponsored by the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communications, the Informatics Institute, the Digital Arts, Sciences, & Humanities (DASH) program, the Program in Health Disparities Research, and the Departments of Anthropology, Sociology, and Pharmaceutical Care & Health Systems.

As colonial Korea transitioned to capitalism, intellectuals embraced the idea of gender equality as well as equality among economic classes and ethnicities (Koreans, Japanese and Westerners). On the one hand, colonial intellectuals promoted women’s education and kinship system reforms. On the other, canonical works of Korean literature from the early 20th century remasculinized colonized men through portrayals of violence against women. How did colonial literature reconcile the modern imperative of equality with the new inequalities that capitalism produced? Jin-kyung Lee, Associate Professor of Korean and Comparative Literature at UC San Diego, will argue that literary representations of violence against women were deployed as a strategy of imagining racial and class equality.
 
Jin-kyung Lee received her BA from Cornell University and her PhD from UCLA in Comparative Literature. Her publications include the book Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work and Migrant Labor in South Korea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Her research interests center around nationalist culture and politics of the colonial era, militarism and development in post-colonial South Korea, representations of gender and ethnicity, Asian labor migration in South Korea, and Korean diaspora.
 
Copresented by the Gender and Violence: South Korea and Beyond research collaborative. Cosponsored by the Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy and the Departments of History and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

While the gender wage gap narrowed over the course of the 20th century, progress has largely stalled since the 1990s. One reason may be women’s underrepresentation in well-remunerated, in-demand occupations such as computer science--a field where women’s representation has actually decreased over time. One possible explanation for that trend? The wage gap. Sharon Sassler, Professor of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University, will examine three key factors in this persistent gap: gender, race/ethnicity, and nativity.
 
Sharon Sassler received her PhD in Sociology from Brown University and joined the Cornell faculty in 2005. A social demographer, Sassler’s research examines factors shaping the activities of young adults and their life course transitions into school and work, relationships, and parenthood, and how these transitions vary by gender, race/ethnicity, and social class. Her recently published book, Cohabitation Nation: Gender, Class, and the Remaking of Relationships (2017), examines how cohabitation is contributing to growing levels of family inequality in the United States; it won the Goode Book Award from the Family Section of the American Sociological Association in 2018. A second stream of her work examines the retention and advancement of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) occupations, as well as the gender wage gap in STEM. 

This event is cosponsored by the Department of Computer Science, the Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy, and the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation.