WGST Lecture Series 2017-18
Additional events and details will be added! Please watch for updates!
Dr. LaShawn Harris (Michigan State), "Madame Queen of Policy: Stephanie St. Clair, Harlem's Number Racket, and Community Advocacy"
Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy
Thursday, November 9, 4:30-5:30 p.m., Halle Library Auditorium
Author of the award-winning book Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (Illinois, 2016), Dr. Harris will explore black women’s participation in arguably one of New York’s most profitable and contested social and cultural pastimes of the early twentieth century: the illegal numbers racket. She will discuss the mysterious and unique life of prominent Harlem numbers banker Madame Stephanie St. Clair as a window to illuminate how some black numbers entrepreneurs used the city’s gambling enterprise to launch lucrative underground enterprises and as a way to cast a spotlight on black New Yorkers’ individual and collective encounters with race, gender, class prejudice, and white supremacy.
This event is co-sponsored with EMU History, and LBC credit is available. For more information, please contact Dr. Mary-Elizabeth Murphy at [email protected]
Dr. Elena Ruíz (Michigan State), "Decolonizing the Ethics of Knowing"
Dr. Elena Ruíz
Wednesday, November 15, 5:30-7 p.m., Halle Library Auditorium
This talk analyzes ethical theories that claim to produce umbrella terms for conceptualizing wrongs done to people in their capacity as knowers from a decolonial perspective. Using the case of Latin American indigenous women's testimonies in the Recovery of Historical Memory Project and transitional justice commissions, Ruíz identifies critical problems with mainstream accounts of so-called 'testimonial' and 'hermeneutic' injustice. She argues these problems are rooted in tacit cultural biases and prejudices in the interpretive frameworks that inform accounts of epistemic injustice, and in fact redouble the invisibility of hermeneutic forms of gender-based violence in Latin America.
This event is co-sponsored with EMU Philosophy, and LBC credit is available. For more information, please contact Dr. Michael Doan at [email protected]
Abbie Conant, Internationally recognized musician
Abbie Conant
Thursday, February 15, 5-6 p.m., Pray-Harrold 204
Conant was the first female musician in the Munich Philharmonic. She will speak on the status of women in music, her experiences of discrimination as a woman trombonist, and the work she did to allow women admission to orchestras that until recently entirely excluded them, such as the Vienna Philharmonic.
This event is co-sponsored with the School of Music & Dance, and LBC credit is available. For more information, please contact Dr. Donald Babcock at [email protected]
Women of Color Feminisms Symposium: Health, Resistance, Transformation
Dr. Xhercis Méndez
Thursday, March 15, 2-6 p.m., McKenny Ballroom
The Women of Color Feminisms Symposium will educate participants on the social, historical, political, cultural conditions and experiences of students and women of color. Participants will discuss strategies and survival tactics to respond to the socio-historical-political circumstances they find themselves in. Panels will include speakers from the local and surrounding communities who are engaged in activism and/or scholarly work to address racialized and gendered forms of social inequality. Dr. Xhercis Méndez, Professor of Philosophy and African American and African Studies at Michigan State University will deliver the keynote address.
This event is co-sponsored by the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, Student Government, General Education, and the Department of Africology and African American Studies. LBC credit is available. Please contact Dyann Logwood at [email protected] or Peter Higgins at [email protected] for more information.
Dr. Elvira Basevich (University of Michigan, Dearborn)
Dr. Elvira Basevich
Thursday, March 22, 5:30-7 p.m., Halle Library 300
Basevich’s research reconstructs the normative basis of W.E.B. Du Bois's critique of 19th and 20th c. American society, highlighting the interrelation of the concepts of freedom and race in the development of American modernity. Her talk presents a Du Boisian critique of modern philosophers such as Kant.
This event is co-sponsored with EMU Philosophy, and LBC credit is available. For more information, please contact Dr. Michael Doan at [email protected]