Works In Progress Lecture Series
showcasing the research and writing of aads core and affiliate faculty
ALL PRESENTATION WILL BE HELD AT BOSTON COLLEGE,AADS OFFICE SUITE: LYONS 301E, 12:00 TO 1:00 PM. ALL EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. To view flyer, click here.
Spring 2012
Thursday, 9 February 2012
Speshal Walker – UMass Boston
TITLE: “Black Beauty, White Standards: A Review”
Speshal Walker is a Ph.D. candidate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. She has research interests in culturally relevant protective factors for Black women negotiating multiple marginalized identities. Ms. Walker’s master’s thesis examined spirituality as a protective factor for Black female survivors of sexual assault and she used an ecological framework sensitive to intersecting identities. Her dissertation research is also informed by ecological perspectives as it critiques the current literature exploring the impact of Eurocentric beauty standards on Black women with attention to Black identity as a potential protective factor.
The talk entitled “Black Beauty, White Standards: A Review” provides a current review of the literature exploring the impact of mainstream beauty standards on Black women. The goal is to address the following questions: 1) What is the existing empirical literature on effects of mainstream American beauty standards upon American Black women’s body image, aside from weight-related body image (e.g., hair texture, skin color, and facial features)? 2) How might this literature be informed by gender, race and ethnicity sensitive ecological perspectives? Suggestions for future research are offered, including a call for work that approaches this line of work from a more culturally sensitive lens and a more appropriate theoretical framework. In addition, the implications of this research in developmental work as well as culturally relevant protective factors are discussed.
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
Peace Medie – Boston College
TITLE: "Gender, War, and Peace: (En)gendered Responses to Pre- and Post-Conflict Violence in Africa"
Peace Medie is a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a dissertation fellow in the African and African Diaspora Studies department at Boston College. Her paper, "Gender, War, and Peace: (En)gendered Responses to Pre- and Post-Conflict Violence in Africa" is a chapter of her dissertation. She will discuss how gender norms, corruption, and resource constraints influence how police officers in Liberia respond to violent crimes against women.
Themes:
- The different ways in which people’s genders influence how they experience violence before, during, and after conflict.
- How gender influences how the state and society responds to violence.
- Women’s contribution to conflict resolution and peace-building.
Thursday, 1 March 2012
Gina Pugliese – Brandeis University
TITLE: "The Missing Black Internationalist: Coding the Black Female in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom"
Gina Pugliese is a first-year PhD candidate at Brandeis University. Her interests include gender, sexuality and intellectual authority in diasporic and postcolonial contexts. This presentation focuses on ways to read McKay's Bita Plant in Banana Bottom. McKay's previous two novels, Home to Harlem and Banjo, deal with black internationalism, citizenship, transience, and male homosociality. Both of these novels are also written in an experimental, jazz-like form of the novel in which linear plot and a distinct, singular protagonist are undermined by impressionistic scenes that mirror the wandering lifestyle of a group of black, male vagabonds pondering notions of the domestic and identity. What then does it mean for McKay to write a final novel that takes up a black woman as its protagonist? Does Banana Bottom become less experimental in form or less political in content as it takes on a woman as its subject? This presentation explores the possibility that in fact McKay does something quite radical in Banana Bottom as he codes Bita, the black, early-20th-century woman, as "lady" and "citizen."
Previous Lectures
Fall 2011
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
Aberra Tesfay – Boston College
TITLE: “No Education Left Behind?: Decentralization Reform and Local Government in Ethiopia”
Aberra is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University. He is currently working on his dissertation research, which examines the impact of decentralization reforms on local government in Ethiopia. The main research question, therefore, is: “Does decentralization reform in Ethiopia improve local accountability in basic service delivery or might problems of accountability increase as power shifts, or appears to shift, downward?” He seeks answers to this question based on his own hypothesis that decentralization does improve local accountability in basic service delivery if local governments have real autonomy in decision-making power, adequate financial and human resources, and the active participation of their citizens in planning, monitoring and implementation of public policies.
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Njelle Hamilton – Brandeis University
TITLE: “‘Yardie to the Core’: Reggae (Trans)Nationalism in Colin Channer’s Waiting in Vain”
Njelle Hamilton is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Brandeis University. A scholar of postcolonial and Caribbean literatures, she is especially interested in the cross-pollination between oral and print cultures, and in contemporary literary aesthetics — how contemporary writers deal narratively and thematically with the social and political issues of the past 60 years. Her dissertation project, “Sound Writing: Music and Memory in the Contemporary Caribbean Novel,” directed by Professor Faith Smith, examines four novels that use Afro-Caribbean popular music forms as cultural signifiers through which traumatized characters reconcile fraught identities and memories.
Her talk, entitled “‘Yardie to the Core’: Reggae (Trans)Nationalism in Colin Channer’s Waiting in Vain,” examines the novel’s deployment of reggae as a trope for a romanticized Jamaicanness that celebrates its ‘out of many one people’ motto, while subsuming all other races and influences under its African heritage. Not only is reggae useful for Channer’s romance novel idealization of his mixed race — but somehow essentially African — cosmopolitan male protagonist, reggae also creates diasporic citizenship by connecting uprooted Jamaican to each other and to ‘yard.’ Reggae nationalism is thus simultaneously the source and solution for the trauma of migration and loss of authenticity.
Njelle Hamilton, Ph. D Candidate, Postcolonial and Caribbean Literatures
Dept. of English & American Literature
Brandeis University
Waltham, MA 02453
Spring 2011
April 26th, 2011
International Development Aid and the Legitimacy Deficit Among Fragile States in Africa
Masse Ndiaye
Part-Time Faculty, African and African Diaspora Studies Program
This event is open and free to the public.
March 15th, 2011
The Role of African Religions within BC's AHANA Community
Aloysius Lugira
Adjunct Associate Professor, Theology Department
This event is open and free to the public.
February 22nd, 2011
Becoming South Africa's Black Jews: Familiarizing Lemba Difference
Noah Tamarkin
Dissertation Fellow, African and African Diaspora Studies Program
This event is open and free to the public.
Fall 2010
September 21st, 2010
I Didn't Know I Was Just Black Until I Got Here: Immigrant Youth, Race, and America
Leigh Patel Stevens
Associate Professor, Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Intruction Department
This event is open and free to the public.
October 19th, 2010
"Writing the Self": The Words of Black Women Living with HIV
Dr. Rosanna Demarco
Associate Professor, Community Health
This event is open and free to the public.
November 16th, 2010
A New Literature of Trauma: Post Earthquake Haitian Writing
Regine Jean-Charles
Assistant Professor of French, Romance Languages and Literatures
This event is open and free to the public.
Spring 2010
February 16, 2010
The Last Great Chicago Bluesman: Magic Slim and the Limits of Genre
Carlo Rotella
Professor, English Department
This event is open and free to the public.
March 16, 2010
The Government Hospital for the Insane and African Americans Perceptions of the State In Post-Reconstruction Washington, D.C.
Martin Summers
Associate Professor, History Department
This event is open and free to the public.
April 6, 2010
International Response to State Failure in Africa: Lesson from Sierra Leone and Liberia
Masse Ndiaye
Adjunct Professor, African and African Diaspora Studies
This event is open and free to the public.
Fall 2009
November 17, 2009
Picturing Exceptionality: Documenting Guantanamo Bay Detainee Subjectivities
Anjali Nath
Visiting Scholar, University of Southern California
October 27, 2009
Constitutional Equality and Brazilian Racial Inequality
Paulo Barrozo
Assistant Professor, Law School
Spring 2009
April 7, 2009
Busing as History: The Desegregation Era in Boston
David Quigley
Interim Dean, The College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
March 17, 2009
Brazilian Modernity and British Nationalism
Zachary Morgan
Assistant Professor, History Department
February 17, 2009
Race, Reconciliation & Reconstruction: Integrating the African into African American History
Karen K. Miller
Adjunct Associate Professor, History Department