Considering a different major? How about Geography as a major or a minor? Stop by Barker Plaza in the Student Center for free pizza and meet some geographers on Tuesday, Nov 16th from 11:00 - 12:30. For more information about this and other GeoDay events in the UK Department of Geography, visit this webpage.
Soapboxes and Stealth on Revolution Street: Revisiting the Question of ‘Freedom’ in Iran’s Hijab Protests
In this talk, I examine how the concept of ‘freedom’ is articulated and deployed in narratives of anti- compulsory hijab protests in Iran. I posit that women’s rights movements in Iran become legible to US audiences when they conform to narrow frames of feminist activism and orientalist tropes. I compare the “Girls of Revolution Street” (GRS) protests in Iran and the US-based “My Stealthy Freedom” (MSF) online movement to elucidate a politics of recognition that I argue reinforces orientalist representations of women’s rights in Iran. Through its circulation of GRS protest footage to its one million plus followers, MSF increased the visibility of resistance to mandatory hijab in Iran. Yet, through MSF’s selection of which GRS protests to publicize and commentary on why this movement is important, other critical aspects of the GRS protests were rendered invisible. I posit that the strategic framing of women’s rights through campaigns like MSF does more to attract international support than address the multi-faceted nature of gender injustice in Iran and, paradoxically, rests on Iranian women reproducing themselves as the vulnerable ‘unfree’ other.
Far from a monolithic population, the contemporary People’s Republic of China is host to a vast array of ethnic and linguistic minority cultures. Minority groups are found in China’s borderlands and recognized autonomous ethnic regions, but also in the factories, fields, mines, and other workplaces that symbolize China’s recent economic boom. This economic expan-
sion is intertwined with migration: both internally within China’s borders, and drawing migrants from the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. According to official statistics, there were more than 245 million internal migrants in 2017, with thousands of foreign-born migrants now working in China as well. Few Americans are aware of the minority experiences embedded within China’s economic and political rise. This panel presentation brings together emerging scholars from a variety of disciplines who focus on migrant and minority groups in China. The panel will help students, faculty, and community at the University of Kentucky become aware of the underlying stories of diaspora and migration beneath the surface of modern China.
Register HERE: https://uky.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_iQW3GabIRZaWPpvt2rka4Q
When I was an undergraduate student at Virginia Tech from 1976-79, in several environmental science, geography, and ecology classes we were taught about global warming and climate change due to human activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation. The physics behind warming due to increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases had been well known for nearly a century by that time, and the fact that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were increasing was also firmly established. Empirical evidence suggesting that human-caused climate change was already occurring was beginning to accumulate.
By Jesi Jones-Bowman
UK undergraduate researchers Bridget Bolt and Gretchen Ruschman. Students are encouraged to explore undergraduate research opportunities at the Research + Creative Experience Expo.
At the University of Kentucky, undergraduates have access to outstanding research and creative work activities led by world-class faculty and staff that promote self-discovery, experiential learning and lifelong achievement.
This is Not the America I Know:
Reading Anti-Blackness within American Landscapes
During and after the siege on the US Capitol by white supremacists on January 6, 2020, the trope “This is not the America I know” resounded from media commentators, politicians, and the social media accounts of millions of everyday Americans. According to this narrative, the assault deviated from our nation’s image as a racial melting pot. Yet, as many African Americans recognized, the January 6th siege was part of a larger continuum of spatial violence in which white supremacy is sanctioned by the state and marks public and private spaces as the property of whiteness. The “this is not the America I know” narrative thus exposes what I refer to as the white unseen--an intentional thought pattern and epistemological process in which acts of white violence and the everyday terrors, trauma, and tensions faced by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)--that renders white racial violence invisible. This chapter examines white racial violence as one of many white supremacist place-making practices that are shaped by and reshape the American landscape.
Dr. Aretina Hamilton is a Cultural Geographer whose work explores the intersection of Anti-Blackness, racial trauma, violence and place-making. As a public scholar, her research examines the place-making practices of African Americans and re-conceptualizes cartographies of anti-Blackness. Her dissertation project, Black Queer Cartographies, which is under contract with UNC Press, explores the physical and symbolic spaces of exclusion and belonging for Black lesbians in Atlanta, Georgia. She argues that African American lesbians in Atlanta created a queer palimpsest, or a multi-tiered space that challenged the dominant culture’s erasures of Southern Blackness and queerness.
As one of the founding members of the Black Geographies Speciality group, her work is also deeply invested in the creation of Black epistemological thought, Black place-making in the academy, and the creation of Black radical spaces. In the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Dr. Hamilton has been writing and speaking widely about racialized trauma within the academy and the everyday sites of intellectual violence.
Dr. Hamilton received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Kentucky with a Certificate in Gender and Women's Studies. Currently, she is the Director of DEI Programs, Training, Education, and Development at Brandeis University.
