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Property, Personhood, and Police: Racial Banishment in Postcolonial Los Angeles

This talk is concerned with processes of dispossession at the present historical conjuncture of racial capitalism in the United States. Conceptualizing Los Angeles as the post-colony, Roy demonstrates how police logics govern the relationship between property and personhood and produce geographies of racial banishment. She also foregrounds how housing and racial justice movements mobilize against such regimes of policing, creating and deploying frameworks of abolition and liberation.

Date:
Location:
W.T. Young Library Auditorium

Queer Places Without Queer Politics: Small City Gay Bars

Gay bars are failures for both queer and mainstream LGBT politics. They are too identitarian, normative, and capitalistic for the former, too frivolous and banal for the latter, and too exploitative for both. What little we know about gay bars comes in the context of gay neighborhoods or as backdrops for more interesting, transgressive performances. But gay bars exist primarily outside gayborhoods—there are more cities with lone gay bars than there are gay bars in San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles combined.

This talk reports on the queerness of one of 52 gay bars I studied that are more than an hour’s drive from another. I argue that these “outpost” bars are queer places without queer politics, best conceived in relation to both the regions they serve and to big-city LGBT life: relatively cosmopolitan and dumpy, relatively un-capitalistic and Republican, relatively queer and apolitical. They are unique sites of convergence for the rural and urban, the cosmopolitan and provincial, tensions that can help extend the metronormative critique away from binaries or a rejection of “the” city. A reorientation towards places, rather than abstract spaces, helps make sense of what might otherwise seem surprising about the small-city lives of the majority of LGBT people: that the gay bars that fail most deeply at both queer and mainstream LGBT expectations might be the queerest places of all.

Date:
Location:
Classroom Building Room 122

Racialization & Settler Colonialism at the Angola Rodeo: Toward De-Anthropocentric & Decolonial Futures

The Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) is a site embedded with historical legacies of plantation slavery and settler colonialism; as the largest maximum security penitentiary in the United States, the prison also reflects the racial injustice of contemporary US mass incarceration. Situated on the site of an old plantation, the prison hosts the Angola Rodeo twice a year, an event that crystallizes violent multispecies social relations in the merging of the US West and South as two distinct kinds of colonial projects.Whereas much scholarship and activism has worked against the wholesale dehumanization inherent in chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and mass incarceration, this paper works to interrogate and disrupt the human-anima binary through which processes of dehumanization are sustained. Drawing together postcolonial studies and animal studies, the paper centers empirical research on the Angola Rodeo to highlight how racialization and anthropocentrism are intertwined logics of subordination and exclusion that carry forward into the present. Ultimately, the paper suggests the need for a mode of analysis and action that does not maintain the subordination of the animal, and instead, takes a de-anthropocentric and decolonial approach to injustice. 

Date:
Location:
Whitehall Classroom Builiding, Room 122

Take Root: A Reproductive Justice Panel

Date: Oct 8, 2019 (Tuesday)

Light Lunch Reception: 11:15am-12:15pm, Multipurpose Room, WTY Library

Panel: 12:30-1:45pm, UKAA Auditorium, WTY Library

Evening Reception: 5-7pm, Lyric Theater 

 

As part of the Year of Equity programming, this panel brings together organizers, activists, and healthcare providers from national organizations red states to discuss challenges, approaches, and perspectives in advancing reproductive justice. Centering on the experiences and leadership of women, trans, and non-binary people of color, this panel will present latest community research, initiatives, and advocacy on reproductive justice.

 

Panelists, in alphabetical order, include: 

In addition to the Year of Equity, this event is co-sponsored by the departments of Anthropology, Gender and Women Studies, Sociology, and Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies; the Office of LGBTQ* Resources, the Center for Health Equity Transformation, the Center for Equality and Social Justice, Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women's Health, the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, and Kentucky Health Justice Network. 

 

 

 

Date:
-
Location:
William T. Young Library Auditorium

New Maps Plus student projects - Summer 2019

 

This gallery is composed of student map projects from the online Digital Mapping (MAP) courses.  More info at newmapsplus.uky.edu

 

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