Anthropology & #BlackLivesMatter
A Discussion of research, activism in relation to the Decolonizing Anthropology Project
Panel featuring: Dawn Elissa Fischer (SFSU), Bianca Williams (UofC-Boulder) and Gina Athena Ulysse (Wes U)
Tuesday, November 1st, 4:30-6:00pm, Beckham Hall
About the speakers:
Dawn-Elissa Fischer (Africana Studies, San Francisco State University) is completing two manuscripts entitled Blackness, Race and Gender Politics in Japanese Hiphop and Methods to Floss, Theories to Flow: Hiphop Research, Aesthetics and Activism (an introductory textbook). Her work has been published in Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Transforming Anthropology, FIRE!!! The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies and The Western Journal of Black Studies. Dr. Fischer has co-produced a short film, Nihon Style, with Bianca White, which documents an annual Hiphop festival and its related organizations in Japan. She co-directs the BAHHRS (the Bay Area Hip Hop Research and Scholarship) project with Dave “Davey D” Cook, which was awarded the Cesar Chavez Institute’s Community-University Empowerment Grant. Dr. Fischer is a founding staff member of Dr. Marcyliena Morgan’s Hiphop Archive as well as a co-founder of the National Hip Hop Political Convention.
Bianca C. Williams’s (Ethnic Studies and Anthropology, University of Colorado at Boulder) research centers on theories of race and gender within African diasporic communities, particularly the emotional aspects of being “Black” and a “woman” in the U.S. and Jamaica. She is at work finishing an ethnography, The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (under contract with Duke University Press) and an edited volume titled, “’Do You Feel Me?’: Exploring Black American Gender and Sexuality through Feeling and Emotion,” co-authored with Jennifer A. Woodruff. Essays in Transforming Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology explore questions of race and gender in ethnographic research and pedagogical practices. She has also edited two collections of essays on #BlackLivesMatter, one for Cultural Anthropology and one for Savage Minds. She is a member of Black Lives Matter 5280 and the AAA Working Group on Racialized Police Brutality and Extrajudicial Violence.
Gina Athena Ulysse is Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University. A feminist artist-academic-activist and self-described Post-Zora Interventionist, she is the author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, A Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica (UChicago Press, 2008), Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (WesPress, 2015) and Because When God is too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD, a collection of poetry, performance texts and photographs (WesPress, 2017). She is Guest Editor of Caribbean Rasanblaj (2015), a double issue of e-misférica— NYU’s Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics journal. Her performance works include: I Am Storm: Songs & Poems for Haiti, VooDooDoll What if Haiti Were A Woman: On Ti Travay Sou 21 Pwen Or An Alter(ed)native in Something Other Than Fiction and Contemplating Absences & Distances. A committed public intellectual, when the mood strikes, she blogs for AfricaIsaCountry, Huffington Post, MsBlog and Tikkun Daily.