What is feminist theory when we begin with black people, black thought, and black culture at the center of our inquiry? How does this point of departure challenge and expand the parameters of feminism and the field of Women’s Studies?
The fourth biennial Interventions symposium will explore temporality, genealogy, knowledge production, and pedagogical strategy through the lens of Black Feminist Thought. This year’s symposium is concerned with the history and the ongoing legacies of Black feminist knowledge production within the Department of Women’s Studies and the field at large. Through a series of panels, speculative discussions, performances, and film screening, we will ponder and sit with the tensions and possibilities present at this political and historical juncture in the department and field of Women’s Studies. In addition, we find ourselves taking up questions of feminist taxonomy, feminist research methodology, and feminist political work within and beyond the academy. Within these broader conversations, we reach toward and invite critical inquiry regarding the ways that we might center genealogies and geographies of Black feminisms, such as the critical activism of Harriet Tubman in Maryland and beyond, in our departmental self-positioning.
The venue for the event is wheelchair accessible.
Thanks to our sponsors: The Department of Women's Studies; the Pepsi Enhancement Fund; the College of Arts and Humanities; the Department of History; the Department of American Studies; the Department of Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies; The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center; the Office of Graduate Diversity and Inclusion
Dr. Mel Michelle Lewis is Associate Professor of Gender/Sexuality in Studio and Humanistic Studies at Maryland Institute College of Art, cultivating Black feminist intersectional queer critical race social justice pedagogies for liberatory art and design education and creative practice. Their personal, professional, and political commitments are to overlapping and interlocking queer, trans, nonbinary, intersex, and feminist communities of color. Originally from Bayou la Batre, Alabama, their creative work explores queer of color themes in rural coastal settings. Previously, Dr. Mel served as Director of the transdiciplinary Center for Geographies of Justice and Associate Professor of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at Goucher College. Their roles have also included Associate Professor and Director of Ethnic Studies at Saint Mary’s College of California and Interim Executive director of the National Women’s Studies Association. Dr. Mel completed their M.A. and Ph.D. in Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park in the area of Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities. They hold an M.S. in Women and Gender Studies with a Public Policy concentration from Towson University and a B.A. in Women’s Studies and Sociology from Goucher College. Dr. Mel serves on the Baltimore City LGBTQ Commission and Baltimore City Enoch Pratt Free Library LGBTQ Advisory Council.
Dr. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and performer whose research focus is on Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. Her current book manuscript argues that Black women’s creative production is feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect she calls “feelin.” She is currently Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.
She has received fellowships from the Five Colleges, The Vermont Studio Center and the University of Maryland. Her poems and essays have appeared in Torch, Mythium, Meridians and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems titled patient. which tackles the history of medical experimentation on and display of Black women won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize and was released in November of 2014. As a performer she has been invited to perform for audiences within the United States and internationally.
Black Caucus with
Timea Webster
1:00 PM
This session is a time for Black identified people in attendance to gather, build community, and discuss what it means to be black in institutions of higher education. It is also a space to imagine our collective and diverse roles in world building, at UMD and beyond.
This panel highlights black feminist cultural production and the ways in which black women have confronted social, cultural, and historical barriers. Using film, television, music and literature as inception points, the papers in this panel explore themes of subversion, fugitivity, autonomy, and futurity through a black feminist lens.
Panelists:
Brienne Adams; "Listen to Black Women”: A Genealogical Love Letter to Black Feminists
Dr. Ollie L. Jefferson; The Oprah Winfrey Network’s Queen Sugar Television Series: A Case Study on African American Women Exemplary Representations On-Screen and Behind-the-Scenes
Nancy Vera; Witches & Tricksters: Feminine Forms of Resistance in Afro-Mexican Folklore
Our panel proposes a (re)turn to and reengagement with Ann duCille’s seminal work “The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies,” published in Signs in 1994. Our panel aims to enact an encounter between duCille’s critique and contemporary debates in and adjacent to Black feminist studies, particularly in regards to the politics of academia and the university. Through three distinct but interrelated engagements, we position duCille as a critical interlocutor in three contemporary fields of discussion in the humanities
Panelists:
Danielle LaPlace; Thorns in the Side: Black Feminists as Disciplinarians within Women’s Studies
Zachary Johnson; In, But Not Of? The “Occult” and/as University Studies
;Adelaida Shelley; “At Least in Some Measure About Jobs”: Value and Accumulation in the Critical Humanities
Thinking about black women’s lives requires us to think about the ways they resist structural subjugation. The papers in this panel turn to archival and autoethnographic research to uncover black women’s resistance, survival and activism in the face of institutional violence.
Panelists:
Lenora R. Knowles; On Black Women’s Coalition Building in the Age of Cold War Surveillance
Jessica Shotwell; Re-thinking Ethnography and the Narrative of the Black Schoolgirl
Dr. Tamanika Ferguson; Women In Prison Speak: Resistance and Activism for Social Justice
Participants:
Siddisse Negero- WMST Undergraduate Student
Sarah Scriven - WMST Doctoral Student
Dr. Mel Michelle Lewis - WMST Alum and Associate Professor of Gender/Sexuality in Studio and Humanistic Studies at Maryland Institute College of Art
Dr. Augusta Lynn Bolles - WMST Professor, Emeritus
Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson - WMST Graduate Certificate Recipient and Associate Professor and Chair of the UMD Department of American Studies