5.17.19
Amari Rebel & the Movement
theblacktastic.rsvpify.com
Amari Rebel & the Movement usher you on a journey. Special guests, special friends, and a special experience as we work to move the culture forward.
Music and vendors will be there. So will you!
$10 with rsvp
Friday, May 17th at 9:00 PM
3849 Warren Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
“Free to Be Anywhere in the Universe: An International Conference on New Directions in the Study of the African Diaspora”
Conference dates: Thursday, April 25 – Saturday, 27, 2019
Conference Locations: The Forum at Columbia University & Columbia University’s Faculty House & Leroy Neiman Gallery at Dodge Hall
Free & Open to the Public;
Registration is Required for Admission into The Forum, secured building
Please register at
https://forms.gle/UwknKsWXRF3phc7g8
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Humanities New York Vision/Action Grant |
UNIVERSITY PARTNERS
Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University
Barnard College Department of Africana Studies
Columbia University School of the Arts
Collaborative to Advance Equity through Research at Columbia University
Selection of event photographs
The Institute for Research in African American Studies Alumni Council congratulates Taurean J. Webb named as the new director of the Center for the Church and the Black Experience and Instructor of Religion and Race at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, effective May 1, 2019
EVANSTON, Illinois – Having just completed a national search, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary is pleased to announce the appointment of Taurean J. Webb as director of the Center for the Church and the Black Experience (CBE). In addition, Webb will be joining the faculty as instructor of religion and race and will be named as assistant professor of religion and race upon completion of his dissertation. Webb will begin his position on May 1, 2019. A leading center of Garrett-Evangelical, CBE was founded in 1970 and has empowered and trained generations of leaders for the African American religious community and society-at-large.
Webb, who has been serving as the interim director of CBE since July 2018, will focus on building a strong financial and programmatic foundation for the center. With experience in pastoral ministry, intersectional justice movement building, cultural education, non-profit governance, and interracial/interfaith coalition training, Webb aims to engage a wide cross-section of professional domains as the director. He is particularly interested in engaging faith communities, educators, and civil society organizations to both enhance the experiences of current Garrett-Evangelical students and also help maximize CBE’s impact outside of the seminary.
“We are delighted that Mr. Webb has accepted our invitation to join the Garett-Evangelical faculty and to direct our historic Center for the Church and the Black Experience,” said President Lallene J. Rector. “His work in black theology, commitment to interfaith dialogue and activism, and expertise in critical race theory are gifts that will enhance and strengthen the seminary’s commitment to preparing spiritual leaders for today’s church and world. Welcome, Taurean!”
CBE has been a beacon of hope and inspiration for Black students, pastors, churches, and communities for nearly five decades. It has been instrumental in fusing Black people and Black religious life into the entire seminary community. As director, Webb seeks to address the unique challenges facing Black students—across the diaspora—while educating and inspiring all persons who live, work, and study at the seminary.
“In so many ways, CBE stands in such a storied lineage of Black institutions that came of age in the thick of twentieth century liberation struggles. For this reason and others, I count it such a great honor to lead this center into its half-century mark—a historical moment in which Garrett-Evangelical, its denomination, and Africa-descended people the world over are urgently wrestling with important questions about God, equity, and justice,” Webb noted. “I’m grateful to the search committee for its tireless work and to Garrett-Evangelical for its commitment to liberation-minded ministry.”
Webb is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Morehouse College, with a bachelor of arts degree in philosophy and religion. He holds master of arts degrees in Black and cultural studies from Columbia University and Northwestern University. He is currently in the doctor of philosophy program at Garrett-Evangelical, with doctoral research that looks at “Blackness” and “Palestinian-ness” as racial formations, and the ways in which an internationalist theological hermeneutic of [visual material] culture can uncover how these communities organically move against white supremacy and Judeo-Christian hegemony. His work is supported by the Forum for Theological Exploration.
Previously, Webb served as Scholar-in-Residence at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, where he produced writings, researched, and managed the organization’s Palestine justice portfolio. He also formerly served as director of staff and academies at the W.E.B. DuBois Scholars Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.
Instituted in 1970 as one of the primary emphases of the seminary, the Center for the Church and the Black Experience (CBE) focuses on African and African American experience and ministry. Part of its purpose is to ensure the integration of Black religious experience into all aspects of seminary life, including student recruitment, faculty development, curriculum planning, and special programs. Its aims are instituted by incorporating African and African American experience into existing curricula, rather than establishing separate Black studies programs; by the endowment of scholarships for black students; and by the establishment of a parity committee made up of equal numbers of Black and white faculty. To learn more about CBE, go to Garrett.edu/CBE.
Image Credit: Mary Sibande, A Terrible Beauty is Born, 2013
Thursday April 25
Location: The Forum at 125th street 12:00pm – Noon – 2:00pm
Roundtable – From Theory to Praxis, Black Studies Beyond the Academy
This roundtable seeks to connect some of the fundamental work of IAC alums whose grounding in IRAAS has made significant impact of their work outside the academy. It seeks to highlight the social justice, political, governmental, medical, and educational work our alums are doing, especially around race, inequality, and justice. A discussion of past programs and initiatives that continue to influence their current work. 2:00pm – 2:15pm – BREAK 2:15pm – 4:15pm
Intellectual Legacies of IRAAS Scholarship
This session will highlight the leading scholarship by IRAAS alums whose work engages the various fields and subfields of Black/African American Studies. Panelists will connect their work to new paradigms and innovations for the future of Black Studies. It will also highlight the legacy and influence of IRAAS on their current work and placement in the academy.4:15pm – 5:00pm – LOCATION CHANGE – Faculty House on Columbia Campus at 116th Street (Amsterdam Avenue & Morningside Drive)
Enter through small Iron gate midblock, next to Jerome Greene Hall. Walk straight back past the Wein courtyard and the Faculty House is on the right 5:00pm – 6:00pm
South African Artist, Mary Sibande Pre-Exhibition Talk 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Mary Sibande Exhibition Opening – Leroy Neiman Gallery, Dodge Hall (Near 116th Street & Broadway gate )
Friday April 26
Location: The Forum at 125th street 10:00am – 11:45am
Genealogies of Black Studies
This session examines distinct and overlapping genealogies of Black Studies. It brings together leading scholars who work in different iterations of Black/African American Studies. Panelists will draw upon their pathbreaking scholarship to speak about trajectories of Black Studies in their own subfields. 11:45pm – 1:15pm
LUNCH BREAK 1:15pm – 3:00pm
Diasporic Politics
What are the emerging forms of social solidarity and activism now taking shape across the African diaspora in the wake of neoliberal economic policies, trans-border migrations, climate change and un/natural disasters, and the rise of white, ethno-nationalisms in North America and Europe? How do we think the concepts of African diaspora and Black World while attending to the differing spatial scales at which diasporic communities are imagined, and the varying interests and projects that they serve? 3:00pm – 3:15pm
BREAK 3:15pm – 5:00pm
The Theoretical Turn
The significance of “theory” has long been a question for scholars who locate themselves in relationship to the interdisciplinary field of African American and African Diaspora Studies. At the same time, one could argue that black studies constitutes a theory of the modern world, and of how to produce knowledge in the wake of modernity’s central contradictions (i.e. of slavery and freedom). That said, in recent years Black Studies has been enlivened by engagements with a variety of theoretical resources that have yielded multiple trajectories (i.e Afro-Futurism, Afro-Pessimism, Black Performance, Black Queer studies, to name just a few). This panel is charged with assessing the resources and weighing the prospects for future work within what some have referred to as a novel “theoretical turn” in Black Studies. 5:00pm – 6:30pm
DINNER BREAK 6:30pm – 8:15pm
Plenary Keynote –
Saturday April 27
Location: The Forum at 125th street 10:00am – 11:45am
Black Urban Life
Scholars in this transdisciplinary panel will explore the multivalent socio-spatial contours of Africa and the African Diaspora, in particular how black agency, politics, humanity and mobility across the topographies formed in the wake of colonialism, enslavement, capitalism, and liberal democracy impact life in the black world. In addressing the nuanced spaces of communal, urban, national, and planetary life, panelists will also consider how to best understand the productive spatio-temporal possibilities of new black imaginaries, cartographies of resistance and refusal, and diasporic community building. 11:45pm – 1:15pm
LUNCH BREAK 1:15pm – 3;00pm
Global Black Feminisms
Concepts of black feminism have informed and helped to reshape fields of academic study as well as political organizing. The proposed panel seeks to present a historical sweep of black feminist thought and practice. Participants might consider a number of questions including, but not limited to the following: How do historical legacies of race, gender and justice shape mass incarceration today? How have black women intellectuals participated in shaping black political thought? How have their participation in global freedom struggles furthered the liberator’s vision of those movements, including what we conventionally understand as movements for Civil Rights? In what ways do contemporary forms of racial and gender inequality influence professional occupations? How has a black feminist framework informed contemporary black cultural production?3:00pm – 3:15pm – BREAK 3:15pm – 5:00pm
Imagining Freedom
This panel considers socio-spatial imaginaries and the active visualization, definition, and construction of artistic freedoms. What roles do literature; music, the visual arts and popular culture play in imagining and articulating trans-diasporic expressions of subjectivity, experience and memory? How do we today theorize the conditions of possibility for an African Diasporic aesthetic, while attending to cultural, historical and geopolitical differences?5:00pm – 6:30pm –
8PM Thursday, March 14, 2019
501 Dodge Hall, Columbia University
Refreshments provided
Biography:
Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco and earned his MA at Columbia University. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. In their citation, the judges for the Griffin Prize wrote that Eisen-Martin’s work “moves between trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other—keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice … His poems are places where discourses and vernaculars collide and recombine into new configurations capable of expressing outrage and sorrow and love.”
Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He lives in San Francisco.
Source: Poetry Foundation
We will remember and celebrate Marcellus Blount’s life and work in Agents of Change: A Symposium in Honor of Marcellus Blount, to be held on Tuesday, March 26, 2019 at Columbia University, Low Library, 1-4:30 pm. Speakers will include George Aumoithe, Sarah Cole, Zinga Fraser, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Jack Halberstam, Ellie Hisama, Jean Howard, Dennis Mitchell, Robert O’Mealley, Rebecca Pawel, Richard Sacks, James Shapiro, Joseph Slaughter, Alan Stewart, Kendall Thomas, and Maya Tolstoy. The program will be announced shortly.
At the symposium, we are planning to distribute a booklet of tributes to Marcellus. If you would like to contribute a memorial statement (a paragraph or two, or 300 words maximum), please send it as a Word document to Professor Ellie Hisama at eh2252@columbia.edu by Monday, March 11. A brief statement would be ideal because we would like to include as many contributions from colleagues, students, and friends as possible. We will post tributes received after the deadline on the memorial website for Marcellus, to be launched by Columbia’s new African American and African Diaspora Studies Department.
Please forward this note to Marcellus’s colleagues and friends–it is an open call.
Thank you, Ellie Hisama
Ellie M. Hisama
Professor of Music & Theory Area Chair
Columbia Faculty Working Group, Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity
Chair, Academic Review Committee
Organizer, Agents of Change: A Symposium in Honor of Marcellus Blount (March 26, 2019)
Founding Director & Co-Director, For the Daughters of Harlem: Working in Sound
Committee on Equity and Diversity in the Arts and Science; Policy and Planning Committee
Faculty committee, Project Spectrum
Columbia University
2960 Broadway, MC 1823
New York, NY 10027
Are you recently out of school and searching for your career passion? Or are you stuck in a long job rut and searching for the next career move to excite and inspire you? Whatever your career goals might be, connect with fellow alumni during this month’s Networking Hour and find others who share your passions, interests, and goals. Happy connecting!
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Don’t see your industry? You can join the “Wildcard” group for a chance to meet alumni from a variety of different backgrounds.
Stay Connected
Source: Columbia Alumni Association
Zinga Fraser, PhD returns to @AM2DM on BuzzFeed News to discuss Shirley Chisholm entrance in the United States Congress and parts of her political career. .@FraserZinga discusses Shirley Chisholm on the 50th anniversary of her first day as the first black woman in Congress pic.twitter.com/iH7NBspEsc — AM2DM by BuzzFeed News (@AM2DM) January 3, 2019 The […]
via Zinga Fraser, PhD returns @AM2DM on @BuzzFeedNews — Zinga A. Fraser, PhD
Toy Drive 2017 collection for 100 items to support New York City Administration for Children Services. Representatives from New York City Administration for Children’s Services, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.; Amazon – Black Employee Network, New York; Brown University – Inman Page Black Alumni Council, New York and Columbia University – Institute for Research in African American Studies Alumni Council.
The Institute for Research in African American Studies Alumni Council of Columbia University invites you join us
For dinner reservations contact 212.939.9443
In 2017 executives in attendance hailed from Amazon Black Employee Network, Sirius XM Black Employee Network, HSBC Bank, State University of New York (SUNY) Suffolk County Community College, City University of New York (CUNY) Brooklyn College, New York City Department of Youth and Community Services, New York City Parks Department, Rustic Tavern, NFL Network, Goldman Sachs, General Electric, Citizens Financial Group, JP Morgan Chase, and many more organizations.
Tyler James, Director of Workforce Development at New York City Administration of Children’s Services coordinated the successful 2017 toy drive to support over 100 youth. Attendees shared “It is such an honor to support our youth and build new community ties at the same time.”
The collaboration is hosted by
IRAAS Alumni Council 