Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Thursday, October 10, 2019, 5:30pm (PST)
Music Recital Hall, UC Santa Cruz
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an award-winning author on race and inequality as well as Black politics and social movements in the United States. Her books include From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Her new book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, is forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press. Taylor’s writing has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, and beyond. In 2016, she was designated as one that one hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by the The Root. Taylor is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Amitav Ghosh
Thursday, February 27, 2020, 6pm (PST)
Music Recital Hall, UC Santa Cruz
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of numerous books, including The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. His most recent book, The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016. The recipient of numerous awards—including France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor, and the Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities—Ghosh’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. His most recent publication is Gun Island, a novel.
Moor Mother + Rasheedah Phillips, of Black Quantum Futurism
Friday, November 13, 2020, 4pm (PST)
Virtual Event, UC Santa Cruz
The exhibition is Moor Mother—a Philadelphia artist praised as part of “a new generation of visionary black storytellers” (The New York Times)—premieres a new video followed by a discussion of Black Quantum Futurism theory and practice with her collaborator Rasheedah Phillips. Weaving through haunting slave narratives as dystopian allegory, negro spirituals, and Black ritual, Moor Mother’s work points to a liberated future through Black Quantum Futurism, a project in partnership with author Rasheedah Phillips. Through a time of ecological and social disaster, she says, “I’m not saying, this is the end, we’re all doomed,” but rather that “I believe there is another way. So it’s about trying to get the audience to understand another way of digesting the truth.”
Nick Estes and Melanie K. Yazzie, of The Red Nation
Thursday, January 21, 2021, 4:30pm (PST)
Virtual Event, UC Santa Cruz
Nick Estes is Kul Wicasa from the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Resistance (Verso, 2019), and the host of The Red Nation Podcast.
Melanie K. Yazzie (Bilagáana/Diné) holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, and is Assistant Professor of Native American Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in Navajo/American Indian history, political ecology, Indigenous feminisms, queer Indigenous studies, and theories of policing and the state. She also organizes with The Red Nation, a grassroots Native-run organization committed to the liberation of Indigenous people from colonialism and capitalism.
Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain, of MTL / Decolonize This Place
Thursday, February 18, 2021, 4pm (PST)
Virtual Event, UC Santa Cruz
Natasha Dhillon and Amin Husain, are MTL, a collaboration that joins research, aesthetics, organizing and action in practice. Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain are co-founders of Anemones and Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, both movement-generated theory magazines; Global Ultra Luxury Faction, known as the direct-action wing of Gulf Labor Coalition; Direct Action Front for Palestine; and, most recently, Decolonize This Place, an action-oriented movement and decolonial formation in New York City and beyond. MTL has published in Alternet, Creative Time Reports, eflux, Hyperallergic, Jadaliyya, and October Magazine. Currently they are directing and producing Unsettling, an experimental documentary film about land, life and liberation in occupied Palestine.
Jodi Dean
Thursday, April 29, 2021, 4pm (PST)
Virtual Event, UC Santa Cruz
Jodi Dean teaches political, feminist, and media theory at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She has written or edited thirteen books, including The Communist Horizon (2012) and Crowds and Party (2016).
Jonas Staal
Thursday, May 20th 2021, 12:00pm (PST)
Virtual Event, UC Santa Cruz
Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, propaganda, and democracy. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing) and the campaign New Unions (2016–ongoing). With BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, he co-founded the New World Academy (2013-16), with Florian Malzacher he is currently directing the utopian training camp Training for the Future (2018-ongoing) and with Laure Prouvost he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union.
