Signature Lecture Archives

Miriam Thaggert
Associate Professor of English 

Thursday, November 17, 2022
3:30 PM via Zoom

Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad

Commentator: Madhu Dubey, Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, Black Studies at University of Illinois Chicago.

Katja Praznik
Associate Professor, Arts Management Program

Friday, September 23, 2022
3:30 - 5:00 pm (EDT)
Hybrid - 509 O'Brian Hall / Zoom

Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism

Commentator: Silvia Federici, Feminist, Activist, Writer Scholar, and Teacher

                                           Recording available here

"Social Reproduction from Majority World Perspectives"

Hybrid Event
Thursday, April 20, 2023
509 )'Brian Hall & via Zoom
3:30PM (EDT)

Recording Available on Youtube

Contemporary social reproduction debates are primarily focused upon the “crisis of care” in high income countries. Less attention has been paid to social reproduction in post-colonial and post-socialist contexts both theoretically and empirically. The “Social Reproduction from Majority World Perspectives” panel highlights how work is experienced as the blurring of the productive and the reproductive for the vast majority of workers in the global economy. From sweatshop workers in India and women factory workers of iPhones in China to migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, this panel will address the links between exploitation and social reproduction from a global and intersectional lens.

Panelists:

Alessandra Mezzadri, Reader, Department of Development Studies, SOAS, a leading scholar on social reproduction in the majority world, and the author of The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India (CUP, 2017).

Yige Dong, Assistant Professor in Sociology and Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, who will share work from her book-in-progress which examines the century-long transformation of women’s work and caring labor in China as the country has transitioned from a communist revolutionary state to a capitalist authoritarian regime.

Gabriella Nassif, doctoral candidate in Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, examines how racism and economic crisis combine to subject migrant domestic workers to extraordinary harm and precarity in Lebanon, and their strategies of resistance and survival.

Moderator: Marion Werner, Associate Professor of Geography, University at Buffalo.

"Social Reproduction and the Crisis of Housing in Buffalo"

Hybrid Event
Wednesday, March 15, 2023
CFA Screening Room & via Zoom
4:00PM (EDT)

Recording Available on Youtube

The “Social Reproduction and the Crisis of Housing in Buffalo” panel aims to bring social reproduction theory home to Buffalo in terms of the struggle for affordable housing. As Dr. Taylor notes above, social crisis has a way of exposing the deeply embedded injustices within a society and as the recent litany of crises demonstrates—from COVID-19 to the white supremacist massacre at Tops in Buffalo's East Side—a host of related concerns about safety, food insecurity, and access to medical care have come to the fore.

Panelists:

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Leon Forrest Professor of African-American Studies at Northwestern University (and former UB undergraduate), 2021 MacArthur Fellow, and author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019), a semi-finalist for a National Book Award and a 2020 finalist for Pulitzer Prize.

India Walton, 2023 Buffalo Common Council (Masten District) Candidate, Director, Roots Action Buffalo/Roots Action Civic Engagement, former Executive Director of Fruit Belt Community Land Trust and 2021 Democratic candidate for Mayor of Buffalo, New York, who ran with a housing advocacy platform plank.

Rahwa Ghirmatzion, Former Executive Director of Buffalo’s People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH Buffalo), a West Side activist and housing advocacy organization.

Moderator: Carrie Tirado Bramen, Director of the UB Gender Institute and Professor of English.

"How Capitalism Created the Care Economy.”

Hybrid Event
Thursday, October 27, 2022
509 O'Brian Hall
3:30PM (EDT)

Recording Available Upon Request
Email ub-irewg@buffalo.edu

Premilla Nadasen is a Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University. Nadasen is the author of four books, most recently Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement, which is a new classic of history-from-below that reconstructs the work of mainly Black women domestic workers in the post-war period. Nadasen is the winner of the first Ann Snitow Prize for writers who combine intellectual pursuits with feminist and social justice activism. Her keynote will be based on her forthcoming book on social reproduction with Haymarket Press.

About the Book:

Telling the stories of African American domestic workers, Household Workers Unite,  resurrects a little-known history of domestic worker activism in the 1960s and 1970s, offering new perspectives on race, labor, feminism, and organizing.
In this groundbreaking history of African American domestic-worker organizing, scholar and activist Premilla Nadasen shatters countless myths and misconceptions about an historically misunderstood workforce. Resurrecting a little-known history of domestic-worker activism from the 1950s to the 1970s, Nadasen shows how these women were a far cry from the stereotyped passive and powerless victims; they were innovative labor organizers who tirelessly organized on buses and streets across the United States to bring dignity and legal recognition to their occupation.

Thursday, September 22, 2022 | 509 O'Brian Hall  | Hybrid Event 
Reception to follow

Silvia Federici is one of the key figures among the group of feminists that spurred the new radical theorizing of social reproduction in the 1970s. In her keynote address, Federici will discuss the enduring relevance of social reproduction and how the theorizing of contradictions in this terrain are necessary for social movements dedicated to reorganizing everyday life and creating non-exploitative social relations.

About the Book:
At a time when we are witnessing a worldwide expansion of capitalist relations, a feminist rethinking of Marx’s work is vitally important. In Patriarchy of the Wage, Silvia Federici, bestselling author and the most important Marxist feminist of our era, asks why Marx's crucial analysis of the exploitation of human labor was blind to women’s work and struggle on the terrain of social reproduction. Why was Marx unable to anticipate the profound transformations in the proletarian family that took place at the turn of the nineteenth century creating a new patriarchal regime? Patriarchy of the Wage does more than just redefine classical Marxism. It is an urgent call for a new kind of radical politics.
Get 25% discount with using the code: Silvia for any of Federici's title books at https://pmpress.org/.



This event is co-sponsored by the UB Departments of Philosophy, English, History and the Arts Management Program.

Friday
April 1, 2022
12 PM (EST) via Zoom

Jessica Nordell is a science and culture journalist who has been covering unconscious bias and its antidotes for ten years. Her essays and reporting on the subject have appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the New Republic, the Washington Post, and many other publications. Educated at MIT and Harvard in physics, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison in poetry, she is a former writer and radio producer for American Public Media. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The End of Bias: A Beginning is her first book.

About the Book:

The End of Bias is a transformative, groundbreaking exploration into how we can eradicate unintentional bias and discrimination, the great challenge of our age.

Unconscious bias: persistent, unintentional prejudiced behavior that clashes with our consciously held beliefs. We know that it exists, to corrosive and even lethal effect. We see it in medicine, the workplace, education, policing, and beyond. But when it comes to uprooting our prejudices, we still have far to go.

With nuance, compassion, and ten years' immersion in the topic, Jessica Nordell weaves gripping stories with scientific research to reveal how minds, hearts, and behaviors change. She scrutinizes diversity training, deployed across the land as a corrective but with inconsistent results. She explores what works and why: the diagnostic checklist used by doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital that eliminated disparate treatment of men and women; the preschool in Sweden where teachers found ingenious ways to uproot gender stereotyping; the police unit in Oregon where the practice of mindfulness and specialized training has coincided with a startling drop in the use of force.

Captivating, direct, and transformative, The End of Bias: A Beginning brings good news. Biased behavior can change; the approaches outlined here show how we can begin to remake ourselves and our world.

End of Bias book is available in paper copies in Lockwood Library. Book summary details can be found here.

Thursday, April 21, 2022 | 12 PM (EST) via Zoom

Cathy Park Hong is an award-winning poet and essayist whose book, Minor Feelings, is a searching work that ruthlessly reckons with the American racial consciousness. Hong is also the author of three poetry collections including Dance Dance Revolution (which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize), Engine Empire, and Translating Mo’Um. She is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The Boston Review, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of the New Republic and full professor at the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program in poetry.

Presented in Collaboration with the Office of Inclusive Excellence as part of the "Let's Talk About Race" Series.

The book discussed above is available in ebook format at the UB libraries, found here.

Recording Coming Soon...

November 4, 2021 | 12:00 PM (EST) | Via Zoom

Cassidy R. Sugimoto is Professor, School Chair, and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Public Policy. Her research examines the formal and informal ways in which knowledge is produced, disseminated, consumed, and supported, with an emphasis on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. She received the Indiana University Trustees Teaching award (2014) and a Bicentennial Award for service from Indiana University (2020), where she served on the faculty from 2010-2020. During her tenure at IUB, Sugimoto also served a rotation as the Program Director for the Science of Science and Innovation Policy program at the National Science Foundation. She has a doctoral degree in Information and Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Recording: https://youtu.be/ok4zKqZAb1c

November 4, 2021 | 10:00 - 11:00 AM (EST) | Via Zoom

Join the conversation to discuss the ongoing effects on caregiving and work demands brought on by COVID-19.  We will share lived experiences and solutions as we grapple with the long-term impact of the pandemic.  Open to UB Faculty, Staff and Students. 

October 7, 2021 | Noon | Via Zoom

Mónica Ramírez is an attorney, author and activist. She is the founder of Justice for Migrant Women and co-founder of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, The Latinx House, and Poderistas. Mónica has received numerous awards, including Harvard Kennedy School’s first Gender Equity Changemaker Award, Feminist Majority’s Global Women’s Rights Award and the Smithsonian’s 2018 Ingenuity Award. She was named to Forbes Mexico’s 100 Most Powerful Women’s 2018 list and TIME Magazine included her in its 2021 TIME100 Next list. Mónica is also an inaugural member of the Ford Global Fellowship. Mónica lives in Ohio with her husband and son.

Presented in collaboration with the Office of Inclusive Excellence.

October 7, 2021 | 3:00 PM | Via Zoom

In this talk, Mónica Ramírez will share her leadership journey from her teen years organizing in her community to serving as a student leader and later a civil rights attorney and activist. She explores the importance of finding ones voice, staying true to oneself and staying grounded, even when facing challenges. Mónica Ramírez will also touch on contemporary challenges facing the Latinx community, including the impact of the border crisis, and how farmworker women are leading the fight to end workplace sexual violence and promote economic and social justice.  

Presented in collaboration with: Inclusive Excellence, Gender Institute, Sustainability, Intercultural and Diversity Center (IDC), Department of History, Health Promotion, Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab.

March 10, 2021

To view a recording of this lecture, please click here.

Barbara Smith is one of the most important Black feminists of our time.

In 1974, she co-founded the Combahee River Collective in Boston. She co-authored their now famous Combahee River Collective Statement in 1977, which became one of the earliest explorations of the intersection of multiple oppressions, including racism and heterosexism. Smith and Audre Lorde co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980. Kitchen Table later published her collection Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983). Her groundbreaking essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” opened the door to serious critical consideration of Black women writers. Her most recent book is the award-winning Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith.  This event is a collaboration with the Department of Africana and American Studies and their 2021 Endowed African American Studies Lecture.

February 17, 2021 

Loretta J. Ross is a Visiting Associate Professor of the Study of Women & Gender at Smith College in Northampton, MA in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender.

To view a recording of this lecture, please click here.

What if instead of calling people out, we called them in? Professor Loretta J. Ross, a human rights leader who writes and teaches on white supremacy, race, and reproductive justice, is challenging call-out culture. Professor Ross will explore how call-out culture has become toxic and transformed conversations that could otherwise be learning opportunities into sparring matches. How do we uphold our commitment to social justice while resisting the pull of the outrage cycle? Professor Ross will discuss how we can build a unified and strategic human rights movement that uses our differences as a platform for modeling a positive future built on justice and the politics of love, thus shifting away from a past based on the politics of fear and prejudice.
Presented in collaboration with the Office of Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence.

December 3, 2020

Mishuana Goeman is a a 2020-2021 UB Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Associate Professor of Gender Studies, American Indian Studies, and affiliated faculty of Critical Race Studies in the Law School, UCLA Presented in conjunction with the Center for Diversity Innovation.

To view a recording of this lecture, please click here.

Niagara Falls has become an important monument marking the boundary of the United States northern border and Canada’s Southern border. For Seneca people however, the falls are the place where the Thunder Beings reside and thus it is a place instrumental to Seneca experience of place. Built up as a tourist site in the early 1900s and later marketed as a honeymoon site, Niagara Falls becomes an important geographical area to examine state produced space (such as making of monuments and jurisdictions) and Indigenous place-making (such as the reflection of experiences through intergenerational stories regarding specific sites, that in turn produce a value system). Niagara Falls becomes a site of biopolitical power in which Americans and Canadian settlers come to know themselves by not only sacrificing the Indian maiden, but literally sacrificing Haudenosuanee histories, land, water and meanings of place. This source of electricity built the grid upon which Buffalo as an industrial city flourished. As the middle class accumulates wealth, Niagara Falls is advertised widely as a vacation spot in New York City circles. Goeman is interested not just in individual Indigenous cities but looking at the interconnecting links between them that create a grid of Indigenous dispossession.

September 17, 2020

Lisa Downing is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is a specialist in interdisciplinary sexuality and gender studies, critical theory, and the history of cultural concepts, focusing especially on questions of exceptionality, difficulty, and (ab)normality. Recent books include: The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer (2013); Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts (co-authored with Iain Morland and Nikki Sullivan, 2015); and After Foucault (as editor, 2018), as well as Selfish Women. Her next book project will be a short monograph-manifesto entitled Against Affect.

Video available by request for UB community members.

In this lecture, Lisa Downing will discuss the key themes of her book, Selfish Women. The book offers a provocative rejoinder to many dominant ideas in mainstream culture, as well as in much feminist thinking, about the ethical character of women and the female proclivity to care, to be for the other.  For an excerpt, please click here.

Selfish Women asks why difficult, unpalatable — selfish — women are treated with such ambivalent fascination and demonization. Focusing on controversial and influential figures who have espoused philosophies and politics of selfishness, including Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher, it asks whether their ideas of self-interest might, counterintuitively and used against the grain, lend something valuable to feminist politics — and, more broadly, whether progressive politics might be missing a trick in rejecting the notion of "self-interest."

February 13, 2020

Nwando Achebe details her personal journey into becoming an Africanist and gender historian. Along the way, she considers questions relating to the ownership and production of Africanist knowledge; while highlighting several influential interpretive voices that have shaped received canon in ways that are at best, problematic; and at worst, Eurocentric. These voices have worked to interrupt and/or disrupt true understanding and knowing about African women and gender. She ends by offering up her own African- and gender-centered intervention into existing discourse and production of history.

Cosponsored by the UB Department of History, Gender Institute, School of Law and the Office of the Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence.

November 7, 2019

Paisley Currah, Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY, is a founding editor, with Susan Stryker, of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, a new journal from Duke University Press. He is co-editor of Corpus: An Interdisciplinary Reader on Bodies and Knowledge and Transgender Rights.  He also co-edited Transgender Rights, which won the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Recent articles have been published in Theory & Event, Social Research, and Hypatia. Currah sits on the editorial boards of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, andSexuality Research and Social Policy. He served as the Executive Director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York from 2003-2007, where he helped launched the International Resource Network, a global network of researchers, activists, artists, and teachers sharing knowledge about diverse sexualities.

October 3, 2019

Moya Bailey is an Assistant Professor of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University. Named to Essence Magazine’s Woke 100 Women for 2018, Professor Bailey coined the word “misogynoir” in 2010, a term that describes the intersection of race and gender-based bias that black women face in popular culture. Her work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She currently curates the #transformDH Tumblr initiative in Digital Humanities. She is also the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network.

April 17, 2019

Wazhmah Osman is a Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Production at Temple University.  Osman, a filmmaker and anthropologist, will discuss ways to imagine global feminist solidarity beyond ‘imperial feminism’ in our current age of hyper-masculinity and militarism. Her acclaimed documentary, Postcards from Tora Bora (2007), has been shown in festivals around the world. There will be a screening of the film ahead of her visit.

The UB Libraries have obtained a license for one year to the film. UB community members may view the film by logging onto the streaming service Kanopy. A direct link to the film on the UB Libraries website can be found here: Postcards from Tora Bora.

October 15, 2018

Kate Manne is an Assistant professor of the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University, where she has been teaching since 2013. She was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2011 to 2013. She did her graduate work in philosophy at MIT from 2006 to 2011, with the generous support of a General Sir John Monash scholarship. She was an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne (her hometown), where she studied philosophy, logic, and computer science.

More recently, her focus is on moral philosophy (especially metaethics and moral psychology), feminist philosophy, and social philosophy. She also enjoys writing opinion pieces, essays, and reviews for a wider audience.