Talk Description: Black feminist artist Nona Faustine’s White Shoes series (2013-2022) stages and documents Faustine’s reparative practice of taking self-portraits in sites around New York City where enslaved Africans lived, died, and are buried. White Shoes foregrounds Faustine’s own corporeality, intervening in an interdisciplinary discursive space concerned with what Kimberly Juanita Brown describes as “the tremendous burden of black subjectivity when that subjectivity is tethered to sight.” In this presentation, I endeavor to look with Faustine at the afterlives of slavery and speculate about liberatory futures-lived-now, in a Black feminist analytic tradition with a long history emblematized by Ann duCille’s call to think with, not only about, Black women. This presentation considers Faustine’s self-portrait series formally as not only photography but also as performance documentation; in so doing, I argue, the historiographic force of her work is revealed. 

Ariel Nereson is Associate Professor of Dance Studies at the University at Buffalo – SUNY. She is the author of the award-winning book Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past (University of Michigan Press, 2022); coeditor of Critical University Studies and Performance (Vanderbilt University Press, 2026); and currently at work on a monograph about institutions, the arts, and reparations. Her research has most recently been recognized with the Sally Banes Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research. Ariel is Editor of Theatre Journal and a practicing choreographer and dramaturg.

Talk description: A wave of attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, and particularly on the rights of LGBTQ+ youth, is underway in the United States. This includes the introduction and passing of a record number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills stifling discussions about marginalized gender and sexual identities in K-12 education. Many of these bills implicitly or explicitly seek to give parents greater oversight of school curricula, particularly as it pertains to diversity-related content (e.g., teaching about race, gender, and sexuality). In this presentation, I'll share experimental and qualitative research documenting cisgender-heterosexual and LGBTQ+ U..S. parents' reactions to LGBTQ+ inclusive education, including how attitudes changed around the 2024 presidential election. This research includes findings on perceptions of inclusive education in elementary, middle, or high school settings, the type of education (e.g., role models, posters, textbooks), and beliefs about the motivations behind educators who share inclusive education materials. In documenting these reactions, I will argue that better understanding backlash toward LGBTQ+ inclusive education is critical for understanding avenues to best support educators, LGBTQ+ youth, and LGBTQ+ families.

Kim Chaney is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at UB. As a social psychologist, Dr. Chaney's research examines how: (1) lay beliefs about prejudice affect marginalized and privileged group members’ expectations, behavior, and well-being, (2) how and when prejudice confrontations reduce prejudice and impact confronters, and (3) how individual and organizational claims of allyship are perceived. Dr. Chaney has been recognized as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science and has received funding from the Spencer Foundation for her research on anti-LGBTQ+ policies impacting perceptions of K-12 education.