About the Conference
At a moment in history when the Covid-19 crisis coincides with the Black Lives Matter movement’s protests against racism and systemic oppression, this interdisciplinary conference investigates how intersectionality, as an analytical category and an experience focusing on mutually constitutive systems of discrimination, engages and narrates blackness in the U.S. and Canada. What kinds of knowledge can an intersectional approach open up about the complex experience of blackness, and how do academic inquiries that are informed by it shape narratives of North America? International speakers from literary and cultural studies, race, gender, and disability studies, sociology and law (amongst them Cedric Essi, Jennifer Nash, and Samantha Pinto) examine how these fields rewrite knowledge systems that have tended to oppress, marginalize, and discipline blackness throughout history.
This conference will take place on April 28-29, 2022, in collaboration with the Bavarian American Academy in Munich.
Photo: © Breana Panaguiton / unsplash.com
Registration
The conference will be held online. It is organized by Prof. Dr. Julia Faisst (University of Regensburg/Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt) and is open to the general public. Please email her at julia.faisst@ur.de if you would like to attend the event.
Conference Program
Thursday, April 28, 2022
3:30-4 p.m.: Doors Open: Amerikahaus Virtual Guided Tour
4-4:30 p.m.: Conference Opening
Welcome Remarks: Kerstin Schmidt (Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt)
Opening Remarks and Introduction: Julia Faisst (University of Regensburg/Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt)
4:30-6:15 p.m.: Audobon’s Black Sisters and Speculative Forms of Reading the Archive
Brigitte Fielder (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Intersectionality, Copyright and the Afterlives of Slavery
Cedric Essi (University of Osnabrück)
Criminalized Subjectivity: Du Boisian Sociology and Visions for Legal Change
Matthew Clair (Stanford University)
6:15-7 p.m.: Break
7-8:30 p.m.: Everybody’s Maybes: Disorienting Intersectionality, Origin Stories, and the Futures of Feminism
Samantha Pinto (University of Texas at Austin)
8:30 p.m.: Virtual Get-Together
Friday, April 29, 2022
4-5:15 p.m.: Alice Dunbar Nelson’s Intersectional Inscriptions in Place
Nathalie Aghoro (Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt)
‘The Talk’ as Script—Age, Race, and Space in 21st-Century African-American Poetry
Mahshid Mayar (Bielefeld University)
5:15-5:30 p.m.: Break
5:30-6:45 p.m.: White Spaces? Blackness, Intersectionality and Disability Studies
Dorothee Marx (University of Kiel)
The Invisibility of Black Canada in National Narratives
Rahab Njeri (University of Cologne)
6:45-7:15 p.m.: Break
7:15-8:30 p.m.: Roundtable Discussion: Coming Into This World: Intersectionality and its (Dis)Contents
The conference will conclude with a roundtable discussion on how the contributors’ latest book/recent work has come/is coming/will come into this world—that is on the conditions of conceiving, publishing, and marketing their recent work and the materials, methodologies, and arguments contained in them, in and beyond the academy, such as in public talks, social media, and similar conversations with a wider audience.
With all participants and input statements by:
Cedric Essi (University of Osnabrück)
Brigitte Fielder (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Nishani Frazier (University of Kansas)
Dorothee Marx (University of Kiel)
Katharina Motyl (University of Mannheim)
The keynote will be live streamed via the Amerikahaus YouTube Channel.
Organizers
Julia Faisst (University of Regensburg/Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt), Bavarian American Academy