Please join us for the launch of the
University of Washington's Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity
(CCDE) on May 27th-May 29th, 2015. Please RSVP through the provided event URL! Attendance
is free, with tickets through Eventbrite used for attendance estimation.
On Friday, May 29th the
CCDE will host its inaugural conference, "Why Communication? Why
Difference? Why Equity?: A Diversity Intervention for the 21st
Century." Dr. Herman Gray (Professor and Chair of Sociology, UCSC) will
give the Earl and Edna Stice keynote lecture entitled, "Precarious
Diversity: Media, Representation, and Inequality," UW faculty and Ph.D.
alums will speak on panels such as "Is Equity a Scholarly
Responsibility?" and "Thinking With and Through Difference: Popular
Representations, Race and Political Economy." Other opening events include
an Equity and Inclusion workshop on Wednesday, May 27th, and a screening and
discussion of Bound: Africans vs. African Americans on
Thursday, May 28th.
Schedule:
5/27,
6-9pm, Rainier Vista Boys and Girls Club, What I Said and What I Meant: Cross
Cultural Communication Workshop with Rosetta Lee
Humans communicate on many
levels: spoken language, tone, body language, style and personality. The fact
that we have complex cultural identities and a host of differing past
experiences increases the probability of cross-cultural miscommunications. This
workshop presents major cross-cultural communication theories, ways that
cultural values, power, privilege and differences affect the way we
communicate, tools for questioning assumptions, and ways to improve
cross-cultural communications skills.
5/28,
6-9pm, CMU 120, MLC Screening of "Bound: Africans vs.
African-Americans" with Discussion Panel and Reception
Please join the Center for
Communication, Difference, and Equity and the Minority Leaders in Communication
as they host a screening of “Bound: Africans vs. African-Americans” with a
discussion panel and reception following. “Bound: Africans Vs.
African-Americans” is a documentary that addresses tension that exists between
Africans and African Americans with personal testimonials to expose how
Africans and African Americans view each other, then discusses their shared
historical experiences that have divided and bound Africans and African
Americans and to foster mutual understanding and reconciliation.
5/29,
10-11:15am, HUB 214, Earl and Edna Stice Keynote Address: Herman Gray,
Precarious Diversity: Media, Representation, and Inequality
Dr. Herman Gray is
Professor and Chair of Sociology at UC, Santa Cruz. He is arguably the most
influential scholar of African American television studies today. Gray is an
award-winning scholar whose work traverses a wide terrain, including
metatheoretical mediations on politics of difference in media; historiographies
of racialized television industries; critiques of Black men’s images on
television; elucidations of racialized representations in the news;
explorations of the nuances of marketing to African Americans through media;
and studies of jazz music, musicians, and industries.
5/29,
11:15am-12:30pm, HUB 214, Staged Reading of "The Mamalogues" by Lisa
Thompson
Lisa B. Thompson’s new
play The Mamalogues explores the intersections of race, class and motherhood in
the age of anxiety. The comedy depicts three characters: Mom, Mommy and Mama in
a variety of vignettes that send up many of the concerns of typical middle
class working mothers such as finding the right summer camp, the perfect school
and an impeccable pair of soccer cleats. While The Mamalogues explores how past
and current racial traumas shape contemporary black motherhood, it also
illustrates the frustrations of all women who find it difficult to find their
bearings within the current cultural landscape.
5/29,
2-3:45pm, CMU 202, Panel: "Is Equity a Scholarly Responsibility?"
Scholars across
disciplines take up charge to transform academia by pushing its physical and
theoretical borders and by actively engaging with the communities they study
and/or to which they belong. Some education scholars advocate change in the
school systems, others in community psychology seek health and social reform,
and some in history fight to tell the stories not usually narrated in our
textbooks. This panel will ask researchers from different disciplines to
discuss how they investigate, communicate, and address equity.
5/29,
3:45-5:15pm, CMU 202, Panel: "Thinking With and Through Difference:
Popular Representations, Race and Political Economy"
Popular culture – visual,
aural and textual – has increasingly been seen as significant to an
understanding of political economies by a diverse range of disciplines
including history, anthropology and political science. The intervention of
Black Cultural Studies in the theorization and analysis of popular
representation and race has been particularly crucial to this project that aims
to examine the conjuncture by investigating the articulation between popular
culture and political economies. The examination of popular culture in South
Asia, for instance, has used the work of the Birmingham School in particular,
to analyze caste, religious and gendered difference. This panel will ask
researchers from different disciplines to discuss how they better understand
difference – as a vector, a category, a modality.
5/29,
5:15-7pm, CMU 129, Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity Reception
Visit the new Center for
Communication, Difference, and Equity space! Refreshments will be provided.
About Keynote Speaker,
Herman Gray
Herman Gray is Professor and Chair of the
Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is
arguably the most influential scholar of African American television studies
today.
Gray is an award-winning scholar whose work
traverses a wide terrain, including metatheoretical mediations on politics of
difference in media; historiographies of racialized television industries;
critiques of Black men’s images on television; elucidations of racialized
representations in the news; explorations of the nuances of marketing to
African Americans through media; and studies of jazz music, musicians, and
industries.
Herman Gray is the author of Cultural
Moves: Culture, Identity, and the Politics of Representation(U of
California, 2005), Watching Race: Television and the Sign of
Blackness (U of Minnesota, 1995),and Producing Jazz:
The Experience of an Independent Record Company (Temple, 1988). He is
the editor of two collections: Towards a Sociology of the Trace (U
of Minnesota, 2010) and The Sage Handbook of Television Studies (Sage,
2014). He has lectured around the world and has been on the editorial boards of
prominent journals on culture and race studies, including Cultural
studies, Callalloo, Velvet Light Trap, Cultural Studies ó Critical
Methodologies, Television and New Media Studies, American Quarterly,
International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Cinema Journal.
About What I Said and What I Meant: Cross Cultural Communication Workshop Instructor, Rosetta Lee
Rosetta Lee is a faculty member at the
Seattle Girls School, an innovative school for Junior High School girls, aiming
to empower women leaders and change agents and dedicating its energies to a
diverse community of students, staff, and faculty. She teaches subjects such as
science, math, technology, art, ethics, model building, and more. As a
professional outreach specialist, she designs and delivers trainings for all
constituencies of the school community, as well as the local and national
educational and nonprofit sectors.
About The Mamalogues' Lisa
Thompson
Lisa B. Thompson is a
playwright and Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and
affiliate faculty in the departments of English, Women and Gender Studies and
Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently the
Associate Director of the John L. Warfield Center for African and African
American Studies. Thompson is the author of Beyond the Black Lady:
Sexuality And The New African American Middle Class (University of
Illinois Press, 2009), which received Honorable Mention in competition for the
Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association,
and the play Single Black Female (Samuel French, Inc., 2012),
a nominee for the 2004 LA Weekly Theatre Award for best
comedy. Her work has been supported with fellowships and awards from a number
of institutions, including the University of California’s Office of the
President, Michele R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford
University, UCLA’s Center for African American Studies, the Five Colleges Inc.,
and Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.