Events

Research is essential for understanding, quantifying, and eliminating disparities in health outcomes. While racism generates and maintains health inequities, there is less clarity and consensus about how racism can be measured and modeled in research, which holds profound implications for eliminating health disparities and improving population health. Join Penn LDI and the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics as we convene national experts across multiple disciplines to critically assess the state of the field with the ultimate goal of moving the science on the links between race, racism, and health forward.

Join us in celebrating the past and present achievements of the GSWS/FQT community during a multi-day symposium, taking place on Penn's campus on Thursday, February 29th and Friday, March 1st. Details to come. Contact gsws-fqt@sas.upenn.edu with questions.

An artistic milestone and homecoming for painter and performance artist David Antonio Cruz, encompassing paintings, drawings, sculpture, and performance that center underrepresented communities; Mr. Cruz mixes art historical, literary, fashion, and pop culture references to reinterpret classical modes of figuration; Institute of Contemporary Art. 

Jonathan D. Katz is perhaps the founding figure in queer art history, responsible for the very first queer scholarship on a number of artists beginning in the early 1990s. His scholarship spans a period from the late 19th-century to the present, with an emphasis on the US, but with serious attention to Europe, Latin America, and Asia as well. He has written extensively about gender, sexuality, and desire, producing some of the key theoretical work in queer studies in the visual arts.

In this CDCS Colloquium talk, Dejmanee presents on the ways that Asian Australians perform and generate dialogue around their everyday practices of negotiating racial, ethnic and national identities. Dejmanee presents the findings of quantitative and qualitative analysis of TikTok content tagged as #AsianAustralian to explore the actors and accounts participating in this content creation, and the emergent themes and discourses that arise through these videos and their accompanying comments. 

The possibilities and perils of leftist organizing and media scholarship assume greater urgency in the face of “backsliding democracy.” ‘Undone’ reflects numerous senses: as a temporary disunity; as an important task unfinished; as a representation of disarray; but all senses of the word hold hope for its reversal. The UDC has always stood as a site of collaboration between activists, scholars, and practitioners—an organization rooted in critical scholarship and practice about the structures of communication themselves, not just in the US, but worldwide. The 2023 conference will see us look back at the first 40 years of the UDC, but we will also look ahead to consider the role of critical communication scholarship and activism in organizing, engaging, and energizing leftist alternatives to authoritarian politics.

Join Penn Professor Kathleen M. Brown in a discussion about her new book, Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race and Rights in the Age of Abolition. The book takes a fresh look at the campaign to end slavery and highlights how abolitionists, Black as well as white, put embodied forms of liberty at the center of the struggle.

The CDCS Colloquium talk draws on the narratives and practices of live streaming to understand how it becomes a form of cultural and economic production in which gender and sexuality become central to digitally-mediated and scale-making communications. It also discusses the intersecting politics of technology, labor, and gender that live streaming’s prevalence in contemporary China and its global expansion informs us about.

A joint book launch for Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt by Dean Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins and The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women by Leigh Gilmore

Open to the public

This talk explores queer media activism in Bangladesh, firstly, through a genealogical account of LGBTQ+ community organizing within the nation-state, along with critically analyzing how adopting a Western framework of queer activism, primarily based on visibility, coming-out strategies, and pride rallies, presented itself with extreme existential challenges for gay, lesbian, and bi-sexual individuals.