Events

Our 2018 Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Lecture in Social Justice will feature a conversation with Judith Browne Dianis, Co-Director of the Advancement Project; Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, Executive Director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice; Amber Hikes, Executive Director of the Office of LGBT Affairs for the City of Philadelphia; and Marc Morial, President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Urban League.

In the spirit of Dr. King’s human rights positions, these guests will engage in a discussion of topics related to the state of the country and the continuing struggle for social justice.

Penn GSE welcomes Craig Steven Wilder, MIT professor and author of "Ebony and Ivory: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities," as a part of its Visiting Scholars of Color lecture series.

Hot jazz and delectable food and good friends.

A Book Reading by Christina Crosby - A Body Undone: Living On After Great Pain in conversation with Janet Jakobsen (Barnard).

When Women Come MarchingHome, is a panel discussion that portrays the courage of women veterans as theytransition from active duty to their civilian lives; the traumas they faced,their invisible as well as physical injuries and all their challenges inreceiving benefits and care.. Sponsors: Office of Affirmative Action & Equal Opportunity Programs, Cohen Military Family Clinic, Veterans at Penn Committee

Keynote address from Dr. Howard K. Koh, former United States Assistant Secretary of Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2009.

The Symposium will bring together experts in health policy, veterans' health, LGBT health, child health, and global women's health as well as researchers, faculty, and students University-wide to collectively provide valuable input on strategies to achieve health equity.

Lunch will be available following the event.

In this paper, based on her current book project, “Why Sex?: Religion, Secularism, and Possibilities for Justice,” Janet Jakobsen reflects on what she has learned from her experience of living with, caring for, and loving Christina Crosby in relation to struggles for justice.  Specifically, Jakobsen connects what she has learned from activism for disability justice to work she did while Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. There she joined forces with community-based organizers working across a range of issues: for prison abolition under the banner “No One is Disposable,” and for “Queer Survival Economies,” as well as with domestic workers organizing through the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and with organizers of Sakhi for South Asian women, on ‘Responding to Violence and Promoting Justice.” Each of these projects represents both the import of universal claims like “no one is disposable,” and the impossibility of realizing those claims in the current world where people are regularly treated as though disposable.  The intertwining of love and loss, happiness and perversity, possibility and impossibility undertaken in this activism allows for a melancholy practice of universal claim-making and utopian world-making. In a queer utopian imagination not everyone must be happy or whole; instead, utopia itself might remain disjunctive, ambivalent, off kilter and possibly perverse.

NewCore (New Conversations on Race and Ethnicity) presents“Conversations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”; Student leaders from the Schoolof Social Policy & Practice (SP2) will view one of Dr. King’s more seldomreplayed speeches and discuss his words, their views, and its relevance to ourtimes today. Location TBA; Sponsors: NewCORE, School of Social Policy& Practice, African-American Resource Center

This panel discussion promises to explore the role that medical distrust and systematic racism plays in engaging people of color in HIV research and how this distrust further exacerbates access issues and hurts science. Space is limited. Register and reserve your seat @ https://is.gd/Left_Engage_Empower or call: 215.746.7352. Co-sponsored by: Penn CFAR (Center for AIDS Research) Advisory Board, BEAT-HIV Community Advisory Board, African-American Resource Center, Du Bois College House.

With words song and the presentation of the MLK awards our annual Interfaith program emphasizes our common humanity and acknowledges individuals whose active service exemplifies Dr. King's vision and work to empower marginalized members of our community through education and advocacy. This year the guest speaker will be award winning photographer John Noltner, founder of A Peace of My Mind - a multimedia arts project built around the simple question, “What does peace mean to you?” Reception follows. Contact: The Office of the Chaplain @215.898.8456