By Sophie Fahey '17
Staff Writer

Every semester the Scripps Humanities Institute presents a series of lectures, exhibitions, and workshops on a topic related to the Humanities. This semester’s program is titled “Dangerous Conversations: Raced/Gendered/Classed Violence in the USA,” and will focus on differences and privilege. “The Humanities Institute will welcome scholars, artists, activists, writers, and musicians — all visionaries who use their brilliant skills and talents to further the discussions around difference by yoking them to the urgent and necessary work of dismantling inequality and social injustice.” (www.scrippscollege.edu/hi)

The program asks: “How shall we live in a Post-Charleston America? This is obviously not the post-racial America many envisioned with the election and re-election of Barack Obama. An apt observation has been made that Post-Charleston USA doesn’t look much different from a Pre-Charleston USA, so the difference must be found in us, in how we respond. More and more people have come out against racial profiling, systems of injustice, implicit bias, and the indiscriminate use of deadly force, which can no longer be characterized as ‘Black issues,’ but as real world practices that affect friends, family, classmates, and co-workers. The legally condoned killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Rumain Bribon, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice have raised concerns to a new level of awareness — outrage that moves us to identify the connections between racial, class, and gendered violence. How and why does America the nation-state promote systems of violence against its own people?”
(http://www.scrippscollege.edu/hi/)

These questions are at the core of the program, and will help guide the course.

13 Scripps students are participate in the Fellows Program this semester. The students in this program take a course with Professor Hao Huang, the Humanities Institute’s director, where they attend the programming, and engage with the guest speakers. The fellows end the semester with either a paper or project that connects their personal interests to the program’s overarching theme. The students are nominated by faculty, then apply to the program.

The Humanities Institute’s next event is a lecture by Beth E. Richie on Thursday, Oct. 15 from 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. in Garrison Theater. Richie is the Director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy and a Professor of African American Studies and Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois. The talk is titled “Gender Violence and Anti-Black Racism: Reflections on the problem of Carceral Feminism and the possibilities of Prison Abolition.”
There will be six more events in November and December after Richie’s lecture. These include lectures by Ji-Young Um, Andrea Ritchie, Suchi Branfman, Jihn-Fei Cheng, and Sohail Daulazai including “Buzzkils: The Parodoxes of War and ‘Feeling Good,’” “Policing Gender, Policing Sex, Policing Race,” and “The Threat of the Hologram: Specters and Shadows of Race.” These lectures are all open to the public.

Speakers & Events

Gender, Violence and Anti-Black Racism
Beth E. Richie
October 15 | 7:30 – 9 p.m.

Buzzkills: The Paradoxes of War and ‘Feeling Good’
Ji-Young Um
November 3 | 12 p.m.

Policing Gender, Policing Sex, Policing Race
Andrea Richie
November 12 | 7:30 – 9 p.m.

“Title TBD”
Suchi Branfman
November 18 | 6:45 – 8:15 p.m.

Kentifrican Interventions
November 19 | 5:30 p.m.

The Design of Gay (Male) Desire
Jih-Fei Cheng
December 1 | 12 p.m.

The Threat Hologram
Sohail Daulatzai
December 3 | 7:30 – 9 p.m.