Oct 29, 2017 | 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM | Studio Theatre

Gloria Holwerda-Williams, MA

InterNational Anti-Racism Group [INARG]: Stopping the promotion of racism to children & adults

In 2014 the InterNational Anti-Racism Group [INARG], was initiated by multidiscipline artist, performer, activist Gloria Holwerda-Williams, bringing together ‘like minded’ people to form a group that would address, internationally, contemporary racism, in hope, to stop individuals/groups/corporations who promote racism. INARG is educators, artists, writers, musicians, activists, parents, and grandparent working, to stop use of the racist character, blackfaced, ’Zwarte Piet/ZP/Black Pete’ in Holland, and to stop the promotion racism.  This presentation will focus on INARG’ efforts, thus far, including; tackling the promotion of racism by Sesame Street Workshop Corporation, Nickeloden/Viacom, North Sea Jazz Festival, and others.

Connie Kendall Theado, PhD

Internationalizing Higher Education: Making Space for Resistance in Transnational Partnerships

In his June 2014 editorial “Iraq’s Best Hope,” American journalist Thomas L. Friedman dubbed Kurdistan the “unsung success story of the Iraq war,” citing the American University of Iraq—Sulaimani as an example of the progress being made in an otherwise militarily and politically troubled Iraq. Friedman’s advocacy for more American-style universities in Iraq as a means of “spreading Western knowledges” is certainly a standpoint resonant with those who believe that the US must develop cross-national understandings with Iraq through humanitarian, rather than military, action. What Friedman’s US-centric standpoint undercuts, however, is precisely that which a number of international researchers (Canagarajah, 2002; Donahue, 2009; Sutton & Obst, 2011) have consistently called our attention to: It is only when Westerners acknowledge the localness of their own knowledge traditions that they can hope to engage colleagues working in other regions of the world in meaningful dialogues about projects common to our shared humanity, like the ongoing development of higher education in Iraqi Kurdistan.

This presentation describes the benefits accruing to a multi-year transnational university partnership between fifteen US and Kurdish faculty engaged in curricular reform at Salahaddin University in Erbil, Iraq. Discussion centers on three salient examples where resistance not only played a positive role in negotiating pedagogical change but also resulted in richer understandings of how Western pedagogies are perceived in a Kurdish cultural context. By examining contradictory points of discourse in our online and on-the-ground partnership activities, this presentation both complicates the idea of resistance in cross-institutional collaborations and calls into question the presumed portability of Western pedagogies for non-Western university faculty and their students.

Marzia Milazzo, PhD

The Race to Silence Race: Colourblind Rhetoric and the Attack on Affirmative Action in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States

In Brazil, South Africa, and the United States, students and faculty of color remain severely underrepresented in academia. Even so, race-based affirmative action programs are under attack in all three countries. This attack is enabled through the systematic deployment of colorblind rhetoric in academia, legal doctrine, and the media. This paper examines arguments against affirmative action programs in selected post-apartheid South African scholarship on race alongside Ali Kamel’s 2006 book Não somos racistas: Uma reação aos que querem nos transformar numa nação bicolor (We are Not Racist: A Reaction to Those Who Want to Transform us into a Two-coloured Nation), which critiques the implementation of racial quotas in Brazilian universities, and the U.S. Supreme Court case Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District (2007), which struck down an attempt to desegregate schools in Seattle and Jefferson County. It is striking that these texts, albeit arising in very different contexts and belonging to disparate genres, avail themselves of a shared rhetorical repository in their parallel efforts to silence white domination and halt measures that aim to redress racial inequality. But while they are centrally invested in silencing racism, the texts do not actually manage to leave race behind. This inability to transcend race is typical of writings that re-inscribe colourblindness. The contradictions that necessarily arise in works that aim to silence racism demonstrate that enforcing colorblindness is an act of epistemic violence: not even at the textual level is nonracialism achievable.