Black Futures Symposium 2022

Fall 2022

(October 13 and October 14, 2022, via ZOOM)

Black Studies Colloquium held its inaugural Black Futures symposium. The theme was “Black Ecologies.” This symposium featured presentations from activists and scholars discussing a range of interpretations of Black Ecologies as thought and practice emerging from the study of geography, social history, effects of climate change or disruptions in the social and natural world, and the ways Black people have created their own environments to protect themselves. 

Black Futures Scholars: Student Research and Award Opportunity

Following the symposium, students were given the opportunity to become Black Futures Scholars. As Black Futures Scholars, students created creative and critical responses to the symposium in the form of researched blog posts, podcasts, and video blogs. There were in-person and online workshops to support the development of their responses.  Black Futures Scholars received a cash award for their contributions.

Learn more about the Black Futures Scholars

SPEAKER: CHRISTINA STURMER, activist & researcher with Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), Landless Rural Workers Movement. 

(Thursday from 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST – October 13, 2022) 

Cristina Sturmer is a researcher and activist of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) based in the Santa Maria Settlement in Paranacity, a municipality in the state of Paraná in the Southern Region of Brazil. Sturmer received her BA in Economic Sciences with training in Cooperativism and Development from the Federal University of Fronteira Sul (UFFS) and her MA in Agroecology and Sustainable Rural Development from the same institution. She was a Substitute Professor in Economic Theory at UFFS Campus Laranjeiras do Sul, systematizing the Cantuquiriguaçu Agroecology Network through a project developed by the National Agroecology Articulation (ANA). She is also a member of the October 4th of the Emergency Brigade of Solidarity with the Mozambican people. Currently, she is on the board of the Vitória Agricultural Production Cooperative (COPAVI) and coordinates the FINAPOP project department, both linked to the MST. Projects developed in the area of Public Policies for Territorial Development, Agrarian Reform, Solidarity Economy, and Agroecology with emphasis on women’s groups, agro-industries, quilombola communities and Guarani indigenous people.

This session was moderated by Professor Rojo Robles, Black and Latino Studies, Baruch College.

Learn more about Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) or Landless Rural Workers Movement. 

SPEAKER COLETTE PICHON BATTLE, ESQ., activist & researcher with Taproot, a global climate justice organization

(Thursday from 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm EST – October 13, 2022)

Colette Pichon Battle is a generational native of Bayou Liberty, Louisiana. She founded the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy and led the development of programming focused on equitable climate disaster recovery, global migration, community economic development, and energy democracy for more than 17 years in the Gulf South. Colette now serves as the Partner of Vision & Initiatives at Taproot Earth, a global climate justice organization working for a world where all people can live, rest, and thrive in the places they love.  She serves on the governance council of the Southern Movement Assembly, co-chairs the national Water Equity and Climate Resilient Caucus with PolicyLink, serves on the steering committee of the Ocean Justice Forum, and is a lead architect of the 5-state, multi-issue initiative Gulf South for a Green New Deal. Colette also helped to develop the 13-state Southern Communities for Green New Deal with the Southeast Climate & Energy Network and the Red, Black & Green New Deal, the national climate initiative with the Movement for Black Lives. In 2022, Colette received the William O. Douglas Award- recognizing individuals who have made outstanding use of the legal/judicial process to achieve environmental goals, particularly those with national significance. Her TED Talk on climate migration was ranked in the top 10 TED talks of 2020. And she was named a 2019 Obama Fellow for her work with Black and Native communities.

This presentation was moderated by Professor Erica Richardson, English, Baruch College.

SPEAKER NISRIN ELAMIN, PhD, Anthropology Department, New College, the University of Toronto

(Friday from 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM EST – October 14, 2022)

Nisrin Elamin received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2020. Her doctoral research was an ethnographic examination of the ways Saudi and Emirati corporate investments in land reconfigured everyday social relations between landless and landholding stakeholders in central Sudan. Through support from the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren, and the National Science Foundation she conducted research in local courts, farming communities, investor conferences, agribusiness farms, government ministries, and in the mosques of Sufi religious leaders mediating land disputes in the aftermath of large-scale land enclosures. Nisrin has published scholarly articles in Critical African Studies and the Project on Middle East Political Science Journal. She has also published a number of op-eds for Al Jazeera, Pambazuka News, Okay Africa, and the Cultural Anthropology Hot Spot Series.  

This session was moderated by Professor Keisha Allan, Black and Latino Studies, Baruch College

SPEAKER CHANKANETSA MAYHUNGA, PhD, Science, Technology, & Society Department at MIT

(Friday from 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM EST – October 14, 2022)

Chakanetsa Mavhunga is a full professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. His latest book is entitled Knowledge in the Service of and through Problem-solving (out early 2023) and is the first in his Dare To Invent the Future trilogy to be published with MIT Press. His professional interests lie in the history, theory, and practice of science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the international context, with a focus on Africa. Prof. Mavhunga joined MIT as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2008 after completing his PhD at the University of Michigan. His previous books include Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2014), the edited volume entitled What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? and The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production (MIT Press, 2018). He also convenes the Graduate Super-Seminar on Global South Cosmologies & Epistemologies alongside distinguished theorists from the Global South. He characterizes his work as knowledge in the service of and through problem-solving, wherein theory is a product of and informs an ethic of ‘responsibility to community,’ so that especially faculty and students from marginalized communities carry their communities’ priorities to shape what they do on campus while drawing the university to communities, to engage in learning-and-solving-at-the-intersection of multiple forms of knowing. Prof. Mavhunga will draw from this ongoing work in Zimbabwe and western Massachusetts for his talk.

This session was moderated by Professor Shelly Eversley, Chair of Black and Latino Studies, Baruch College.

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Spring 2022

Mishkin Gallery, Screening & Discussion of Quilomobo (1984): Racial Capitalism, Radical Black Feminism, and Imagining the Archive

(Tuesday at 6:00 PM – March 1, 2022, in-person & available via Zoom)

Screening of select scenes from Quilombo (1984) with a discussion with Professor Tshombe Miles (Black and Latino Studies), Professor Rojo Robles (Black and Latino Studies), and Professor Erica Richardson (English). This open discussion and reflection on the film focused on racial capitalism, radical Black feminism, and “telling impossible stories” from archives of slavery as explored in Saidiya Hartman’s essay, “Venus in Two Acts” (2008).

The Mishkin Gallery is an intimate Baruch College space for exhibitions focusing on modern & contemporary global art & culture. It is located on the first floor of the Baruch Administrative Building, on 135 East 22nd Street East 22nd, between Lexington and 3rd Avenue. 

AN INDESTRUCTIBLE LIFE: REFLECTIONS ON MARRONAGE, a presentation & discussion on Zoom with activist, scholar, & writer, Dr.Pedro Lebron Ortiz 

(Wednesday at 6:00 PM – March 16, 2022)

How can we understand marronage beyond juridical, anthropological, or historical limitations? If our present moment is constituted by the “afterlives of slavery”, or “las huellas de la esclavitud,” and historically slavery and marronage were two inextricable processes, how can we think about marronage expansively? Relatedly, how can we understand Blackness and Black life beyond the over determination of anti-Black violence and coloniality? What can a move beyond the masterful drive of Western metaphysics tell us about our existence? What can this move tell us about freedom? This talk will propose a potential philosophical conception of marronage that attempts to move beyond the Western ontological presupposition of Black Being as being. In other words, the proposition is that marronage constitutes the affirmation of life beyond modernity’s sub-ontological reduction of those designated as “Other”, while also gesturing away from the ontopolitical subsumption of Blackness as mere resistance.

This session was moderated by Professor Rojo Robles.

BLACK FUTURES IN THE CLASSROOM PART 1: FACULTY PRESENTATION & FIRESIDE CHAT WITH THE BARUCH COMMUNITY

(Thursday from 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM – March 31, 2022)

We believe that teaching is reciprocal: namely, that students and faculty share in the production of knowledge.  The diversity among our student populations also offers a kind of local and global perspective that has been underutilized.  

In this discussion, via Zoom, scholars, and students addressed the significance of Black Studies and African Studies. Following this intellectual and practical exchange, Dr. Angie Beeman (Sociology), Dr. Rojo Robles (BLS), and other Baruch’s Black Studies Colloquium faculty developed public knowledge projects with their students. Baruch’s Black Studies Colloquium faculty developed public knowledge projects with their students inspired by the open education innovations of Schomburg Syllabus and PRSyllabus. 

BLACK FUTURES IN THE CLASSROOM PART 2: FACULTY WORKSHOP

(Tuesday from 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM – April 5, 2022)

Via Zoom, this presentation of key lessons from the Teach-in on March 31 was followed by a faculty workshop led by members of the Center for Teaching. This workshop was led by members of the Black Studies Colloquium.

CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS, author of UNDROWNED: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

(Thursday from 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM – April 14, 2022)

This conversation via Zoom was on the compelling work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, UNDROWNED:  Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.

“Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs’s Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of “vision” and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice” (from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Website)

“SUCH IS AUNT NANCY”: GENDER, SCAVENGING, & RADICAL CAPITALISM ON THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE STAGE, a Work-in-Progress presentation by Professor Erica Richardson (Baruch, English)

(Thursday at 6:00 PM – April 28, 2022)

 In what spaces and places can poor Black women’s work be economically and socially valued? Is scavenging labor? Can Black women’s care and ingenuity transform discarded items? And what does it mean to depict these issues in the context of an emerging Black Modernity of the Harlem Renaissance? In this Work-in-Progress style presentation, Professor Erica Richardson (English, Affiliated faculty in Black and Latino Studies, Weissman Arts and Sciences, Baruch College) responded to these questions through an excavation of The Chip Woman’s Fortune (1923) by Willis Richardson (no relation to Professor Erica Richardson).

Can Black women’s care and ingenuity transform discarded items?

Using concepts from Black feminist theory, Black Marxism, Care work studies, and Discard studies, this presentation elaborated on how Richardson’s play depicts alternative Black political and social economies that operate within and outside the norms of racial capitalism.  This presentation considered how Black people, particularly Black women, through scavenging, can transform discarded items into value, an act that affirms Black women’s agency while creating new stories of Black betterment and progress within Black Modernity. This event was moderated by Professor Angie Beeman (Marxe School of Public and International Affairs)