Please check the details of each event for format and location. All events, as always, are free and open to the public.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America
Franchise investigates the untold history of the cooperation among fast-food companies, politicians, civil rights leaders, and black entrepreneurs in the years following the 1960s civil rights movement. The prevalence of fast-food restaurants in Black communities today resulted from a push by these groups for what they saw as an economical solution to racial disparities in America’s Black communities — the franchising of fast-food restaurants in black neighborhoods by Black people. Franchise illuminates the power of Black-owned franchises in a larger freedom struggle while also explaining how corporations such as McDonald’s have deprived genuine wealth in Black urban communities.
Marcia Chatelain is a Professor of History and African American studies at Georgetown University. The author of South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration (2015), Chatelain is a scholar of African American life and culture. Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America was published by Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton. In 2014 she organized her fellow scholars in a social-media response to the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri, entitled #FergusonSyllabus. #FergusonSyllabus has led to similar online initiatives and has shaped curricular projects in K–12 and university settings.
This is a virtual event. Click here to join the livestream ot the Benjamin Hooks Institute's Facebook page.
Belle McWilliams Lecture in History
Nakia D. Parker // Michigan State University
At the same time the domestic slave trade transported over one million African Americans from the Upper to the Lower South, the federal policy of Indian removal expelled thousands of American Indians from their homelands in the midwestern and southeastern parts of the United States. How did chattel slavery and the domestic slave trade shaped removal processes in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations and the lives of the individuals expelled westward to Indian Territory? Dr. Parker’s presentation will examine how Indian removal forced Indigenous people westward while simultaneously serving as another form of slave migration, as Native people brought their enslaved people west with them.
Nakia D. Parker is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Michigan State University. Dr. Parker is a historian of nineteenth-century U.S. slavery, African American, and American Indian history. She is currently working on her book manuscript, Trails of Tears and Freedom: Black Life in Indian Slave Country, 1830-1866 which examines the lives of enslaved and self-liberated individuals of African and Afro-Native descent in Choctaw and Chickasaw communities in nineteenth-century Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma).
Kim Potowski // University of Illinois, Chicago
The U.S. has always been a linguistically diverse nation, but the overall climate usually discourages and sometimes outright discriminates against the use of non-English languages. The grandchildren of immigrants often don’t speak their grandparents’s language anymore, which represents a huge loss to families and to the nation’s diversity. In addition, in general we don’t do a great job of teaching languages to monolingual English-speakers. This talk explores several myths about languages in the U.S. and presents arguments and strategies to promote multilingualism among our population.
Kim Potowski is Professor of Spanish linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on Spanish in the United States: Who uses it, with whom, and for what purposes? What changes is it undergoing? How does it connect to identity and to promoting social justice? She began directing her campus’ Spanish Heritage Language Program in 2002 and is the founding director of its summer study abroad program in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she spent a year as a Fulbright scholar. Her advocacy for the value of dual language education was the focus of her 2013 TEDx talk “No child left monolingual.” She is currently writing a methods textbook for heritage language teachers, and she has authored and edited over 12 books.
This event will take place on the Rhodes College campus, in Blount Auditorium.
Southern Journal of Philosophy Keynote Address
Susan James // Birkbeck College London
Many of the most influential early-modern interpretations of social justice focus on equity, and the conclusions seem to license what we would regard as rampant social injustice. So one might ask: does early-modern philosophy have anything positive to teach us about social justice? This talk suggests that we may find it more productive to focus on another aspect of early-modern arguments about justice. During this era, philosophers were keenly aware that purportedly wise people can make mistakes about what is and is not equitable. For them, the status quo remains open to question, and what counts as social justice is up for debate. This raises problems that carry forward to our own moment: What obstacles distort our sense of social justice? Through what processes can communities reform their sense of justice and learn to live more equitably?
Susan James is a professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College London. She has published seven books and more than 50 journal articles, ranging over the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, political and social philosophy, and feminist philosophy. Much of her research considers how early modern metaphysics, psychology, political philosophy, and ethics were thought to contribute to the overall project of living well. She was elected a Fellow in the British Academy in 2019..