Friday, November 16th, 2018
9:00am-4:30pm 9:00am Breakfast, 9:30am Discussions , 4:30pm Closing Reception
UCLA Faculty Center, Sequoia Room
Audre Lorde famously maintained that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” This gathering explores the concept of care against the backdrop of Lorde’s quote, through the lens of black feminist epistemology and praxis. It understands care as a community practice of generating power, as well as an individual ethic of self-love, and asks how ideas about care shape our political activism, critiques of power, and dreams of freedom. It also seeks to reimagine black wellbeing within a self-help culture that privileges whiteness and normative femininity, and explores how black people have cared for one another across time and space. And it reconsiders the most familiar narratives of stress and depletion to show how black lives are diminished by state violence, historical trauma, neoliberal assaults, heteropatriarchal norms, ravaging kin ties, and intramural violence. How can we engage new possibilities for self-care, radical healing, wholeness, and joy?
Participants:
Erica Ball, Occidental College
Marne Campbell, Loyola Marymount University
Judith Casselburry, Bowdoin College
Aisha Finch, UCLA
Honor Ford-Smith, York University
Sarah Haley, UCLA
Beverly Hanson, Sistren Theater Collective
Cheryl Harris, UCLA,
Imani Johnson, UC Riverside,
Jessica Johnson, Johns Hopkins University
Courtney Marshall, Phillips Exeter Academy
Jessica Millward, UC Irvine
Jasmine Seydullah, Vassar College
LaKisha Simmons, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Sponsored by the UC Consortium for Black Studies in California, the Division of Humanities, the Division of Social Sciences, the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, the Center for the Study of Women, the Department of Gender Studies, and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies
