Part III: Transforming Institutions
This multi-year series responds to current challenges to rational public debate. Following Part II of the series in 2020-2021 entitled “Data & Democracy,” and Part I in 2019-2020 “Race and the Promise of Participation,” the 2021-22 speakers series turns to the question of transforming institutions in public life. From public health and the university to museums and monuments, institutions have received increased scrutiny and renewed attention in recent years. In this series, humanities scholars and practitioners reflect on institutions and their transformation. The series brings together speakers who share insights on global healthcare, public monuments, African American heritage, and the university. From diverse interdisciplinary perspectives, speakers will share their efforts to reimagine institutions and generate their transformation.
SPEAKERS
Spring 2022
Joy Connolly (President, American Council of Learned Societies, The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, Distinguished Professor of Classics)
“Co-creating Knowledge: Collaboration and Change”
4:00pm Tuesday March 1, 2022
Virtual Event – Register Here to Receive Zoom URL
The model of the solitary scholar writing articles and books in the library has given way to a diverse array of approaches to humanistic research: collaborative teams, community engagement, multimedia publication, and more — as well as new questions about how the public interest can and should affect research choices. Focusing on the humanities and social sciences, I will discuss ongoing challenges to innovation and possible implications of changes in scholarly method and publication for the future organization of the American college and university.
Joy Connolly began her service as President of the American Council of Learned Societies in July 2019. Previously, she served as provost and interim president of The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, where she was also Distinguished Professor of Classics. She has held faculty appointments at New York University (where she served as Dean for the Humanities from 2012-16), Stanford University, and the University of Washington. She has published two books with Princeton University Press on Roman political thought and rhetoric and over seventy articles, reviews, and short essays, including for media such as Bookforum and the Times Literary Supplement.
POSTPONED
***Events with Brent Leggs have been postponed to September 23, 2022.***
Brent Leggs (Executive Director, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and University of Pennsylvania)
“Preserving Galaxy of Black Landmarks is an Act of Racial Justice”
2:00pm Friday September 23, 2022 – Smathers Libraries 100
Without a thorough reckoning with the complex and difficult history of our country, especially when it comes to race, we will not be able to overcome intolerance, injustice, and inequality. That is why, in November 2017, the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a $25 million campaign to reconstruct a true national identity that reflects America’s diversity. Preserving this tapestry of America’s shared culture, pride and heritage is an act of racial justice and should be viewed as a civil right.
Evening Event: “Preserving African American Communities and Landmarks: A Conversation with Brent Leggs (African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund) and Diedre Houchen (Office of Resilience, Climate Change and Sustainability; Alachua County)”
6:30pm Friday September 23, 2022 – Cotton Club Museum, 837 SE 7th Ave
Reception to follow
Brent Leggs is the founding executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund – a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and largest preservation campaign in U.S. History on behalf of historic African American places. Through the Action Fund, he leads a broad community of leaders and activists in honor of the clarion that preserving African American cultural sites is fundamental to understanding the American story. Leggs is a Harvard University Loeb Fellow, author of Preserving African American Historic Places, and the 2018 recipient of the Robert G. Stanton National Preservation Award. His efforts to protect the A.G. Gaston Motel, Madam C.J. Walker estate, John and Alice Coltrane and Nina Simone residences, and Joe Frazier’s Gym is exemplary of his successful campaigns to preserve many cultural monuments throughout the U.S. Leggs is also an Adjunct Associate Professor and Senior Advisor to the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design.
Diedre Houchen, Ph.D. is the Equity & Community Outreach Manager in the Office of Resilience, Climate Change, and Sustainability in Alachua County, Florida.
Fall 2021
Michele Bratcher Goodwin (Chancellor’s Professor of Law; Director, Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, University of California, Irvine)
“Policing The Womb: Invisible Women & The Criminalization of Motherhood”
4:00 pm Thursday October 14, 2021
Virtual Event – Register Here to Receive Zoom URL
In this talk, Professor Goodwin addresses the escalation of criminal punishments directed at pregnant women in the United States. Her talk reflects more than ten years of research addressing the intersection of mass incarceration and reproductive health and rights. In this talk, Professor Goodwin offers a deeper look at the ways in which reproduction has become a site of increasing state surveillance and punishment.
Michele Bratcher Goodwin is a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine and founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. She is the recipient of the 2020-21 Distinguished Senior Faculty Award for Research. Her books include Policing The Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (2020); Biotechnology, Bioethics, and The Law (2015); Baby Markets:Money and the Politics of Creating Families (2010); and Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts (2006). Professor Goodwin’s constitutional law scholarship appears in or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, California Law Review, Chicago Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Michigan Law Review, New York University Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others. She is also the host and executive producer of the podcast, On the Issues with Michele Goodwin, at Ms. magazine.
Paul M. Farber (Director, Monument Lab, Philadelphia)
“Topple: Reimagining Monuments”
4:00pm Thursday November 4th, 2021
Virtual Event – Register Here to Receive Zoom URL
Monument Lab Director and Co-founder Paul Farber shares insights on the reckoning and reimagining of our nation’s monuments. Over the last decade, artists, activists, and cultural organizers have pushed the status quo in public art, especially to reckon with symbols and systems of power and injustice. Farber explores current practices and debates around art, memory, and history, on and off the pedestal, by sharing stories from Monument Lab projects and partnerships, reflections on recent monument events around the country, and a wishlist and action items for the next generation of monuments.
Paul M. Farber is Director of Monument Lab. Farber is author of A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall and co-editor of Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia. He also currently serves as Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Public Art & Space at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design.
All events are free and open to the public.
UF Series Funders and Co-Sponsors:
Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment); College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; UF Research; African American Studies Program; Bob Graham Center for Public Service; Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship; Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research; Cotton Club Museum and Cultural Center; Department of Biology; Department of Classics; Department of History; Department of Political Science; Department of Urban and Regional Planning; George A. Smathers Library; Levin College of Law; One Health Center of Excellence
For information on past speaker series, click here.