Community Engagement

World Champion Hoop Dancer Lisa Odjig to Perform at UConn

Posted on November 6, 2024November 6, 2024 by BD

In honor of Native and Indigenous Heritage Month, world champion hoop dancer Lisa Odjig (Wiikwemkoong First Nation) will perform at two UConn events in November. The events are supported by the UConn Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) in the Department of Social and Critical Inquiry.

Odjig's first performance will take place at the UConn Women's Basketball halftime show on Nov. 10 at 4:30 p.m. The following day, she will lead a classroom performance followed by a Q&A/workshop on Nov. 11 at 10 a.m. in the School of Business Building. Both events are open to all students.

A two-time World Hoop Dance Champion, Odjig was introduced to hoop dancing at a young age by her uncle. She has since dedicated her life to performing this traditional and powerful art form across the U.S., Canada, and internationally.

WGSS Co-Sponsors Wonderland Puppet Theater Symposium

Posted on November 1, 2024November 1, 2024 by BD

A group of participants poses in front of a display of puppets at the Wonderland Puppet Theater Symposium. — From left to Right: Katharine Capshaw, CLAS associate dean and professor of English and social and critical inquiry; Jeffrey Ogbar, professor of history and Africana studies; Paulette Richards, curator and puppetry historian; Vibiana Bowman, Rutgers University; John Bell, director of the Ballard Institute of and Museum of Puppetry; Nancy Naples, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of sociology and social and critical inquiry; Khalilah Brooks, puppeteer, Aunty B’s House; Stephen L. Ross, professor of economics; and Jacqueline Wade, filmmaker and puppeteer.

The Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) Area in the Department of Social and Critical Inquiry co-sponsored the Wonderland Puppet Theater Symposium, which took place Oct. 25-26, 2024.

Hosted by the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, the event offered an interdisciplinary exploration of how puppetry in the U.S. has intersected with the Civil Rights Movement, residential segregation, and the Women’s Movement. It featured several panel discussions; a film screening on African American puppetry; and a keynote by curator Paulette Richards, an adjunct instructor in the UConn School of Fine Arts.

The event was attended by scholars, puppeteers, and activists from across the U.S. and abroad. Participants from the Department included CLAS Associate Dean and Professor Katharine Capshaw and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Nancy Naples.

UConn Scholars Consider ‘Historic Firsts’ of 2024 Election

Posted on October 14, 2024October 14, 2024 by BD

It’s rare that any particular event can be confidently predicted to be of major historical significance before it happens, but American presidential elections definitely fit the bill. And while all presidential elections are momentous, each one has unique dynamics and characteristics that influence history in very different ways.

It was with this in mind that three UConn scholars gathered at the Old State House in Hartford on Tuesday, Oct. 8, to analyze the current presidential contest in terms of historical significance – and what makes this election distinct.

One of the most striking differences between this election and every previous presidential campaign is that a major party nominee – Vice President Kamala Harris – is a woman of color. Even more remarkable, the scholars said, is the way she came to win the Democratic Party’s nomination – being endorsed by President Joe Biden after his unprecedented decision to drop out of the race just weeks before the party’s nominating convention in August.

“What I will never forget, especially as a political scientist, is the way she came to be the Democratic nominee,” said Evelyn Simien, professor of Political Science, Director of the Africana Studies Institute, and author of “Historic Firsts: How Symbolic Empowerment Changes U.S. Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Manisha Sinha, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History and author of “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2017)” and “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (Liveright, 2024),” agreed that the circumstances of Harris’ nomination make the 2024 election unique.

“This is probably one of the first times we’ve had a presidential nominee so late in the game who has been able to step up so quickly,” she said.

Another distinctive factor of this election, argued Christopher Vials, professor of English and author of “Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight Against Fascism in the United States (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014),” is that “new taboos continue to be broken” in political rhetoric surrounding the race.

Pointing to an interview the pundit Tucker Carlson conducted in September with a far-right podcaster notorious for defending the Third Reich and blaming Winston Churchill for World War II, Vials said, “Tucker Carlson is nodding his head, and then Elon Musk tweets about how that was a fabulous interview. They’re sort of breaking the Hitler taboo now.”

One concern all three scholars shared was the possibility of low voter turnout, especially in states like Connecticut, where the presidential race is not expected to be competitive.

“A lot of people become a little blasé about elections; they think noting changes, they think their vote doesn’t count, and that can open the door to authoritarian outcomes in elections,” Sinha said.

Simien said she reminds her students that the right to vote has only, in historical terms, recently been won by all Americans regardless of race or gender, and shouldn’t be taken for granted.

“Younger voters owe a debt to older generations, people who have sacrificed life and limb so that we can have the right to cast a vote in American elections,” she said.

Vials noted the importance of elections for state and local offices, pointing out that decisions made in city hall or Hartford often have immediate, direct consequences in daily life.

“State elections affect your lives a lot; they determine whether social services are going to be provided, whether universities are going to be funded, tax rates, who gets taxed – those are things that affect people’s lives every day, apart from the federal election,” he said.

The forum at the Old State House was sponsored by the UConn Department of Critical and Social Inquiry, Department of English, Africana Studies Institute, Department of History, and the Department of Political Science.

A Look Back, A Look Forward With WGSS

Posted on March 19, 2024October 14, 2024 by BD

For the uninitiated: WGSS, the acronym for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UConn, is affectionately pronounced “wigs” by the students. Housed in Beach Hall, where a cozy lounge offers students a place to connect and recharge, the program is beloved by hundreds of students majoring or minoring in WGSS, as well as its faculty.

Thursday, March 21, and Friday, March 22, will see a celebration marking 50 years since the program’s inception in 1974 — the first formal women’s studies program in the state.

And, true to form, this celebration will foreground complex thought, conversation, and coalition-building.

Scholars from institutions across the country will speak on panels addressing the significance of WGSS for the social and political issues facing the world today.

Alexis De Veaux, a multi-award-winning writer, activist, scholar, and biographer of Audre Lorde, will open the celebration. Later in the day, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, the Anna Julia Cooper professor of women’s studies at Spelman College, and M. Jacqui Alexander, professor emeritus of the University of Toronto’s women and gender studies department, will deliver the keynote conversation.

The event will be titled “The Uses of Anger: WGSS at 50,” in a nod to another significant event in UConn WGSS history.

“The Uses of Anger” Then and Now

In 1981, the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) chose UConn as the host site for its annual conference, bringing together scholars from across the then-emerging discipline of women’s and gender studies. The NWSA organized the conference around the theme of “Women Respond to Racism” and invited Audre Lorde, along with Adrienne Rich, to be the keynote speaker.

Behind the podium at Jorgensen Auditorium, Lorde delivered her famous speech “The Uses of Anger.” In it, she argued for the resignification of anger as an appropriate and human response to racism — and as a source of energy for altering the societal conditions that produce it.

“Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification,” Lorde said.

In 2023, sitting in the lounge beneath a painting of Lorde, a WGSS organizing committee brainstormed a theme for the upcoming celebration. Associate professor in residence and WGSS interim director Sherry Zane, WGSS and English assistant professor Briona Simone Jones, and professor of political science and WGSS affiliate Jane Gordon concluded that learning from “The Uses of Anger,” looking back and looking forward, would make a generative focus.

It was an especially apt choice given Jones’s research specialization — she has worked extensively with Lorde’s oeuvre throughout her career, as a scholar of Black Lesbian thought.

“We wanted to conceive a conference around this particular essay to really scrutinize all of our efforts and be honest about whether we see Audre’s teachings as sort of litanies, or as instruction for how to achieve liberation in the here and now, or if it’s just sort of a conceptual piece of writing and we don’t feel as though we have to be committed to her practices,” Jones says.

Jones’s point is especially relevant given the context of Lorde’s original speech. The NWSA conference had been criticized for refusing to waive fees for low-income attendees, meaning attendance was essentially restricted to middle- and upper-class women. The conference was also predominantly white.

Additionally, while white women could choose from various affinity groups (Jewish women, lesbian women, etc.), Black women and women of color at the conference were all grouped together. The conference organizers encouraged them to all “sit together under a tree and talk about race together,” Zane says. Among them were Lorde, Guy-Sheftall, and bell hooks.

Lorde’s powerful speech was in part motivated by anger over the conference’s treatment of women of color. Speaking to the NWSA, she was acutely aware of how the discipline of women’s studies “has historically been violent against women of color, and Black women specifically,” as Jones notes. In the essay, Lorde emphasized the importance of building coalitions for radical change based on honesty and love for one another.

Imagining Anew

With this history in mind, the organizing committee composed of Gordon, Jones, Elva Orozco Mendoza, and Zane, believe that the WGSS 50th anniversary should ask, “How does Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies, as a discipline, continue to perpetuate those issues – and how can we revive and reVision our praxis?”

WGSS 50’s “Looking Back” panel will include attendees from the 1981 NWSA conference, including Judith Plaskow, professor emerita of religious studies at Manhattan College; Chela Sandoval, associate professor of Chicana Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Holly Smith, archivist at Spelman College.

In the “Looking Forward” panel, Zane says, intergenerational and transdisciplinary scholars V Varun Chaudhry, PJ Di Pietro, Evren Savci, endawnis Spears, and Jaimee Swift will consider how the discipline can continue to evolve.

“We want to bear witness to that past, so we can move toward a new vision, not just for WGSS program, but for the BIPOC students, faculty, and staff who work and live here,” Zane says. “Transformation is our future, and we’re open to all of the possibilities that brings.”

For the organizing committee, planning the 50th anniversary celebration has offered an opportunity to reflect critically about Lorde’s legacy and how future generations of UConn WGSS scholars can continue to strengthen that legacy.

In the future, Jones says, “I’m hoping that we won’t need these separate disciplines” — like WGSS, Africana Studies, and other social justice-oriented programs — “that the disciplines will actually be able to coalesce around differences. We had to create our own separate disciplines because we were excised from knowledge systems that were dominant.”

She would also like to see “the university not be heralded as the ultimate place where learning is done.”

“We can imagine something anew,” Jones says.

The two-day events are listed on the WGSS website and include several powerhouse speakers; a co-curated art exhibit by graduate and undergraduate students Nikki Blumenfeld, Ruba Bouzan, Urvi Kaul, Anh Le, Alejandra Leos, Georgia Poirot, and Christina Young, and Professors Orozco Mendoza, Gordon, and Zane at the Benton Museum of Art; a career roundtable with WGSS alumni; and a concert on Friday featuring American-Peruvian two-spirit, transgender poet, musician, model, and painter Bobby Sanchez.

Zane invites everyone to continue the celebration through the weekend: the Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) program is hosting IndigiPalooza events, culminating on Sunday with a powwow, also listed on the WGSS @ 50 website.