March 25, 2021
ArtSci Roundup: Fighting Visibility: Unpaid Gendered & Racialized Labor for the UFC, Beverly Guy-Sheftall – Say Her Name: The Urgency of Black Feminism Now, and More
During this time of uncertainty and isolation, find solace in digital opportunities to connect, share, and engage. Each week, we will share upcoming events that bring the UW, and the greater community, together online.
Many of these online opportunities are streamed through Zoom. All UW faculty, staff, and students have access to Zoom Pro via UW-IT.
Fighting Visibility: Unpaid Gendered & Racialized Labor for the UFC
March 31, 3:30 – 5:00 PM | Online
In the first COM Spring Colloquium, hosted by the Department of Communication, Dr. Jennifer McClearen specifically considers how UFC athletes navigate the labor of visibility on social media. She examines interviews with female UFC fighters and discourse analysis of UFC content. Building followers online, engaging with fans, and promoting sponsors as micro-influencers is an unpaid and often invisible form of aspirational labor that the UFC strongly encourages its fighters to undertake. Dr. McClearen considers how white women and women of color navigate the athletic labor of femininity to promote themselves online. She argues that the UFC’s unpaid labor practices leverage a disproportionate gendered and racialized tax on the very women it claims to make visible at unprecedented levels.
Free | Register and More Info
Live Webinar: Mellon Sawyer Seminars “Humanitarianisms” Series: Sinan Antoon
April 1, 3:30 – 4:45 PM | Online
This webinar is the first of three on “Rethinking the Human,” part of the Simpson Center for the Humanities’ Humanitarianism Sawyer Seminar series.
Material and discursive resources and energies are dedicated (insufficiently and unequally) to rescue the living from harm, and to tend to their wounds. But what of the dead? What can we, the living, learn from the rituals and traditions of tending to the dead and to their wounds? Beyond the corporeal, encounters with the ghosts and memories of the dead raise crucial political questions about the ways in which humans inhabit this world. Al-Ma’arri cautioned us a millennium ago to “tread gently, for the soil of this earth is made of these corpses.” This talk, delivered by poet Sinan Antoon and Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization Selim S. Kuru will summon al-Ma’arri’s ghost, among others, to address these questions.
Free | Register and More Info
BOOK TALK | Anand Yang, “Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia”
April 1, 3:30 – 5:00 PM | Online 
Join the South Asia Center as Walker Family Endowed Professor in History and Professor of International Studies Anand Yang speaks about his new book, followed by a Q&A session. Hosted by Sunila S. Kale, Director of the South Asia Center and Associate Professor of International Studies.
A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, Empire of Convicts narrates the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.” Anand Yang brings long journeys across kala pani (black waters) to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts.
Free | Register and More Info
Beverly Guy-Sheftall – Say Her Name: The Urgency of Black Feminism Now
April 5, 6:30 PM | Online
Black feminist discourse and activism have been significant interventions in a variety of social justice movements in the U.S. since the 19th century, though this has not always been acknowledged. In the aftermath of reforms catalyzed by the Black Lives Matter Movement, a queer black feminist project, Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s talk will reflect upon the transformations in civil society, academe, electoral politics, the criminal justice system, and other spaces that have occurred over the past year as a result of recent protests around systemic racism and other issues. Sponsored by the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, the Department of English, and the Department of American Ethnic Studies.
Free | Register and More Info
Jewish Questions Podcast
Jewish Questions is the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies’ podcast on issues that matter now in Jewish life, politics, history and culture — from a scholarly perspective.
This season, hosts Associate Professor of History Laurie Marhoefer and Director of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies Noam Pianko talk with faculty experts from the University of Washington about anti-Semitism: what it is, its long history, and how to push back against it today.
Jewish Questions comes out weekly on Wednesdays. This season’s five episodes will look at the causes and consequences of anti-Semitism across history, from medieval Spain to Nazi Germany to the United States in the 20th century.
Free | Listen and More Info
Looking for more?
Check out UWAA’s Stronger Together web page for more digital engagement opportunities.
Tag(s): ArtsUW • Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture • College of Arts & Sciences • Department of American Ethnic Studies • Department of Communication • Department of English • Department of Gender Women and Sexuality Studies • Department of History • Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilization • Henry Art Gallery • Jackson School of International Studies • Meany Center for the Performing Arts • Meany Hall for the Performing Arts • Simpson Center for the Humanities • South Asia Center • South Asia Studies Program • Stroum Center for Jewish Studies
