From Artistic Joy to Collective Wellness with Marc Bamuthi Joseph

By Meany Center for the Performing Arts

At Meany Center, we believe that art-focused, youth-centered, mental health today is a key ingredient in an equitable and inspired social future. Our 2023–24 season engagement with Marc Bamuthi Joseph begins our journey of imagining Meany as a cultural hub that facilitates accessible pathways from artistic joy to collective wellness.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph (a man with dark skin, a beard in a purple jacket and white shirt)

In this coming year, our engagement team will be gathering various communities of practice together with Marc — who is engaged for five separate virtual and in-person residency visits — to imagine ways to normalize arts spaces as hubs for mental and emotional wellness for young people of all kinds.

We began our partnership with Marc Bamuthi Joseph in 2021, with Sozo Vision’s Healing Forward program, through which Meany Center staff identified the mental health of our student population at UW to be a top priority and a place where we felt we were well positioned to make a meaningful impact. This season we will explore the various ways that Meany’s programs can support the wellness of young people in our region, together with our partners who are committed to these values in their work with students on the UW campus and with youth in our surrounding communities.

Look for opportunities to engage with us around these ideas, including Marc’s UW Public Lecture at Town Hall on March 5, 2024. Marc’s residency with Meany will also include the premiere of his newest piece, Carnival of the Animals, at Meany Center on Saturday, April 6, 2024.

To learn more about this initiative, please contact our engagement manager, Kristen Kosmas: kkosmas@uw.edu.

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UW PANDEMIC PROJECT | RADICAL LISTENING SESSION (Nov 7th)

When: November 7th, 2023

Where: Virtual & Walker Ames (Kane Hall)

Time: 6:30 pm to 8 pm

Click here to register

Event Description: The Pandemics – COVID 19 and the worldwide racial reckoning – forever changed how we work, live, go to school, and interact as a community. Come listen to recorded dialogues about the pandemics, and engage in dialogue with your UW community. Together we will remember and honor our lived pandemics experiences.

Sharon Stein, “The University and Its Responsibility for Repair: Confronting Colonial Foundations and Enabling Different Futures” | A Worlds of Difference lecture (Nov 7th)

For the past 500 years, higher education has been entangled in the reproduction of social and ecological violence around the globe. This presentation asks how universities, and those of us who work and study within them, might meaningfully reckon with and enact repair for our complicity in historical and ongoing coloniality and unsustainability. It approaches reparations as a potentially regenerative process of enacting material redistribution and restitution, (re)building relationships grounded in respect and reciprocity, and repurposing our institutions to be more relevant and responsible in the context of the current polycrisis. The talk will also review several resources for navigating the complexities of confronting the colonial foundations of higher education and enabling different futures.

Sharon Stein (Educational Studies, University of British Columbia) is the author of Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education (Johns Hopkins, 2022), founder of the Critical Internationalization Studies Network, and a co-founder of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) Collective.

WHEN	Tuesday, Nov 7, 2023, 4:30 – 6 p.m.
EVENT INTERVAL	Single day event
CAMPUS LOCATION	Communications Building (CMU)
CAMPUS ROOM	120
ACCESSIBILITY CONTACT	Accommodation requests related to a disability or health condition should be made 10 days in advance to the Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu.
EVENT TYPES	Lectures/Seminars
EVENT SPONSORS	Simpson Center for the Humanities, humanities@uw.edu, 206.543.3920 Co-sponsored by the Office of Global Affairs in partnership with the UW Law Sustainable International Development Graduate Program, the Comparative History of Ideas Department, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Go to the event page