seminar in media and political theory
race critical theories
2020-2021
Seminar
The 2020-21 GEM Seminar is organized around the problem of Race Critical Theories. Among other inspirations, it borrows its conceptual orientation from Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg’s 2001 eponymous collection. The volume, which both gathered seminal scholarship on race and racism from the 1980s and 1990s, alongside newly commissioned responses to that work, sought to “look back reflectively as a way forward.” Our seminar returns to this historically grounded but present-focused intervention in order to look back, as a way forward, again. We are equally inspired by the project’s challenge to nation-centric (e.g. the United States) understandings of race and racial discourse. Instead, it draws on a transnational network of scholars and activists to explore a set of multi-sited and global dynamics, demonstrating that “there is no singular national space that does or should dominate the thinking about race and racism.” This formulation is critical to GEM’s mission and informs the organization of this years’ remote lectures and workshops. Race Critical Theories works both to examine the specificities of race and racism in Canada and the US – settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, white supremacy, ethno-nationalism, among other crucial issues – but also to locate these paradigms and expand our frames to other sub- and trans-national structures. This includes what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms the global idea of race. Finally, we take as our starting point the global Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, as well as the deeply violent inequalities exposed by the present pandemic’s disproportionate assault on Black and Indigenous communities, People of Color, Migrants, Queer and Trans* people, among many others marginalized by cisheteropatriarchy and white supremacy.
2020-2021 GEM Seminar Related Events & Annual Initiatives
Whiteness and Anti-anti-racism in Québec
Participants: Bruno Cornellier (Winnipeg), moderated by Luca Caminati
Sept 25th, 2020 @ 2pm (Online)
Participants: Edward George (BAFC) in conversation with Dhanveer Singh Brar (Goldsmiths), moderated by Kay Dickinson (Concordia)
Oct 30th @ 2pm (Online)
Participants: Christine Goding-Doty (Hobart and William Smith)
Oct 20, 2020 @ 3pm (Online)
Asymmetries: Race, Media, and the Asia(s)
Participants: Workshop w/ Michelle Cho (UT), Eng-Beng Lim (Dartmouth), Feng-Mei (NYU), Meenasarani Murugan (Fordham), moderated by Joshua Neves (Concordia)
Nov 18, 2020 @4pm (Online)
Embodiment and Black Aesthetics
Participants: Shelleen Maisha Greene (UCLA), moderated by Luca Caminati (Concordia)
Jan 29, 2021 @ 2pm (Online)
Participants: Atif Siddiqi (Filmmaker), Eisha Marjara (Filmmaker), moderated by Gregorio Pablo Rodríguez-Arbolay Jr (PhD Candidate, Concordia)
Feb 19, 2021 @ 2pm (Online)
Participants: Rey Chow (Duke), seminar / discussion
Mar 8, 2021 @ 2pm (Online)
Participants: Denise Ferreira da Silva (UBC), lecture
Mar 19, 2021 @ 2pm (Online)
Race and Post-Soviet Diaspora in Transnational Reality TV
Participants: Claudia Sadowski-Smith (ASU), moderated by Masha Salazkina (Concordia)
Mar 25, 2021 @ 2pm (Online)
Participants: Filmmaker Esery Mondesir in conversation with Nataleah Hunter-Young (York), moderated by May Chew (Concordia)
Apr 8, 2021 @ 2pm (Online)
Works-In-Progress Working Group
Organizers: Lola Remy, Ylenia Olibet
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The Methodology of HOMING: Documentary Co-creation, Women, & Home
Workshop event with Iphigénie Marcoux-Fortier, co-presented with Mance Dominique Champagne -
Space Invaders on Film School Sets: Participatory Photo Story, Embodied Subjectivities, and White-Masculine Spaces
Workshop event with Dr. Tracy Ying-Zhang, co-presented with Whitney Norceide -
TV Series and Uncertainty: COVID Narratives, Audiences, Methods
Workshop event with Professor Marta Boni (UdeM)
Cinema in the Midst of Struggle
Organizers: Jake Pitre, Pat Bonner, Maggie El-Masry & Nhân Trần-Tiễn.
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Africville / Restigouche, A screening and conversation with Delvina Bernard
Remember Africville (1991, Dir. Shelagh Mackenzie)
Incident at Restigouche (1984, Alanis Obomsawin) -
There is a Garden with filmmaker Masoud Raouf
There is a Garden (2014)
Co-Sponsored Events
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Cultural Resistance During Dark Times: A discussion with Anand Patwardhan
Discussion and Q&A with award winning documentarian Anand Patwardhan.
January 24, 2021 - 5pm