Tuesday, September 8

OPEN CLASS/LECTURE
9:40 - 10:55
Research Methods in Psychology, Professor Jeremy Jamieson

Class lecture is "Stereotyping, Prejudice, & Discrimination: Psychological Processes & Measurement" and is open to all.

If you are interested in receiving a recording of the lecture, email janelbryant@rochester.edu.

VIRTUAL EVENT

10:00-12:00
Mixtape for Justice: The Protest Music of Black America 
hosted by Prof. Darren Mueller (Eastman School of Music) 
60+ people participated in this event

This listening session will present the protest music of Black America across genres, geographies, and time periods. This will be a space for listening and contemplation—the music and the musicians will take center stage. Attendees will be invited to offer suggestions and all submissions will be collected into a playlist for later circulation.

Here is the playlist!

OPEN CLASS
11:05-12:20
Innovation in Public Service, Professor Stu Jordan

Reading: No required reading, but useful to view beforehand this video about the history of racist housing practices and policies in Monroe County.

We will be holding an introductory discussion of the concept of residential segregation (What counts and what doesn't count as segregation?), and from there moving into a discussion of how to use data from the American Community Survey to explore the nature, extent, causes and impacts of residential segregation, applied specifically to Monroe County New York.

Lecture notes are posted here.
 

OPEN CLASS
11:00-12:00
The Museum of Broken Windows: Art and Police Brutality Professor Heather Layton
90+ people participated in this class

To view a recording of this lecture, click here.

Lecture and Artist Talk: The Museum of Broken Windows was a pop-up art exhibition in NYC that responds to issues of police brutality in America. The broken windows theory, first proposed by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Killing in 1982, suggests that any sign of disorder in a neighborhood, such as a broken window, encourages small crimes which lead to serious crimes. Still used by the NYPD, it is a policing strategy that criminalizes poverty and turns neighborhoods into police occupation zones. Nafir White, one of the artists featured in the exhibition, will join us to discuss her art as it relates to this topic. 

VIRTUAL EVENT led by students
4:00-5:00
"Who are we keeping safe? Reimagining public safety on campus"
120+ people participated in this event

UR Student-led Zoom discussion focusing on how to reimagine public safety in the wake of the deaths of Daniel Prude and so many others, and in the midst of a pandemic.Recording of event can be viewed here.

Wednesday, September 9

OPEN CLASS
10:25-11:40
Intro to Language Sound Systems, Professor Joyce McDonough
100+ people participated in this class

Reading: Rickford, John R. & King, Sharese (2016). "Language and linguistics on trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel (and other vernacular speakers) in the Courtroom and Beyond." Language, 92(4), 948-988. Access text here.

Class discussion will be focused on the issues addressed in the Rickford and King paper and will concern speech and the analysis of speech and the importance of dialect and identity. The paper is an analysis of the speech and dialect of Rachel Jeantal, and an examination of her dialect and the way her critical testimony was treated (i.e. dismissed) in the trail because of blatant racial biases against the dialect and the inability of the court system to address them.

Sharese King is from Rochester. She's a '12 BA in Linguistics from UR. Her Stanford dissertation work was on dialect in Rochester.

Abstract of paper to be discussed: Rachel Jeantel was the leading prosecution witness when George Zimmerman was tried for killing Trayvon Martin, but she spoke in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and her crucial testimony was dismissed as incomprehensible and not credible. The disregard for her speech in court and the media is familiar to vernacular speakers and puts Linguistics itself on trial: following Saussure, how do we dispel such ‘prejudices’ and ‘fictions’? We show that Jeantel speaks a highly systematic AAVE, with possible Caribbean influence. We also discuss voice quality and other factors that bedeviled her testimony, including dialect unfamiliarity and institutionalized racism. Finally, we suggest strategies for linguists to help vernacular speakers be better heard in courtrooms and beyond.

VIRTUAL EVENT
11:00AM
Teach In with Free the People ROC
300+ people participated in this event

For a recording of this event, click here.

Join organizers from Free the People ROC to learn about the work they have been doing all summer, their demands in relation to policing and Rochester, how students, staff and faculty can get involved, and discussion of the university's relationship to ongoing events.

OPEN CLASS
11:50-1:05
Intersectionality: History of an Idea, Professor Eden Osucha
50+ people participated in this event

Reading:

• “What is Critical Race Theory?” [excerpt from Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Editors’ Introduction to Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, And the First Amendment]
• Neil Gotanda, “A Critique of 'Our Constitution Is Color-Blind’”
• Alan David Freedman, “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Decisions”
• Ian Haney Lopèz, “White by Law”

Class discussion: It is common practice to speak of the “social construction of race” as a key feature of white supremacy in the US yet the phrase itself doesn’t fully capture the more intimate levels at which racial construction takes hold—that is to say, how it is that white Americans in particular come to believe that they are white. I borrow this formulation from Ta-Nehisi Coates who uses variations on the phrase “the people who believed themselves to be white” to refer to “white people” throughout Between the World and Me (2015), a substitution that underscores white racial identity’s status as not just dominant ideology but as a fantasy that passes for reality by exerting a total hold on the consciousness. Coates’s conception of white race consciousness and the social construction model of analyzing race converge in Critical Race Theory, an intellectual movement launched by law school Professoressors of color nearly four decades ago. Critical Race Theory provides a set of tools for analyzing racial ideology and power in many areas of American life and the historical and ongoing subordination of people of color by placing race, as a term of analysis, at the center of the American legal system, its visions of justice and its written laws (from the U.S. Constitution to local municipal orders). Come with questions, insights, and impressions in response to the assigned writings, which represent formative CRT scholarship.

12:30-1:45
Humanitarianism and Systemic Oppressions, Professor Cilas Kemedjio

A discussion of how Black Lives Do not Matter under Colonial Humanitarianism, police tactics, and the future of the movement.

Powerpoint from class is here.

 OPEN CLASS
12:30-1:45
Environmental Literature: Memory and Modernity, Professor Leila Nadir
Zoom link: Please email leila.nadir@rochester.edu no later than 9am on Wednesday 9/9 to obtain the link.

Nurturing ourselves, our communities, and the earth is a theme of this course surveying environmental literature, from Henry Thoreau and Toni Morrison to Leslie Silko and Rachel Carson. In that spirit, today we will take a break from the usual academic labor of traditional classroom learning to have a supportive and open discussion about care-taking ourselves, our city, our families, our campus, and our communities during this latest violent manifestation of our nation's racial legacy. This meeting is optional for current students in this course because we all need to do what is best for us during this strike, and all members of the Environmental Humanities Program have been invited to attend. If you would like to join us, please contact me. The goal is to create a safe place for us to support one another and find some solace in each other's company during this time. 

OPEN CLASS
2:00-3:15
Indigenous People’s Movements, Professor Tom Gibson
Zoom link: For the link, email Gibson at thomas.gibson@rochester.edu

Reading: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. 2018. Pp. 29-57 in Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Class discussion: From its foundation, white supremacy in the US has rested on a particular combination of private militias and official police and military organizations. In the attached reading, Dunbar-Ortiz traces the origins of America’s peculiar gun culture back to the role played by private militias in the initial settlement of the lands cultivated by the first nations of the continent and the role played by private patrols in maintaining the institution of slavery. Early state constitutions often required that all adult white men be armed. These frontier militias and slave patrols were backed up by military units when necessary. A similar symbiosis exists today between white militias and local police forces within the US, as demonstrated by recent events in Portland and Kenosha. It also exists between private mercenary forces and the official military in countries under US occupation, such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

OPEN CLASS
2:00-3:15
Racial Democracies, Professor Molly Ball
Zoom link: Please email mollycball@rochester.edu to obtain the link
Readings (All three are available digitally through our Rush Rhees collections.)

• Graham, Shifting the Meaning of Democracy: Race, Politics, and Culture in the United States and Brazil Introduction – chapter 3
• Alberto, Terms of Inclusion : Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil, chapter 2
• Alison Parker, "When White Women Wanted a Monument to Black 'Mammies'," New York Times, Feb 6, 2020.

OPEN CLASS
2:00-3:15
Writing for Social Change, Rachel O'Donnell
Zoom link: Please email rachel.odonnell@rochester.edu to obtain the link

Reading: 1) Selections from Feminist Manifestos ed. Penny Weiss. 2) The 10-point program of the Black Panther Party and 3) Our Demands from the Black Student Collective at the University of Oregon.

Discussion:This class session will focus on manifestos. We will discuss those read in preparation for the class meeting as well as ideas for the manifestos written by students as an assignment for this class. Guests are invited to participate in this assignment but it is not required to attend this session.

A manifesto conveys a sense of urgency with its use of direct language. This could be why manifestos, no matter when they were written, feel very contemporary. Any manifesto worth reading demands the impossible. Surely the best first line since Marx and Engels’s “A spectre is haunting Europe” in “The Communist Manifesto” (1848) was the BPP’s “We want freedom” at the start of its 10-point program (1967). In both cases, the language is dangerous and unpredictable, and demands something of its reader.

Often a manifesto is written to promote a belief system or an international movement. In many cases it advertises an ‘ism,’ a way of seeing the world, or a set of demands (even if that demand is for larger understanding). Manifestos have been a popular technique to declare what it is you believe in for centuries, and therefore, it is not easy to write because first you first have to figure out what you believe.

In our recent readings of manifestos, you may have noticed that 1) Manifestos are written to challenge and provoke 2) Manifestos come in many forms (sometimes a list of numbered tenets or advertisements with selling points, like ‘join us’) and 3) Manifestos are better very short than very long. Your goal, therefore, is to write something that will challenge and provoke in a form that works well for you as a writer, as long as it is very brief yet direct.

OPEN CLASS
3:25-4:40
History of Linguistic Thought, Professor Ash Asudeh
Zoom Link: ash.asudeh@rochester.edu no later than noon on Wednesday 9/9 to obtain the link.

Reading: Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. Excerpt: Preface (pp.xxv-xxix) and Notes on Orwell's Problem (pp.276-287).
Please email ash.asudeh@rochester.edu no later than noon on Wednesday 9/9 to obtain the reading.

In this book, Chomsky considers two problems of knowledge. The first is "Plato’s problem": How can we as humans "know so much given that we have such limited evidence.” The second problem is the one we will focus on instead, as it is about how we understand our own societies and how they are governed. It is "Orwell’s problem": How can we "know so little, given that we have so much evidence.”

Chomsky writes, "Orwell's problem is to explain why we know and understand so little, even though the evidence available to us is so rich. Like many other twentieth-century intellectuals, Orwell was irnpressed with the ability of totalitarian systems to instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with obvious facts about the world around us. To solve Orwell's problem we must discover the institutional and other factors that block insight and understanding in crucial areas of our lives and ask why they are effective."

OPEN CLASS
3:25-4:40
American Body Politics, Professor Eden Osucha
Zoom link: For the link, email eosucha@ur.rochester.edu

Reading: Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839)

Class Discussion: Edgar Alan Poe’s well-known story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” published in 1839, is a landmark work of Gothic fiction, wedding a sophisticated account of psychological processes and insight into the unconscious with a meticulous narrative craft and obsessive attention to detailed description one admiring British critic later in the nineteenth century referred to as Poe’s “microscopic power of analysis.” With its generic European setting, blurring of distinctions between life and death and fantasy and reality, and evocations of the supernatural and the uncanny, “The Fall of the House of Usher” might seem hard to place within American literary history, given the story’s lack of overt references to its author’s own place and time or to any historical or cultural signposts that locate the narrative within an “American” scene. However, Poe was a Southerner, writing in the antebellum context of heightened national consciousness of race issues, virulent racism, and the political question of slavery; Poe's evasions of race matters and ambiguous racial symbolism--is his work implicitly racist or subversive of racist beliefs?--have led recent scholars of American literature to center questions of racial ideology in their analyses of Poe's writing and distinctive aesthetic. This class will discuss how the horrors of slavery, antebellum discourses of race, and still current anxieties over the “purity” of whiteness reverberate throughout “The Fall of the House of Usher,” finding expression in its Gothic literary strategies. This is a weird text to be sure but also one that is fun (hopefully!) to unpack collaboratively; students are encouraged to bring questions and impressions.

OPEN CLASS
4:50-6:05
Radical Social Theory, Professor Tom Gibson
Zoom link: For the link, email Gibson at thomas.gibson@rochester.edu

Reading: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

Class discussion: In 1848, two young radicals, Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Engels (1820-1895) published The Communist Manifesto. They argued that the replacement of monarchical rule with parliamentary democracy would only intensify the exploitation of the working class if revolutionary advances in science and technology became the private property of a tiny group of capitalists concerned only with profit. They demanded instead that democratic principles and scientific knowledge be applied to the economy as well as to politics. 170 years later, the role played by major oil, agricultural and tobacco corporations in deliberately sowing doubt about scientific research into climate change, lead poisoning, and cancer shows that continuing to base the world economy on the profit motive is putting life itself at risk, and that a transition to social democracy is more urgent than ever before. What form this will take remains to be determined.