Thursday, March 7th
Noon to 1:30 pm | PUB NCR

Some eleven million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States, carving out lives amid a growing web of surveillance that threatens their and their families’ societal presence. Asad L. Asad’s book Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life examines how undocumented immigrants navigate complex dynamics of surveillance and punishment, providing an extraordinary portrait of fear and hope on the margins.

Asad L. Asad brings together a wealth of research, from intimate interviews and detailed surveys with Latino immigrants and their families to up-close observations of immigration officials, to offer a rare perspective on the surveillance that undocumented immigrants encounter daily. He describes how and why these immigrants engage with various institutions—for example, by registering with the IRS or enrolling their kids in public health insurance programs—that the government can use to monitor them.

This institutional surveillance feels both necessary and coercive, with undocumented immigrants worrying that evasion will give the government cause to deport them. Even so, they hope their record of engagement will one day help them prove to immigration officials that they deserve societal membership.

Asad uncovers how these efforts do not always meet immigration officials’ high expectations, and how surveillance is as much about the threat of exclusion as the promise of inclusion. Calling attention to the fraught lives of undocumented immigrants and their families, this superbly written and compassionately argued book proposes wide-ranging, actionable reforms to achieve societal inclusion for all.

Author Bio: Asad L. Asad is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and a faculty affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. He studies how citizenship and legal status matter for multiple forms of inequality. He is the author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life.

Thursday, February 29th
Noon

In my book, Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities and Culture from Houston to Accra, I examine the diverse cultural and transnational strategies through which Ghanaians position themselves as citizens of the world.

The Afropolitan is a politic, identity, and aesthetic that insists on elevating Africa’s place on a global stage. Afropolitan Projects demonstrate how a politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality shape the way an increasingly class-privileged cohort of Africans connect with others on the continent and in the diaspora.

In this presentation, I have three aims:

• First, I outline how immigration policies such as the U.S. Diversity Visa Program and African national contexts such as state failures and access to higher education have shaped the emergence of this “new” African diaspora.
• Second, focusing on the politics of return, global anti-blackness, and anti-queer movements, I illuminate some of the political contests that inform Afropolitan projects in the African diaspora.
• Third, I provide an analysis of what this context and contests offer by way of transnational connections and diasporic solidarity.

Through this analysis, I invite audiences to consider how Afropolitan Africa as a contemporary Black diasporic site presents opportunities and pitfalls in the struggle for Black liberation.

Author Bio: Anima Adjepong is the author of Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities and Culture from Houston to Accra, founder of Silent Majority, Ghana, a nonprofit that engages indigenous Ghanaian knowledge and collective organizing to champion queer freedom in Ghana, and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

Chertok Professorship Lecture Series Presents:

How Liberals Silence Racial and Class Oppression

with Angie Beeman, PhD
Associate Professor, Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College-CUNY.

November 16th | 12:30 – 1:30pm
Showalter 109
Or Join us via Zoom

Angie Beeman is an Associate Professor in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs and Affiliate Faculty with Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College |  New York, NY 10010. She is also a Director with the Global Listening Centre Academic Board.

Her research examines changing expressions of racism and how this affects interracial organizing, progressive politics, and workplace equity.

Dr. Beeman’s research has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Forbes Magazine, The Wire, Sociological Forum, Social Science Quarterly, the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Violence Against Women and as chapters in several edited volumes. She has been quoted in Nature, Forbes, Huffington Post, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, Galveston Daily News, Wallethub, and College Magazine.

Her book, Liberal White Supremacy: How Progressives Silence Racial and Class Oppression examines divides among progressives and the role of liberal ideology in preventing significant change. In this book, and in her earlier works, she conceptualizes racism-evasion as the outcome of color-bind ideology and advances practical applications of what she calls “racism-centered intersectionality.” She argues that white supremacy is maintained not only by right-wing conservatives or racial bigots but also by progressives, who see themselves as allies to people of color.

By distinguishing between liberal and radical approaches to racism, class oppression, capitalism, and social movement tactics, Beeman shows how progressives continue to be limited by liberal ideology and perpetuate rather than dismantle white supremacy. She analyzes case studies that elucidate various aspects of this process as well as her own experiences in diversity workshops and academic discussions. Drawing from Systemic Racism Theory and Black Feminist Thought, Beeman advances racism-centered intersectional approaches as correctives to progressive organizational strategies that either downplay racism in favor of a class-centered approach or take a talk-centered approach to racism without developing explicit actions to challenge it.

Dr. Beeman has shared this work with multiple audiences and is frequently invited by organizations to speak on liberal ideology, racism, social justice, and allyship. She is currently writing a manifold workbook with training and instructor resources to accompany her book. Learn more about Dr. Beeman on her website.

Lecture & Panel Discussion at Liberty Park Library on November 16th at 6:30pm – Learn more here
402 S. Pittsburg St. Spokane WA 99202

Panelists: Justice Forral | Operations Director of Spokane Community Against Racism (SCAR)
Robert Huitt | Racial Equity and Network Manager of Greater Spokane Progress (GSP)
Liz Moore | Executive Director of Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane (PJALS)
Facilitated by Kassahun Kebede, PhD & Pui-Yan Lam, PhD | Professor of Sociology at EWU