Dangerous Subjects Series - "Held in Memory": Immigrant Detention Surveillance and Struggles of Visual Evidence, with Diana Flores Ruíz
Registration Required
Video surveillance systems in ICE detention centers capture the inner workings of immigrant incarceration, yet ICE agents and contractors employ a variety of tactics to keep their closed-circuit video footage out of the public's view. This chapter excerpt, from Diana Flores Ruíz’s book-in-progress, examines epistemic and administrative violence produced through ICE’s digital retention practices regarding on-site surveillance video. As a feminist media scholar, Ruíz approach the institutionally incriminating potential of ICE’s own surveillance footage with skepticism rooted in historical carceral impunity. Rather than advocate for increased datafication of immigrants and people on the move, Ruíz emphasizes the epistemic violence produced by deleted, unarchived surveillance video footage. For families, loved ones, and advocates of immigrants killed and assaulted in detention, they hold promises of legal accountability. As such, Ruíz reframes the discussion of these videos’ evidentiary c…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: CMU 202. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Tuesday, April 29, 2025, 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM.
Deadline for 2024-25 GWSS Award Nominations
The Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies is accepting nominations for the 2024–25 academic year awards. Nominate outstanding individuals who have made a significant impact in our community. Self-nominations are allowed for many awards.
Awards Include: GWSS Service Award , Herring Phelps Outstanding GWSS Senior Award , Herring Phelps Scholarly Activism Award , Pamela E. Yee Gender and Disability Studies Award , Marie Doman Excellence in Teaching Award , GWSS Alumni Award, For comprehensive details on each award, including eligibility criteria and nomination guidelines, please visit our dedicated awards page. Don’t miss the chance to celebrate excellence in our community!
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: GWSS, gwss@uw.edu, 206-593-6900. Event Types: Not Specified.
Wednesday, April 30, 2025.
Letters from the Ancestors: Family History and our Capitalist Future | Nathan Connolly, Johns Hopkins
In “Letters from the Ancestors,” Prof. Connolly follows the experiences of four generations of his Caribbean family, offering an intimate view of the history of late capitalism in the Atlantic World. Under twentieth-century colonialism, he argues, working people developed uniquely gendered coping strategies for managing the precarities of racism and reputation. Even in apparently post-colonial times, these strategies continue to govern how we relate to institutions, set our aspirations, and even narrate our own personal and political histories. More than just a tour through a single family’s past experience, “Letter from the Ancestors" seeks to retain and advance our fluency in the history of colonized families. This history, Connolly suggests, seems all the more relevant today, in a nation and world of dwindling government protections for women and people of color. N. D. B. Connolly is Associate Professor of History and holder of the Herbert Baxter Adams Professorship at Johns Hopkins University. Prof.…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: 120. Accessibility Contact: histmain@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, April 30, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM.
Political Software: Mapping Digital Worlds From Below
By focusing on software and countermaps primarily designed for political action with social, environmental, and land justice movements, this conference brings together organizers, researchers, educators, and technologists questioning the interdependencies between digital infrastructures, software code, and emancipatory spatial futures.
Panel 1: Community Mapping, 10:00 am-12:30 pm
This session explores how activist groups mobilize counter-mapping and cartographic software in order to mobilize for spatial and territorial justice. Speakers include members of groups of the following projects: Queering the Map (Canada), kollektiv orangotango (Germany), Ushahidi (Kenya), Missing Basti Project (India), and Waterlines Project (Turtle Island). Together, we will explore what it means to mobilize spatial software for emancipatory futures.
Lunch Break, 12:30-1:30 pm, Panel 2: Community Software, 1:30-4:00 pm
This session focuses on community-made political software and how different collectives mobilize digital…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Allen Library (ALB). Campus room: Petersen Room. Accessibility Contact: humanities@uw.edu. Event Types: Conferences.
Thursday, May 1, 2025, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM.
Splintered Intimacies: Work and Friendship in Karachi's Service Economy
Register | Campus map | Visitor parking info
This talk will draw on ethnographic fieldwork to explore the social lives of low-wage women workers in Karachi, Pakistan. Most women in stigmatized beauty salon and retail jobs are divorced, separated, unmarried or otherwise abandoned by the state and the family, and therefore, they turn to each other for social and economic support. However, status struggles in a heightened context of stigma splinter women’s emergent non-kin intimacies, which become marked by discourses of secrecy, competition, and suspicion. Labor control in the workplace and patriarchal control in the home additionally impinge upon women’s ability to forge meaningful relations. Consequently, women’s relations with each other are often truncated, antagonistic, and episodic, rather than solidaristic. Bringing together feminist framings of friendship with broader theories of worker solidarity, I argue that understanding how class-gender dynamics fracture this precarious social terrain is crucial…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN). Campus room: DEN 313. Accessibility Contact: sascuw@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: This event is free and open to the public. Registration advised.
Thursday, May 1, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
The AfroFuture Now
Join award-winning graphic novelist and all-around champion of Black culture, John Jennings for a conversation about the current history of Black speculation.
This event will also be livestreamed. John Jennings, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside (UCR)
John Jennings is a professor, award-winning author, graphic novelist, curator, Harvard Fellow, New York Times Bestseller, 2018 Eisner Winner, and all-around champion of Black culture.
As Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside (UCR), Jennings examines the visual culture of race in various media forms including film, illustrated fiction, and comics and graphic novels. He is also the director of Abrams ComicArts imprint Megascope, which publishes graphic novels focused on the experiences of people of color. His research interests include the visual culture of Hip Hop, Afrofuturism and politics, Visual Literacy, Horror, and the EthnoGothic, and Speculative Design and…
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: lectures@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Open to the public.
Thursday, May 1, 2025, 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM.
Seattle Town Hall.
Eunsong Kim w/ Chandan Reddy, "The Politics of Collecting"
About the Book
In The Politics of Collecting, Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation—rather than merit or good taste—are responsible for popular ideas of formal innovation and artistic genius. In doing so, she details how Marcel Duchamp’s canonization has more to do with his patron’s donations to museums than it does the quality of Duchamp’s work, and she uncovers the racialized and financialized logic behind the Archive of New Poetry’s collecting practices. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a new history of contemporary art that accounts for the complicated entanglement of race, capital, and labor behind storied art institutions and artists. Drawing on history, theory, and economics, Kim challenges received notions…
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: 206-624-6600. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Special Events. Target Audience: Free and open to the public. Registration required.
Saturday, May 3, 2025, 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Elliott Bay Book Company.
For more info visit www.eventbrite.com. "The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property" by Eunsong Kim
"In The Politics of Collecting, Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation—rather than merit or good taste—are responsible for popular ideas of formal innovation and artistic genius. In doing so, she details how Marcel Duchamp’s canonization has more to do with his patron’s donations to museums than it does the quality of Duchamp’s work, and she uncovers the racialized and financialized logic behind the Archive of New Poetry’s collecting practices. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a new history of contemporary art that accounts for the complicated entanglement of race, capital, and labor behind storied art institutions and artists. Drawing on history, theory, and economics, Kim challenges received notions of artistic suc…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: CMU 120. Accessibility Contact: Dept. of English 206.543.2690. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: UW community.
Monday, May 5, 2025, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM.
For more info visit dukeupress.edu. Sexuality & Queer Studies Capstone: "'A Resource for Metaphor': Framing the Human in Etheridge Knight’s 'For Freckle-Faced Gerald'” (1968), presented by Alec Fisher (English Department)
In an interview for the humanities magazine Callaloo, Etheridge Knight described the goal of the poetry he wrote while incarcerated as a method of meditating on "the subject of oppression." While critics have often argued that Knight renders that subject in masculinist ways, this capstone presentation argues that Knight's representations are much less tied to binary formations of sex and gender than might at first appear. Using Knight's poem as a central example, this presentation contends that this divergence from binary formations of sex and gender is more widespread in the genre of Prison Literature than has been previously considered.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Padelford Hall (PDL). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/SupbK8LtSp-VcD-65klkbA. Campus room: PDL B110 G. Accessibility Contact: GWSS, gwss@uw.edu, 206-593-6900. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Free and open to the public.
Wednesday, May 7, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Spring CELEbration 2025
Spring Celebration is a forum for CELE Center and Mary Gates Endowment students to showcase student service, leadership, and activist work conducted in partnership with the community. We are so excited to celebrate all the accomplishments of our CELE Center students and Mary Gates Leaders.
3:45–4:30 p.m. — Session 0 (Lightning Talks)
4:30–4:50 p.m. — Event Welcome & Community Partners Recognition
5:00–5:50 p.m. — Presentation Session 1
6:00–6:50 p.m. — Presentation Session 2
7:00–7:30 p.m. — Community Conversations
The event officially ends at 7:30 p.m.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: Husky Union Building ballroom and meeting rooms. Accessibility Contact: springcele@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Conferences. Special Events.
Wednesday, May 7, 2025, 4:30 PM – 7:30 PM.
For more info visit cele.uw.edu. "Ron Athey's Tragic," Visiting Professor Tom Sapsford, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Boston College
First diagnosed in 1986, Ron Athey uses his HIV-positive body—through piercing, bloodletting, penetration, and medical procedures—as text for performance pieces shown in galleries, theaters, and nightclub spaces. Connecting the ritual and spectacle of the Pentecostal tradition in which he was raised to ancient classical drama, Athey views Greek Tragedy as an act of ‘pagan worship,’ which can ‘abduct the viewer into a heightened abstract, unexpected state.’ This talk explores Athey’s redeployment of two figures from Athenian drama: Helen of Troy, reborn as Trojan Whore (1995), and Philoctetes in Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound) (2006).
Tom Sapsford is a scholar of performance, gender, and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome, with a specialization in imperial Latin verse. He is the author of Performing the Kinaidos: Unmanly Men in Ancient Mediterranean Cultures (Oxford 2022) and is currently writing a book on Classics and the Gay Counterculture.
To attend this talk via Zoom, please register here.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN). Campus room: DEN 212. Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, May 9, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
2025 GWSS Spring Community Gathering: Undergraduate Research Colloquium
Please join us as this year’s Undergraduate Research Grant awardees share their research with the GWSS community. This event is an opportunity to engage with emerging scholarship in gender, women, and sexuality studies and to celebrate the work of our undergraduate researchers.
Each student will give a short presentation, followed by responses from GWSS graduate students Marielle Marcaida, Shelley Pryde, and Royalti Richardson, who will help facilitate the discussion. Whether you're a student, faculty member, or community member, we invite you to attend, support these scholars, and take part in the conversation!
A reception will follow the event from 5-6 pm—come connect with our presenters and fellow attendees over refreshments!
Presenters Include: Lou Chow, "Alleviating Dysmenorrhea in BIPOC Populations through Community Dance" , Matthew Judd, "Dialogue/ Loving yourself as you would love another" , Fiona Rivera, "Queer Animality: Dismantling Spanish Colonialism Through Peruvian Artistry" , Mel Whitesell…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: CMU 202/204. Accessibility Contact: GWSS, gwss@uw.edu, 206-593-6900. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars. Student Activities. Special Events.
Friday, May 9, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Sexuality & Queer Studies Capstone: "Falling Asleep in the Museum," presented by Eric Villiers (Theatre History & Performance Studies)
Presenter: Eric Villiers, PhD Candidate, Theatre History and Performance Studies
Moderator: Amanda Swarr, Professor, Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies
Museums are exhausting, rarely providing people with opportunities to rest their bodies as they look at the objects within. In many ways, museums reinforce the idea that value is apprehended and measurable through productive labor and its effects on the body and society.
In fact, museums are colonial technologies that reproduce and naturalize dominant Western ideologies which the museumgoer is meant to labor to embody.
The recent queer-themed exhibition, Leerstelle: Zeit haben. Zeit zählen. Zeit füllen. (Gap: Having time. Counting time. Filling time.) at the Schwules (Gay) Museum in Berlin, Germany, reimagines the museum in opposition to these notions. Bringing together a series of art videos and sound pieces that interrogate queer practices of rest and worldmaking, museumgoers were invited to embody these queer practices of rest by watching and listening…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Hutchinson Hall (HUT). Campus room: HUT 154. Accessibility Contact: GWSS, gwss@uw.edu, 206-593-6900. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Free and open to the public.
Wednesday, May 14, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Global Sport Lab: African Women, Gender and Soccer with Martha Saavedra
Join us for a retrospective reflection on the future of African women and football followed by a Q&A featuring guest speaker Martha Saavedra, faculty and associate director of the Center for African Studies at the University of California in Berkeley. This event is part of the Global Sport Lab initiative.
This event is free and open to all. About the speaker
At the Center for African Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Martha Saavedra manages the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, and other African-focused research, fellowship and public programs. Trained in International Studies and Political Science, Martha has taught in California, Ohio, and Madrid. Her research has been on agrarian politics in Sudan, gender and development and sport in Africa.
She is a board member of Sports Africa and Soccer Without Borders. A veteran of Title IX battles in the U.S. she has been involved with soccer/football most of her life as a player, coach, scholar, and fan.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: Room 340. Accessibility Contact: Katie Sandler (ksandl@uw.edu). Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Special Events.
Thursday, May 15, 2025, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM.
GWSS Oral History Website Launch Party
Details to come.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Allen Library (ALB). Campus room: Allen Auditorium. Accessibility Contact: GWSS, gwss@uw.edu, 206-593-6900. Event Types: Special Events. Target Audience: Free and open to the public.
Wednesday, May 21, 2025, 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM.
Memorial Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2025. Quarter: Spring. Event Types: Academics.
Monday, May 26, 2025.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. DH Colloquium - Introduction to The Black Grandmother Archive
“When an elder dies, a library burns.” This African proverb emphasizes the irreplaceable role of elders as guardians and transmitters of knowledge, culture, and wisdom. Black grandmothers, as living "libraries," carry and preserve vital stories and cultural inheritances—such as material possessions, traditions, rituals, and language—that have shaped the matriarchal legacies and cultural identity of African-descended peoples. The Black Grandmother Archive and The Black Grandmother Worldmaking Library intervene in the fields of archiving and preservation by offering publicly accessible, digitally preserved websites for user-generated narratives. They also reshape the discourse around Black culture and history by centering Black grandmothers as knowledge producers. Their stories set the historical record straight, providing invaluable insight into Black experiences and cultural traditions.
These digital humanities projects digitize the stories and cultural inheritances of Black grandmothers, counteracting the…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Smith Hall (SMI). Campus room: Smith Hall, Room 320. Accessibility Contact: ejred@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Information Sessions.
Wednesday, May 28, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
Lecture | Militant Mothers of Kurdistan: Mothering the Dead and Care Beyond Life
This event is free and open to the public.
This talk discusses the unconventional forms of care that emerge out of Kurdish resistance in
Turkey, where mothering becomes a powerful response against necropolitical state violence. By centering
the stories of two Kurdish mothers who had to care for their dead children and mother beyond life under
the violent state of emergency regime declared in 2015; the talk examines the ways in which Kurdish
mothers “rescue the dead” (Antoon, 2021) from the necropolitical state and create their own
necropolitical power through a radical embrace of death and decoupling of mothering from the corporeal
link between the mother and the child. It is a critical intervention into conventional humanitarian care
frameworks that prioritize human survival and calls for a re-imagination of humanitarianism as
something that extends to the non-human and the dead and for the discovery of sites where humanitarian care
is not passively received but is politically reconstructed as a site of…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: 337. Accessibility Contact: Katie Sandler, ksandl@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Monday, June 2, 2025, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM.
GWSS Graduation
The University of Washington Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies invites you to join us to celebrate our graduates of the 2024-2025 school year! We will honor the accomplishments of our wonderful graduates with presentations by students and faculty.
Registration link for graduating students to come.
The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation in its services, programs, activities, education and employment for individuals with disabilities. To request disability accommodation contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance at: 206.543.6450/V, 206.543.6452/TTY, 206.685.7264 (FAX), or e-mail at dso@u.washington.edu.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: Lyceum. Accessibility Contact: gwssadvs@uw.edu. Event Types: Ceremonies. Special Events. Student Activities.
Wednesday, June 11, 2025, 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM.
Juneteenth
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2025. Quarter: Summer. Event Types: Academics.
Thursday, June 19, 2025.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Independence Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2025. Quarter: Summer. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, July 4, 2025.
For more info visit www.washington.edu.