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). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/j/97058853009. 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.
GWSS Spring Colloquium: "Homocapitalism in the ‘Gay Capital of Africa’: Interrogating South African Sexual Exceptionalism," Presented by Shelley Pryde
Presenter: Shelley Pryde, PhD student, GWSS
Moderator: Reggie Kent, PhD student, English
South Africa enjoys an international reputation as an LGBTQ+ -friendly nation, undergirded by its status as the only African state that has thus far legalized same-sex marriage. While the 1996 constitution provides legal protections to LGBTQ+ South Africans, there remains a disparity between ‘rights on paper’ and lived realities of stigma and violence, which disproportionately affect poor, black, and trans citizens. In light of these contradictions, Shelley Pryde examines South African sexual exceptionalism through the lens of homocapitalism. She traces points of transnational politico-economic interaction to unpack their significance to the post-transition nation-building project: and thereby also, to the fracturing of queer subject formation along race and class lines. Ultimately, she argues that South African sexual exceptionalism is predicated on a colonial and apartheid amnesia that 'blackwashes' homophobia, and…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Padelford Hall (PDL). Campus room: PDL B110 G. Accessibility Contact: GWSS, gwss@uw.edu, 206-593-6900. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, May 28, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Workshop: Christopher Wild (U. Chicago), "Theater and theoria in Hannah Arendt’s Late Thought"
In her last work, the posthumously published Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt develops a phenomenology of the activities that make up mental life, specifically thinking and willing (the section on judging remained largely unwritten). In order to elucidate thinking (and to a certain extent willing) in its constitutive invisibility she frames it within a phenomenology of what she calls the “world of appearances.” The workshop will examine the role of theoria (the Greek word for contemplation), theater, and theatricality in this phenomenology by closely reading selected excerpts from the Life of the Mind and her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy,” in order to mine it for a generalized theory of theatricality.
Reading in preparation for Workshop: Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind Part One/Thinking: pp. 19-53; 92-125, and 129-141 , , Please join us even if you are not able to read all the selections above!
Generously supported by the
Simpson Center for the Humanities,
with sponsorship from the…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN). Campus room: DEN 359. Accessibility Contact: uwgerman@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Workshops.
Thursday, May 29, 2025, 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM.
Ethics, Policy & Humanity’s Future in Space
Humankind has already established a firm and growing presence outside the boundaries of planet Earth. Moreover, it is likely that major actors are currently creating path dependencies that will determine the conditions of long-term future, often unknowingly and unintentionally. The following decades will presumably set a space future, but what kind of future is still up for grabs? What can it be like and what should it be like are both questions that need addressing urgently, because decisions made over the next few decades are likely to affect the lives and futures of many generations to come? This roundtable brings together scholars and practitioners from ethics, policy, and industry to discuss humanity’s future in space from the perspective of intergenerational ethics and justice.
Stephen Gardiner (University of Washington) researches global environmental problems, future generations and virtue ethics.
Chelsea Haramia (Spring Hill College and University of Bonn) serves on the SETI Institute’s Science…
Event interval: Ongoing event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: HUB 214. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 29, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM.
The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping with Joseph Torigian
Please join us for a book talk with Joseph Torigian, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution and Associate Professor, School of International Service at American University.
The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping
Friday, May 30, 2025
1:00-2:30 PM
TEAL Seminar Room M232, Gowen Hall
China's leader, Xi Jinping, is one of the most powerful individuals in the world―and one of the least understood. Much can be learned, however, about both Xi Jinping and the nature of the party he leads from the memory and legacy of his father, the revolutionary Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002). The elder Xi served the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for more than seven decades. He worked at the right hand of prominent leaders Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang. He helped build the Communist base area that saved Mao Zedong in 1935, and he initiated the Special Economic Zones that launched China into the reform era after Mao's death. He led the Party's United Front efforts toward Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Taiwanese.…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Gowen Hall (GWN). Campus room: Tateuchi East Asia Library Seminar Room M232. Accessibility Contact: A. Bernier, abernier@uw.edu, #206-543-4391. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Special Events.
Friday, May 30, 2025, 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM.
For more info visit www.hoover.org. Annual Graduate Student Invited Lecture: Christopher Wild (U. Chicago) "Exercitia theatralia: Toward a Theory of Baroque Tragic Drama"
The lecture proposes a new poetology of German Baroque Tragedy by placing it within the tradition of spiritual exercises and meditation that emerged in antiquity as an integral part of a philosophical paideia and then in early Christianity as it sought to define itself as the vera philosophia. The surge of lay spirituality and the rediscovery of philosophical schools beyond Aristotle across Early Modern Europe also prompted a reemergence of spiritual practices and meditation, which were integrated – alongside rhetorical exercises – into a comprehensive paideia that dominated schools across the continent. Framing continental (school) drama within a “care of the self” allows not only for a better understanding of its intended (non-Aristotelian) efficacy but also for the articulation of a new – historically informed – theory of theatrical performativity.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN). Campus room: 359. Accessibility Contact: Department of German Studies, uwgerman@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, May 30, 2025, 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM.
Social Protests and Electoral Authoritarianism in Kazakhstan by Masaaki Higashijima, University of Tokyo
Why do some protests in autocracies attract popular participation while others do not? This paper argues that when opposition elites and the masses have divergent motivations for protesting, anti-regime mobilization struggles to gain momentum. Moreover, this weak elite-mass linkage is further exacerbated when autocrats selectively repress protests led by opposition elites while making concessions to those organized by ordinary citizens. To empirically test these claims, I examine the case of Kazakhstan, where frequent protests remained small in scale until the massive January 2022 demonstrations. An analysis of daily-coded protest data (2018–2021) reveals that protests led by opposition elites predominantly focused on political issues such as human rights, elections, and political prisoners, whereas spontaneous mass protests were primarily driven by economic concerns, including welfare, income, and utilities. A 2021 conjoint experiment further highlights citizens’ underlying preferences on public dissent, sho…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Thomson Hall (THO). Campus room: 317. Accessibility Contact: reecas@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars.
Monday, June 2, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 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: jsisevents@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Monday, June 2, 2025, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM.
Jen Rose Smith Ice Geographies Book Launch
Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation. Yet, in Ice Geographies, Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations. Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Hans Rosling Center for Population Health (HRC). Campus room: 155. Accessibility Contact: lnguye@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Special Events.
Friday, June 6, 2025, 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM.