Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender

Archive for April, 2017

Patricia de Santana Pinho: “African American Roots Tourism in Brazil: Encounters in Sameness, Difference, and Inequality” – April 5, 2012

International tourism has often been criticized for promoting unequal encounters between privileged inhabitants of the World’s centers and their disadvantaged peripheral “Others.” However, recently, new forms of travel have emerged where tourists have sought to employ their privilege, knowledge, resources, and even the status of their nationality for the benefit of the “tourees.” Aware of their power as US citizens and affluent consumers, African American “roots tourists” in Brazil have actively employed their national identity as well as their purchasing power to benefit Afro-Brazilians. The lobbying made by African Americans on behalf of Afro- Brazilians is certainly well intended, and […]

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Misty Bastian: “Witches and “Cheap Christians” Confessions of Diabolic Temptation Among Nigerian Pentecostals” – November 28, 2006

Throughout the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, Nigerian Pentecostal Christians began to produce a number of pamphlets and novellas about the ongoing battle between Pentecostals and demonic members of the undersea or underworld “kingdoms”. Professor Bastian will discuss a particularly rich Pentecostal novella, Abali O. Abali’s Rescued by Christ: The Witch (2000), which offers its readers a fictionalized, “insider” account of contemporary Nigerian witchcraft, focusing on how witches attack and subvert the faith of Pentecostal Christians. Echoing, perhaps, the education and social experience of its author, the novella describes a spiritual world that partakes of features […]

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Kety Silva ’14: “A Home Away From Home” – April 18, 2013

The NGO, Verdefam, receives grants to offset the costs of gynecological exams, ultrasounds, STI exams, contraceptive methods, pregnancy tests, and family planning options. This presentation will focus on healthcare policy, legislation, and how a new sovereign state like Cape Verde tackles political and sociological issues surrounding healthcare access. Kety Silva ‘14, a Sociology and Spanish Major, Women’s and Gender Studies Minor, was born on the Cape Verdean islands off the West Coast of Africa. Her parents immigrated to the United States when Kety was just two years old. Thanks to a grant from BPIP for providing funding to attend a […]

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Evelyn Blackwood: “Global sexualities, or are there really lesbians and gays everywhere?” – March 29, 2010

Dr. Evelyn Blackwood, author of the forthcoming book “Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia,” has conducted research on lesbian and transgender identities, histories and practices globally for over twenty-five years. Her talk explores the diversity of female same-sex relations across cultures, from women in Suriname to tombois in Indonesia. Blackwood proffers the view that sexuality is a social product dependent on cultural norms and beliefs.  Despite the fact that we live in a globally connected world in which Western ideas seem to dominate, Blackwood demonstrates that the concept of sexual orientation does not hold up cross-culturally. Her discussion of the […]

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David Linden: “Perception, Emotion and the Creation of Narrative in the Brain” – October 27, 2009

In this colloquium, neurobiologist David Linden will present the following argument: “The feeling that we have about our senses, that they are trustworthy and independent reporters, while overwhelming and pervasive, is simply not true. Our senses are not built to give us an “accurate” picture of the external world at all. Rather, through millions of years of evolutionary tinkering, they have been designed to detect and even exaggerate certain features and aspects of the sensory world and to ignore others. Our brains then blend this whole sensory stew together with emotion to create a seamless ongoing story of experience that makes […]

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