Reminder – The Moment is Now Featuring Tracie D. Hall as Scholar in Residence
A Message from Dr. Renée T. White, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
I’m pleased to share that Tracie D. Hall begins her appointment as Scholar in Residence at The New School today. She joins the university for a week-long visit as part of The Moment is Now: In Dialogue with Changemakers. Each semester, this series features prominent and emerging scholars, thinkers, artists, and practitioners across disciplines that bring about positive change in the world and connect with the university’s academic strengths and mission. With a focus on exploring and addressing current topics in art, politics, race, and culture, this series provides an opportunity for students, faculty, staff, and our surrounding community to engage with a range of perspectives and reimagine change.
As I shared in the strategic planning update this semester, opportunities for our community to play an active role in imagining, shaping, and participating in important initiatives will connect to broader community engagement efforts this spring. The second iteration of this series invites Hall, Executive Director of the American Library Association, to meet our community in this moment of reflection and adaptation from her unique perspective as a rigorous scholar, curator, activist, artist, and leader in reimagining inclusive and just spaces in libraries, the academy, and other structural learning systems.
Central to Hall’s residency will be the facilitation of focused and open convenings with our community. Please join us for the upcoming programs in this series:
- The Moment is Now – How to Read the Room: Healing as Literacy, Literacy as Agency, Agency as Disruption of EDISJ Performativity
Tuesday, April 4, 3:30-5:00pm, Jefferson Market Library, Willa Cather Room, New York Public Library. Moderated by Joy Bivins, Director of the Schomburg Center and Cresa Pugh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at NSSR and Lang.
Seeing hope and contrast in the growing interest in and return to Black and Indigenous healing methodologies and memory work by descendants of these communities, public scholar Tracie D. Hall mines the possibility of healing and literacy as liberation technique and disruptive technology. This conversation and forum offers space to be in community and imagine how we can collectively bring our past along with us to inform our current work, and to do so in a way that propels us through and beyond that past.
Register here.
- Henry Cohen Lecture Series – Compulsory (il)Literacies: Intersecting Race, Information Redlining, and Limitations on the Right to Read
Tuesday, April 11, 7:00-8:30pm, The Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street.
The current rise in book censorship activity has now eclipsed that which occurred during the McCarthy era. In this lecture Tracie D. Hall looks at how nineteenth century US laws that sought to make reading an outlaw activity and reading materials contraband for enslaved Africans, directly link to the escalating censorship legislation being experienced today and reads these de jure attempts at information withdrawal against ongoing histories of Black resistance against compulsory illiteracy.
Register here.