Speakers
Speakers and keynotes are organized by seminar and can be accessed by clicking on the dropdown boxes. This list will be updated throughout the seminar to reflect current, upcoming, and previously held events. Links to previously recorded seminars are also included in dropdown boxes.
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Event Details: The future is disabled,” writes disability justice organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. While disability has long been a site of exclusion and experimentation, people with disabilities remain the largest minoritized group in the United States: There are rich legacies of organizing, cross-movement solidarity, and collective refusal led by the most-impacted and in close partnership with other efforts for justice, decarceration, and liberation. Join us to learn more about these possibilities and how we are creating disabled and reparative futures here in Newark and beyond. This kick-off seminar for the 2024-2025 Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures,” draws together prominent scholars, activists, and educators to explore disability justice, human displacement and reparative practices, to illuminate frameworks that can inform generative responses to past and present social harms. Recordings of seminars can be found on our YouTube page www.youtube.com/@SawyerRUNewark.
Click here to watch recording!
Wednesday, October 23, 2024 | 11:30 am – 5:30 pm | Express Newark, 54 Halsey Street, Second Floor, Rm: 213, Newark, NJ 07102 Download Program
Dean Jacqueline Mattis, Rutgers–Newark
Lauren Shallish, Ph.D., Co-Principal Investigator
KEYNOTE: Keah Brown, Author, Actress, Journalist, and Screenwriter
Bill Davis, Black Impact Summit
Amanda Jaeger, Ph.D., Joseph C. Cornwall Center of Metropolitan Studies
Mon Moha, Sick of It
Talib Charriez, Senior Program Coordinator, NJSTEP 
LaChan Hannon, Director of Teacher Preparation & Innovation, Department of Urban Education
Samuel Quiles, The Center for Justice Innovation
Tiyanna Scarlett, Counselor, NJ-STEP
Jack Tchen, Director Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, and the Modern Experience
Mark Comesañas, Executive Director of My Brothers Keeper, Newark
Date: Thursday, October 24, 2024 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm | Live Webinar | Download Program
Dr. Linda Steele, Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney Law -
Event Details: How can histories of violence be narrated? How can these stories produce more critical, complex, and nuanced pictures that attend not simply to the individual experience of victimization, but might also shed light on experiences of agency? From examining the role of historical thinking and writing in wartime and postwar contexts, and examining the place of literature and art in commemorations of war and conflict, to grappling with the ethical implications of the stewardship of objects that bear witness to histories of extraction and exploitation, this seminar will explore the ways that narrative and storytelling practices have the potential to mediate both violent pasts and the present in ways that may offer reparative tools for the future. Recordings of seminars can be found on our YouTube page www.youtube.com/@SawyerRUNewark.
Click here to watch recording!
Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024 | 1:30 pm – 5:30 pm | Express Newark, 54 Halsey Street, Second Floor, Rm: 213, Newark, NJ 07102
Mayte Green Mercado, Ph.D., Lead Principal Investigator 
Amir Moosavi, Ph.D., Assistant Professor English
Wendell Marsh, Ph.D., Assistant Professor Africana Studies
KEYNOTE: Catalina Muñoz, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Gary Wilder, Ph.D., Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change
Wednesday, November 13, 2024 1:00 – 7:00 pm | Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hall, 15 Washington Street, Newark, NJ 07102
Abdullah Bayyari, Independent researcher and Author
Fatin Abbas, Novelist 
Ibtisam Azem, Novelist
Sinan Antoon, Novelist
Deirdre de la Cruz, Director ReConnect/ReCollect
Wafa Ghnaim, Senior Interdisciplinary Research Fellow
Abdourahmane Seck, University Gaston Berger
Elsa Saade, This Time’s Quartet
Farah Barqawi, This Time’s Quartet
Tracy Chahwan, This Time’s Quartet 
Kamelya Omayma Youssef, This Time’s Quartet -
Event Details:
Recent conversations about reparations in the United States have drawn on both history and analyses of current economic, social, and political perspectives to propose reparative practices that range from monetary compensation to targeted policies that address racial disparities in wealth, housing discrimination, and education access, among others. At a wider scale, scholars like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have offered a constructivist view of reparations that proposes a historically informed project of distributive justice that serves a larger and broader world-making process. The project of reparations, therefore, has a forward-facing orientation that by necessity is anchored in the past. Recordings of seminars can be found on our YouTube page www.youtube.com/@SawyerRUNewark.
Date: Wednesday, February 5, 2025 | 11:30 pm – 5:00 pm | Express Newark, 54 Halsey St. Newark, NJ 07102
KEYNOTE: Davarian L. Baldwin, Ph.D., Author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower 
Hattie Thomas Whitehead, The Linnentown Project, Financial and Public Chair
Rachelle Berry, Ph.D., Assistant Professor Department of Geography, Planning, & Environment University of Georgia
Jerry Shannon, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Undergraduate Coordinator University of Georgia
Sherri Arguello, Community Member, Displaced Aurarians Displaced Aurarians Neighborhood Memory Project
Nolbert Chavez, Board of Regents, University of Colorado
Liz Ševčenko, Co-Director, Humanities Action Lab
Date: Thursday, February 6, 2025 | 10:00 pm – 5:00 pm | Express Newark, 54 Halsey Street, Second Floor, Rm: 213, Newark, NJ 07102
Ambassador Dobrene O’Marde, Vice-Chair, Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Support Commission
Hyacinth Miller, Assistant Teaching Professor, Internship & Study Abroad DirectorDean Jacqueline Mattis, Rutgers–Newark
Jean-Pierre Brutus, Esq., Ph.D., Senior Counsel, Economic Justice Program, New Jersey Institute for Social Justice
Dreisen Heath, Co-Chair Public Education & Narrative Committee, New Jersey Reparations Council 
Simon Anderson, Ph.D., Director, Chronic Disease Research Centre of CAIHR, Professor of Population Health Sciences, Faculty of Medical Sciences
Deborah Gray White, Ph.D., Board of Governors Rutgers University
Wendell Marsh Ph.D, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Rutgers University – Newark Liz Ševčenko, Co-Director, Humanities Action Lab
Esperanza Santos, Sawyer Seminar Outreach Coordinator and Working Session Facilitator 
Mark Krasovic, Ph.D, Associate Professor History, Rutgers– University Newark
Michael Conteh, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Associate, Institute for the Global Study of Racial Justice -
Brian Murphy PhD, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers–Newark Amir Moosavi, PhD, Assistant Professor English
Gaiutra Bahadur, Associate Professor of Journalism and English Rutgers– University Newark
Jack Tchen PhD, Director Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, and the Modern Experience
Kali Rubaii PhD, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Purdue University
Shourideh C. Molavi PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Forensic Architecture
Mariam Abazeri, PhD, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Commissioner Shawn M. LaTourette, New Jersey’s Commission of Environmental Protection 
Maya K. van Rossum, Founder of the Green Amendment For The Generations Movement
Quinn Yeargain PhD, Associate Professor of Law, Michigan State University
Anita Bakshi PhD, Instructor, Rutgers University – New Brunswick
Wayne Mann, Ramapough Lenape Nation
Micah Fink, Emmy-nominated producer and Director of Mann v. Ford