Sawyer Seminar Series

Disability has long been framed as an individualized, bio-medical deficit in need of remediation, control, or erasure. Dominant definitions have deferred to the “expert knows best” over the person themselves. These framings originated from medicalized perspectives that approached illness or impairment as a problem to be solved. In educational spaces, special education classes for students … Read More

How do we reckon with and repair the injustices of institutionalizing disabled people? Haunted house attractions, exclusive housing estates, and abandoned buildings are some of the common afterlives of disability institutions … justice and reparations are not. However, there is increasing momentum at the international human rights and local community levels for truth-telling and reparations … Read More

How can histories of violence be narrated? What can be done to 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 political agency? From examining literature and assessing the affective power of everyday objects in commemorations of war and conflict, … Read More

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. Register at go.rutgers.edu/reparations. 

NEW START TIME: 11:00AM (EST)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. Register at go.rutgers.edu/reparations. 

Restorative and reparative environmental justice is preoccupied with both past and ongoing harms that have been inflicted on communities and the limitations that come with developing and enforcing meaningful environmental regulations under traditional, legalistic approaches to environmentalism and conservation. But newer humanities-influenced approaches to environmental justice consider a future built from individual and collective actions … Read More

The SASN-Audible Environmental and Climate Justice Lecture What Now?!: Research, Learning, & Doing During Climate Catastrophe and Hyper-racial Capitalism brings together community organizers, scholars, and students to examine the existential challenges posed by climate change. This event will feature a keynote by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, author of Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Capture, Vincent Mann, Chief of the Ramapough Lenape Nation Turtle Clan, María López … Read More

Join Drs. Wendell H. Marsh and R.A. Judy for an engaging discussion on Textual Life, a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa.