Black Lives Matter Panel

Black Lives Matter Panel

Black Lives Matter has developed over the past few years as one of the strongest and widest activist movements in the critique of race relations and civil rights sparked by a national conversation about police profiling and violence against black U.S. citizens. This panel seeks to address Black Lives Matter from the personal and ethnographic accounts of anthropologists and other social scientists whose work relates to the growth of the movement and race relations in the US. Panelists will address the issues impacting race relations today, and how we as anthropologists might contribute to this dialogue both as a reflection of our own community and how we may bring our work to bear on the communities in which we live and work.

Happy Hour from 5:00 - 7:00 PM at The Mayflower Hotel Edgar Restaurant (back room), 1127 Connecticut Avenue NW

MEETING INFORMATION

Detail:  This panel seeks to address Black Lives Matter from the personal and ethnographic accounts of anthropologists and other social scientists whose work relates to the growth of the movement and race relations in the US. Panelists will address the issues impacting race relations today, and how we as anthropologists might contribute to this dialogue both as a reflection of our own community and how we may bring our work to bear on the communities in which we live and work.

Participant Bios:

Kalfani Nyerere Ture (Panelist) is a practicing cultural anthropologist/criminologist and an educator, who teaches Anthropology and Criminology/Criminal Justice at Winthrop University, at the rank of Assistant Professor. Ture` earned a BA in African/African American Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and a MA in Applied Anthropology at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. In between undergraduate and graduate school, he engaged in a folk ethnography project of law enforcement agencies at the municipal, county and state level believing that as an aspiring criminologist, he could offer a more informed perspective and pedagogy on the American criminal justice industry. As a result of his folk ethnography undertaking, he was certified in basic law enforcement and as a sheriff deputy through three Atlanta metropolitan police agencies. As a former police office, he provides invaluable insight into the use of law enforcement as an instrument of state violence against marginal peoples.

Shaneda Destine (Panelist) is a teaching fellow at James Madison University for the 2016-2017 school year. She identifies as a Black Queer woman, who is currently a 4th year Doctoral student at Howard University in the department of Sociology and Anthropology with a dual concentration in Social Inequality and Medical Sociology. Shaneda’ dissertation research is entitled: Contemporary Black Women Activists’ Consciousness and Agency in the Struggle Agains State Violence. This research highlights the unique ways Black women are affected by state violence and the ways in which they strategize and negotiate caring for themselves and movement participants, as part of their political practice. Shaneda’s work can be found in a co-authored article entitled "The Dispossessed and Disposable: Today’s Rising Movement Engages Frantz Fanon" in the Issues in Race & Society: An Interdisciplinary Global Journal 4, and a review of “Young and Gay: Jamaica’s Gully Queens” in Societies Without Borders: Human Rights and the Social Sciences 10.

Tabria Lee-Noonan (Panelist) - TBA