Session I: Tue. 10/8, 12:45-2:00pm
Unsettling Latinx Senses of Place: Reimagining Belonging in the City
A Lecture by Madelaine C. Cahuas (Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Environment & Society; University of Minnesota
This talk explores how differently racialized, Black, Indigenous and queer Latinx young people, understand, navigate and make place in Tkaronto (Toronto, Canada). Toronto is the fourth largest city in North America, lauded for its cultural diversity, but marked by its racially fraught past and present as a settler colonial city. It is also an important and often overlooked site of Latinx life. Drawing on queer Kichwa digital media artist, Samay Arcentales Cajas’ film series, Will You Listen? Latinx Voices in Tkaronto, and the ongoing community organizing efforts of PODER, a local intersectional Latinx feminist collective, Cahuas demonstrates how Latinx people can voice distinct senses of place that disrupt or unsettle dominant accounts of urban life. Cahuas offers unsettling Latinx senses of place as a concept that speaks to how Latinx people relate to place through an anti-colonial feminist praxis that challenges oppression and refuses uncritical ways of belonging to the city, nation-state or hegemonic Latinidad. Latinx people also illustrate new forms of belonging grounded in relationships of care, reciprocity and solidarity across differences. Ultimately, by deeply engaging with Latinx senses of place we can see and hear the presence of Latinx people’s geographies that work towards more socially just and decolonial urban futures.
 

Session II: Tue. 10/22, 12:45-2:00pm
Bodies in (R)evolution: Visions of Radical Healing in The Panza Monologues and Your Healing is Killing Me
A Lecture by María Durán (Assistant Professor of Latinx Cultural Studies; Brandeis)
The concern for self-care practices, especially as it has manifested in the last decade in the United States, has enabled a heightened attention to physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual wellness. Nevertheless, the contemporary configuration of self-care detrimentally leans on neoliberal ideologies and capitalist agendas, as multinational corporations intently market products and services and align them with the pursuit of care and healing. This self-care capitalist enterprise inhibits necessary contemplations about the root causes of harm and violence in society and results in the creation of counterfeit pathways toward healing, forcefully explains Chicana playwright Virginia Grise in her performance manifesto, Your Healing is Killing Me. This line of thought can be traced back to Grise’s The Panza Monologues, a play co-written with Irma Mayorga. Both works, rooted in the lived experiences of Latinx communities, particularly women of color, challenge dominant narratives surrounding health, wellness, and the body, and thus reimagine care as a form of resistance and empowerment. In this presentation, I show how Your Healing and The Panza Monologues articulate a vision of care that is deeply intertwined with cultural identity, collective-care, and resistance. I argue that these works advance a radical re-centering of community and protest for care and healing, which are intrinsically linked to the broader struggle of cultural survival. I focus on how each work distinctly engages with body knowledge of (un)wellness, and I also examine how both use the theatrical stage as a site and form of collective care for communal healing and solidarity. Finally, my presentation invites further exploration into how cultural practices and narratives of care can serve as tools toward radical healing.

Session III: Tue. 11/19, 12:45-2:00pm
"People Were Enslaved Here?" Black Existential Reflections on Researching Slavery in Minnesota
A Lecture by eddie o'byrn (Assistant Professor of African American Studies; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
This presentation explores the origins of my current book project Existence Precedes Enslavement, the text’s primary methodology of reconstruction, and epistemic violence both at historical sites and in U.S. historical imagination. Building out from my personal relationship to Minnesota and my on-site research, this talk reflects on two frequently encountered phrases. When discussing research on slavery in the region, people would either ask “People were enslaved here?” or assert that “Slavery was illegal in Minnesota”. Utilizing Black feminist epistemologist Kristie Dotson’s 2011 essay, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing”, this presentation uncovers how these phrases enact forms of epistemic violence and often erase the complexity of a region’s Black history. Responding to that violence, Existence Precedes Enslavement offers reconstruction as a method of redressing erasure of Black life and restoring an existential complexity to Black freedom struggle.

These presentations are open to all members of the Wellesley College community. 
Lunch will be provided. RSVP required to ensure accurate lunch count.