The Global Arts + Humanities 2020-21 Society of Fellows graduate workshop series brings together artists, scholars and activists working in a broad range of disciplines aligning with our 2020-21 theme of Human Rights: Pasts and Futures. Areas of expertise include studies in art, performance and activism; critical human rights; disability; environmental justice; incarceration; Indigeneity; intersectional rhetorics; migrant and refugee rights; race and citizenship; and sexuality, among others.
Workshops will be capped at thirty participants; priority will be given to related graduate seminars, Society of Undergraduate Fellows and Graduate Team Fellows. RSVPs are required.
This event will not have live transcription, but participants can indicate if they will need transcription on the RSVP webform.
Please direct questions to Program Manager Puja Batra-Wells (.1).
Downloadable poster
COVID-19: VIRAL RACISM
September 22, 10:30 a.m. to noon
Workshop leader: Iyko Day (Associate Professor, Department of English and Critical Social Thought—Mount Holyoke College)
Moderator: Jian Chen (Associate professor, Departments of English and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies)
This workshop will explore the ways COVID-19 has fueled anti-Asian sentiment and reignited fears of disease-carrying foreigners. Drawing on her research on Asian racialization and settler colonial capitalism, Iyko Day will review the historical depictions of Asians as untrustworthy, sneaky and diseased, which are linked to longstanding associations of Asians with a destructive economism. Like the virus, the insidious character of this racialized economism turns on its invisibility and abstract character.
