Programs and Events

Dr. Barbara Combs, Chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice and Professor of Sociology, "What We can Learn from The Alabama Riverboat Brawl."

In Barbara Harris Combs’ 2022 book, Bodies Out of Place: Theorizing Anti-blackness in U.S. Society, she argues that anti-Black racism is not better than it used to be, it just takes different forms. In this discussion, Dr. Combs will utilize her theory to unpack the August 5, 2023, Alabama Riverboat Brawl in Montgomery, Alabama a city known as both “the cradle of the confederacy” and “the “Birthplace of the civil rights movement.” In her talk, she weaves a discussion of Black resistance to continuing racial oppression and Black cultural pride amidst the backdrop of overt and covert white supremacy.

Date: October 24, 2024

Time: 12:30pm - 1:30pm

Location: ALC4103 (Academic Learning Center)

To join us online, please follow this link:

https://ksuhub.com/cas-oct-24

Dr. Masonya Bennett, Assistant Professor of Black Studies, "The Great Global North Escape & What It Means for the Global South: Black on Black Tourism, Entrepreneurship, and Other Transnational Exchanges in the Neoliberal African Diaspora."

In 2019, U.S-based Black American travelers spent 129.6 billion on domestic and international leisure travel, yet this demographic remains largely understudied (MMGY 2021). Ghana’s Year of Return campaign in 2019 presented a clear impetus directing Black Americans’ return to Africa with an emphasis on “roots tourism” and opportunities for economic investment as an incentive for relocation. At the same time, due to proximity, more affordable travel costs, and the realization of prominent African descendent populations outside of the US and Africa, countries such as Brazil and Colombia have become major destinations for Black American tourists and expats. My on-going research aims to (re)shift our understandings of resistance, movements, and migrations from those associated with the Transatlantic Slave Trade to those stirred by Contemporary Globalization. Further, by reconceptualizing the idea of migration as an upward trajectory from “South” to “North” to one of “North” to “South,” my work endeavors toward an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of the ways in which sociocultural and economic exchanges premised on interactions between Black American tourists/expats and Afro-descendants in the Global South foster transnational forms of economic sustainability, resistance, and collective identity. The study also begs the question of how Black Americans potentially reify Global North socioeconomic hierarchies, intra-racially, within the Global South.

Date: November 13, 2024

Time: 12:30pm - 1:30pm

Location: ALC4103 (Academic Learning Center)

To join us online, please follow this link:

https://ksuhub.com/cas-nov-13