Sawyer Seminar

On the Seminar

The Sawyer Seminar, “Racial Disposability and Cultures of Resistance,“ is a project of Penn State’s Department of African American Studies, the College of the Liberal Arts, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“Racial Disposability and Cultures of Resistance” focuses on regimes and relations of disposability and resistance in various sites, including Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico and the United States, from the 18th century forward. Racial disposability names a bundle of practices, institutions, and laws that demographically distributes and neglects civil rights, concentrating the use of force and threat of incarceration on particular communities with limited recourse to investigation and remedy.

Seminar Themes

Epistemologies

The seminar takes as its central premise that disposability is at its core an epistemological and discursive project.

Enviornments

This thematic track considers the difference that place and locality make in the logic of disposability.

Infra/Structures

The logic of disposability has material consequences that shape the unequal distribution of power, resources, and state policy.

Aesthetics

Scholars of anti-racist social movements throughout the Americas have long analyzed the complex cultural politics that have emerged as a critical response to normalized patterns of social exclusion.