Registration is now open for the first annual Black Research Symposium on March 23-25, centered around the theme “The Power of Community: Afro-Diasporic Worldbuilding and a Sustainable Futurity.”
The African American Cultural Center and the NC State University Libraries invite the university community and the public to the symposium, which will feature Black diasporic learning, scholarship, and epistemologies via cutting-edge research, storytelling, creative works, discussion circles, community-based projects, and industry initiatives from the NC State campus and surrounding community.
The keynote address will be a collaborative talk between Stephanie R. Toliver, PhD (University of Colorado Boulder) and Kamal Bell (Founder of Sankofa Farms) about Afrofuturism, worldbuilding, and sustainability. The address will be held at the Witherspoon Student Center on Saturday, March 25 at 10:15 a.m.
The symposium will include oral presentations, roundtables, poster presentations, visual art, cyphers, storytelling, creative practices, and performances; as well as panels and networking opportunities. Programming will take place in the Witherspoon Student Center on Thursday, March 23 and Saturday, March 25 and in the Hunt Library on Friday, March 24.
Register for the symposium and see the entire schedule here.
Libraries programming will feature a special Coffee & Viz series event with Dr. Derek Ham on Friday, March 24 at 9:30 a.m. in the Hunt Library’s Teaching and Visualization Lab. In “Worldbuilding and Recovery: Revisiting Historical Moments With Virtual Reality,” Dr. Ham will will present the inspirations and processes behind his ground-breaking work in Virtual Reality that re-examines and reclaims moments in Black and Civil Rights history, including the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike and Negro League Baseball.
The symposium will ask these central questions: What is required to create a Black futurity where Black people are thriving? What do we need to sustain our communities? What critical theory and frameworks must we engage in in order to address social problems across the Black Diaspora? What types of political economics, systems, and institutions need to be abolished and dismantled? How do we build a future that is sovereign, just, and sustainable?
This post was originally published in NC State University Libraries.