Mar 16 2021

Feminisms Lunch Lecture: Black Women Intellectuals: The Educational Philosophy of Lucy D. Slowe

Feminisms Lunch Lectures

March 16, 2021

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Location

Zoom

Calendar

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White, beige and yellow text on a green background. Lucy D. Slowe with the title

Join us for a presentation by UIC History PhD student Sekordri Ojo:

The history of African American education has neglected to analyze how gender has influenced the development of education. The experiences and contributions of Black women educators remain under-researched. Historians have yet to fully acknowledge the Black women who did take up space as leaders in education. Furthermore, rarely are the ideas, philosophies, and theories of these women held as sacred or influential. Thus, the purpose of this research is to center the intellectual ideas of Black women within the history of African American Education.

Centering the educational philosophy of Lucy Diggs Slowe this paper argues that while African American education may have been racialized, it has also been gendered. By ignoring the intellectual contributions of Black women, we ignore how their gender impacted their educational experiences, their philosophies about education, and how they influenced educational ideas and practices. Slowe helps us to realize that throughout American history education has been a demarcation of free and enslaved, and citizen and non-citizen, and that this history is racialized and also gendered.

The presentation will be followed by a response from Dr. Cynthia Blair, Director of UIC's African American Cultural Center and Associate Professor of Black Studies and History, as well as audience Q&A.

CART live captioning will be provided. Please send any questions or additional accommodation requests to wlrc@uic.edu.

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WLRC's Feminisms Lunch Lectures series offers faculty, graduate students, visiting scholars, and activists an opportunity to present their projects, ideas, and works-in-progress on a wide range of topics and engage participants in lively and provocative discussion. For the Spring 2021 semester, WLRC is partnering with the Gender and Women’s Studies department to feature UIC graduate students whose current research, creative, or community projects engage feminist movements and scholarship.

 

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Contact

WLRC
wlrc@uic.edu

Date posted

Mar 5, 2021

Date updated

Mar 12, 2021

Speakers

Sekordri Ojo | PhD Student, History | University of Illinois at Chicago

Sekordri Ojo is a doctoral student in the History Department. She was born and raised on the south side of Chicago and attended DePaul University, where she double majored in History and African & Black Diaspora studies. After graduating from DePaul, Sekordri joined Teach for America in 2014 where she taught reading and history on the south side of Chicago. Sekordri enjoys spending time with her family and her two fur babies. Sekordri’s current research examines the intellectual contributions of African American women teachers living and teaching in the southern United States during the late 19th and early 20th century. Specifically, she researches how African American women have historically used education as a tool to redefine what it meant to be African American. Sekordri’s research interest also includes the study of politically and socially organized forms of African American women resistance against racial power structures and institutions within the United States.

Dr. Cynthia Blair | Director, African American Cultural Center and Associate Professor, Black Studies and History | University of Illinois at Chicago

Cynthia Blair studies the intersection of race and sexuality in American society, African American urban history, American film and popular culture, West Indian immigration, and transnational networks and identities. Her research focuses primarily on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-Of-The-Century Chicago, explores African American women’s sex work in Chicago during the decades of some of the city’s most explosive growth, expanding not just our view of prostitution, but also of black women’s labor, the Great Migration, black and white reform movements, the emergence of modern sexuality, and the criminalization of Black women in the early twentieth century city. The book won the Lora Romero Book Prize awarded by the American Studies Association to the best-published first book in American Studies that highlights the intersections of race with gender, class, sexuality and/or nation. She is currently working on two research projects. The first, Moms Mabley: A Cultural Biography, is a book project that examines the life and career of the African American comedian Jackie “Moms” Mabley. The second, “In a Time Like This”: Jamaican Migrants to the United States, 1940-1964, is an oral history and documentary project that explores the migrations of men and women from Jamaica to the Midwestern United States at the middle of the twentieth century.