CEE Updates

Happy holidays!

The CEE would like to wish you a happy holiday season!

Film + Social Change recap

On Monday December 3, the CEE hosted its first event, featuring Louis Massiah in conversation with John L. Jackson, Jr.

Louis shared an excerpt of the film he is currently directing, The T.C.B. School of Organizing, which presents a biography of Toni Cade Bambara as a primer for social justice. The excerpt was moving, and served as an example of how culture can be used as a tool for social change in movement building. Check out an excerpt from the discussion below!

Photos by Alissa Jordan

Upcoming Events

CEE Launch Party

Friday February 15, 2019
5:00-10:00pm
Penn Museum

The launch party will feature films by the "Films of Utility" course, taught by Louis Massiah. Then, join us for a dance party afterwards!

Graduate Student Summer Research Grant

Applications are now open for the CEE's graduate student summer research grant opportunity. Learn more at www.centerforexperimentalethnography.org/research-grants

Black Women Moving - Spring 2019 course

Instructor: Aimee Meredith Cox, CEE Visiting Scholar
Listed as ANTH391-301, to be taught Tuesdays from 1:30-4:30pm

In this course we explore the theory and methods employed by Black women ethnographers, artists, and activists invested in transforming the traditional norms of the academic disciplines and creative contexts in which they operate. These boundary erasing, rule breaking women challenge us to think expansively and act courageously in our efforts to not only dream a new world but bring that world into fruition.

The life and work of anthropologist/dancer/choreographer/activist Katherine Dunham (1909 – 2006) provides the framework through which we think through the strategies contemporary scholar-artists employ in their social justice practices, while the concept of MOVEMENT is our theoretical and methodological foundation for engaging with the work of historical and contemporary Black women change agents. We will ask how movement functions in the work of Dunham and these contemporary scholar-artists in terms of: the moving and/or dancing body; movement and migration across geographic territories and imagined space; and participation in social movements. Inspired by the techniques these women have developed for re-imagining the possibilities for moving as an act of social change, we will experiment with creating our own embodied artistic practices and research methods.

Students who register for this class should anticipate a holistic experience that requires an openness to physical activity and choreography (accessible to all) as one of our primary tools for both analyzing the multi-media course texts, as well as constructing our own boundary crossing projects.

Learn more at the Penn Department of Anthropology's course list: www.sas.upenn.edu/anthropology/pc