The Sawyer Seminar - "Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures"

Date

November 11, 2024

About this series:

Rutgers University – Newark was awarded a grant by the Mellon Foundation to organize a Sawyer Seminar Series titled Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures. The Sawyer Seminar, led by ISGRJ-Newark Campus Director Mayte Green-Mercado, co-organized by Lauren Shallish (Urban Education), and hosted at Rutgers-Newark during the 2024-2025 academic year, will explore themes of social justice centering on four critical areas of inquiry: systemic racism, environmental crisis and climate change, disability, human displacement and post-conflict resolution, to illuminate common histories and methodological frameworks that can inform generative responses to past and present social harms. Each area of focus reflects not only the scholarly interests of our faculty, but also the institutional commitments of Rutgers University- Newark as an anchor institution devoting its resources to serve our community.

Events in this series

“Especially in recent history, more often than not, one form of oppression has been replaced with another, different form that is similar or even more unjust than the one that preceded it… If we want to do more than alter the color of our children’s chains, we will have to successfully oppose more than isolated instances of oppression. ― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

Image credit: Toyin Ojih Odutola. (2018). Picnic on the Grounds. [Charcoal, pastel and pencil on paper 74 1/2 × 50]. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Wednesday, February 5, 2025:

11:30 – 12:30 PM: Introductory Remarks and Keynote
Dr. Mayte Green Mercado, Associate Professor of History, and the Newark Campus Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice
Dr. Davarian L. Baldwin, Author of In The Shadow of the Ivory Tower, Trinity College Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies

12:30 – 1:00 PM: Book signing with Dr. Davarian L. Baldwin,

1:00 – 2:00 PM: Lunch

2:00 – 4:30 PM: Panel The Renewal Project: Reckoning with University-Driven Displacement and Dispossession
Dr. Rachelle Berry, Assistant Profession Department of Geography, Planning & Environment, University of Georgia
Dr. Jerry Shannon, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Coordinator, Department of Geography, Planning &Environment University of Georgia
Hattie Thomas Whitehead, The Linnentown Project, Financial and Public Chair
Sherri Arguello, Museum of Memory’s Displaced Aurarians
Nolbert, Chavez, Board of Regents 7th Congressional District, Democrat, Museum of Memory’s Displaced Aurarians
Liz Ševčenko, Co-Director, Humanities Action Lab, Rutgers Newark, Moderator

4:30 – 5:00 PM: Closing remarks

Thursday, February 6, 2025:

10:00 AM – 11:30 AM: Introductory Remarks and Keynote
Dr. Mark Krasovic, Associate Professor of History, Co-Organizer, Rutgers University – Newark
Dr. Michael Conteh, Postdoctoral Associate in Public Policy and Administration, Co-Organizer, Rutgers University – Newark
Ambassador Dobrene O’Marde, Vice-Chair, Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Support Commission

11:30 AM – 1:00 PM: Panel Critical Conversations: The Movement for Reparations (Local and Global)

1:00 – 2:30 PM: Lunch

2:30 – 4:30 PM: Working Session: Towards a Statement of Strategic Need
Dr. Wendell Marsh, Assistant Professor of History, Co-Organizer, Rutgers University – Newark
Liz Ševčenko, Co-Director, Humanities Action Lab, Rutgers Newark, Moderator
Dr. Mark Krasovic, Associate Professor of History, Co-Organizer, Rutgers University – Newark

4:30 – 5:00 PM: Closing remarks

Accommodations: Please submit accommodation requests to sawyerseminar@newark.rutgers.edu by Friday, April 18, 2025.

Overview: Recent conversations about reparations in the United States have drawn on both history and analyses of current economic, social, and political perspectives to propose reparative practices that range from monetary compensation to targeted policies that address racial disparities in wealth, housing discrimination, and education access, among others. At a wider scale, scholars like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have offered a constructivist view of reparations that proposes a historically informed project of distributive justice that serves a larger and broader world-making process. The project of reparations, therefore, has a forward-facing orientation that by necessity is anchored in the past.

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“Challenging a narrative often implied as an exclusively masculine performance of national sacrifice, Leila Nseir’s The Marytr (The Nation) depicts the martyrdom of a woman, and displays the mourning of her death. Pushing back against the distinctly male image of the fedayi freedom fighter that has typically dominated the iconography of liberationist struggle in the Arab world, the subject is held up by her grieving female companions, as crying children reach up to touch her. Likely a product of Nseir’s visit to south Lebanon 1976, the work places a somber spotlight on the female plight in war.” ― Barjeel Art Foundation

Leila, Nseir. (1978). The Martyr (The Nation). [Oil on canvas 160 x 140 cm]. Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

Dates:

Tuesday, November 12, 2024 | 1:30 pm – 5:30 pm | In-Person, Express Newark, 54 Halsey St. Newark, NJ 07102

Wednesday, November 13, 2024 1:00 – 7:00 pm | In-Person, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hall, 15 Washington Street, Newark, NJ 07102

Event Details: How can histories of violence be narrated? How can these stories produce more critical, complex, and nuanced pictures that attend not simply to the individual experience of victimization, but might also shed light on experiences of agency? From examining the role of historical thinking and writing in wartime and postwar contexts, and examining the place of literature and art in commemorations of war and conflict, to grappling with the ethical implications of the stewardship of objects that bear witness to histories of extraction and exploitation, this seminar will explore the ways that narrative and storytelling practices have the potential to mediate both violent pasts and the present in ways that may offer reparative tools for the future.

Tuesday, November 12, 2024:

1:30 – 2:30 PM: Lunch and Learn with Introductory Remarks | Download Program
Mayte Green Mercado, Associate Professor of History, and the Newark Campus Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice
Amir Moosavi, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University – Newark, and Co-Organizer
Wendell Marsh, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University – Newark and Co-Organizer
Screening of Newest Americans Historias para lo que viene

2:30 – 3:50 PM: Methodology Teach-In
Dr. Catalina Muñoz, Associate Professor of History, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia

3:50 – 4:00 PM: Coffee and Tea Break

4:00 – 5:30 PM: Keynote Conversation: Histories for the Future: Critical Conversations on Reparative Practices
Dr. Catalina Muñoz, Associate Professor of History, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Gary Wilder, Professor of Anthropology and director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change,
Liz Ševčenko, Director, Humanities Action Lab, Rutgers Newark, Moderator

Wednesday, November 13, 2024:

1:00 – 2:20 PM: Lunch and Learn with Short Film Screening | Download Program
Short film screening of Something Dead in Every Landscape and conversation with Abdullah Bayyari, Moderator Roula Seghaier

2:20 – 2:30 PM: Break

2:30 – 3:50 PM: Panel Writing in Times of War
A conversation with novelists Fatin Abbas (Sudan), Ibtisam Azem (Palestine), and Sinan Antoon (Iraq)

3:50 – 4:00 PM: Coffee and Tea Break

4:00 – 5:30 PM: Hybrid Roundtable: Institutions of Repair
Deirdre de la Cruz, University of Michigan, Director of ReConnect/ReCollect
Wafa Ghnaim, Senior Interdisciplinary Research Fellow for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art
Abdourahmane Seck, University Gaston Berger, Senegal and co-founder of the Groupe d’Action et d’étude critiques

5:30 – 6:00 PM: Coffee and Tea Break

6:00 – 7:00 PM: Performance featuring the This Time’s Quartet at Clement’s Place
“Disabled, in the eyes of many is a dirty word because it shines a light on the differences of our world, and when we acknowledge difference, we must acknowledge privilege – and that opens a whole other can of worms.” ― Keah Brown, The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love With Me

Dates:

Wednesday, October 23, 2024 | 11:30 am-5:30 pm | In-Person, Express Newark, 54 Halsey St. Newark, NJ 07102

Thursday, October 24, 2024 3:00-4:00 pm (ET) • Virtual via Zoom (register to receive link). Download Program

Event Details: The future is disabled,” writes disability justice organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. While disability has long been a site of exclusion and experimentation, people with disabilities remain the largest minoritized group in the United States: There are rich legacies of organizing, cross-movement solidarity, and collective refusal led by the most-impacted and in close partnership with other efforts for justice, decarceration, and liberation. Join us to learn more about these possibilities and how we are creating disabled and reparative futures here in Newark and beyond. This kick-off seminar for the 2024-2025 Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures,” draws together prominent scholars, activists, and educators to explore disability justice, human displacement and reparative practices, to illuminate frameworks that can inform generative responses to past and present social harms. Recordings of seminars can be found on the Sawyer Seminar at Rutgers – Newark YouTube channel. This event was made possible by the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminars. Many thanks to our co-sponsors for their additional support and contributions. Much gratitude to Gourmet Dining, Reservations, and Express Newark!

Wednesday, October 23, 2024:

11:30 AM – 12:00 PM: Welcome Luncheon and Remarks by Dean Jacqueline Mattis
Chancellor Jeffrey Robinson and Dean Jacqueline S. Mattis, Rutgers University, Newark

12:00 – 12:45 PM: Keynote and Book Signing with Keah Brown
“The Pretty One and What Happens After You Learn to Love Yourself”
Keah Brown, Author, Actress, Journalist, and Screenwriter

1:00 – 1:15 PM: Black Impact Summit Report: Supporting Individuals with Disabilities
LeDerick Horne and Bill Davis, Black Impact Summit

1:15 – 1:45 PM: Policy Report on Race and Disability by Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies
Amanda Jaeger, Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies, Rutgers University, Newark

1:45 – 2:45 PM: Zine Making Workshop by Sick of It!: Incarceration and Disability Justice
Mon Moha, Sick of It!

2:45 – 4:00 PM: Liberating Disability: New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP), Urban Education, and The Anti-Eugenics Project
Talib Charriez, Senior Program Coordinator, NJ-STEP, Rutgers University, Newark
LaChan Hannon, Department of Urban Education, Rutgers University, Newark
Samuel Quiles, The Center for Justice Innovation
Tiyanna Scarlett, Counselor, NJ-STEP, Rutgers University, Newark
Jean-Pierre Brutus, New Jersey Institute for Social Justice
Mark Comesañas, Executive Director My Brothers Keeper, Newark
Jack Tchen, Director of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, and the Modern Experience, Rutgers University, Newark

4:00 – 5:00 PM: Film Screening: CRIP CAMP: A Disability Revolution
Crip Camp is both a gripping look at the history of the disability rights movement and a timely call to action, urging us to explore our own duty to fight for the dignity of all people.” – President Barack Obama

Thursday, October 24, 2024:

3:00 – 4:00 PM: Disability and Reparations: From Haunting to Hope
Dr. Linda Steele, Associate Professor at University of Technology Sydney Law Faculty and Adjunct Associate Professor at University of South Australia

Livestream:

Click to view recorded livestream.