Beyond Father Figures RIW (our website) warmly invites students, staff, and faculty to our workshop “Finding Our Feet or Swallowing Sand?: A Reflection on Genealogies and a Silent Past.” Our workshop will occur over Zoom, on Wednesday, Oct 6th, 6 pm - 7:30 pm. (*Updated* Zoom Link: https://umich.zoom.us/j/94204785897)
We’re excited to announce we’ll be joined by Dr. María Cotera (UT Austin, formerly of U of M) whose work, Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture (2008), examines the histories of three intellectual women of color working in the academic mainstream in the early twentieth century. Centering our conversation around Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, and Dr. María Cotera’s work, we’ll be considering Hurston’s place in intellectual lineages, and what might be involved in asserting she and others are our ancestors. Among other things, this will mean thinking about the particular ways Hurston conducted and wrote ethnography. During the workshop, we will focus on book excerpts and questions to connect Hurston’s scholarship and experiences to today’s academia. We encourage everyone to contribute brief excerpts and/or questions in this collaborative handout (Link to Google handout).
