Belonging in America
Alondra Nelson, Darryl Pinckney, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Kirk Semple
Wednesday 18 April, 2012
6 - 8pm, $0
NYU Institute for Public Knowledge
20 Cooper Square, Floor 5
What does it mean to belong? To belong in America? To belong to America? From an emotional state to a legal one, to one coded in our DNA, how have the conditions of belonging changed? Is belonging an ambition to embrace? A challenge to resist? How do you belong in America? As a queer. As a woman. An African-American. An immigrant. A white working class male? Please join Alondra Nelson, Darryl Pinckney, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Kirk Semple as they each share their thoughts on Belonging in America. The event will be moderated by Harel Shapira.
Alondra Nelson is Associate Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her writing focuses on the intersections of science, technology, medicine, and inequality. These themes are taken up in her most recent book, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination. Her next book, Reconciliation Projects: Race, Politics, and the Social Life of DNA, will trace how claims about heritage and ancestry are marshaled together with genetic analysis in a range of social ventures. She is also an editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past and of Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. In 2011, she was a senior fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
Darryl Pinckney is the author of the novel High Cotton which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (The Alain Locke Lectures). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and received the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letter in 1994. Currently a Fellow at the New York Public Library Cullman Center, he is working on a collection of essays about twentieth-century black literature.
Elizabeth Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her work has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. She has explored this question in four books, most recently Economies of Abandonment; in the short film, “Karrabing, Low Tide Turning,†selected for the 2012 Berlinale International Film Festival; and most also in a graphic memoir.
Kirk Semple joined The New York Times in the spring of 2003. He has worked on the paper’s foreign and national desks as a correspondent in the Baghdad, Kabul, United Nations and Miami bureaus, and he currently covers the immigration beat for the metro desk. Prior to joining The Times, Mr. Semple was a freelance correspondent based in Bogotâ, Colombia. He has also worked for the The Associated Press, the Miami New Times and the Durham Morning Herald.
Harel Shapira joined the Institute for Public Knowledge as a Postdoctoral Fellow in January 2010 after completing his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation, winner of the Robert K. Merton Prize, is now a forthcoming book entitled Waiting for José: The Minutemen’s Pursuit of America.
Alondra Nelson is Associate Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her writing focuses on the intersections of science, technology, medicine, and inequality. These themes are taken up in her most recent book, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination. Her next book, Reconciliation Projects: Race, Politics, and the Social Life of DNA, will trace how claims about heritage and ancestry are marshaled together with genetic analysis in a range of social ventures. She is also an editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past and of Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. In 2011, she was a senior fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
Darryl Pinckney is the author of the novel High Cotton which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (The Alain Locke Lectures). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and received the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letter in 1994. Currently a Fellow at the New York Public Library Cullman Center, he is working on a collection of essays about twentieth-century black literature.
Elizabeth Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her work has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. She has explored this question in four books, most recently Economies of Abandonment; in the short film, “Karrabing, Low Tide Turning,†selected for the 2012 Berlinale International Film Festival; and most also in a graphic memoir.
Kirk Semple joined The New York Times in the spring of 2003. He has worked on the paper’s foreign and national desks as a correspondent in the Baghdad, Kabul, United Nations and Miami bureaus, and he currently covers the immigration beat for the metro desk. Prior to joining The Times, Mr. Semple was a freelance correspondent based in Bogotâ, Colombia. He has also worked for the The Associated Press, the Miami New Times and the Durham Morning Herald.
Harel Shapira joined the Institute for Public Knowledge as a Postdoctoral Fellow in January 2010 after completing his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation, winner of the Robert K. Merton Prize, is now a forthcoming book entitled Waiting for José: The Minutemen’s Pursuit of America.