Events By Quarter
Race & Literature
Intimacies to Apocalypso: Decolonial Feminism & Archipelagic Relationalities
Dr. Yomaira Figueroa-Vasquez
Online
How do we map relations across the Afro-Atlantic? How do the diasporic cultural productions of the sole Spanish-speaking nation in Subsaharan Africa connect with works emerging from Afro-Cuban, Afro-Puerto Rico, and Afro-Dominican diasporas? What insights do we gain by reading these contemporary works alongside each other? This lecture will examine the long history of Atlantic crossings between Equatorial Guinea and the Latinx Caribbean and engage in a robust discussion about colonialism, diaspora, and decolonial feminisms and relationality. We will trace how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in a series of works and will consider how Black diasporic histories are impacted by interlocking structures of oppression. By centering often-peripheralized Afro-Atlantic peoples through a set of diasporic texts we can come to understand how they not only reveal violence but also forms of resistance and the radical potential of archipelagic thought.
Cup of Culture
The #1 Bus Chronicles
Director: Joel Katz
In-person: MCC Theater
The #1 Bus Chronicles uses a small sociological microcosm – a bus stop on an industrial highway in New Jersey – to intimately portray some of the most marginalized lives in America today - the ‘working poor’, the recently incarcerated, and immigration asylum seekers. In startlingly intimate encounters, strangers share hopes and dreams as well as stories of resiliency, suffering and loss. Many are in states of transition, struggle, or waiting for change. 2021. 58 min.
Post-film Q&A with director Joel Katz.
Conscious Conversations Series
Care or Criminalization?: BIPOC Youth in Foster Care
Ali Guajardo, Clay Wesley, Levette Morales & Kayla Martensen. Moderated by Isabella Restrepo
Online
The Foster Care system is often understood as a system of help for our most vulnerable populations, children and youth - this panel asks us to complicate this understanding to unpack the ways this system, embedded with carceral logics, impacts BIPOC youth. How can we shift our understanding of this system to center the needs of BIPOC youth? How can we understand the criminalization and pathologization of BIPOC youth within this long standing system? How can we think about the foster care system in relation to abolitionist discourse? Join the MCC for a discussion that explores the contemporary foster care systems impacts on BIPOC youth and the ways that youth practice resistance to this system of control.
PANEL:
- Ali Guajardo, LCSW (he/him) is a behavioral health consultant and clician at the Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics where he specializes in transgender behavioral healthcare. With over six years experience serving Santa Barbara's BIPOC communities and as a former foster youth, Ali weaves experiential knowledge with clinical expertise to offer intersectional approaches to his practice. Ali is trained in DBT and EMDR and utilizes an eclectic, trauma informed approach in working with diverse communities.
- Clay Wesley.
- Kayla Martensen - Kayla Marie Martensen (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois Chicago in the Criminology, Law and Justice department and an instructor at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches class related to punishment, race, gender and social justice. Her areas of interest include critical carceral studies, feminist abolition, prison abolition, gender violence and youth studies. Currently, Kayla’s research focuses on Latinx/a young women who experience incarceration in a variety of institutions, including juvenile detention centers. In a forthcoming publication, prison is not feminist, service is not liberation, Kayla highlights the theoretical framework of this current study by critiquing the expansion of carceral logic and practice into community agencies and ‘non-punitive’ residential placements.
- Levette Morales is a Parent Partner with Casa Pacifica’s Wraparound program in Santa Barbara County. As a former foster youth, Levette has found a passion in utilizing their personal experience and knowledge to support parents and caregivers in gaining an increased understanding of systematic and interpersonal traumas and learning skills to support caring for high needs youth.
Children’s Event
Drag Queen Story Hour with Miss Angel
Angel D’Mon
MCC Lounge
Drag Queen Story Hour is an inclusive storytime event hosted by drag queen and author, Miss Angel. The children’s books that we’ll read highlight diverse voices and authors and focus on empathy, acceptance, equity, identity and kindness. During storytime we’ll read three books together with a short activity for children and families in between each reading. These activities will be done as a community – children and adults welcomed! Join us for an afternoon of reading fun!
Cosponsor: RCSGD
