Racial Formation in the 21st Century Symposium

Racial Formation in the 21st Century Symposium
April 17-18, 2009
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR


Professors Howard Winant (UC Santa Barbara) and Michael Omi (UC Berkeley) will headline a groundbreaking symposium addressing the theories, politics and practices of racial formation. The two-day program includes a plenary session featuring Omi and Winant, keynote addresses by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Duke) and Devon Carbado (UCLA), and four other sessions which bring together 15 leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines.

The symposium is organized in anticipation of the upcoming 25th anniversary of the first publication of Omi and Winant’s landmark book
Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s.

Omi and Winant's work—influential to a generation of scholars across the social sciences and humanities—will serve as the point of departure for a series of panels and presentations exploring the past, present and future of racial formation.

The panels will examine a diverse set of locations and times: from the plantations of Colonial Virginia to the Rastafarian communities of Western Jamaica in the 1990s to the prisons of Abu Ghraib today. Speakers will explore the ways race is constructed, inhabited, and transformed and will discuss contemporary policy questions; such as conceptions of race in biomedical research. The panels will offer fresh perspectives on social movements, such as the diverse origins and membership of the United Farm Workers in the 1960s. And they will consider a range of provocative theoretical frameworks—Native studies, feminist theories, critical race studies--to depict the various ways that struggles over land, identity, bodies and nationhood articulate racial meaning and power.

The symposium is free and open to the public.
No advance registration is required.

http://www.waynemorsecenter.uoregon.edu/Racial_Formation_09/home.html