Love and Solidarity Series: Funk the Clock: Transgressing Time While Young, Perceptive, and Black 

Thursday, May 23, 2024
7:00-8:30 pm CT
Hybrid: In-person and Zoom

FREE and open to the public (Registration Requested)
REGISTER HERE!

Conversation with Rahsaan Mahadeo
Justin Goodman
Tia-Simone Gardner
Moderator: Brian Lozenski

Join us for an engaging conversation with Professor Rahsaan Mahadeo, author of Funk the Clock: Transgressing Time While Young, Perceptive, and Black. In this work, Mahadeo challenges conventional notions of time, race, and youth experiences and makes clear why conventional sociological theories of time are both empirically and theoretically unsustainable and more importantly, why they need to be funked up/with. Through his study of a youth center in Minneapolis, Mahadeo provides examples of Black youth constructing alternative temporalities that center their lived experiences and ensure their worldviews, tastes, and culture are most relevant and up to date. He will be joined in this conversation by Justin Goodman, Tia-Simone Gardner, and moderator Brian Lozenski.

Rahsaan Mahadeo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Black Studies program at Providence College. As a scholar of race, time, the human and the episteme, Rahsaan studies how time is racialized, how race is temporalized and how racialization and racism condition youth’s perspectives on time. In his forthcoming book, Funk the Clock: Transgressing Time while Young, Perceptive, and Black (Cornell University Press), he explores how black and other racialized youth in urbanized space reckon with time. Rahsaan’s work forges new directions in the sociology of time, the life course perspective, urban sociology, and ethnic and racial studies. His writing has appeared in Critical Sociology, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Theory in Action, The Encyclopedia of Child and Adolescent Development, Contexts, The Poetry Project Newsletter and Truthout.

Tia-Simone Gardner is an artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar from Fairfield, Alabama. Working primarily with photography, moving-image, and drawing, her practice is deeply grounded in interdisciplinary strategies that activate ideas of ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. Gardner holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania and Ph. D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. She is currently working on a photographic/writing project with her mother that juxtapose questions of biopolitics, Black Southern familial memory and geology with vignettes of extractive capitalism.

Justin(J) Goodman (he/they) is an educator, curriculum designer, and artist based in Bde Ota Othunwe. J’s educational philosophy can be traced back to their great-grandma’s porch in Sacramento, where community gathered, exchanged resources, information, and care. This philosophy guided his work as a public school teacher in Los Angeles. Their work as an artist weaves music, film, and archival materials together to examine memory, time, and the in between.

Born, raised, and residing in the Mississippi River Valley, Duaba Unenra is a Black culturesmith who uses written and spoken word, publishing, facilitation, and research as tools of liberation and healing. He has spent his entire life surviving and witnessing anti-Black governments enact violence on the communities that give him life. He creates because it makes resistance a life giving act of joy. One of his longest running projects is called the Ki-Kala, a hieroglyphic writing system for survivors of the Maafa-the Middle Passage. When he’s not busy with a project, he loves getting lost in good Sci-Fi.

Brian D. Lozenski is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Educational Studies Department at Macalester College. His research explores the intersections of critical participatory action research, black intellectual traditions in education, and cultural sustainability. As a teacher educator and researcher he has worked with youth, educators, parents, schools, and districts to develop perspectives and strategies that aspire toward social justice while illuminating the historical realities that have created current educational disparities. Dr. Lozenski holds deep commitments to community-engaged scholarship. In this effort he is affiliated with organizations such as the Network for the Development of Children of African Descent, Education for Liberation Minnesota, and the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition.

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN FOR THE CAUSE OF SOLIDARITY!