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Talk: "The Afrofuturist Dialogues and Other Speculations" | This event is part of the Interseminars event series.
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About the SpeakerEve L. Ewing, a lifelong Chicagoan, is a writer and scholar who uses multi-genre storytelling, tools of sociological inquiry, archives, and community-grounded epistemologies to interrogate racialized histories and imagine emancipatory possibilities. Working through the lenses of Afrofuturism, Black feminism, and Du Boisian sociology, Dr. Ewing attempts to situate cultural organizing, the praxis of care, and relational accountability at the foundations of her scholarship. A former public school teacher, she is particularly interested in the role of schools as social institutions and in the ways that schools can construct, normalize, and reinforce forms of social inequality, the ways that educational inequities reflect social cruelties beyond the walls of the school building, as well as, conversely, the still-lingering possibility that educational spaces can be sites of joy and liberation.
She is the award-winning author of four books: the poetry collections Electric Arches and 1919, the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, and a novel for young readers, Maya and the Robot. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. She has written several projects for Marvel Comics, most notably the Ironheart series. Dr. Ewing also co-wrote a story with Janelle Monáe as a contributor to the collection of Black queer Afrofuturist fiction The Memory Librarian, and she also cowrote the young adult graphic novel Change the Game with Colin Kaepernick. Currently she is working on her next book, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, which will be published by One World. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.
Photo credit: Jaclyn Rivas