This year’s CALS spring symposium focuses on the urgent ways in which artists and scholars across disciplines create and/or advocate for art that combines artistic expression with advocacy to promote awareness and social and political change at a moment when colleges and universities, and the humanities writ large, are facing overwhelming challenges that undermine, rather than enable, the work of activist arts and scholarship. Five panelists—including four Penn State colleagues and an external invited panelist—will remark upon the manifold ways in which they, and the arts and/or scholarship they create, intersect with the symposium topic. Each panelist will have ten minutes to deliver an opening remark, to be followed by thirty minutes of Q & A with the audience.

 

Panelists:

 

 

Mimi Khúc’s work includes Open in Emergency, a hybrid book-arts project decolonizing Asian American mental health; the Asian American Tarot, a reimagined deck of tarot cards; and the Open in Emergency Initiative, an ongoing national project developing mental health arts programming with universities and community spaces. Her most recent work, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss (Duke University Press), is a journey into the depths of Asian American unwellness at the intersections of ableism, model minoritization, and the university, and an exploration of new approaches to building collective care.

 

 

Julia Spicher Kasdorf has published four collections in the Pitt Poetry Series including, most recently, As Is. With photographer Steven Rubin, she created Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, to depict human and environmental impacts of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Currently she is working with Rubin on a similar project to represent agricultural resilience within 30 miles of her home in Bellefonte.

 

 

Lonnie Graham is an artist, photographer, and cultural activist whose work addresses the integral role of the artist in society and seeks to seeks to re-establish artists as creative problem solvers. Graham served as Chairman of the Board of the former San Francisco Art Institute, was Associate Director of The Fabric Workshop and Museum, and served as Director of Photography at Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, Graham developed innovative pilot projects cited as a National Model for Arts Education.

 

Elizabeth Gray is completing a book manuscript entitled The Poetics of Intervention: Art and Activism in Contemporary Latin America, which explores literature, performance, and protest in spaces of present-day crisis. The project centers on the artistic practices of excluded communities and amplifies innovative models for responding to social and ecological issues. She has worked as a public school teacher in the United States, Brazil, and Chile, and facilitates workshops in arts and social justice.

 

Matt Tierney teaches and writes about the digital and media critique that takes shape in cultural production, social movements, and knowledge work. He’s published two books including Dismantlings: Words against Machines in the American Long Seventies (Cornell University Press) and What Lies Between: Void Aesthetics and Postwar Post-Politics (Bloomsbury).

 

For additional information, please contact Sean X. Goudie, director of the Center for American Literary Studies, at sxgoudie@psu.edu.