BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//UIC
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:2026041901190120260415T18000020260415T20300069e42d85ac5a3@uic.edu
CATEGORIES:MEETING
STATUS:TENTATIVE
DTSTAMP:20260107T101805
DTSTART:20260415T180000
DTEND:20260415T203000
SUMMARY:Film screening: Massacre River with Dr. Lorgia García Peña, Dr. Manoucheka Celeste, and Dr. Natalie Bennett
DESCRIPTION:Join the UIC Social Justice Initiative for a free screening of Massacre River: The Woman Without a Country, a documentary about race, statelessness, and the Dominican-Hatian borderlands. This character-driven documentary follows the story of Pikilina, a Dominican-born woman of Haitian descent, and her family. Racial and political violence erupt when the country of her birth, the Dominican Republic, reverses its birthright citizenship law and she is left stateless, along with over 200,000 others.    The film will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Lola Ayisha Ogbara in conversation with Dr. Lorgia García Peña, Dr. Manoucheka Celeste, and Dr. Natalie Bennett.    RSVP at go.uic.edu/MassacreRiver    MEET THE PANELISTS    Dr. Natalie Bennett is the Director of the Women's Leadership and Resource Center. Dr. Bennett comes to Women?s Leadership and Resource Center as a scholar-activist whose research, teaching and activism centers the lives of black women and girls. Her interests are transnational in scope, located at the intersection of black feminisms, gender/class/sexuality and social policy in Jamaica, and migrations in the African diaspora. Dr. Bennett has taught at Hunter College (CUNY), Long Island University, University of Nebraska, DePaul University and University of Illinois at Chicago. Her publications focus on transnational migration and Caribbean immigrant women?s labor, racial and sexual identities among African American lesbians and the politics of same-sexualities in Jamaica.    Dr. Bennett received her Bachelor of Science (BS) in Biology and Sociology from Union College (Schenectady, New York) and her doctorate (PhD) in Sociology from University of Michigan. Most recently, she served as the Assistant Director of Gender and Women?s Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.    Dr. Manoucheka Celeste, associate professor of Gender & Women?s Studies, is a Black and Caribbean feminist communication and media scholar. She joined the University of Illinois Chicago in Fall 2022 as a part of the University of Illinois System Distinguished Faculty Recruitment Program and as co-principal investigator of the Social Justice and Human Rights Cluster. Her published research focuses on Black women and immigrants, and immigration and tourism in media, with emphasis on the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. Celeste is the author of Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the African Diaspora: Travelling Blackness, winner of the National Communication Association Diamond Anniversary Book Award. She also writes about women of color mentoring. Celeste?s scholarship also appears in anthologies and journals, including the article ??What Now??: The Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference,? in Black Camera.    Dr. Lorgia García-Peña is a writer, activist and scholar who specializes in Latinx Studies with a focus on Black Latinidades. Her work is concerned with the ways in which antiblackness and xenophobia intersect the Global North producing categories of exclusion that lead to violence and erasure. Through her writing and teaching, Dr. García Peña insists on highlighting the knowledge, cultural, social and political contributions of people who have been silenced from traditional archives.    She is the author of award winning books, The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, 2016) which was translated and published in Spanish by Editorial Bonó in 2020; Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke, 2022) and Community as Rebellion (Haymarket, 2022), translated as La comunidad como rebelión (Haymarket, 2023). Additionally, her work has been covered in several publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Boston Review and Harper?s Bazaar. She has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, Univision and Telemundo and is a regular contributor to NACLA and Asterix Journals.     An engaged scholar committed to liberating education and bridging the gaps that separate the communities she comes from (Black, immigrant, working) and the university, Dr. García Peña is also a co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, a school that provides college instruction to undocumented students and the co-director of Archives of Justice a transnational digital archive project that centers the life of people who identify as Black, queer and migrant. She has been widely recognized for her public facing work: in 2022 she received the Angela Davis Prize for Public Scholarship, in 2021 the Margaret Casey Foundation named her a Freedom Scholar, and in 2017 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) presented her a Disobedience Award for the co-founding of Freedom University. Additionally, her scholarship has been supported by the Ford Foundation, The Johns Hopkins University African Diaspora Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Future of Minority Studies Fellowship and the Mellon Foundation.     García-Peña received a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and an M.A. in Latin American and Latino Literatures from Rutgers University. | Event post: https://sji.uic.edu/events?page_id=2236
LOCATION:Chicago Justice Gallery 1344 S. Halsted St.  Chicago IL 60607
CLASS:PRIVATE
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR