Conversation & Reading

Power, Collective Struggle, and the Poetic Imagination

Mon, Oct 1, 2018

6:30 PM–8:30 PM

The Skylight Room (9100)

Click below to watch the video of this event:

Join us for the launch of three timely books, Building Power From Below: Chilean Workers Take on Walmart by Carolina Bank Muñoz, Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling by Sujatha Fernandes, and Landia by Celina Su, that look at the joy and poetry of collective struggles. Panning through the voices of Chilean Walmart workers, Afghan women writers, West Indian domestic workers in New York, and Burmese refugee children in northwestern Thailand, these books explore what it means to tell one’s story, the value and peril of symbolic power, and the poetry at the heart of social struggles in the contemporary world. Authors will discuss themes from their books, followed by a Q & A with the audience.

Co-sponsored by Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC); the Center for Place, Culture and Politics; the PhD Program in Sociology; Gittell Urban Studies Collective; and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

https://vimeo.com/293718790

Participants

Sujatha Fernandes

Sujatha Fernandes is a Professor of Political Economy and Sociology at the University of Sydney. Her work explores social movements, storytelling, and cultural politics in the Americas and globally. Her books include Cuba Represent! (2006), Who Can Stop the Drums? (2010), and most recently Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling (2017). Her literary work includes a memoir on global hip hop, Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (2011), as well as essays and short stories published and forthcoming in the New York Times, The Nation, The Maine Review, Aster(ix), and elsewhere. Fernandes has also worked as a faculty co-leader in the Narrating Change, Changing Narratives research group of the 2014-2016 Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Celina Su

Celina Su‘s first book of poetry, Landia, was published by Belladonna* in 2018. Her writing includes three poetry chapbooks, three books on the politics of social policy and civil society, and pieces in the New York Times Magazine, n+1, Harper’s, and elsewhere. Her current book project centering radical democracy, Budget Justice: Racial Solidarities & Politics From Below, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Su is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and a Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York. She was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and lives in Brooklyn, part of unceded Lenapehoking.