16th Dealing with Difference Institute
Tuesday, May 19 - Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Spoon River College, Macomb, IL
Featured Presenters
Maulana Karenga
Dr. Maulana Karenga, is professor of Africana Studies at California State University—Long Beach. He holds two doctoral degrees, one in political science (United States International University) and another in social ethics (University of Southern California), as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Durban, South Africa. He is the creator of the pan-African cultural holiday Kwanzaa and the Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles) and author of the authoritative text titled Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture.
As an activist scholar Professor Karenga has played a major role in Black political and intellectual culture since the 1960s and has lectured on the life and struggle of African peoples on campuses in the U.S.A., in Africa, the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Trinidad, Britain, and Canada. He has written numerous scholarly articles and books, including Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics; Selections from the Husia: Sacred Wisdom of Ancient Egypt; The Book of Coming Forth By Day: The Ethics of the Declarations of Innocence; Odu Ifa: The Ethical Teachings; and Introduction to Black Studies.
Dr. Karenga will open the Dealing with Difference Institute on Tuesday, May 19, with the presentation “Uprooting Racism, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Towards an Ethics of Sharing.” The governing interest of his presentation is to offer a critical delineation of racism in terms of its systemic character and its fundamental expressions as an imposition of dominance, an ideology of justification, and a series of institutional arrangements to secure and sustain the imposition and the ideology. He will also discuss critical differences between “race,” people-hood, and culture, and the ethical imperative of respect for each people and culture as a unique and equally valuable way of being human in the world.
Professor Karenga will call critical attention to the difference between racial prejudice as negative attitudes about difference and racism as imposition of those attitudes in public policy and social practice. He will draw a crucial distinction between the premature announcements of the “end of race” and the enduring reality of racism itself. After defining and exploring the possibilities of a multiculturalism beyond “food, fashion, and festival,” symbolic representational diversity, and minimum legal procedural practice, he will propose a reconceived and vibrant multiculturalism rooted in and reflective of an ethics of sharing, i.e., shared status; shared knowledge, shared space; shared resources; shared power, shared interests; and shared responsibility for building the just and good society and world we all want and deserve to live in.
Sut Jhally
Dr. Sut Jhally, a Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was born in Kenya, raised in England, educated in graduate studies in Canada, and currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is Founder and Executive Director of the Media Education Foundation (MEF) and one of the world's leading scholars studying the role played by advertising and popular culture in the processes of social control and identity construction.
The author of numerous books and articles on media, including The Codes of Advertising, Enlightened Racism, and The Spectacle of Accumulation: Essays in Culture, Media, & Politics, Dr. Jhally is also an award-winning teacher. He has received the Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Massachusetts and has been voted "Best professor" by the UMass student newspaper. In addition, the university has honored him through its Distinguished Outreach Award and its Distinguished Faculty Lecture Award.
Professor Jhally is best known as the producer and director of films, videos, and DVDs that deal with issues ranging from gender, sexuality, and race to commercialism, violence, and politics. Among his best known works are Dreamworlds: Desire/Sex/Power in Music Video; Tough Guise: Media, Violence and the Crisis of Masculinity; Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire; and Advertising and the End of the World..
Dr. Jhally will make two presentations on Wednesday, May 20, as part of the DWDI. In the first, "Race and the American Dream in the Age of Obama," he will look at how Obama's victory (as well as the high visibility of other affluent black people) is related to the way we think about the continuing realities of racial inequality and stratification. Though many people have claimed that Barack Obama's presidential victory demonstrates that America has moved into a "post-race" period, Professor Jhally suggests that apathy and a denial of the realities of race may be the ironic outcome of the election of the first African American President.
In "The Joyless Economy: Happiness, Satisfaction and the Market," Dr. Jhally will continue his exploration of one of the themes he introduced in Advertising and the End of the World. He will examine the "paradox of affluence" and illuminate the central contradiction of advertising and media in producing the phenomenon of the joyless economy. While we get objectively richer as a society, levels of satisfaction and subjective happiness remain frustratingly level, perhaps even declining. The market system that delivers such vast material bounty seems ill-equipped to deliver a corresponding level of subjective well-being.
Ripan S. Malhi and Charles Roseman
Dr. Ripan S. Malhi, is currently an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Animal Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as well as an affiliate at the Institute for Genomic Biology. He received his graduate training at the University of California, Davis, studying patterns of mitochondrial DNA diversity among contemporary and prehistoric populations in North America. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Medical School in the Department of Human Genetics, he studied DNA diversity among genes involved in alcohol metabolism in humans to identify potential signals of natural selection acting on these genes. Dr. Malhi co-founded and served as the CEO of the biotechnology company Trace Genetics, Inc. before serving as Research Director for DNAPrint Genomics, Inc. He joined the University of Illinois faculty in August of 2006 where he is currently active in research using DNA analysis to reconstruct the population and evolutionary history of Native Americans. As part of his research, he is collaborating with Native American communities in British Columbia to use DNA analysis to help reconstruct their population history.
Dr. Charles Roseman received his BA from the University of Southern California in 1998 and his PhD from Stanford University in 2005. He has been a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign since 2005 and a visiting assistant professor at Washington University School of Medicine in 2006 and 2008. His research focuses on the genetic basis and evolution of complex characteristics, which are features of an organism that result from the combination of many different genetic and environmental influences. Currently he is using model organisms (mice and baboons) to study experimentally how genes and environments work together to produce individual differences in skeletal form with the intention of applying these insights to evolutionary problems using quantitative evolutionary genetic theory in combination with comparative data from museum skeletal collections. His overarching interest is in human evolution and understanding the processes by which human biological diversity came to be.
Drs. Malhi and Roseman will present "Human Biological Diversity, History, and the Concept of Race" on Tuesday, May 19 and will bring their backgrounds in genetics to bear on our understanding of race. Observing that "anatomically modern humans first appear in the fossil record roughly 160,000 years ago in Africa," have come to people most of the rest of the world, and have undergone periods of high population growth, they will explore how this "evolutionary history has patterned human biological diversity in characteristic ways." They will examine how the "fact that humans have been confronted with different environments in different parts of the world has caused natural selection to further shape diversity in myriad other ways" and note how poorly human biological diversity is described using racial categories. While acknowledging that "[r]ace, as we know it, is a product of social and historical factors and not of the distribution of biological similarities and differences that we see among humans," Malhi and Roseman recognize it "as a social and historical phenomenon with very real and direct consequences on individual lives and society alike." These they argue "include interactions with biology and other aspects of society that result in things like different health outcomes," concluding that "a clearer understanding of race and human biological diversity requires both an understanding of the evolution of humans as a species and world history."
View the Presentation Schedule.
DWDI Planning Committee members included: J. Q. Adams, Western Illinois University; Richard Hazley, Trinity Higher Education Corporation; Frances Murphy, Eastern Illinois University; Diane Nyhammer, McHenry County College; Joyce Reed, Lincoln College; William O. Miller, Principia College; and Janice R. Welsch, Western Illinois University.
For further information: e-mail Dr. J.Q. Adams or Dr. Janice Welsch with any questions about the institute.
