Race, Rhetoric, and Media: A Symposium

TACOMA, Wash. – Four Northwest colleges invite you to a public symposium that will examine how today’s media and popular rhetoric are shaping public attitudes and impacting individual lives when it comes to questions of race.

The Race, Rhetoric, and Media Symposium is a free event open to the public. It will run from 6 p.m. Thursday, March 31, through Friday afternoon, April 1, at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. No registration is required, and everyone is welcome.

 

The two-day event will include a joint keynote presentation and an undergraduate research symposium in which students from Lewis & Clark College, University of Puget Sound, Whitman College, and Willamette University will present research papers on how popular media and public rhetoric shape our understanding of race relations. The colleges are members of the Northwest 5 Consortium, an innovative partnership that allows regional liberal arts colleges to share resources and expertise.

“Race has been a perennial issue in American society,” said organizer James Jasinski, professor, and chair of communication studies at Puget Sound. “And our ways of talking about race and the discourse and media forms we use to represent race are extremely important. Our students today recognize this fact, and this research symposium will provide students at some of the Northwest 5 institutions an opportunity to extend class projects and explore the intersection of race, rhetoric, and media in greater depth.”

 

The keynote event will be a conversation between two recognized communication scholars on the topic of “Intimus Interruptus: An Exploration of How Black Men Negotiate Ruptures in Their Political and Personal Intimacy.” The speakers are Lisa Corrigan, associate professor of communication and director of gender studies at the University of Arkansas, and Ebony Utley, associate professor of communication studies at California State University, Long Beach. Corrigan is the author of the forthcoming book Prison Power: How Prison Politics Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation (University of Alabama Press). Utley is the author of Rap and Religion: Understanding the Gangsta’s God (Praeger, 2012).

The keynote conversation and Q&A with the audience will take place at 6 p.m., Thursday, March 31, in the Tahoma Room, Commencement Hall. No tickets are required.

On Friday, April 1, from 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., the Race, Rhetoric, and Media Undergraduate Research Symposium will hold three sessions in Wheelock Student Center Boardroom:

9–10:45 a.m.:            “Minority Representation in the Digital Age.”
11:15 a.m. –1 p.m.:   “From Linguistic Self Expression to Mass Mediated Representation: A Spectrum of                                     Racialized Constructions.”
2:25–4:45 p.m.:          “Artistic Expression, Constructions of Blackness, and Interrogating White Privilege.”

As part of each of these three sessions, students from the four colleges will give presentations on research they have conducted relevant to each topic and discuss their work with each other and the audience. The wide-ranging research topics cover subjects including racial passing, Black Twitter, President Obama, spaces for empowerment, racialized reporting in The New York Times, obstacles to Spanish-speaking immigrants’ freedom of speech, biracial autobiography, captivity and counterterrorism in the television series Hatufim, the American dream, why we like the film Crash, and 1934 art commentary on lynching, among others.

The Northwest 5 Consortium supports the Race, Rhetoric, and Media Symposium; University of Puget Sound’s Catharine Gould Chism Fund, Race and Pedagogy Initiative, and Department of Communication Studies; Lewis & Clark College’s Department of Rhetoric and Media Studies; Whitman College’s Department of Rhetoric Studies and Associate Dean for Faculty Development; and Willamette University’s Department of Civic Communication and Media, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and Dean of Campus Life.

For directions and a map of the University of Puget Sound campus: pugetsound.edu/directions
For accessibility information, please contact accessibility@pugetsound.edu or 253.879.3236, or visit pugetsound.edu/accessibility.

Press photos of the keynote speakers are available on request.
Photos on page: From top: Lisa Corrigan (courtesy of University of Arkansas); Ebony Utley (courtesy of California State University, Long Beach)

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