CLA Women's and Gender Studies Speaker Series -- Practices of Freedom under Conditions of Unfreedom -- Dr. Devonya Havis

CLA WOMEN'S AND GENDER STUDIES SPEAKER SERIES

DEVONYA HAVIS
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
Canisius College

PRACTICES OF FREEDOM UNDER CONDITIONS OF UNFREEDOM:
ARTS OF REFUSAL

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9
2:30—3:30 P.M.

Virtual via zoom

Zoom registration link:
https://rit.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0pduGgqDkrH9dAzABxNWf63jRKmkrH1b…

How might such concepts as freedom and justice be transposed by those communities whose racialized bodies are subjected to intimate, yet structural, violent constraint? How might we understand living under these racialized conditions as an existence that is more than oppression? What teachings are offered by persons who have needed to be skillful in crafting possibility from impossibility? The talk will explore how groups that have been marginalized refuse to accept an unjust world, and how they engage in practices of world-building despite unremittingly long conditions marked by radical disruption and loss.

Devonya Havis is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College and her B.A. in Religion from Williams College. Her scholarly engagements utilize insights from Michel Foucault as a means of exploring issues in Critical Philosophy of Race, Critical Disability Studies, and Phenomenology. In addition to her numerous publications, she teaches to promote social justice, an interest that is especially evident in the Immersion East Side (Buffalo, NY) Ignatian Seminar that she has co-designed and co-directed for the last seven years. The immersion is designed to engage students in the unique rites, rituals, cultural practices, and refusals of Buffalo’s East Side residents (largely Black) who operate in the context of numerous structural, social, and political impediments. The seminar not only explores these realities but also celebrates the historical Black capacity to “create” even in the midst of a desert. Havis serves on the Partnership for the Public Good board of directors and is a member of the Prison Visiting Project Western New York Auxiliary.