The 1st Annual UMD ATLAS Conference

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Conference Program now available here.

The inaugural UMD ATLAS Conference will be held on the UMD campus on Tuesday, February 27, 2024. Join us for engaging panel presentations and discussions highlighting UMD faculty-led research related to Africa, the African diaspora, and African American studies.

Dr. Orisanmi Burton, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University and author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, will be our inaugural Keynote Speaker. 

We ask all conference attendees to register whether they are attending a portion of the event or the full day (the conference is free to attend and open to all)--please scroll down this page to register, registration will remain open for all sessions for both in-person and virtual attendees and we will be registering people at the door as well, although lunch space is limited and not guaranteed. The conference will be held at H.J. Patterson (see room details in conference program) and will also be available via Zoom for online attendees. Online attendees must register to receive a Zoom link. 

Conference program (times are subject to change):

PANELS (titles subject to change):

Media, Literature, and Other Expressive Cultures - Panel Moderator: Sangeeta Ray (Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, English)
Cécile Accilien (Languages, Literatures, and Cultures), “To Stay or to Leave? The Complexity of Home in the film Freda by Gessica Généus”
Briana Barner (Communication), “Black Podcasts as Transformative Media”
Eva Hageman (Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies), "shiplap"
Valérie Orlando (Languages, Literatures, and Cultures), “African Authors Writing in/for La Littérature-Monde: A Literary World of Exchange”

Health, Vulnerability, and Care - Panel Moderator: Nikita Viswasam (Doctoral Student, Sociology)
Kenneth Leonard (Agriculture and Natural Resources), "Improving health outcomes by choosing better doctors: Evidence of social learning about doctor quality from rural Tanzania"
Sangeetha Madhavan (African American and Africana Studies, Sociology), “Because marriage matters for mothers' mental health”
Kirsten Stoebenau (Public Health), “Why should we care about marriage in urban Africa?”
Shanéa Thomas (Public Health), "Mother, as a Gender: Life and Research at the Intersection of Blackness and Queerness"

Feminisms, Genders, and Sexualities - Panel Moderator: Devon Betts (Doctoral Student, American Studies)
Zenzele Isoke (Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies), “Yabo! Loving Blackness as Emancipatory Pedagogy”
Will Mosley (Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies), “Looking for Tenderness in All the Wrong Places”
Matthew Thomann (Anthropology), “Flesh in the Excess: HPV, Anal Warts, and the Queer Potentiality of Ad-Hoc Care in Kenya”

Food, Environments, and Agricultural Politics - Panel Moderator: Amber Ketchum (PhD Student, Anthropology)
Catherine Nakalembe (Geographical Sciences, NASA Harvest), “Interplay of Agriculture, Land Use, Climate Change, and Food Security in Africa”
Jen Shaffer (Anthropology), “Network Complexity in Conservation Management of the Maasai Mara-Serengeti”
Paul Turner (Public Health), "Fungal contaminants in sub-Saharan dietary staples - a potential third arm in the nexus of limited improvements in infant growth"
Psyche Williams-Forson (American Studies), “Black women and the hypocrisies of food conversations in the Anthropocene”

Keynote Address by Dr. Orisanmi Burton, "Methods of Carceral War"

Grounded in a criminalized tradition of Black radical analysis, this lecture reframes “mass incarceration” as carceral war. In doing so, it demystifies the U.S. prison system as a modality of counter-insurgency. Challenging popular conceptions of “correctional institutions” as inert sites of penological intervention, it illuminates the prison’s hidden technologies of subjugation and charts their relation to global archives of colonial power. By theorizing the prison in this way, this talk foregrounds the complex and protracted formations of Black Revolt against which prisons are constantly mobilized. It demonstrates that the imperative of “neutralizing” the very possibility of Black Revolt is a primary historical driver of prison expansion and innovation. Here “method” takes on a dual meaning, referring not only to the techniques through which scholars can apprehend, theorize, and write about this war, but more importantly, how it is concretely imposed and contested. Without understanding carceral spaces as zones of undeclared domestic war, zones that are inextricably linked to imperial and officially acknowledged wars abroad, we cannot fully understand how and why the United States became the global leader of incarceration that it is today, nor will we be able to effectively fight back.

Additional Details for Visitors

Attendees who are visiting the UMD campus for the event can find transportation and parking information here. There are free and frequent shuttle services available between College Park Metro and campus. 

Address:
H.J. Patterson Hall
1126 Campus Drive
College Park, MD 20740

We look forward to seeing you there!