Wild Futures: Taking Flight - Harriet Tubman Day Commemoration 2025
Monday, March 10, 2025 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm
The David C. Driskell Center, and Online
Wild Futures: Taking Flight offers a chance to reflect on how knowledge of the environment and ecology played crucial roles in the ways that freedom seekers pursued their escape from enslavement.
In narratives of freedom, we find an extensive engagement with bondage (“The Plantation”) and, on the other hand, arrival (“The North”). That said, the middle, that space in between, can sometimes be either obscured or ignored. What, then, in a practical sense, did seeking freedom require? How did freedom seekers deploy their knowledge of their natural environment to escape bondage? How were these knowledges acquired? And what kinds of responsibilities do we have to seek out and understand this knowledge as expertise?
This year, we in WGSS invite you into a conversation about what it means to make yourself ready to take flight, the kinds of knowledge integral to taking flight, and how these knowledges were deployed in seeking freedom. How was the wild/wilderness both an accomplice and constraint in these processes?
Wild Futures: Taking Flight, then, builds on multiple iterations of wild - metaphoric, literal, ontological – to consider why and how liberation calls us to wrestle with the wild and to be wild as integral to what it means to be free; and, to invoke Mariame Kaba, we want to reflect on the ways that these historical antecedents can function as a kind of technology that holds clues for contemporary modes of activism.
March 5 & 6, 2025 • 8PM
Tuesday, February 25, 2025 11:00 am - 7:30 pm
Join the BSU-UMD Social Justice Alliance for a powerful and thought-provoking discussion on the lynching of Emmett Till and the modern-day murder of Lt. Richard W. Collins III with The Barn author Wright Thompson and mother of Lt. Collins, Dawn Collins. Moderated by Sociology Professor Rashawn Ray, this conversation will discuss how echoes of our country’s lynching past create shadows of racial violence in the present. We hope this dialogue will elicit a reckoning that contributes to healing and the pursuit of social justice.
On February 21st, 2025, The 1856 Project will hold its second Annual Research Update, during which the project's second research report will be discussed. The 1856 Project investigates the University of Maryland’s connection to the regional context of slavery. It is the local chapter of Universities Studying Slavery (USS), a multi-institutional and international consortium of colleges and universities encouraging their institutions to think about their connections to slavery and the slave trade while addressing historical and contemporary issues surrounding race and inequality in higher education. The second annual presentation of findings will provide a research update based on historical information uncovered in 2024 by The 1856 Project members, a BSOS Summer Research Initiatives participant, a Fall 2024 semester Graduate Assistant, and community historians.
This BlaQ History Month, join the LGBTQ+ Equity Center for a book talk with Saeed Jones on Wednesday, February 19th, from 5:00-6:15pm in the Ulrich Theater in Tawes Hall. Jones is a black queer author whose award winning novel, How We Fight for Our Lives, is a coming of age story that centers a young black man who navigates growing up in the Southern United States.
Did you know that the first complete opera by a Black American has been hidden in a single manuscript for more than 130 years? Edmond Dédé, a fourth-generation free person of color born in 1827 New Orleans, had an incredibly successful career as a conductor and composer in Bordeaux, France, writing nearly 100 critically and popularly acclaimed works for the French stage. His magnum opus, however–a four act French grand opera on themes from Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves–had yet to receive a premiere at the time of his death and languished, unrecognized, in private collections and libraries for over a century.