November 13, 3:00 – 4:30pm | Online

In this Diversity Lecture Series, Denova Collaborative Health’s executive director, Angela Roumain, will explore the maternal rate of illness and rate of death in the United States, including health complications and harmful outcomes that can occur during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum. Poor maternal health outcomes affects Black and Indigenous women and women of color significantly more, and Roumain will highlight this stark and deeply rooted problem in the United States’ healthcare system.

Free |

November 13, 3:30 – 5:00pm | Communications Building

The Simpson Center for the Humanities presents the AI, Creativity, and the Humanities Workshop. The workshop offers a hands-on, technical introduction to large language models (LLMs) for humanities researchers, led by Melanie Walsh, an Assistant Professor in the Information School and co-Principal Investigator of the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded AI for Humanists project, and Maria Antoniak, a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI. Walsh and Antoniak will focus on building practical knowledge of (1) how these models work and how they are trained and (2) how practitioners can apply particularly for these models to humanistic texts.

Free |

November 14, 5:30 – 7:00pm | ��Jacob Lawrence Gallery

Join the School of Art + Art History + Design to celebrate the official reopening of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery. Dedicated to Professor Jacob Lawrence, the gallery is a space for education, social justice, and experimentation, honoring the memory of one of the School’s most beloved faculty. The newly transformed gallery, now equipped with climate control, modern lighting, and new exhibition infrastructure, was made possible by the generous supporters of the UW Art + Music Capital Campaign.

Free |

November 14, 6:30 – 8:00pm | Washington State Labor Council��

Free |

November 15, 3:00 – 5:00pm | Communications Building

The Department of American Ethnic Studies is proud to sponsor a book talk at the Simpson Center with author Elmer Dixon. Rick Bonus, chair of the Department of American Ethnic studies and professor, will be speaking to Dixon about his new book: “Die Standing: From Black Panther Revolutionary to Global Diversity Consultant.”��Students and faculty in the Department of Ethnic Studies are encouraged to attend this event.

Free |

November 16, 5:00 – 8:00pm | wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Intellectual House��

The Department of American Indian Studies hosts an annual literary and storytelling series, Sacred Breath, which features Indigenous writers and storytellers sharing their craft at the beautiful wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Intellectual House on the UW campus. This year, Christopher B. Teuton (Cherokee Nation), professor and chair of the Department of American Indian Studies, and Tami Hohn (Puyallup), assistant teaching professor of the Department of Indian Studies, will be leading the event. Both storytelling and reading aloud can impact audiences through the power of presence, allowing for the experience of the transfer of sacred breath, as audiences are immersed in the experience of being inside stories and works of literature.

Free |

November 16, 6:00 – 7:00pm | Jacob Lawrence Gallery

The Jacob Lawrence Gallery presents What Do You Make of This? featuring the work of Kristine Matthews, Associate Professor of Design and Chair of the Visual Communication Design program at the UW School of Art + Art History + Design.

Free |��

November 16 – 18, 8:00 pm | ��Meany Hall

Inspired by the drawings and paintings of Francisco de Goya, Noche Flamenca’s new work references the artist’s response to the political turmoil and injustices of 18th and 19th century Spain, echoing conflict prevalent in contemporary time. Choreographed by artistic director Martin Santangelo and award-winning principal dancer Soledad Barrio, Searching for Goya features a company of dancers, singers, and musicians whose mastery of flamenco stretches the boundaries of the art form to a journey through Goya’s imagination.

Buy Tickets |

November 16, 7:00 – 8:30pm | Thomson Hall

The Stroum Center celebrates its 50th anniversary with a discussion on how putting mothers at the center of Jewish history can provide unexpected insights and startlingly unfamiliar perspectives. From ancient biblical narratives to cutting-edge genomic research, author Cynthia Baker will point out how this is especially true in relation to issues of race/ethnicity and its entanglements with gender, religion, and nationality.

Free |��

October – November | “Ways of Knowing” Podcast: Episode 5

“Ways of Knowing” is an eight-episode podcast connecting humanities research with current events and issues. This week’s episode is with José Alaniz, professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, analyzes the physical depictions of superheroes and villains through the decades.

This season features faculty from the UW College of Arts & Sciences as they explore race, immigration, history, the natural world—even comic books. Each episode analyzes a work, or an idea, and provides additional resources for learning more.

More info

Have an event that you would like to see featured in the ArtSci Roundup? Connect with Lauren Zondag (zondagld@uw.edu)

January 24, 7:30 PM |, Meany Hall

Since winning the London International Piano Competition in 2009, Behzod Abduraimov’s passionate and virtuosic performances have dazzled audiences around the world. His “prodigious technique and rhapsodic flair” (The New York Times) have defined his career as a recording artist, recitalist, chamber musician and soloist with major orchestras worldwide. The Tashkent, Uzbekistan native presents a program specifically crafted for his Meany debut, featuring Uzbek composer Dilorom Saidaminova, along with works by Florence Price, Robert Schumann and Modest Mussorgsky.

$48- 60 tickets |

January 27, 6:30 PM | , Henry Art Gallery Auditorium

Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust is a powerful documentary film on the linked histories of Indigenous dispossession, Japanese American incarceration, and struggles over water in the desertified Owens Valley of California, lands once known as Payahüünadü—the place where the water always flows. Join us for a screening of the film and discussion with director Ann Kaneko. Ann will be in conversation with Dana Arviso, Sage Romero, and Alex Miranda. Dana is director of Unite:ED in the UW College of Education, and an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and grew up on the Bishop Paiute-Shoshone Indian Reservation in California. Sage was one of the film’s sound artists and a member of the Tovowahamatu Numu (Big Pine Paiute) and Tuah-Tahi (Taos Pueblo) Tribes. Alex Miranda, also a sound artist on the film, is a contemporary Payómkawichum (Luiseno) artist from Southern California.

Free |

January 26, 4:30 PM | , Diverted, CMU 202

Composing a score for a film about the interrelation of Indigenous dispossession, Japanese American incarceration, and ecological catastrophe posed complex challenges, even before the Covid-19 pandemic upended typical modes of artistic collaboration. In this event, the composing team of Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust (Lori Goldston, Alex Miranda and Steve Fisk), along with contributing sound artist Susie Kozawa, singer Sage Romero and filmmaker Ann Kaneko, gather to talk about the challenges of aurally representing intersecting histories of organizing and resistance on Native land, and the unique process of improvisation they developed while working remotely. This “dream team” of artists will reflect on questions of musical structure, community, authenticity, ethics and film practice, in developing an award-winning score that embodies the sounds of Payahuunadü.

Free |

School of Music Concerts

January 25 |,��Meany Hall

January 28 – 29 | , Meany Hall

January 31 | , Brechemin Auditorium

January 18 – February 15, 7:30 PM |, Kane Hall

The medieval period has always occupied a paradoxical position in our cultural memory. An age of fantasy unimaginably distant from historical reality, it is also an era onto which writers and artists—and now moviemakers and gamers—have long projected their fears and desires. Why do cultures remake certain figures from the past—but not others–in their own image?

Join Professor Emerita Robin Stacey for this five-lecture series where she looks at the present’s relationship with the past through the lens of the making and remaking of important historical figures—some real, some fictional, and some the creatures of myth.

Free |

Have an event that you would like to see featured in the ArtSci Roundup? Connect with Lauren Zondag (zondagld@uw.edu).

A reviewer from Stanford University wrote that Banks’ book of essays “illustrates the importance of the current quests by marginalized groups around the world for full citizenship and sheds light on the heated and divisive debates that are taking place around citizenship and civic education.”

Banks has gathered many titles over the years; he is the Kerry and Linda Killinger Endowed Chair in Diversity Studies Emeritus and the founding director of the UW’s , which is now the

He is the author of many books and dozens of articles. Often referred to as “,” Banks retired from the UW in 2019 but remains active professionally.

UW Notebook caught up with Banks for a few questions about his new book.

What guided your choices as you gathered these essays from across your career?��

James Banks: Because I am an African American who grew up in the Arkansas Delta in the 1950s and 1960s, I was denied many citizenship rights that most White Americans take for granted because of racial segregation. For example, our school’s yearly visit to the zoo in Memphis, Tennessee (which is about 60 miles from Marianna, Arkansas, the town in which my school was located), was a highlight of the school year. However, we could only visit the zoo on the day reserved for Blacks, which was Thursdays. Consequently, the yearly visit to the Memphis zoo is a both a painful and joyous memory.

Because of my personal journey in the South and later in Chicago after I migrated there in 1960, how to change schools and social studies teaching so that African Americans and other marginalized groups would attain full citizenship rights became a major goal of my teaching and publishing career. This collection of essays consists of articles that I published from 1983 to 2019 that focus on ways in which the social studies and civics curriculum in schools can be changed so that students of color and other marginalized groups can attain full citizenship rights within the schools and society writ large.

The book explores what you term “the citizenship-education dilemma.” Could you explain that a little? Is it about the disconnect of teaching democratic values in an often unequal and unjust world context?��

J.B.: Yes, the “citizenship education dilemma” is about teaching students about justice and equality when they are being educated in schools and a nation that contradict and violate the values and ideals they are being taught.

I was educated in a racially segregated school in which we walked five miles to and from school, while the White students rode to school in a bus that spilled mud on us as it speedily passed us on the muddy road. That is one of my most powerful and poignant memories of my school days. Yet each day in the school morning exercise we said, “I pledge allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Our Black teachers knew there was not “liberty and justice for all” in the Arkansas Delta nor in the United States. That is why our teachers required us to sing both the “Star-Spangled Banner” and the Negro National Anthem, “,” every morning in morning exercise. Our teachers wanted us to develop an identity and loyalty to the United States but also an identity with our cultural and ancestral roots.

Throughout the U.S., students are still experiencing a “citizenship education dilemma” because they are learning about democratic ideals and social justice in schools and a nation that are highly stratified by social class inequality and in which racism, sexism and negative attitudes toward LGBTQ people are widespread and institutionalized.

You write that students can learn democratic values by directly experiencing them in transformative classrooms, which you envision in the book. To the non-educator or parent, what might transformative classrooms look like?��

J.B.: In a lengthy, engaging, and informative 2018 history of the United States that I finished reading last night, , “All over the world, populists seeking solace from a troubled past sought refuge in imagined histories.” In the U.S. as well as in most other nations, the social studies curriculum is replete with “imagined histories”: national myths, the denial and marginalization of the struggles of diverse racial, cultural, ethnic and religious groups, and the glorification of and the conquering of indigenous groups such as Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians.

In the transformative curriculum, students develop the knowledge and skills that are needed to question “imagined histories,” to construct versions of history that reflect the struggles and experiences of diverse groups within the nation, and to conceptualize ways in which they can take civic action to make their local communities, the nation, and the world more humane and just.

They examine case studies of transformative citizen actors, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, who took actions that violated local laws but which actualized human and civil rights. In transformative classrooms, students learn to know, to care, and to act to make their communities and nation more just and humane.

Do you remain hopeful for the future in such a time as this?��

J.B.: , the great African American educator and founder of Bethune-Cookman University said, “Without faith, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.” My African Americans teachers in Arkansas were greatly influenced by the teachings and example of Mrs. Bethune. Consequently, I have internalized her ideas about faith and hope.

As educators we must be hopeful, and we must have faith that our work will make a difference. Faith and hope enable us to wake up every morning and to keep going — believing that we can make a difference. Without faith and hope we are immobilized.

***

Other education book notes:

Jennifer Hoffman book studies connection between higher education and sports

A new book by UW College of Education faculty member , delves into the intersection of athletics and higher education, exploring how college athletics departments reflect many characteristics of their institutions and are susceptible to many of the same challenges in delivering on their mission.

One of the book’s key messages is that all who work in higher education must view sports not merely as a spectator, but also be mindful of ways sports can be more educational and purposeful on college campuses.

The book also explores the level of control athletes have over their name, image and likeness. Hoffman is a faculty affiliate of the UW’s

Learn more and listen to a podcast with Hoffman on the College of Education .

***

Education faculty Meredith Honig, Lydia Rainey to publish book on supervising school principals

An upcoming book by College of Education faculty members and will explore how school district leaders can more effectively support principals as instructional leaders. “ will be published in May by Harvard Education Press.

Based on extensive research of school district central offices, the authors argue for a shift in the focus from an orientation of compliance and evaluation to one where administrators are learning partners for the principals.

Honig is a professor in the program and an adjunct professor in the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance. Rainey is a research scientist and director of research for the College of Education’s . The college plans a on the topic in coming months.

***

Three UW researchers among editors for ‘Education in Movement Spaces’

“” is a new book edited by

, and of the UW and Timothy San Pedro from The Ohio State University.

Studying recent social movements in the U.S. — from Standing Rock to Black Lives Matter — the book shows the vital connections among Native American and Black communities in education.

Contributors to the book — scholars, educators and organizers — highlight the importance of activist-oriented teaching and learning “in community encampments and other movement spaces for the preservation and expansion of resistance education.”

Django Paris is the James A. & Cherry A. Banks Professor of Multicultural Education and directs the Banks Center for Educational Justice. Rae Paris is an assistant professor of English and affiliate of the center and Alayna Eagle Shield a research assistant. The book was published in April by Routledge.