The seventh annual Center for Communication, Difference and Equity (CCDE) Conference, “Resistance Through Resilience,” will be held in collaboration with the (UWRL).

The two-day conference will consist of listening sessions, workshops and a spotlight panel. This year’s theme builds off last year’s event, “.”

“What we started to hear overwhelmingly from those who were involved in the ‘Quarantining While Black’ project was that they were exhausted,” said, CCDE director and UW communication professor, “and that they needed other ways to help take care of themselves and their community members.”

With that in mind, Joseph and Resilience Lab director started discussing how to bring contemplative practices into anti-racist work. A grant from the, a nonprofit based in Virginia that was co-founded by the Dalai Lama, the CCDE and the Resilience Lab to unite and address those issues.

The “Resistance Through Resilience” training and speaker series brings together leaders on campus and in the community to focus on mindfulness and compassion-based practices as tools for interrupting racism.

For months, those thoughts leaders have engaged in conversations about resistance and resilience, said , a doctoral student in communication and a CCDE research assistant. Heading into the conference, she’s most excited for the opportunity to reflect on those discussions.

“Resisting is tiring work,” moultrie said. “The point of this conversation is to have the opportunity to say, ‘How do we tend to ourselves through the work? How do we tend to our bodies? How do we tend to be present in those moments?’ How do we say to ourselves, ‘I want to affect change in my communities, but I also want to take care of myself?’”

Kennedy said working with the CCDE was a chance for the Resilience Lab to think deliberately about racism and how to address it: with a set of practices designed to help people build dialogue.

“I think we are really in the moment where we’re needing these types of skills to not just think about, ‘How I disrupt this moment of microaggression,’ but also, ‘What do I do with the surging anxiety that happens before and afterward?’” Joseph said. “I hope people will leave the conference feeling like they have some skills in that area.”

The conference will open May 18 with two online sessions. The morning session, “Everyday Microaggressions, Everyday Awareness” will serve as a primer on the forms of lived discrimination. The afternoon session will be: “The Power of Inquiry: Introducing Questioning as the First Anti-Racism Tool for Interrupting Microaggressions.”

“Given what we know about college, mental health and well-being, we know that BIPOC students are experiencing high rates of mental health struggles,” Kennedy said. “That points to social factors like the climate and culture and experiences of imposter syndrome, discrimination and microaggressions.”

On May 19, four community leaders will participate in an afternoon spotlight panel. The speakers are, an information systems retiree who grew up in Texas during the Jim Crow era;, acting chair and associate professor in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health at the UW;, assistant director of graduate student affairs in the UW Graduate School; and Marsha Rule, retired editor of UW Medicine Newsroom.

“The way that we do our work matters,” Kennedy said. “Part of resisting is working collaboratively rather than at cross purposes with one another toward common outcomes. I think coming together is part of how we’re going to create better outcomes for students and all of us. How we work together matters.”

The conference is sponsored by the Mind & Life Institute, the UW’s Diversity and Inclusion Seed Grants, the UW Department of Communication and the Office of Undergraduate Academic Affairs.

Not long after the 2016 general election, faculty at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s (CCDE) recognized a need for students, especially BIPOC students, to talk about their experience of race.

The hope was that by listening to each other and creating a community of experiences, it would be possible to disrupt racism in all its forms.

Under the leadership of the Center’s director, , students, alumni and community members started sharing their stories: when they first experienced discrimination; what it was like to be Black at UW; growing up in Seattle’s Central District and watching as the neighborhood gentrified; drinking from a water fountain labelled “Black only;” or quarantining while Black during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What emerged is , a nationally recognized program based on Joseph’s “Radical Listening” approach, which teaches people how to listen fully without judgment. Begun as a , the program now has expanded to embrace the BIPOC Seattle community, partnering with the .

On Thursday, the Interrupting Privilege Website Launch + Radical Listening Party is scheduled at Othello — UW Commons and online. The and celebration are the culmination of five years of work, documenting people’s experiences and building community.

“It’s an intimate opportunity to engage with your community,” said Meshell Sturgis, a UW doctoral student in communication who first took Interrupting Privilege as a class, and now helps facilitate the program. “It’s really geared toward communicating across differences.”

Building on the original intent ­— to bring different generations together to talk about race — Interrupting Privilege evolved organically, and the website is a way to bring more people into the conversation, said Joseph, who also is a professor of communication in the College of Arts & Sciences and associate dean for equity & justice and student affairs in the Graduate School.

“This has completely reshaped my work,” she recently told . A scholar trained in media studies, Joseph has moved from studying texts to engaging in conversations. “I’ve seen the need for people to learn to speak about race, and to speak to each other about race.”

As Interrupting Privilege grew, so did the catalogue of recorded, intimate conversations about race and racism in the Pacific Northwest. To build the website, teams curated those conversations. The site organizes the dialogues into themes that include COVID-19, advice for teachers, Black in Seattle, mental health and more.

Some of the dozens of conversations that are available include: “Black woman shares how microaggressions translate to online with video meetings”; “Older generation Black Seattleite reminisces about what the Central District looked like in the past and how much it has changed”; and “Two Black men share stories of when they first ‘realized they were Black.’”

“The Interrupting Privilege program has made our community a better place because it has equipped people of color with the tools and strategies to dismantle racism and privilege where it exists,” said LaNesha DeBardelaben, president and CEO of the Northwest African American Museum. “It is in the pausing, and the listening, and the exchange that we learn, reflect and gain greater clarity.”

People’s experience of race is different depending on where they’re from. Someone from the Pacific Northwest may not experience overt racism, but they still encounter microaggressions and racism in more subtle ways, said , an assistant professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside who completed her doctorate at UW and helped produce many of the recordings on the website.

By creating a website, people from other parts of the U.S. and the world can hear what it’s like to be Black in Seattle.

“It is helpful to put those stories out there and to have the ability for other communities that are maybe working on similar projects to connect with, to see how experiences are similar or different,” Brekke said.

DeBardelaben said the program is “a necessary part of our healing process” and will have a compounding impact and influence as more people learn and experience being in conversation about race.

While Interrupting Privilege may not change the hearts and minds of those calcified in racist beliefs, the collection can be a resource for people who are interested in these kinds of discussions and in interrogating some of their assumed beliefs of the ways in which they were raised.

“We still have a long way to go,” Joseph said. “This is not the moment for us to let up in any way, this is a moment for us to continue to push hard.”

For more information, contact Joseph at rljoseph@uw.edu.

There’s a mental health crisis on college campuses across the country.

Recent show that 53% of first-year students reported a substantial increase in mental and emotional exhaustion. Inside Higher Ed that 30% of students noted increased depression, 27% said they experienced greater loneliness and 20% felt more hopeless.

Traditionally, the intervention to help students was to send them to individual counseling. While that remains an important pillar of support, the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý is broadening the way it provides help not just to students, but to faculty and staff as well. Using a broad toolbox of mindfulness, compassion and well-being centered programming, officials are trying to change campus culture, said , director of the and co-chair of the .

“By aligning and strengthening the work that we’re doing as a campus writ large, around supporting student mental health, we’re actually preventing some students from getting to a point where they need more serious intervention,” she said. “We can bolster the resilience of folks within the system at multiple levels and in doing so, support our entire community.”

Research over the past several decades has shown that teaching social and emotional learning skills to K-12 students has promoted higher academic success and persistence to graduation. Extending that into higher education makes sense, officials say, catering to students’ emotional intelligence, better preparing them for a career and allowing them to be their whole selves.

Students at UW were arriving on campus with skills to succeed, but not to stumble and then rise, said Ed Taylor, vice provost and dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs.

“When they actually got here and encountered situations where they might trip up or even fail, students were underprepared for that,” Taylor said. “What students were saying — high on their list of things that concerned them — was their fear of failure and not being able to recover when they did encounter difficulties or challenges once they left home and came to college for the first time.”

Facing uncertainty, let downs and even failure is part of the college experience.

“They should be stepping into those challenges, especially here,” Taylor said.

The Resilience Lab helps students — and now faculty and staff, too — do just that.

Founded by Anne Browning in 2015, the Resilience Lab originally was intended to help support and retain undergraduates by helping them cope with stressors, including failure. Then in 2019, Browning transitioned to become assistant dean for well-being at UW Medicine. That’s when now-director Kennedy came on board.

Officials decided to take a step back to view student well-being and mental health along a continuum, broadening the scope of the Resilience Lab to embrace faculty and staff as part of the mission.

Today, the Resilience Lab’s three-fold mission is to support UW students in becoming change-makers on campus and in their communities; provide students, staff and instructors with training and tools to build their self-awareness, respond to stress more effectively and cultivate compassion; and advocate for policies and systemic changes that promote a more resilient, compassionate and inclusive campus culture.

They do this through a growing variety of programs that includes research, community building, instruction and programming.

Resilience Lab programs focus on well-being

��(Resilient Attitudes and Living) is an initiative that promotes mental health and well-being by equipping participants with cognitive behavioral skills to manage emotions and cope with stressful situations, mindfulness skills to strengthen self-awareness, and practices to encourage compassion for themselves and others.��Be REAL was developed and evaluated by the UW’s Center for Child & Family Well-Being and, in partnership with the Resilience Lab, expanded to staff and students on all three UW campuses.

To date, most of the Be REAL skills groups and trainings have been open to the entire UW community, but moving forward the intention is to develop expertise within university units and departments. For example, several people in the College of Engineering went through the Be REAL program over the summer and the entire staff at the UW Alumni Association are scheduled for fall quarter, Kennedy said.

“It’s really encouraging to see these teams wanting to learn together and dive into this work together,” she said.

Tyneshia Valdez, who works as the assistant to the chair in the Department of Astronomy, said that participating in Be REAL has helped her through the pandemic, return to work and in interactions with others.

“If I’m more graceful and less burnt out and I do things to make myself happy, I know that that will really trickle downstream,” she said. “Be REAL is surprising. It’s free. It’s easy to do. You don’t have to bring a lot with you, just yourself, your authentic self.”

In 2020, the Resilience Lab published an 87-page combining research, best practices and personal testimony tailored to support the whole student. The guidebook was distributed to all instructors, deans and chancellors and advising staff across the UW. Leaders convened a tri-campus community of practice where more than 40 instructors and staff across nearly 20 academic departments still meet monthly to exchange ideas and teaching strategies. A new community of practice started within the School of Medicine this fall across their five-state region.

“What we’re doing is creating both a venue and a map — if you will — toward healing and compassion in our community,” Dean Taylor said.

Partnering to ‘interrupt racism’

In a new partnership, the��, led by , and the Resilience Lab are developing a new training and speaker series, “Resistance through Resilience,”��that focuses on the application of mindfulness and compassion-based practices to interrupt racism.

Prior to COVID-19, many people wanted to come together in community to talk about racism and combat microaggressions, but the months of isolation — combined with a national dialogue sparked by the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis — left the BIPOC community and other anti-racism activists feeling exhausted, said Joseph, who also is a professor of communication in the College of Arts & Sciences and associate dean for equity & justice and student affairs in the Graduate School.

“People also needed to attend to the health of themselves and to their communities while still continuing to do the vitally important daily work of protesting racism,” Joseph said.

Bringing together the Resilience Lab and the Center for Communication, Diversity and Equity will help lead to systemic change, leaders say.

“We’re really committed to addressing the systems of oppression and racism that exist, and to think critically about why we have a system that promotes so much stress,” Kennedy said.

Fueled by a $15,000 from , a Diversity and Inclusion Seed Grant and Communication Department funding, the groups will focus on bringing mindfulness and compassion-based practices together to address racial exhaustion, nourish each other and confront everyday oppression.

“The mindfulness and stress-reduction skills Megan has taught me provide me personally with other strategies, and give a whole other set of tools to my students, my community members, people that I know and love and am connected to. These are ways to make their lives healthier,” Joseph said. “The CCDE’s new partnership with the Resilience Lab just gives me hope in this moment, and I think that that’s what we need to make it through right now and to continue garnering the strength to fight.”

Sowing resilience through seed grants

In partnership with the��,��the Resilience Lab awards����to support projects that cultivate resilience, compassion and sustainability at the UW. To date, over $118,000 has been disbursed to fund projects led by students, faculty and staff across all three campuses.

For example, UW Bothell Assistant Professor received a grant to support BIPOC students in sharing their personal stories during the pandemic. Chen had facilitated similar story circles prior to COVID-19, but had yet to bring them online. Chen worked with graduate students and undergraduates, and they came together in a safe, empathetic community to share challenges they’d faced through a difficult year.

“It was something different than what they got in their day-to-day in their classes,” said Chen. “It was a space of support, a chance to build community in a different way.”

Chen, who participates in the monthly Resilience Lab community-of-practice meetings, continues to work with BIPOC students in telling their own stories as part of the larger project, “Breathing in a Time of Disaster.” And, they’re implementing techniques in the classroom, like playing music or doing a grounding exercise to start class.

A path forward

The UW’s Resilience Lab also is part of the Flourishing Academic Network, an emergent consortium of research and teaching centers throughout North America. Together, the institutions are collaborating to explore innovative pathways that integrate academics and student affairs, with the overall goal of supporting student mindfulness and well-being.

This work has taken on new meaning during the pandemic, as students, staff and faculty were forced into months of being apart. Now, everyone is facing the stress of returning to a new normal.

“We don’t want to go back to business as usual but rather develop consciousness about how we’re returning to campus,” Kennedy said. “Staff and students are turning to the Resilience Lab to learn some strategies for managing stress effectively.”

That approach has made a world of difference for , a lecturer in Landscape Architecture who works at UW Friday Harbor Laboratories and is part of the cohort of faculty engaged in the Resilience Lab’s work.

“This work has been transformational in my ability and desire to stay in academia,” Sullivan said.

She’s using a Resilience Lab seed grant to bring the compassion work to the College of Built Environments. She is also helping support compassion and mindfulness at Friday Harbor Labs and is participating in the cross-campus community of practice.

“Faculty are empowered and supported to reflect on and make needed change in higher education, and in turn, model resilience culture in our lives, disciplines and to our colleagues and students,” she said.��“The results have been substantial.”

A strong culture of care and competence around these compassion issues is needed in all disciplines and is the backbone to a thriving��and resilient��university environment, she said.

“There is simply not enough vulnerability and compassion in higher education,” Sullivan said. “We are not robots. We can take the agency to change this culture��— one interaction at a time. In fact, we already are.”

For more information about the Resilience Lab, contact Kennedy at meganken@uw.edu.

The ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s 2021 will examine ‘Quarantining while Black.’ The two-day virtual event, scheduled for the morning of June 1 and the afternoon of June 2, is an invitation to radically listen to the ways in which Black Americans in Seattle and beyond have experienced the dual pandemics: COVID-19, with its disproportionate impact on Black communities, and the worldwide racial reckoning that emerged after the murder of George Floyd.

“We have been honored to host conversations with Black people from all walks of life including graduate students, police officers, librarians, a hairdresser, tech workers, retirees, artists and many more,” said , the center’s director and the Presidential Term Professor in the UW Department of Communication. “This conference showcases the Interrupting Privilege research group’s year of work. Our researchers have done a phenomenal job of thoughtfully facilitating conversations, carefully coding transcripts and artfully clipping out dialogues.”

That research team includes communication graduate students Lando Tosaya, Laura Irwin, jas�� l. Moultrie, and Meshell Sturgis; political science graduate student Thomas Locke; education graduate student Kaleb Germinaro; social work graduate student Sasha Duttchoudhury and undergraduates Chardonnay Beaver and Mari Watkins.

The conference is an extension of Interrupting Privilege, a community-engaged dialogue program centering to conduct action-oriented research that interrupts structures of power. Through stories, participants feel a sense of agency when their voices are intentionally listened to, and audiences empathize with personal stories when they are presented conversationally.

Scheduled conference sessions include:

• What does it mean to Quarantine While Black and How do we Radically Listen?
• Shifting Priorities: How Quarantining Changed Our Lives
• Roots in Seattle: Where is “Black Seattle” Today?
• Stressors: Feeling Trauma through the Dual Pandemics
• Policing While Black: Black Police Officers’ Stories of Racism and Care
• Community(Self-) Care: Healing Ourselves by Healing with Community

The conference is free, but is required.

For more information, contact Joseph at rljoseph@uw.edu.

In her new book, , ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý associate professor of communication, explores how African-American women celebrities, producers and even audiences use “postracial discourse” — the thinking that American society has evolved beyond racial discrimination and strife — to refute the idea of postracialism itself.

“” was published in October by New York University Press.

In the book she describes a sort of “tightrope” that Black celebrity women must walk: “Do they call out racism only to face accusations of being called ‘racist’ themselves? Or respond to racism in code only to face accusations of selling out?”

Joseph answered a few questions about “Postracial Resistance” for UW News.

How do you define “postracialism” in the book?

Postracialism is the myth that racism — and race — are relics of the past. It leads to the silencing of any form of race-talk, or of forthrightly identifying racism. Postracial resistance entails performing postracialism, or put another way, following certain conventions of postracialism (such as not using explicit race talk), in order to resist racism.

In relating your own experiences, you write that you learned to stay quiet in some situations and “sing freely” in others … “I learned how to be strategically ambiguous.” Strategic ambiguity is a key term in your book — how do you define it?

Strategic ambiguity is the main tool of postracial resistance. It’s a way to speak back to racism — often without “speaking” (at least not immediately) at all. Strategic ambiguity is a tool of strategic silence, for example, that you might use when you’re experiencing a microaggression and you feel as though you will be punished if you respond.

To put it another way: Strategic ambiguity is a tool that the sole person of color in an all-White space might use when she has experienced racism/sexism (racialized sexism) but realizes that defending herself will result in her being blamed, shamed or further discriminated against.

Instead she might choose to play the long game, respond in ways that do resist (and might even shift an institution), but do so through using what I describe as postracial codes where she does not immediately call out the racist/sexist action.

As an aside, this is the exact opposite theory to what I teach in my Interrupting Microaggressions workshops — which tries to empower people to respond to interpersonal discrimination right away.�� But I think we need all of the tools we can have in our toolboxes in order to fight discrimination.

You write: “I contend that in its very denial of the uses of race, postraciality remains embroiled in precisely what it claims not to be … postrace is an ideology that cannot escape racialization, complete with controlling images or racialized stereotypes.” Would you explain?

I think this line boils down to my dislike of how power can impose silencing. To me postrace is a device of silence. What postrace means to me is “we (people who are uncomfortable with race) are going to act as though that race is irrelevant because we simply don’t want to talk about all of the complexities of race, and moreover, how we all fit into the race puzzle — how we are all complicit in constructing the racist fabric of this country.”

Postrace sews up this silence, just hoping that race will go away if we don’t talk about it. But talking about things doesn’t erase them — so all of the old forms of racism — including stereotyping — are still there. Ideologies of postracialism simply make it more difficult for us to have discussions about race, and racism.

Postracial resistance allows us to flip the power and decide when we want to be silent, not simply having to be forced in to silence because of others’ discomfort.

The use of strategic ambiguity, you write, can, if unintentionally, “devolve into playing into racism.” In what ways is this so? ��

I think that all of us who use strategic ambiguity have to understand that it’s a potentially dangerous tool — when you don’t call something out right away, those around you who have, for example, made the racist/sexist remark might never realize what they said is a problem, or worse, they think they can they get a pass. famously wrote that “the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house,” and strategic ambiguity is arguably a tool of the master. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s one that we shouldn’t use – that we can’t slowly erode the structural integrity of the house by sneaking out a brick at a time. But it comes with clear challenges.

You study Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey and television producer Shonda Rhimes in the book. Why these three?����

Well the book is, in many ways, a love letter to Michelle Obama. From when she first came on the scene in the 2008 presidential campaign I was so taken by every aspect of how she had to comport herself. I watched with horror when she had to endure extreme, virulent racism, and delight when she experienced over-the-top adulation.

I began writing about one incident where she was attacked in a racist/sexist manner — and had to respond in a strategically ambiguous manner. From there I started looking for other incidents where high-profile Black women celebrities used what I started to deem postracial resistance in their responses to racist/sexist attack (and that were unlike Michelle Obama’s responses). Oprah and were two other perfect examples.

The media’s focus on a few Black women celebrities, you write, enables it to ignore larger issues of Black female disenfranchisement, and shows that the idea racism is ending as “an empty and dangerous lie.” How might media better balance its approach?

I think that even though it’s 2018 the media can fall into the old tropes of covering issues in silos: Racism happens to Black men, sexism happens to White women. Black women’s suffering becomes erased in this formula — but the public might not realize this because of the representational omnipresence of Black women celebrities.

It feels pretty simple to me: When media is covering an issue, any issue, Black women, in tandem with all women of color, need to be represented.

In the second half of your book you write about joining a group of young Black women to watch the popular show “America’s Next Top Model.” You studied their response to “representations of women of color on television who perform strategic ambiguity.” What did you learn?

In this book I didn’t just want to propose a theory as I had in my first book. I wanted to exercise this theory with real-life folks. What I learned with my audience study was that the young women did not believe — at all — in strategic ambiguity. They believed in speaking truth to power, in calling out racism and sexism forthrightly and immediately. And when they identified someone on their screens — like Tyra Banks — performing strategic ambiguity they skewered her for it immediately.

Now, I think some of this response was generational — they were younger women, idealistic, bolstered in their college classes and not yet in the workplace — and some of it was that they were imagining their responses while in the company of only other women of color. There was a certain safety in their girls having their backs — they could respond in any way they wanted and be validated.

When I write about strategic ambiguity, I talk about it as something one has to perform when we’re essentially all alone, and there’s not someone there who sees us, who can witness our discrimination, and can help us respond in ways that all can hear. It’s a strategy of the desperate!

Can the ideas of your book be universalized to speak to all underrepresented populations? If so, what would you suggest as its take-away message?�� ��

Absolutely! The experience of being “the only” representative of a population who is minoritized — whether that means being the person of color, the out LGBTQ+, the person with a disability — is fairly universal. We learn how to speak in certain similarly coded ways for our safety.

One of the most exciting parts, for me, about having a book come out is sharing it with different audiences, and the “Postracial Resistance” audiences I’ve met so far have been full of different types of folks who have identified with having to use strategic ambiguity because of all kinds of underrepresentation.

You are also founding director of the UW . The center held a conference on race and media this spring. What’s next for both you and the center?

As always, we have a lot going on! We have been collecting data for our Generation Mixed Goes to School project, which is the title of my third book (with my co-author, Bay Area psychologist Allison Briscoe-Smith). We will be sharing some of our first stories from the book at our .

This year our signature program — our intergeneration, antiracist dialogue program — is growing with different UW populations, including the program and the program. In the spring we will partner again with the Alumni Association. Our research team is working on papers based off data from Interrupting Privilege program.

Finally, our annual conference next spring is on Racial Categories and the 2020 Census, so we will be gearing up for that soon too. Our community is hungry for the tangible tools to fight racism right now, and we aim to provide those tools.

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For more information, contact Joseph at rljoseph@uw.edu.

The conference will be held Thursday through Saturday May 10 to 12, in the Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center. The event is organized by staff and faculty of the center, including , UW associate professor of communication, its founder and director. The full schedule is listed .

, professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, will give the keynote address at 7 p.m. Thursday, under the title “In These Dark Times: The (Re)Making of a Radical Black Public Sphere.”

“This conference is an opportunity for scholars to share their cutting-edge work on all aspects of race and media,” Joseph said. “Studying race and media is so important because in our starkly segregated lives, the media is one of the few places that people engage regularly with folks who are different races than themselves. But what happens when racialized difference only happens on our screens?�� This is what we’ll be talking about.

“It will also focus on how the rhetoric of post-racialism — which Joseph called “the idea that racism, and maybe even race itself are figments of the past” — has combined with an increasing threat to ethnic studies and “weakened our ability to call attention to race.”

The conference will bring scholars to Seattle from about two dozen institutions nationwide. Several UW faculty will present or facilitate discussions. These will include:

• , associate professor of anthropology, will lead a discussion on “Producing Race Behind the Screens”
• , associate professor of American ethnic studies, will lead a discussion of “Sonic (Re)Collection: Memory and Resistance through Sound”
• , assistant professor in the Information School, will lead a discussion on “Racial and Spatial Signifiers: Negotiations of Self (Re)presentation”

Also, Joseph will host a lunchtime discussion Thursday on “Balance, Children, and Other Academic Juggling Acts” and , associate professor in the Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies Department, will host a discussion of “Race, Media, and Public Scholarship for Faculty of Color.”

Other presentations include:

• “The Lessons of Failure: The Networks and Latina/o Sitcoms of the ’80s and ’90s”
• “Black Women Showrunners’ Politics of Representation”
• “From Post-Race to Post-Truth? Media and the New Era of Overt Racism”
• “Because You Watched: Algorithmic Identities and What It Means To Be Latina/o According To Netflix”
• “Post-Race in HBO’s ‘Westworld'”

On the final afternoon, the conference will present several collaborative projects and video presentations from researchers in the School of Public Health, College of Education, UW Bothell’s Digital Futures Lab and the Information School.

Joseph said, “With this conference we hope to foster a space of dialogue and critique around the most important issues of race and media today.”

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For more information or for press access, contact Joseph at rljoseph@uw.edu.

, ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý associate professor of communication, has guest co-edited a special triple issue of the interdisciplinary journal with her former mentor and dissertation adviser, Jane Rhodes of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Joseph’s own article in the issue focuses on the creator of the television show “Grey’s Anatomy,” set in Seattle.

The special edition, the guest editors , resulted from a panel discussion called “The Right Representation: Race, Gender, and Black Respectability Politics in the Media” held at the 2014 meeting of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. The issue’s wide-ranging articles on respectability politics in the media range from magazines Jet and Ebony to reality TV show “Preachers of LA” and the lives of pioneering African American scientists and artists.

“The ideals of respectability and the regulation of so-called appropriate behavior have loomed large in the lives of African Americans and other minoritized groups for generations,” said Joseph, who is also founding director of the UW .

The panel’s organizers expected a “lively conversation” about the historical and contemporary aspects of the politics of respectability, but the response was much greater.

“What we found was that the overflowing crowd, while interested in the individual papers, was really focused on the larger topic of how to make sense of race and respectability in our highly politicized and fraught cultural moment.”

Organizing the panel along with Joseph were colleagues of the University of Michigan, of Rutgers University and , professor and chair of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who also co-edited the triple issue.

Talking later, they agreed there was much more to say on the topic: “We wanted to further interrogate how the representations of marginalized people bear the weight of depicting whole communities, cultures and races,” they wrote.

The first part of the special issue has articles that take a historical view of respectability politics, and the second part “examines contemporary examples of African American engagement with and struggles over respectability politics.”

Joseph’s own in the issue was about the respectability politics of , the “showrunner” or creative force behind the television show “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Joseph wrote: “In the shift from the pre-Obama era to the #BlackLivesMatter era, Rhimes’s careful negotiation of the press demonstrates that, in the former moment, to be a respectable Black woman is to perform strategic ambiguity, or not speak frankly about race, while in the latter, respectable Black women can and must engage in racialized self-expression, and thus redefine the bounds of respectability.”

Souls is housed in the African American Studies department of the University of Illinois at Chicago and is edited by Barbara Ransby, a professor of history there as well as an activist and president of the National Women’s Studies Association.

The triple issue, Joseph said, broke the journal’s record for submissions for a special issue.

Joseph holds adjunct appointments in the Department of American Ethnic Studies and the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies.

Respectability politics also figures in the current era of protest, Joseph added: “What forms of protest we use, the language of our protest, and whose voice gets heard in a protest are all regulated by respectability.”

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For more information, contact Joseph at rljoseph@uw.edu.

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