November 4, 2020
9:30 a.m. Welcome
Dean Lacy Ford, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina
10:00 a.m. What 2020 has taught us: On Restoring and Reclaiming our Mental Health and Wellness
Napoleon Wells, PhD, Clinical Psychologist
Shari Dade, PhD, LP, Psychologist, Key Consultant, & Founder of Everyday Psychology, LLC
April Scott, PhD, Associate Director of Mental Health Initiatives at the University of South Carolina
Sterling Watson, PsyD, Assistant Director of Training, Counseling and Psychiatry at the University of South Carolina
2:00 p.m. Policing and Alternatives in 2020
Aparna Polavarapu, JD, Associate Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina, Founder and Executive Director of the South Carolina Restorative Justice Initiative
Geoffrey Alpert, PhD, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina
Kirk Foster, Ph.D., MSW, MDiv, Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and InclusionAssociate Professor in the College of Social Work at the University of South Carolina
Seth Stoughton, JD, Associate Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina
4:00 p.m. Historic and Recent Ways that Whiteness Polices and Controls Bodies Dialogue Activity
Ed Lee, EdD, Senior Director of the Alben W. Barkley Forum for Debate, Deliberation, and Dialogue at Emory University
(Conference attendees will be guided through a series of small group dialogues discussing issues of policing and bodies)
6:00 p.m. Keynote Speech
Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Heavy was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction and the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction. It was named a best book of 2018 by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly.
November 5, 2020
9:30 a.m. Welcome Jennifer Gunter, PhD, Director, Collaborative on Race
10:00 a.m. Bodies and Activism in 2020
Don Polite, Jr., Community Activist
Jazmyne McCrae, VP of the Board of Directors and Lead Organizer for the Midlands, Repeal the Heritage Act
Aditi Srivastav Bussells, PhD, MPH, Community Activist
2:00 p.m. Talking About Dance as Radical Labor
This is an artist talk with Associate Professors Tanya Wideman-Davis and Thaddeus Davis from the Department of Theatre and Dance and the African American Studies Program. As Co-directors of Wideman Davis Dance, the two dance makers and artists have used the Covid-19 pandemic to re-evaluate their practice of site-specific performativity and investigate how the radical insertion of black dancing bodies hold a particular value in historic architectural sites. In this talk they will discuss their current work “Migratuse Ataraxia,” the effects of covid-19 on their practice, and quarantine thoughts that have sparked new ways of thinking about social justice and art-making.
Tanya Wideman-Davis, Co-Artistic Director of Wideman/Davis Dance, Associate Professor at The University of South Carolina
Thaddeus Davis, Co-Artistic Director of Wideman/Davis Dance, Associate Professor at The University of South Carolina.