CDTS Speaker Series: Professor Bianca C. Williams

About the lecture:

Black Feminisms, Emotion, and Radical Honesty as Praxis
How might we understand race, gender, and power better if we were to take emotion, and the knowledge that comes from emotional knowing, seriously? During this public dialogue, Bianca C. Williams (Bowdoin College) will be in conversation with moderator Nisrin Elamin (University of Toronto) about radical honesty as a Black feminist truth-telling praxis. Here, they will talk about the important ways emotion and truth-telling have shown up in both their multi-sited research-based explorations of race and gender, their classrooms, and in their organizing communities. 

About Professor Williams:
Bianca C. Williams (she/her) is an Endowed Chair in Race, Racism, and Racial Justice and the Matthew D. Branche Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Anthropology at Bowdoin College. She examines race, gender, and emotion in higher education and organizing communities, with a focus on Black women’s affective lives. The investigative thread that binds Williams’ organizing, teaching, and research is the question “How do Black people develop strategies for enduring and resisting the effects of racism and sexism, while attempting to maintain emotional wellness?” She has written about Black women, travel, and happiness; “radical honesty” as feminist pedagogy; white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and campus activism within the Movement for Black Lives; and writing while anxious. Williams is the author of the award-winning book The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (Duke U 2018), and co-editor of the volume Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education (SUNY 2021). She received the 2016 AAA & Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology, and the Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship Award in 2021.