New Directions in the Study of Global Africa

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

This panel, comprising a multidisciplinary group of graduate students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, offers insight into new areas of research in the study of Global Africa across time and space. Intersectional and transnational in breadth, papers include discussions of the connections among the asylum, slavery, race, and settler colonialism in early-nineteenth-century Illinois; the underrepresentation of Black women in STEM; contemporary Cuba and its use of sports in advancing African liberation; and community opposition among African American and African residents to the Obama Library in Chicago. Taken together, these papers, by a new generation if scholars, offer new ways of thinking about the U.S. Midwest, Cuba, community organizing, Black women, carcerality, academia, and, above all, about the meandering and complex flow of possibilities, struggles, and landscapes embodying freedom struggles across the African world, now, then, and in the future.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Desirée McMillion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

Individual Presentations

• The Underrepresentation of Black Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Fields in the Twenty-First Century - Joanna Adewunmi

• Contemporary Cuba, Sports, Internationalism, and Global African Liberation - Omar Hernandez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• South Side African and African American Community Opposition to the Obama Presidential Center - OLUWATOBILOBA Adewunmi