"President Chisholm" by Sharon Hayes, donated to the ArtforPhiladelphia campaign. ArtforPhiladelphia campaign raises funds for the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund using donated limited-edition prints by local artists.
Questions that had been circulating prior to Memorial Day – like “what will life be like post-COVID?” – have now shifted into another kind of terrain, “What could life be like post-police?” How would we organize a truly anti-racist system of accountability and authority? How do we dismantle global white supremacy? For many, these have always been the questions motivating our research, activism, and art, but for others the questions have new urgency, and necessitate new approaches.
Moving into uncharted territory requires rethinking business “as usual,” rejecting the idea that at some point, maybe later, hopefully sooner, “things” will go “back to normal” and “we” will all fall back into the routines we knew and often (but not always) loved. This approach to the future is not only a kind of wishful thinking, but also obscures the hierarchies and inequalities that make up the normal and that have been so forcefully brought into view (again, for many) these last few months. Future-thinking requires infinite, polite deferment, accommodation, and patience, and emerges from a belief in modern, capitalist notions of perfectability. The pandemic has interrupted this future thinking, and riots have destabilized this deferral.
As many have noted, efforts to think and work in a decolonial way, to generate meaningful forms of repair, must also unveil the various ways in which we are all complicit in the forms of violence (to the environment, to each other) that are the legacies of capitalist modernity and nationalism. I am inspired, these days, by many things, of which I will share three…
Here are excerpts from an interview conducted with Gary Younge, a journalist I have long admired who has been part of a new progressive media outlet called Double Down news.
Here is information about a fundraising campaign Sharon Hayes and other Penn Design faculty have been involved with that is contributing limited-edition prints of their work to support the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund.
And here is an open letter to Mayor Jim Kenney written by the Youth Arts and Self-Empowerment Project advocating on behalf of arts and culture leaders within the city of Philadelphia asking for divestment from the police department.
WHAT DO COVID-19, POLICING, AND PARENTING HAVE TO DO WITH COMMUNITY THEATRE IN LIBERIA?
Jasmine Blanks Jones has been performing and writing plays since she was a child, long before she founded the B4 Youth Theatre group in Liberia. Now a PhD Candidate in Africana Studies and Education, Culture & Society (and a student with the Center for Experimental Ethnography), Jasmine recalls her high school experiences, when she was part of a large peer group of fellow performers, all seemingly on a path to performance-centered careers. However, on the perilous trek through an educational system that "served different students in different ways" Ms. Blanks Jones veered toward college studies in performance education, while highly talented peers inexplicably ended up on less prestigious pipelines, including incarceration...KEEP READING
WHEN STUDIES FALL APART
Student cooks and GSE collaborators at William L. Sayre Highschool watch over footage from the YouTube cooking show they are building with graduate students at the School District of Philadelphia- Penn Graduate Student of Education program.
How do you continue making a film when the access, plans, and conditions underlying it suddenly dissolve? Students in Amitanshu Das's class grappled with this question last semester when, in the midst of creating documentaries with/of students across Philadelphia highschools, the COVID-19 pandemic put an abrupt stop to both on-site filming and the school programs featured in the films. This month we are screening their films, and will be following up in July with conversations with the students about their process and their experience remotely and collaboratively editing films during this time of physical distancing.
In the SDP (School District of Philadelphia)-GSE (Graduate School of Education) Penn Film Program, students learn about ethnographic filmmaking by making films in the community. The program is led by founder Amitanshu Das (Senior Fellow and Director at the Penn GSE and the Annenberg School for Communication) with the Ethnographic Filmmaking courses taught by Das and Kathleen Hall. In the fall, Penn students first learn filmmaking and are introduced to ethnographic principles, approaches and methods. Planning for this year's program started more than a year ago in Spring 2019, when Philadelphia high schools were invited to apply to be one of three selected schools, finally resulting in Sayre Highschool, Girls High, and the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts being chosen...KEEP READING
VIRTUAL SCREENINGS: PDS-GSE FILMS
William L. Sayre High
Jean Chapiro &
Maryann Dreas &
We are pleased to announce the winners of our second round of graduate student summer funding at CEE! An interdisciplinary committee of faculty reviewed the impressive projects that were submitted to CEE for funding, resulting in fourteen funded summer research projects. These projects were submitted from across Penn, including graduate students from School of Arts and Sciences, a medical student from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, graduate students at the Annenberg School of Communication, students in the Graduate School of Education, and a graduate student at Penn Design.
Pablo Aguillera del Castillo (SAS)
Shelby Davies (CHOP)
Akudo Ejelonu (SAS)
Arlene Fernandez (Annenberg)
Jeremy Gallion (SAS)
Rabani Garg (GSE)
Juliet Glazer (SAS)
Amber Henry (SAS)
Breanna Moore (SAS)
Kimberly Noronha (Design)
Jake Nussbaum (SAS)
Farrah Rahaman (Annenberg)
Atenea Rosado-Viurques (GSE)
Rachael Stephens (GSE)