Location: College of Communication, COM 101 640 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA 02215
Event Description:What does it mean to listen and learn from the quiet, haunted spaces and places of race and indigenous presence in the United States? Dr. Mark Auslander and Rev. Dr. Avis Williams discuss their collaborative strategies for recovering long-lost stories of individuals and communities whose lives left behind relatively little in terms of conventional textual documentation.
How do we help bring to light long-hidden stories through careful attention to physical objects and landscape features, in careful and respectful partnership with historically marginalized communities? Dr. Auslander and Dr. Williams explore the work of reconstructing the history associated with Ashley’s Sack, as well as collaborative work in helping restore narratives of enslavement and liberation embedded in rivers, forests, and cemeteries.
This event is sponsored by the Kilachand Honors College, CAS Department of African American Studies, and CAS Department of History of Art & Architecture.
Attendance: Kilachand students, you can register for this event in advance on Handshake here. At the event, a QR will be posted for you to check in. Please note that while registration is not mandatory, it should make the check-in process smoother. You must check in to earn co-curricular attendance credit for this event.
If you are not a Kilachand student joining us for this event, please know that you are welcome to join in person or via Zoom Webinar (Webinar ID: 966 4887 7307 | Passcode: 389291).
Learn more about our speakers
Dr. Mark Auslander
A sociocultural and historical anthropologist, Mark Auslander works at the intersection of ritual practice, aesthetics, environmental transformation, kinship, and political consciousness in sub-saharan Africa and the African Diaspora. As an Africanist, he has published on such topics as grassroots debates over green revolution technologies, land tenure transformations and the etiology of HIV/AIDS, modern mass witch-cleansing movements, the revitalization of precolonial political ceremonies, and creative re-readings of tradition-based African art by contemporary multimedia artists. Dr. Auslander’s Africanist work on kinship, aesthetics, place-making, and political cosmology informs his scholarship on race and cultural politics in the African Diaspora and North America.
Photo Credit: Emory photographer for the 2022 graduation banner.
Williams is a beloved graduate of Oxford College of Emory University and holds three additional Emory degrees: a BA in Chemistry from Emory College of Arts and Sciences, and both an MDiv and DMin from Candler School of Theology.
Williams was born and raised in Covington, was one of Oxford College’s earliest African American graduates, and has been a community leader in Newton County and the surrounding area for more than 40 years. She has led efforts to address health disparities and equity and justice issues in local African American communities, serving on the boards of hospitals and clinics and working to provide access to healthcare in schools and places of worship.
Williams is the owner of a Newton County environmental, health, and safety consulting firm, which provides training for federal, state, and local agencies and performed Phase I Environmental Site assessments. She also currently serves as the Community Liaison for the Putnam County Charter School System, building and strengthening family and community partnerships.
