About this English Conference
Join us Friday, May 5th for “Where Is Academic Work?” the annual English Student Association Graduate Student Conference featuring keynote speakers Akua Gyamerah, Arthur Musah, and Mary Catherine (MC) Kinniburgh. MC Kinniburgh is an alum of the CUNY Graduate Center, who will be speaking in the morning about her archival work on 20th century poets. Meanwhile, Arthur Mussah and Akua Gyamerah will speak in the afternoon about their activist work for queer rights in Ghana and the diaspora, and how it relies on decolonial theory.
The format for this conference will at build conversation over the course of a single day, where all presentations and discussions will take place in the same room, the Skylight Room at the CUNY Graduate Center.
SCHEDULE:
Friday May 5th, CUNY Graduate Center, Skylight Room (9100), 9th Floor, 9am-3pm
8:45 Open & Coffee
9:00 Opening Remarks: Sam O’Hana
9:05 Keynote Session: MC Kinniburgh
9:35 Session 1: Sites of Science
- Rilquer Mascarenhas: “Studying Birds in the Depth of the Atlantic Forest”
- Kim Fernandes, “Patchwork and/as Carework: On Continuing Fieldwork Through the
Pandemic & Beyond”
10:10 Session 2: Locations of Creative Practice
- Steffen Fischer: “The passport: a cultural device to engender a ‘designerly’ way of
being” - Andrea Liu: “Dispatch from the Artist Residency: Bifurcation between
“International” vs. “Regional” Artist”
10:45 Break
11:00 Session 3: Cash & Campus
- Natalie Goodman: “Academic Work, Working Academics: Service Industry
Narratives and the Precarious University” - Kiran Saili: “Grad School is The Best Paying Job I’ve Ever Had; And Still: “... Race,
Class, Sex [And Graduate Labor]”
11:35 Session 4: College and its Systems
- Ian Williams: “In-between disciplines and campuses: a diagrammatic view from
Social Welfare” - Rani Srinivasan & DeVaughn Harris: “Academic Writing as Worksite: Transitioning
Ideas of Writing from the Isolated to the Communal”
12:10 Lunch
1:00 Keynote Session: Akua Gyamerah & Arthur Musah
2:00 Session 5: Postcoloniality & Place
- Shyam Patel: “I Stood at the Border”
- Liyang Dong: “Archiving Testimonial Work of Resistance: Undocumented Chinese
Female Immigrants in Detention”
2:35 Close
3:30 Reception & Poetry Reading featuring Jessica Femiani in the English Lounge (4406)
Cosponsored by the English Student Association of the PhD Program in English, the Postcolonial Studies Group, the Doctoral and Graduate Students’ Council, and the Center for Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center.
