From MSU News Service
The MSU Women’s Center, the Center for Science, Technology, Ethics and Society and the MSU African Students Association will host events in celebration of Black History Month in February.
The Montana State Women’s Center will host author and MSU professor Katherine Johnston as she presents a Sack Lunch Seminar on “Slavery and the Invention of Race.” The seminar will be held from noon to 1pm on Wednesday, February 14th, in the SUB Alumni Legacy Lounge. The event is free and open to the public. Attendees are asked to bring their own lunch.
Johnston will discuss the development of ideas of racial difference in the U.S. and larger Atlantic world. She will cover the origins of invented claims to slavery, their economic and political utility and their legacies.
Also during Black History Month, the MSU Center for Science, Technology, Ethics, and Society will host Autumn Womack, an associate professor of African American studies and English at Princeton University, who will present a lecture titled “Unruly Matters: Blackness, Aesthetics, and the late 19th-Century’s ‘New’ Data Regimes.” The lecture will be held at 5:30pm on Thursday, February 15th, in American Indian Hall, Room 166. Womack will discuss the interplay between early 20th-century data regimes, or data-producing technology systems, and Black life. This event is free and open to the public.
The African Students Association, a registered student organization, will host an evening celebrating Africa at its annual African Cultural Night. The free, public event will take place at 6pm on Sunday, February 25th, in the Strand Union Building ballrooms.
African Cultural Night will celebrate the food, fashion, drama, music and cultures of the African continent and diaspora. This year’s theme is “Ubuntu,” a South African phrase meaning “I am, because you are.”
MSU also hosted an event with author and filmmaker St. Clair Detrick-Jules on Feb. 7th in the Strand Union Building, Ballroom A. •
