Dr. Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico, will discuss the long tradition of settler violence and indigenous resistance in the U.S. Estes is the author of the book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019) and he co-edited Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement. In 2014, he co-founded The Red Nation, an Indigenous resistance organization. ***30 free copies of Dr. Estes’ book and Humanities Center bookmarks will be given away to participants as part of this event***

Dr. Chan Hellman is internationally renowned for his work on building a hope-centered response to trauma. Hellman is a professor in the Anne & Henry Zarrow School of Social Work and Founding Director of the Hope Research Center. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine and Department of Pediatrics for the OU College of Medicine and the Department of Health Promotion Science for the OU College of Public Health. With over 150 scholarly publications and countless workshop in the areas of child maltreatment, domestic violence, homelessness, etc., Chan has focused his work on sharing the science and power of hope in our ability to overcome trauma and thrive. If you’re interested in ways to build a hope-centered approach to trauma, then you won’t want to miss this discussion.

Join us for a virtual conversation between Dr. André Carrington and Dr. Rebecca Wanzo on representations of race in The Watchmen–and beyond. From comic books to science fiction, our acknowledgement of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature, television, and culture is more important than ever. Carrington is a scholar of race, gender, and genre in Black and American cultural production. His first book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minnesota, 2016) interrogates the cultural politics of race in the fantastic genres through studies of science fiction fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts. Rebecca Wanzo is a professor and chair of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her most recent book, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (NYU Press, 2020) examines how Black cartoonists have used racialized caricatures to criticize constructions of ideal citizenship, as well as the alienation of African Americans from such imaginaries.