Dr. Monica M. White—professor, scholar and Andrew Carnegie Fellow for 2022-24—is Occidental College’s 2024 Stafford Ellison Wright Black Alumni Scholar-in-Residence. She will deliver a public lecture as part of her two-day campus residency.
There will be a reception preceding the talk, from 6-7 p.m.
The scholarship on the Great Migration concentrates on those who left the South, overlooking the millions of African American farmer families who stayed. Through life history interviews, archives, and family storytelling as method, this lecture analyzes the significance of the Paris Family as a case study of Black farmers' contribution to civil rights. Their story offers a lens to understand social movement activism across the lifespan, intergenerational activism, and how agriculture was used as a strategy of resistance and resilience.
Monica White, author of Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, is the Distinguished Chair of Integrated Environmental Studies, associate professor of Environmental Justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and past president of the Board of Directors for the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. She is the first Black woman to earn tenure in both the College of Agricultural Life Sciences (established 1889) and the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies (established 1970), to which she is jointly appointed.
As the founding director of the Office of Environmental Justice and Engagement (OEJ) at UW-Madison, White works toward bridging the gap between the university and the broader community by connecting faculty and students to community-based organizations that are working in areas of environmental/food/land justice toward their mutual benefit. She is also an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for 2022-24 and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology and the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. Read more about Monica White
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Created by Occidental’s Black Alumni Organization (BAO), the Stafford Ellison Wright Endowment enables distinguished Black scholars from a variety of fields, artists, elected officials and others to spend time in residence at Occidental each year. BAO members believe that a student’s educational experience will be enriched by in-depth contact with individuals who serve as symbols of excellence.
