Choi Auditorium

From slavery to the present, Black women healers have confronted the commodification and devaluation of Black life. Their work and thought thus transcended matters of individual health and addressed a wider array of social ills. Examining Black women's healing practices across time reveals a politics of survival and reclamation meant to counter the hostile climate of slavery and its many afterlives.

Lecture is free and open to the public. Reception to follow at 5:30pm in the AGC 2nd floor rotunda.

The event is free; tickets are available through Eventbrite.

Rater’s goal in sharing her family’s experience – which inspired a key character in “Doubt,” the 2017 CBS legal series she and husband Tony Phelan created – is to help educate people on transgender identity as well as discuss her struggles for more transgender visibility on TV.

Fania Davis is a leading national voice on restorative justice, a quickly emerging field which invites a fundamental shift in the way we think about and do justice. She is a long-time social justice activist, Civil Rights trial attorney, restorative justice practitioner, writer, and scholar with a Ph.D. in Indigenous Knowledge. A founder and currently Director of Restorative Justice of Oakland Youth (RJOY), Fania served as counsel to the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers.

Currently the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and professor of environmental science and policy at Harvard University, Holdren also served as science adviser to President Barack Obama from January 2009 to January 2017, the longest-serving science adviser in the history of the position.

Honors include being awarded one of the first MacArthur Prizes (1981), the Volvo International Environment Prize (1993), the Tyler Prize for Environment (2000) and the Heinz Prize for Public Policy (2001).

Mahdavi's research interests include gendered labor, human trafficking, migration, sexuality, human rights, youth culture, transnational feminism and public health in the context of changing global and political structures. Mahdavi received her PhD in Sociomedical Sciences and Anthropology, MPhil in Anthropology and Master's in International Affairs from Columbia University. She also studied Diplomacy and World Affairs as an undergraduate at Occidental College.

All are welcome.

Mary Thompson-Jones is the Chair of Women in National Security and Diplomacy at the U.S. Naval War College. Her book, "To the Secretary: Leaked Embassy Cables and America's Foreign Policy Disconnect" (Norton 2016), was praised by Joseph Nye as "a fascinating account of how diplomacy really works from the bottom up." Her diplomatic experience spans a 23-year career as a foreign service officer in leadership roles in the Czech Republic, Canada, Guatemala, Spain, and Washington, D.C.