First Fridays
Emory College and the James Weldon Johnson Institute present: First Fridays at 4: Emory Faculty Scholarship on Race. Emory professors will share their latest research on topics related to race, difference and equity.
Schedule of Events
APRIL 1, 2022: LITERATURE OF Liminal America
April’s speaker is Dr. Tiphanie Yanique, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing. She will discuss the topic, Literature of Liminal America: Virgin Islands Literature and Expanding the Borders of US Identity.
Dr. Yanique will read from her book Monster in the Middlefollowed by a conversation between Dr. Yanique and Professor Michelle Gordon, Senior Lecturer in the department of African American Studies, on the relationship between American literature and Caribbean literature and how literature of the US Virgin Islands sits between and on the outside of both.

MARCH 5TH - Dispossession: the Price of "Progress" (EVENT HAS PASSED)
This new monthly series kicks off on March 5 with Dr. Tayari Jones, Professor, English and Creative Writing.

OCTOBER 1ST -ASCO: Disgust and the Struggle Against Racism (EVENT HAS PASSED)

APRIL 2ND - On Debt: Neoliberal Coloniality in the Colony of Puerto Rico (EVENT HAS PASSED)
Our April 2 talk with Dr. Rocio Zambrana, Associate Professor of Philosophy will discuss debt functions as a form of coloniality in the colony of Puerto Rico. It operates not only as an apparatus of capture and predation, intensifying a neoliberalism reconfigured by the financial crisis. It also operates as a form of coloniality, actualizing a race/gender norm installed and updated throughout an ongoing colonial history. Placing in conversation Marxist approximations to financial neoliberal capitalism, decolonial thought, and decolonial feminism in Puerto Rico, this talk considers the work of debt in updating modalities of gender and racial, particularly antiblack, violence.

MAY 7TH - Do Our Votes Count? Race and Political Inequality in American Democracy (EVENT HAS PASSED)
Dr. Bernard L. Fraga, Associate Professor of Political Science, will discuss the causes and consequences of racial/ethnic disparities in who turns out to vote. Drawing on research from his recent book The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America, the talk will explain the persistence of large disparities in rates of political participation between whites and non-whites in contemporary elections. The talk will also demonstrate the power of Black, Latinx, and Asian American voters to shape election outcomes when mobilized and empowered to do so, both nationwide and in Georgia specifically