Refusing Repair: Conversations on Kinship
Time: Nov. 14, 2022, 4 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Location: 114 Bird Library; Peter Graham Scholarly Commons
Part of the Syracuse Symposium series.
Jodi Byrd, Ethan Madarieta
Jodi Byrd (Cornell University; Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma)
Ethan Madarieta (Syracuse University)
Jodi Byrd presents a public seminar that, in lieu of the academic talk, asks us to create knowledge together through conversations on indigeneity, kinship, refusal, and critiques of repair from Indigenous perspectives. We interrogate, for example, what is erased or elided by framing ongoing dispossession, slavery, and structures of elimination that affect and delimit Black and Indigenous lives and deaths as “damage” that can be “fixed,” “mended,” or “repaired?" What are the politics of reconciliation, so often posed as a project of repair, and how might we understand Indigenous refusal of such projects? What is kinship, and how might it unsettle the logic of repair and popular conceptions of what constitutes indigeneity?
The seminar will attend to these questions and more, beginning with a conversation between Professors Byrd and Madarieta, followed by public discussion on the above-mentioned themes.
Those interested in pre-reading materials (optional) before conversation are invited to explore this selection of texts.
Additional supporters:
- Engaged Humanities Network
- Department of English
- Department of Geography & the Environment
- Native American and Indigenous Studies
- Program on Latin America and the Caribbean (PLACA)