The Transformative and Rehabilitative Power of Higher Education in Prison

Bryan Jordan was born and raised in the city of New Haven, Conn. He is the oldest of five siblings: two brothers and two sisters. After dropping out of high school, he received his GED while incarcerated in 1994. However, in 2016, while serving a sentence that would later be overturned, he was accepted into Second Chance Educational Alliance to pursue higher education in prison. Subsequently, Jordan went on to be 1 of 600 inmates to apply and be accepted into Yale University. Since his release, he has begun the enrollment process into Yale in pursuit of a law degree.

Trauma, Incarceration and Ability to Learn

Em Daniels is a master educator and leading expert on the impacts of trauma on adult learning. They are a skilled facilitator and speaker, with an extensive background in adult education that includes alternative high schools, prisons, free college campuses, private and nonprofit organizations, government institutions and community agencies. Their expertise focuses on countering the impacts of trauma on learning by expanding beyond a mental health approach and defining multiple points of entry to the work. Daniels emphasizes the necessity of addressing individual and systemic trauma as crucial to create and sustain a just and compassionate world.

Longevity for the World: Self and the Social Body in Early Modern China

Self-perfection and immortality are central to understanding Chinese medical history, but He Bian (Ch. 邊和), associate professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University, highlights the rise of the social body and techniques for the masses.

Fear and Loathing in New Spain: Antiblackness in Colonial Mexico

Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race Symposium, October 19–22, 2021

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Enmity is a sustaining force for systemic racism, a fervent antipathy toward a category of people. Enmity exists at the nexus of individual and group identity and produces difference by desiring opposition and supremacy, imagining separation by force, and willing conflict. Enmity unfolds in different ways in different places, according to local logics of territory, population, language, or culture, even as these geographical divisions are subject to constant change.

This interdisciplinary symposium, hosted by Rutgers University, focuses on how premodern racial discourses are tied to cartographical markers and ambitions. The notions of enmity and region provide a dual dynamic lens for tracing the racial repertoires that developed in response to increasingly hostile contention between premodern cultural and political forces. The symposium will invite scholars to take up this intersection between region and enmity, and to examine how belief in difference, or the emergence of polarizing structures and violent practices, configured race thinking and racial practices in ways that are both unique to different territories and that transcend them.

Miguel A. Valerio is an assistant professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. His work has appeared in several journals, including Slavery and Abolition and Colonial Latin American Review. He is currently completing a book on Afro-Mexican festive practices, “Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Festive Practices, 1539–1640,” under contract with Cambridge University Press. Besides exploring black joy and communal sovereignty, the book studies how Iberian racial ideology impacted Afro-Mexicans’ daily and festive lives. 

Co-sponsored by Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University.

Artists Jess T. Dugan and David Antonio Cruz with Amber Johnson