Join the UCR Department of Ethnic Studies for our colloquium speaker series:

“Black Women, Biographies, and the Challenge of Two-Faced Archives”

By K.T. Ewing

Monday, November 24, 2025
1:00-2:00 p.m.
CHASS INTS 1111

The craft of Black women’s biography enables a more accurate recounting of their lives as a corrective to how those stories have been erased, underappreciated, or misunderstood. This process of reclamation locates the presence of Black women in their fullness, both within and beyond traditional archives. It challenges the narrative that the relative silence surrounding Black women’s interior lives is synonymous with an absence of complexity. When these women intentionally preserve their own stories, the result is even richer. Using blues performer Alberta Hunter as an example, this talk explores how some Black women use a process of two-faced archiving to preserve and sometimes share their life stories on their own terms.

K.T. Ewing is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at The University of Alabama, is a proud third generation HBCU graduate whose interests include Black history, women and gender studies, and the influence of blues culture in American society. She has writings published in The Black Scholar, Black Perspectives, Transformations in Africana Studies, and Black Female Sexualities. Her current book project, Remember My Name: Alberta Hunter and the Two-Faced Archive, examines the life of Alberta Hunter, a twentieth-century blues and cabaret singer from Memphis, Tennessee.

Join the UCR Department of Ethnic Studies for our colloquium speaker series:

“Sleepless: Racial patterns of Sleep Hygiene in a County Jail”

By Michael Lawrence Walker

Monday, February 24
1:00-2:00 p.m.
INTS 1109 (note the room change)

Problems associated with sleep hygiene are among the more unexamined issues in carceral organizations. We know that poor sleep hygiene is associated with increased risks for developing mood disorders, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and other physiological problems. In this study, I use ethnographic data from a Southern California county jail system to show: (a) poor sleep hygiene is endemic penal living; (b) jail mental health staff were ill-equipped to address the interplay of sleep hygiene and mental health for penal residents; (3) the jail as an organizational setting patterned resident dreams into themes; and (4) carceral organizations stratify poor sleep hygiene across racial groups. I offer the outline of a sensitizing scheme for the sociology of dreams.

Michael Lawrence Walker earned his Ph.D. in 2014 from the University of California, Riverside. In 2017, he joined the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities where he is the Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts in the Department of Sociology. He is the author of Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail, which won the 2022 C. Wright Mills Book Award and the Charles H. Cooley Award for Best Recent Book. Walker’s research focuses on race relations, social exchange, punishment, identities, and time. His current project is a book length examination of the socioemotional landscape of law enforcement work.

Join the UCR Department of Ethnic Studies for our colloquium speaker series:

“The Mer-Warrior: A Fantastic Afro-Nostalgic”

By Jalondra A. Davis

Monday, February 10
1:00-2:00 p.m.
INTN 3023

In contrast to mainstream representations of the mermaid as an innocent, hyperfeminine girl-culture waif, a hypersexualized, commercialized object, or, more rarely, a tempting, predatory, carnivorous siren, Black mermaid stories, narratives, and performers offer entirely different dimensions to this fantastical figure that are remarkably consistent across literary, visual, and other popular culture. Building upon Badia Ahad-Legardy’s concept of afro-nostalgia, this presentation will focus on the mermaid as a warrior figure, and the way in which Black storytellers and creatives center the kinds of histories usually used to exclude blackness from fantasy landscapes—captivity, enslavement, and ongoing racial violence—as actually especially entitling Black communities to mermaid stories.

Jalondra A. Davis is an Assistant Professor of English at UC Riverside, has published on speculative fiction in various venues, including Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Science Fiction Studies, Misrepresentations of Black Womanhood, Routledge Anthology of Co-Futurisms, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Her monograph manuscript, Merfolk and Black Being in Water, analyzes the historically specific worldbuilding of Black literature, art, and performance featuring human-aquatic hybrids, with a focus on how such narratives interrogate Western modernity, humanism, and the Anthropocene. A current Hellman Society of Scholars Fellow with an Ethnic Studies Ph.D. from UCR, she also hosts the Merwomanist Podcast.