What is "home" and what is "abroad"? How have those concepts evolved specifically for marginalized peoples within the United States? How can we all become more aware of the numbers of individuals walking around without passports and the ability to move? And how does color, gender, sexuality, race, hair, able-ish, sight, marital status, class and built environment impact the way that we all move through the world and where we dare to enter or escape to?
Ayanna Legros, a Northwestern University Alum (Class of 2013) now completing a Ph.D. in History at Duke University will encourage participants to develop the tools and skills needed to become a more conscious traveler in a world designed to sustain inequity. This talk invites and encourages individuals to reflect on their lived experiences through reflection exercises, dialogue, and questions. The goal is to support students, staff, faculty, and administrators navigate through their travel decisions and choices.
Ayanna Legros is in her fifth year of a Ph.D. in the Department of History at Duke University. She completed her Bachelors of Arts at Northwestern University and was "listed as a senior to watch" along with being awarded a Davis Foundation grant to write educational curriculum in the Dominican Republic with Leslie Clark (Northwestern University Alum) for young women ages 12 - 16. At New York University, she was a recipient of a MacCracken Fellowship which allowed for the pursuit of intellectual training in Africana Studies, a full scholarship, and the opportunity to co-pilot an initiative centering the life of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In this role, she co-led institutional partnerships with the Museum of Modern Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and New York University's Brooklyn campus with the goal of amplifying conversations about the U.S. art market and its relationship to afro-descended artists. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Fierce by Mitu, and academic journals such as the Journal for Haitian Studies, the Journal for Latinx and Latin American Visual Culture, and NACLA Magazine. She has delivered talks and panels about Haitian identity, migration, education, politics, and spirituality at Oxford University, Skidmore College, Posse Foundation, and City University of New York and has served on the boards for the Latin American Studies Association, the Haitian Studies Association, and the Max Cadet Dental Fund in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Â
Within Latin America and the Caribbean she has lived, traveled, and studied in Spain (Study Abroad), Bolivia (NU Global Engagement Summer Institute), Turkey (NU Global Engagement Spring Break), Colombia (NYU Human Rights Fellow), Haiti (Department of Education), and more with the goal of better comprehending world history. She sees herself as a cultural worker and is currently working to catalog, preserve, and document the history of a Haitian radio program that existed for over thirty-two years in order to document the history of Haitian migrants in New York. Her ultimate goal is to pursue both academic publishing and writing for the public to contribute to efforts to build a more empathic world that looks to history with care, patience, and a desire to learn from the past.
Mary Pattillo is the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, and Chair of the African American Studies Department, at Northwestern University. Her areas of research include race and inequality, housing, urban politics, education reform, criminal legal studies, and stratification within the Black community. She is the author of two award-winning books – Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class and Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City – that focus on African American neighborhoods in Chicago. She is also co-editor of Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration. She has won many fellowships and awards, including Fulbright-sponsored study and research in Brazil and Colombia. Pattillo holds a BA in Urban Studies from Columbia University and an MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago.
