The University of Minnesota will host professor Lisa Anderson-Levy for a lecture on "decentering whiteness," Campus Reform reported.
Anderson-Levy, an associate professor of Anthropology at Beloit College in Wisconsin, believes "whiteness poses an existential threat to social, political, and economic life in the U.S."
She describes whiteness as "one of the most urgent social dilemmas of our time." The lecture, titled, "The Elephant in the Room: A 'Grown-Up' Conversation about Whiteness," is set for March 22. The lecture description states:
There has been little public discussion about the logic of white supremacy and how it contextualizes the ways in which we understand who is a terrorist/what counts as terrorism; who is a patriot/what counts as patriotism; and who is an immigrant and what counts as unfavorable immigration.
Anderson-Levy reportedly will discuss ways that academic institutions can "interrupt these discourses" that could impose a paradigm shift:
This presentation prompts us to ask: what might it look like to decenter whiteness in our scholarship, pedagogy, institutional governance, and broader intellectual praxis — including in our budgets, our curricula, our disciplinary genealogies, our interactions with students, and our relationships with each other as colleagues?
The lecture will be open to students and faculty, according to Campus Reform.
“The ICGC Alumni Lecture Series is an opportunity to highlight successful alumni and allow current students to engage with them,” UMN spokeswoman Emmalynn Bauer told Campus Reform in a statement.
Anderson-Levy believes teaching is a political act, according to her bio on the Beloit College website.
"Political because the production of knowledge involves choices about which voices get heard, which are suppressed, and which are ignored completely," she wrote.
