2020-2021 The Conversation Series

Winter/Spring 2021 Conversation Series:

Reframing Sacramento: A Dialogue between Artists, Humanists, and Community Advocates

Sacramento as a city is racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse; home to significant immigrant and refugee communities; and boasts thriving arts and multicultural centers in a metropolis that has long been affordable. In recent years, however, in the face of gentrification and an influx of new inhabitants including many Bay Area tech workers, entire communities have been displaced, and Sacramento stands at the brink of change that puts its cultural diversity at risk. In this pilot discussion series, funded by a Humanities for All Quick Grant from California Humanities, The UC Davis Humanities Institute, in collaboration with the Center for Sacramento History, the UC Davis Department of African American and African Studies, and the Consulate General of France in San Francisco, is organizing three cross-disciplinary and cross-community panel discussions about the past, present, and future of the city across the themes of the arts and humanities. These sessions seek to ask: how can we sustain a Sacramento whose cultural, ethnic, racial, and religious diversity is celebrated; where values of racial and economic justice and equality are upheld; that is economically vibrant and a locale for innovations in the arts, culture, technology, and medicine in ways that enrich and celebrate communities rather than displace them?

This event has passed. Watch it on our YouTube Channel here: https://youtu.be/b9c4AD5j9so

View the event poster

This event has passed. Watch it on our YouTube Channel here: https://youtu.be/Gt1wIcOjmtM

View the event poster

This event has passed. Watch it on our YouTube Channel here: https://youtu.be/sqw7g3TyZQE

View the event poster

California Humanities, a nonprofit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, promotes the humanities—focused on ideas, conversation, and learning—as relevant, meaningful ways to understand the human condition and connect people to each other in order to help strengthen California. California Humanities has provided grants and programs across the state since 1975. To learn more, visit calhum.org, or like and follow California Humanities on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

The Humanities For All Quick Grant is a competitive grant program of California Humanities that supports locally-initiated public humanities projects that respond to the needs and interests of Californians, encourage greater public participation in humanities programming, particularly by new and/or underserved audiences, and promotes understanding and empathy among all our state’s peoples in order to cultivate a thriving democracy.

Read the Humanities For All Quick Grants Press Release.

The Center for Sacramento History is a historical research center for the Sacramento region and maintains artifact, archival, photographic, and audiovisual collections, making them available for study and exhibition to the public. It the official repository for the archival records of the City and County of Sacramento and maintains privately donated artifacts, manuscripts and personal papers from individuals, businesses, and organizations in the community.

The Oakland / Saint-Denis Cooperation Project  has brought together cultural and urban leaders in both cities – Oakland, California and Saint-Denis, France – to compare innovations, promote international and interdisciplinary dialogue, and amplify the role of the cultural sector in urban development.  Both cities have deeply rooted artistic communities that can play an increasingly critical and catalyzing role in creating more inclusive and equitable cities.  This partnership includes the French American Cultural Society and the Institut Français, Paris in collaboration with Légendes Urbaines.

Democracy in Crisis, Democracy in Movement(s)

A DHI Conversation Series - Fall 2020

The Democracy in Crisis, Democracy in Movement(s) fall Conversation series looks at contemporary crises in democracy globally and at social justice movements that have thrown new demands at democratic principles and practices. In Women, Voting, and US Empire, Faith Bennett, Katherine Marino, Lisa Matterson, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu address the mixed legacy of women’s suffrage and ask what voting rights look like in the context of US empire. In Democratic Movements in Times of Crisis, Michael Hardt asks what it means for social movements to claim the mantle of democracy at a time when conventional conceptions of democracy seem ever more tenuous and the institutions that support them ever weaker. In Democracy in Crisis? Wendy Brown and James Vernon ask, among other questions, whether democracies founded in racial subjugation are capable of extirpating the effects of these foundings, and whether neoliberalized capitalism and financialization can be reconciled with democratic governing and public interests. Join the DHI for these timely and urgent discussions on the past, present, and future of democratic practices, principles, and movements in the world today.