Monday, August 03, 2009

Black Women Academics (by Prometheus 6)

Five months ago Rutgers University had a conference titled, "Black Women Academics in the Ivory Tower." The entire proceedings of the conference is on a pretty massive You Tube play list, and it covers a lot of intellectual ground.

This one is an example selected because it relates directly to my primary interests, and because I met Dr. Williams at a historians' convention in 2002. She was presenting on the material in her book "The Politics of Public Housing, Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality," which documents Black women in public housing in Baltimore not just as subjects of examination, but as real participants, responding to local events in local terms in ways that shaped local policy. For reasons that she gets into in this talk, titled "Obscured lives, hidden histories," it was all new to me.