A Reading & Discussion Series facilitated by IHRAF Team Member Dr. Layla Zami (Pratt Institute)
Thursdays, 6.30pm-7.30pm (USA Eastern Time)
Dates: September 23, October 7, October 21, November 4, November 18
Online via Zoom
Free & Open to all
To attend one or more sessions, please register here.
Sponsored by a Humanities NY Reading & Discussion Grant.
Why and how do we choose to engage in civically engaged activity? How does our service impact our communities? What sustains and renews us? In this series, we will reflect on these and other questions by discussing a selection of texts from The Civically Engaged Reader: A Diverse Collection of Short Provocative Readings on Civic Activity. Over the course of five sessions, we will read and exchange on authors and sources such as Maya Angelou, Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, Pablo Neruda, Soggyal Rinpoche, Langston Hughes and the Mishneh Torah. We will explore convergences and divergences among them, ask how their words resonate with our present, and what meaning they may hold for our future.
Facilitator:
Dr. Layla Zami (Paris, 1985) is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, and globetrotter. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities at Pratt Institute, and was a Co-Chair of Black Lives Matter at Pratt. She obtained her PhD in Gender Studies at Humboldt-University in Berlin, Germany, where she also earned the First Prize in the Faculty Teaching Award for her innovative and friendly pedagogy. In her hometown, Zami graduated from Sciences Po Paris and worked for Christiane Taubira at the French Parliament. She is the author of Contemporary PerforMemory: Dancing through Spacetime, Historical Trauma and Diaspora in the 21st Century (Columbia University Press, 2020). Based in Brooklyn, Zami was born in France of Jewish-German-Russian and Afro-Indian-Caribbean descent. She blossoms on tour as a poet/speaker/musician with Oxana Chi Dance & Art. Zami is a current Co-Curator of Dance and former Assistant Producer at the International Human Rights Art Festival. www.laylazami.net