James Baldwin Distinguished Lecture on Literary and Social Criticism: Racial Justice in the Digital Age
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Join us for a talk with Natalie P. Byfield, PhD, the founding director of the Institute for Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at St. John’s University.
Commensurate with the rise of the digital age’s technological developments that have elevated public and private surveillance to unprecedented levels has been heightened state control through systems of law enforcement. Achieving racial justice in this context will require new inclusive cultural imaginings that transform the boundaries that now contain and subjugate us.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is not required.
Sponsored by James Baldwin Distinguished Lecture on Literary and Social Criticism and the Center for African, Black and Caribbean Studies
About the Speaker
Natalie P. Byfield, PhD
Dr. Natalie P. Byfield is a Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology. Her research is interdisciplinary; it is broadly concerned with hegemony, specifically the relationship between knowledge and power in the construction and reproduction of racial inequalities in the modern western world and the social justice response to them. She writes about the construction of knowledge and power relationships in the language, media systems, technologies, and research methodologies that occur in the institutions of policing, journalism, the social sciences, and higher education. Dr. Byfield is currently a Senior Research Fellow of the university’s Vincentian Center for Church and Society. Her past fellowships include a Samuels Center Fellowship from the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College of the City University of New York, a Revson Fellowship at Columbia University, and a National Science Foundation Fellowship. She is the author of the monograph Savage Portrayals: Race, Media, and the Central Park Jogger Story. Dr. Byfield has been a consultant on major documentaries about the Central Park Jogger case including “The Central Park Five,” a documentary by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon and the ABC 20/20 Documentary, “One Night in Central Park.” She has worked as a journalist for the New York Daily News. Her work in journalism has also been published in The New York Times, HuffPost, Time: The Weekly Newsmagazine, New York Law Journal, and New York Woman Magazine. Her current book project is titled Minority Report: Place, Race, and State Surveillance in New York City.