African-American Futures: Dialogues on Futurity at the Interstices of Realities

Join us for "African and African-American Futures: Dialogues on Futurity at the Interstices of Realities," with presentations by Isaac Joslin, assistant professor of French, and Sakena Young Scaggs, doctoral candidate in gender and women’s studies and Africana studies.

Isaac Joslin is assistant professor of French. His interdisciplinary research on Francophone African literatures and cinemas combines aesthetic theories of representation and socio-cultural interpretations of texts in order to reconfigure discourses of cultural hybridity; gender and youth identity; diaspora communities; and epistemological and developmental autonomy within a humanistic African-centered theoretical framework. His talk is titled “Re-Writing the Science of Science-Fiction: African Writers at the Edge of Futurity.”

Sakena Young-Scaggs is a doctoral candidate in gender and women’s studies and Africana studies. Her research areas include womanist ethics, philosophy and religion with special emphasis on family dynamics, human intersubjectivity and social epistemology as they pertain to women’s collectives. Employing a theoretical lens to study women’s activism, faith-based social movements, intergenerational cultural dynamics and African Diasporic religious practices, she employs phenomenological methodology informed by womanist ethics and a decolonial transformative ontology in her research practice. Her talk is titled “Afrofuturist Phenomenology and Life-Affirming Liminality in Independent Comicon Culture.”

For more information, please contact Isaac Joslin at ijoslin@asu.edu.