Reimagining cultural healing ways is central to healing justice, Black Lives Matter, and other contemporary movements. However, “moving from race to culture to creation,” as Resmaa Menakem puts it, takes work. This talk engages in this work by centering epistemologies of Black/African-American traditional medicine, often reclaimed as “conjure.” Drawing on short stories by Zora Neale Hurston and interviews, Jones will consider how Black “knowings” of health, healing, and biomedicine continue to be both racialized and mobilized – and the urgency of taking other(ed) knowledge seriously in this pandemic moment (and beyond).

RSVP by 11 AM (PST) on Wednesday, February 10th; you will receive Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

Naya Jones (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Core Faculty in the Global and Community Health Program at UCSC. As a geographer and cultural worker, she especially studies Black geographies of community health and healing in North and Latin America (African-American and Afro-Latinx). Often in partnership with community-rooted organizations, she engages a range of storytelling, embodied, and arts-based methods. She is a former Culture of Health Leader (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2017-2020) and a recent recipient of the Anne S. Chatham Fellowship for Medicinal Botany (Garden Club of America).

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.

Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.

*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.