Acting Up in Hopeless Times

April 14, 2026 in Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall

• Panel 1 from 9:55 AM-11:10 AM  - Creating Protest/Resistance from Public Panic (Marlon Bailey, Jamal Batts, Salonee Bhanam) + moderated Q&A
• Panel 2 from 2:40 PM-3:55 PM - Queer Historical Imagination in Crisis (Debra Levine, Dahlia Li, Olivia Polk) + moderated Q&A
• Activist Teach In and Community Q&A from 7:00PM-9:30PM with ACT UP member, Debra Levine

Please click HERE to RSVP for this event by 3:00 p.m. on April 7th.

Acting Up in Hopeless Times convenes an intergenerational group of public intellectuals, community historians, activists, and scholars to consider the ongoing queer legacies of the 1980’s AIDS pandemic and ACT UP activism. This symposium puts the politically-dire situation of 2026 for LGBTQ+ individuals in continuity with the political histories begun and continued in the 1980’s AIDS epidemic. By framing LGBTQ+ activism, culture, and community as the direct result of political crisis, rather than its pre-emption or remedy, this symposium aims to catalyze a renewal of 1) queer theory and historiography within scholarly and public discourses and 2) forms of queer civic and political life that have faltered since the discontinuities of knowledge transfer created by COVID-19. This event is free, accessible and open to the public.

To view the AccessAble USA guide for the Scheuer Room of Kohlberg Hall please click here. To view AccessAble USA for Swarthmore College, please click this link.

For directions, parking, and a campus map, please visit our website at https://www.swarthmore.edu/visit-swarthmore.

For more questions or more information, please contact kgomezz1@swarthmore.edu.

Marlon M Bailey Paper Title: "Black Gay Pleasure Placemaking as Collective Care in the Age of AIDS"

Bio: Marlon M Bailey is Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU). He is also a former Visiting Professor at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) at the University of California, San Francisco. Marlon is a Black queer theorist and critical ethnographer whose work focuses on Black LGBTQ cultural formations, sexual health and wellness, and HIV prevention. He is the author of the award-winning book, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (U of Michigan Press, 2013). His current book project in progress is titled "Black Gay Sex," which is an ethnographic examination of the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on Black gay men's sexuality. Marlon is also the Board President of the National AIDS Education and Services for Minorities (NAESM) agency based in Atlanta GA. Marlon earned a PhD in African Diaspora Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley.

Jamal Batts Paper Title:  "A Terror of Solidarity: Chocolate Babies and the Idea of Black Queer Cinema"

Bio: Jamal Batts (he/him) is a writer, curator, and Assistant Professor of Black Studies at Swarthmore College. His work considers the relation between Black contemporary art making, sexuality, and risk. Previously, he has served as a Stanford University IDEAL Provostial Fellow, a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, and a Curator-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. His writing is published or forthcoming in the catalogue for The New Museum’s exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, Los Angeles Review of Books, b2o: boundary 2 online, ASAP/J, and Social Text. He is a member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic who have programmed four seasons of experimental Black film and published three edited volumes.

Salonee Bhanam Paper Title: "Credible Pain and Specific Infection: The Fight to Expand the Definition of HIV"

Bio: Salonee Bhaman is an interdisciplinary scholar and legal historian whose research explores questions of gender, political economy, and social welfare. Her first book project tells the story of how people with AIDS and their allies negotiated the meaning of “care” against a backdrop of urban divestment. In it, she places the stories of women, drug users, sex workers, and people of color alongside the political history around the renegotiation of the American welfare state at the end of the twentieth century. Her broader research interests include histories of social movements, transnational feminist history, and cultural studies. Salonee researches and gives radical queer history walking tours with the Close Friends Collective; organizes for gender justice with the Asian American Feminist Collective; and thinks about HIV/AIDS cultural production alongside members of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? collective. She was previously a Faculty Fellow at NYU (XE) and the Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s and Public History at the New York Historical, where she curated The New York Sari. She earned her PhD in History with a certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Yale University in 2023. She is currently a Curatorial Scholar at the New York Historical and completing her first year at NYU Law School.

Debra Levine Paper Title: “The World of Possibilities Stands Behind Us: How Liberationist Histories Inspired ACT UP”

Bio: Debra Levine is a writer, dramaturg and performance studies scholar focusing on contemporary global performance, feminist and queer theater and performance, and disability studies.  She has taught at NYU Abu Dhabi; was the Director of Studies for Theater, Dance & Media at Harvard, and currently teaches at NYU and Princeton. She co-produced and co-directed the documentary  "I'm You, You're Me: Women Surviving Prison, Living With AIDS" (1992); and produced and directed "ACE Against The Odds" a documentary on the peer-led AIDS Counseling and Education Program at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester, New York (1996). Debra was an active member of ACT UP New York from 1988-1994.

Dahlia Li Paper Title: “Notes from an Immaterial Girlhood: Trans Representability and the Crisis of Citation”

Bio: Dahlia Li (she/her) is a scholar and artist working between the fields of dance and performance, screen-based media, critical diaspora studies, and feminist, queer, and trans poetics. Her manuscript-in-progress, Stranded Affect: Decolonial Screen Ecologies and Diasporas of Disappointment explores these research interests through a global south framework. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Swarthmore College. From 2022-2023 she was a Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellow through the Whitney ISP. She has performed, exhibited work, and taught artist's workshops at a variety of venues in Europe and North America including the 2016 Venice Biennale, the 2022 Tanzkongress, Schmorévaz Project Space, p0nderosa dance center, and EmergeNYC, among others. Her published and forthcoming writing can be found in The Routledge Companion To Dance and American Popular Culture, The Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Camera Obscura, PA Museum Online, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts, and the exhibition catalog for "The Dancing Plague" at GaMEeC Bergamo.

Olivia R. Polk Paper Title: “Angela Davis's Blues Lesbianism: Notes Toward Self-Determination in the Midst of the Crisis”

Bio: Olivia R. Polk (she/they) is a Black dyke living on Dakota land in Mni Sota Makoce, now called Minneapolis. They work as an Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She earned her PhD, M.A. and M.Phil in American Studies and Black Studies from Yale University, and her BA in Africana Studies (with highest honors), Art History, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Williams College. Olivia is currently at work on her first book project, which draws on Black lesbians’ experiments with cultural production, criticism, political organizing, and intimate relationships to make the case for Black Lesbianism as an ethical way of life capable of supporting transformative adaptation to the multiple unfolding crises of our time. The project has received support from the Carter G Woodson Institute at UVA, the NYPL Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Ford Foundation, Yale's Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and Visual AIDS, among other sources. Olivia's writing has appeared in Signs, Feminist Theory (UK), The Black Scholar, TSQ, and Black Women Radicals, and elsewhere. In her classrooms, Olivia aims to put students in touch with critical traditions of imagination, analysis, and action that can support their development as self-determining people living in a highly contradictory, yet interdependent world.

Presented with the support of Sager Fund, William J. Cooper Foundation, Clark Fund for Gender Discourse, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, and The Swarthmore Office of Inclusive Excellence.

Cosponsored by Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Swarthmore Intercultural Center, Department of English, Department of Black Studies, Department of Theater, Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the Department of History.

A special community screening of the new documentary TCB - The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing

Followed by a conversation between filmmaker Louis Massiah and documentary participant Conor “Coco” Tomás Reed, moderated by Nina Johnson (Chair of Sociology and Anthropology) and introduced by Jamal Batts (Assistant Professor of Black Studies)

Author, educator, activist, and documentary filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara, with humor and deep insight, inspired a generation of artists to dedicate themselves to community empowerment. Editor of the breakthrough anthology The Black Woman (1970) and author of The Salt Eaters (1980) among other acclaimed works, Bambara came to Philadelphia and worked with Louis Massiah on the truth-telling documentary The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986) and remained an activist and cultural worker in film and literature until her untimely death in 1995. TCB - The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing (2025, 105 min.) is a testament to their long and generative collaboration.

Massiah’s film, co-directed with and edited by Monica Henriquez, is structured as a series of lessons on cultural organizing, gleaned from Bambara's life and shared by her friends, colleagues and students. Not yet widely released, the film received its world premiere opening night at Philadelphia’s BlackStar Film Festival in August, where it was awarded Best Feature Documentary by the jury, voted Favorite Feature Documentary by the audience, and called “riveting” by Variety.  Featuring: Toni Morrison, Nikky Finney, Haile Gerima, Shirikiana Aina, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Manthia Diawara, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Malaika Adero, Linda Holmes, Conor Tomás Reed, Makeba Lavan and Clyde Taylor.

Credits:
Producer/Director – Louis Massiah
Editor/Director – Monica Henriquez 
Director of Photography – Michael Chin, Henry Adebonjo 
Sound – J.T. Takagi 
Music – Jerome Jennings
Animation/Motion Graphics Design – Gabriel Coffey

Aydelotte’s ongoing series, Race, Racism and the Liberal Arts, explores histories of how Black people, organizations, and ideas have existed outside of, pushed against, or reshaped from within the legacies and institutions of the  liberal arts. Bambara’s legacy and Scribe Video Center are vivid examples of this cultural work.

Louis Massiah’s award-winning documentaries include The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986); W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in Four Voices (1996), two episodes of the PBS series Eyes on the Prize II (1987), and A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown (2002). Recipient of many accolades, including a duPont-Columbia Award, a Peabody, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and a local Emmy for his coverage of the MOVE Commission Hearings, Massiah is founder and director of Scribe Video Center, a leading Philadelphia-based nonprofit media arts center that seeks to explore, develop, and advance media as art and tool for progressive social change. From 2010-2012, Massiah served as the Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change at Swarthmore College, and he received an honorary doctorate in 2024.

Conor 'Coco' Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican~Irish, gender-fluid street scholar of social movements in the Americas and the Caribbean, and the author of New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University (2023). Coco is developing a new book project Hemisphere in Bloom, as well as a co-edited multilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean (Malpaís Ediciones). They have been immersed in two decades of struggles at the City University of New York and in New York City around transforming education and public space, anti-imperialism, police and prison abolition, solidarity with Palestine and Puerto Rico, reproductive rights, housing justice, and beyond, and they recently relocated to Philadelphia.

This event is free, accessible, and open to the public. Swarthmore can be reached by SEPTA Regional Rail on the Media/Wawa line. Driving directions can be found here.

The conversation will be livestreamed HERE.

Co-sponsored by the Black Cultural Center, Black Studies, Film and Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. 

Filmmaker Osadolor Osawemwenze Screening & Performance

Filmmaker Osadolor Osawenwenze will present a screening of their film a_blurred_fluxx_00.avi and a live art performance on the theory and sound behind their art practice. Osadolor is a New York-based art director, visual maker, creative researcher, and sound designer. Their film a_blurred_fluxx_00.avi is an experimental documentary that delves deep into the complex interiority and fluid conversations among today's Blackqueer youth. This dynamic and non-linear supercut provides a carefully crafted audiovisual space for the multiplicity of Blackqueer self-expression to traverse candid everyday moments of joy, melancholy, introspection, euphoria, loneliness, and community-in-active-formation. The film was a finalist for Best Documentary (International Short Film) at the London Breeze Film Festival and has screened at the Black Harvest, Ann Arbor, and Lagos Queer Film Festivals. Osadolor is a recent graduate of Stanford University's Department of African and African American Studies with Honors and Distinction and a minor in Art. This event is co-sponsored by Swarthmore College's Department of Black Studies, Department of Film and Media Studies, Office of Inclusive Excellence, and Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. Open to Swarthmore campus community.

Unveiling Black Studies: Ula Taylor and Jarvis Givens in Conversation

How do we define Black Studies and what is at stake for the discipline in our current political moment? This event brings together two distinguished Black Studies scholars–Ula Taylor and Jarvis Givens– to examine the field’s histories, current challenges, and new directions. As a newly minted department at Swarthmore College, this conversation also invites us to celebrate the achievements of Black Studies at the College and to imagine its future possibilities.

This event will be held on February 26, 2026 at 7:30pm in the Scheuer Room at Swarthmore College and will be livestreamed at this link: [Livestream]. It is open to all in the Tri-Co community and to the public. 

In-person attendees will receive a complimentary copy of Givens’ new book, I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month (2026).

This conversation is part of the Aydelotte Foundation’s project on “Race, Racism, and the Liberal Arts.” This project assembles work on underrepresented histories of how people, institutions, and ideas have existed outside of, pushed against, or reshaped from within the ideas and institutions of the liberal arts. It also investigates and recounts curricular, epistemological, and institutional genealogies that challenge how or whether the term liberal arts has silenced histories and ways of knowing developed by Black people, indigenous people, and people of color. 

This event is organized by Jamal Batts (Assistant Professor, Department of Black Studies) and Edlin Veras (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Department of Black Studies) and is co-sponsored by The Department of Black Studies, The Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The Black Cultural Center, The Department of Educational Studies, and The History Department.

Ula Taylor is a professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film, and co-editor of Black California Dreamin: The Crisis of California African American Communities.

Jarvis R. Givens is a professor of education and African & African American Studies at Harvard University, and he is the co-founding faculty directory of the Black Teacher Archive at Harvard. He is the author of four books, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (2021), School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (2023), American Grammar: Race, Education and the Building of a Nation (2025), and I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month (2026). Givens’s work has been published in various outlets including American Education Research Journal, Journal of African American History, Harvard Educational Review, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, and more.