Speakers

• Gina Athena Ulysse

  Gina Athena Ulysse is a feminist anthropologist, artist and activist, and self-described post-Zora interventionist. She is Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University. Her research interests focus on Black diasporic conditions. Her ethnographic work has appeared in several journals and collections. Her creative projects include spoken word, performance art, and installation pieces. Her latest award winning book Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (2017) is a collection of poetry, performance texts and photographs. She was awarded the 2018 Anthropology in the Media Award by the AAA. She is a also the recipient of Wesleyan’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching and the Haitian Studies Association award for Excellence in Scholarship in 2015. Her presentation acknowledges the work of Anténor Firmin, Jamaica Kincaid, Ian F Lopez, Toni Morrison, Arlene Torres and Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

• Lennard J. Davis

  Lennard J. Davis is a Professor in the English Department in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In addition, he is Professor of Disability and Human Development in the School of Applied Health Sciences of the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as Professor of Medical Education in the College of Medicine. He is also director of Project Biocultures a think-tank devoted to issues around the intersection of culture, medicine, disability, biotechnology, and the biosphere.

• Park McArthur

  Park McArthur is a New York-based visual artist who works in sculpture, installation, sound, and text. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally, including at the SFMOMA, San Francisco; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Yale Union, Portland; Lars Friedrich, Berlin. She was included in the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016) as well as the Whitney Biennial (2017). A 2014 winner of the Wynn Newhouse Award, she is represented by Essex Street Gallery in New York.

• Nora D. Volkow

  Dr. Nora D. Volkow, M.D., is the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health. As a research psychiatrist and scientist, Dr. Volkow has been instrumental in demonstrating that drug addiction is a disease of the human brain. She has been the recipient of multiple awards, including the Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences and has been named one of Time magazine’s “Top 100 People Who Shape Our World”, “One of the 20 People to Watch” by Newsweek magazine, Washingtonian magazine’s “100 Most Powerful Women” in both 2015 and 2017, “Innovator of the Year” by U.S. News & World Report, and one of “34 Leaders Who Are Changing Health Care” by Fortune magazine.

• Nan Goldin

  Nan Goldin is a photographer known for her intimate portraits. She is particularly celebrated for The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a filmic slideshow, which documents hundreds of images of the lives of her friends and loved ones throughout the 1970s and 80s. Most recently, through her founding of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), she has used activism to ‘make the personal political’ to combat the opioid crisis. As a survivor of the opioid crisis herself, and as an artist, Nan has particular stake in pressuring the Sackler family (the manufacturers of the opioid crisis) to be held accountable, and for museums to reject Sackler donations.