55th Anniversary Commemoration
AAAS@55: Making Lives and Building Worlds with Black Studies
The Department of African and African-American Studies invites you to join us in celebrating 55 years of Black Studies at Brandeis University on Thursday, March 27, 2025. In honor of this anniversary, the department is hosting a series of panels about the possibilities of Black Studies.
For all events, an RSVP is requested. This event is hybrid; please see the RSVP form to register to attend remotely. Light refreshments will be available to guests attending in person. The public is welcome and encouraged to attend.
12:00-1:45 PM
Making a Life with Black Studies
A panel discussion featuring Brandeis alumnae Sharon Whittaker '81, President of the Brandeis Alumni of Color Network; Makayla Richards '20, community organizer and first-generation Afro-Caribbean femme living and working in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work blends together Black feminist frameworks and direct service to women, youth, and families; Professor Amaris Brown, '16, John Holmes Assistant Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English, Tufts University.
2:15-3:30 PM
Black Studies and World-Building
Discussion featuring Professor Simone Browne, Dept of African and African Diaspora Studies, Director of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of the award-winning Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. In conversation with Professor Wangui Muigai, AAAS, History, and HSSP.
4:00-6:00 PM
How Do We Already Change the World Through Play? with Professor mattie brice
2025 Eleanor Roosevelt Lecture in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Sponsored by the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
WGS Annual Eleanor Roosevelt Lecture by Professor mattie brice, artist, designer, activist, UC Santa Cruz.
Since the turn of the 21st century, games, game design, and gamification gained wide attention as tools for social change work, introducing new participatory aesthetic frameworks to the social design field. However, design and technology are facing a decolonial reckoning that challenges how computational and social technologies are used to perpetuate and reinforce power structures of western countries to the whole globe. Once we shift our focus to play and the marginalized folks engaging with it as a survival practice through a lens of gender, race, sexuality, new alternative realities become possible for art and design activism.
*The Roosevelt Lecture does not require an RSVP and is in-person only.
About the Presenters
Amaris Brown
Amaris Brown is John Holmes Assistant Professor of the Humanities at Tufts University, where she teaches in the
English Department. A past Fellow of the Ford Foundation, Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism
and the Humanities, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, she received her PhD in Africana Studies from Cornell University, with a dissertation “grounded in black feminist diagrammatic drawing, critical disability studies, psychoanalysis, and studies in affect and aesthetics.” She is a contributor to the new collection of essays on the work of Professor Hortense Spillers (Brandeis graduate and University Alumni Awardee), The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers, with an essay entitled “The Errant Protester: Tracing Black E/motion in the Visual Work of Hortense Spillers.”
Makayla “M.K.” Richards
Makayla “M.K.” Richards is an Afro-Caribbean femme, community organizer, and full-spectrum doula. Her life’s work centers on establishing extra-institutional means that support the holistic well-being of Black women, queer people, and their families. As an undergraduate student at Brandeis, Makayla established an Independent Interdisciplinary Major in Black Women’s Studies that called the racialization of gender and sexuality to the forefront and evaluated social paradigms that reinforce practices and standards of oppression. From there, her interest in communal care networks bloomed. She is a trained birth doula, sex educator, and facilitator who believes in a gender-expansive, Black feminist, and anti-carceral future that is explicitly anti-white supremacist. Currently, Makayla works with the Georgia Resilience and Opportunity Fund as Program Manager for In Her Hands, a guaranteed income initiative that distributes unrestricted monthly cash payments to women living below the poverty line across Georgia. She is a former Manager of Organizing with the youth education justice organization Our Turn and Georgia State Organizer with URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity. She is a proud member of Brandeis Atlanta Posse 6, a cat mother, and a true Taurus.
Simone Browne
Simone Browne is an Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and Director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently writing her second book, which examines the interventions made by artists whose works grapple with the surveillance of Black life. She is an EPIC Advisory Board Member and A People's Guide to Tech Advisory Board Member. Her research focuses on the social and ethical implications of surveillance, both AI-enabled and not. Examining potential algorithmic harms and tech equity in order to better understand the development and impact of AI, her research ranges from the environmental impact of electronic waste to the effects of increased pollutant exposure experienced by those living near data and fulfillment centers.
mattie brice
mattie brice is Assistant Professor of Games for Transformational Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz. She is an artist and designer working with contemporary social issues through play. She has been a culture worker within the games industry for over a decade as a critic, designer, activist, organizer, curator, and educator. Her creative work manifests as medium-agonistic games and play experiments, from the memoir game Mainichi, conceptual art like EAT, performance with empathy machine, and speculative experiences including The DAFRA Pairing Ceremony. mattie’s organizing work spans various scales, having co-organized the Queerness & Games Conference, IndieCade, and #LOSTLEVELS. (Courtesy of mattie brice.)