Scholar to Discuss Women’s Response to White Supremacy, Fascism

Event Information

Time: 4:15 p.m.
Date: Thursday, April 4
Place: Room 152, Bucksbaum Center for the Arts, 1108 Park St., Grinnell

Valerie Ann Johnson, Mott Distinguished Professor of Women’s Studies and director of Africana Women’s Studies at Bennett College in North Carolina, will give a lecture titled “A Fearful Militancy of Women” at 4:15 p.m. on Thursday, April 4.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will focus on how black, radical, queer, and transgender women respond to white supremacy and fascism.

Event Sponsor

American Studies Concentration with funding from the Center for the Humanities and the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies.

Speaker Bio

Valerie Ann Johnson is Mott Distinguished Professor of Women’s Studies and director of Africana Women’s Studies at Bennett College, a small, private, historically black liberal arts college for women in Greensboro, North Carolina. In addition to her academic responsibilities, Johnson is one of two black members of the 11-member North Carolina Historical Commission and she chairs the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission.

Although the Historical Commission voted not to move three Confederate statues from the State Capitol grounds to another location, Johnson read her dissent into the historical record of the commission’s proceedings. “These memorials to white supremacy should not continue to be on our public grounds,” she wrote in her dissent. “For those who believe that removing the memorials demonstrates partisan capitulation to an imagined fringe group is to deny the full inclusion in our state of the people who were instrumental in making the state what it is today.”

Johnson’s research, conducted in places such as Costa Rica, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, the Seychelles Islands, and the United States, centers on gender, bioethics, disability, the health of women and girls, and environmental justice. In North Carolina, Johnson researches African-American foods and culture, especially focused on the church supper and food justice. She holds a Ph.D. in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, a master’s degree in sociology from Atlanta University, and bachelor’s degree in sociology from Spelman College.