2025 Grace Holt Celebration
April 22 - 24, 2025
Address
Chicago, IL 60607
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Join us for our annual Grace Holt Lecture and Celebration! This event honors the tremendous work and legacy of Dr. Grace Holt, the founder and first director of the UIC Department of Black Studies. It also serves the purpose of engaging our community of faculty, staff, students, and alumni with emerging scholars and pressing issues in Black Studies as well as providing a space for reconnection and community.
Each year, we uphold Grace Holt's commitment to Black Studies and celebrate our community through a keynote presentation, series of community and scholarly events, and recognition of the Grace Holt Award recipients. The theme for the 2025 Grace Holt Celebration Blackness Solidarity Politics. This year’s Grace Holt Lecture is the culminating event in a semester- long focus on scholarship, activism and arts pertaining to the politics of solidarity in the Black diaspora.
This year, the keynote lecturer is Dr. Nisrin Elamin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Toronto. Dr. Elamin's keynote lecture is entitled "Sudan's Counterrevolutionary War."
The lecture and all related program are co-sponsored by the Global Middle East Studies program.
A detailed description of the 2025 Grace Holt program is provided below.
- April 22nd: Workshop: Public Scholarship and Organizing Within and Beyond the Confines of the Academy
- April 23rd: Grace Holt Keynote Lecture & Awards Ceremony
- Lecture Title: Sudan's Counterrevolutionary War
- April 24th: Teach-in: Transnational Solidarity, Student Organizing and the War in Sudan
Date posted
Mar 20, 2025
Date updated
Mar 20, 2025
Speakers
Dr. Nisrin Elamin | Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies | University of Toronto
2025 Grace Holt Program Heading link
Workshop: Public Scholarship and Organizing Within and Beyond the Confines of the Academy
This interactive workshop will engage students in a discussion of what public scholarship can look like and why it can be important to think, speak and write for audiences beyond the academy. It will also explore the link between public scholarship and research in service of communities and organizing outside the academy? Finally, we will discuss the limitations and challenges of engaging in public scholarship within the context of institutions which value individual output and productivity over collective labor and organizing. Students will receive practical tips and engage with examples of public scholarship by scholars across N. America and beyond.
Grace Holt Keynote Lecture & Awards Ceremony
Lecture Title: Sudan’s Counterrevolutionary War
Lecture Description: The war in Sudan has largely been framed as either a power struggle between two generals or a proxy war serving the interests of external actors. Neither framing fully captures the ways this war is a counterrevolutionary war fought at multiple scales, which is meant to protect the interests of Sudanese elites and their international partners. This talk will historicize and contextualize Sudan’s current counterrevolutionary war and famine from a political economy perspective. In particular, it will center struggles over land and the role civilian-led mutual aid networks are playing in leading relief efforts and in continuing to challenge the legitimacy of military elite rule.
Teach-in: Transnational Solidarity, Student Organizing and the War in Sudan
This teach-in will link the current war in Sudan to other forms of imperial and genocidal violence around the globe. How do capitalism, colonialism and imperialism link seemingly disparate wars and genocides? What forms of resistance and organizing are we witnessing against militarized state violence in Sudan and beyond? What lessons can students in particular draw from these forms of resistance as they mobilize against fascist forces at home and organize in solidarity with movements and communities elsewhere? What can transnational solidarity look like beyond and against a reliance or reification of nation states and state power?