Un/Making Blackness: On the Aesthetic Discourses of Post-Race and Urban Space Date Wednesday, November 18, 2015 12:30 PM - 02:00 PM Location Institute for Public Knowledge Address 20 Cooper Sq, Room 222, New York, NY 10003, USA The Institute for Public Knowledge's Race and Public Space<https://ipk.nyu.edu/ipk-working-groups/race-and-public-space> working group invites you to join us for a lunchtime presentation and discussion with Brandi Summers. Her talk will explore the spatial production of blackness as a way to understand race and the political economy. She will discuss how blackness is inscribed in the built environment and in media during an economic and political moment hailed as "post-racial." Dr. Summers will use the high fashion industry and urban redevelopment in Washington, D.C. to analyze how racial difference is linked to aesthetics as a way to marginalize conversations about the continuing significance of race. Her focus on the way blackness is produced, inscribed, and apprehended in diverse environments demonstrates how an ostensible demographic characterization has also become an aesthetic, as well as a politics. She suggests that aesthetics also open up a space for play with the fluidity of blackness especially when black bodies are not present. Brandi Thompson Summers is an assistant professor of African American Studies and Director of the Center for Research on Culture, Race and Representation at Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. Summers' research and teaching interests include racial aesthetics, media studies, social theory, and visual culture. Her research explores the broad range of meanings ascribed to black bodies in diverse environments. Her new project explores the way that competing notions of blackness structure efforts to raise capital and develop land in Washington, D.C., as well as practices and policies concerned with re-shaping prevailing narratives about progress in US race relations.? More info and RSVP: https://ipk.nyu.edu/calendar/events/275-un-making-blackness/event_details?