Chapter 2: The Darkroom, curated by Abdullah Qureshi, is a multidisciplinary virtual exhibit that looks at: cruising, erotic spaces and practices that are traditionally understood as sexually promiscuous, and thus, morally rejected or pushed to the peripheries by the dominant heteronormative society, challenging and re-claiming histories of orientalism, activating and disrupting spaces that are otherwise considered dangerous, and opening up the possibilities of sex and gender expression from queer, Muslim, and migratory perspective.
The four-day program features artistic contributions, films, and talks. The full schedule, artists, contributors and registration for the exhibit can be found on Facebook (https://fb.me/e/4FTg2dtaJ) and Instagram (@mythologicalmigrations).
Social Reproduction and the City: Welfare Reform, Child Care, and Resistance in Neoliberal New York by Simon Black
With: Meg Luxton, Introduction and Idil Abdillahi, Discussant
Date: November 5, 2020
Time: 3pm-4:30pm (EST)
Registration: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0rcu6rpzojH9z2qAwj_LQ4jn1nC0lFOgUW
The transformation of child care after welfare reform in New York City and the struggle against that transformation is a largely untold story. In the decade following welfare reform, despite increases in child care funding, there was little growth in New York's unionized, center-based child care system and no attempt to make this system more responsive to the needs of working mothers. As the city delivered child care services "on the cheap," relying on non-union home child care providers, welfare rights organizations, community legal clinics, child care advocates, low-income community groups, activist mothers, and labor unions organized to demand fair solutions to the child care crisis that addressed poor single mothers' need for quality, affordable child care as well as child care providers' need for decent work and pay. Social Reproduction and the City tells this story, linking welfare reform to feminist research and activism around the "crisis of care," social reproduction, and the neoliberal city.
Simon Black is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Labour Studies at Brock University. His research employs a feminist political economy approach to the study of work and labour in urban, national and transnational contexts and explores how race, class, gender, citizenship/migration shape social reproduction and the organization of paid and unpaid work. Black is the author of Social Reproduction and the City: Welfare Reform, Child Care, and Resistance in Neoliberal New York, (University of Georgia Press 2020), and producer (with Idil Abdillahi and Howard Grandison) of It Takes A Riot: Race, Rebellion, Reform, a documentary short film on police violence, anti-Black racism, and resistance. Twitter: @_SimonBlack
