Event Details

For the annual Leola Johnson Lecture in Media and Cultural Studies, we are proud to welcome Shana M. griffin for a talk titled Black Feminist Geographies, Insurgent Ecologies, and Cartographic Reimagining Along the Mississippi River: An Artist Talk with Shana M. griffin. Shana will explore her projects DISPLACED, SOL, Cartographies of Violence Series, and Black Rivers (working title)

Shana M. griffin is a Black feminist activist, researcher, sociologist, abolitionist, artist, and mother. Shana’s practice is interdisciplinary, activist-centered, research-based, and decolonial—centering the experiences of Black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive regulation, economic exploitation, housing discrimination, and climate change. Her work exists across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, and land-use planning—and within movements challenging displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender-based violence. Shana is the founder of PUNCTUATE, a feminist initiative integrating critical research methods with activism and art, and the creator of DISPLACED, a multimedia public history project tracing the geographies of Black displacement, dislocation, and containment in New Orleans and the surrounding region. Her project Theirs Was a Movement Without Marches documents hidden narratives, activist campaigns, and abolitionist strategies employed by low-income Black women organizing in public housing to transform their communities. Her latest initiative, SOIL, interrogates the carceral spaces of what is left behind in and on the grounds of sugarcane plantations lining the East and West banks of the Mississippi River in southeast Louisiana through archival research, soil collection, and photography. Shana is the recipient of several awards, including a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship, 2021 Creative Capital Awardee, and 2020-21 John O’Neal Cultural Arts Fellowship.