The University of Minnesota School of Music will host the Chinese Festival “Music for the Soul, Art for Life” to celebrate the vibrant and expanding presence of Chinese art and culture in the Twin Cities, and to showcase the achievements of Chinese and Chinese-American musicians and artists.

Serra Hakyemez's research concentrates on the weaponization of law in pursuit of counterinsurgency war with a special focus on the criminalization of the Kurdish freedom movement since the 1980s. 

Katrina Klett is a 3rd year PhD student in the Department of Natural Resources Science and Management working in the honeybee lab on the St. Paul Campus. She is a beekeeper and is passionate about getting more habitat back onto the landscape in the Upper Midwest.

Lwando’s research focus is on what he loosely terms “queering the postcolony”. Lwando is looking to develop this concept of “queering the postcolony” and incorporate, engage, challenge, and stretch concepts such as decolonisation, sexuality (queerness), gender, culture, and futurities within the post-colonial South African context.

The talk calls to attention to critiques of Lusotropicalism emerging in very different geo-cultural and political spaces of contestation and/or active struggle against Portuguese colonialism in Africa.

This paper is based on Chowdhury's current book project that contemplates the postcolonial trajectories of development and democracy. The focus is a river bridge in Bangladesh which is the country’s largest and most high-profile development project. 

This research examines the connection between the writings of women who have ended their lives and the authors who have interconnected their own narratives to them. It examines how the experience of fatalistic suicide, as a social act, is embodied by women writers. 

Lindokuhle Mandyoli proposes a re-examination of what we understand colonial injustice to be – a fundamentally material injustice. Mandyoli essentially deals with two contending arguments on the debate on justice in South Africa, namely Transformative Constitutionalism and the Constitutional Abolitionists.

Laura Pulido will explore how U.S. cultural memory represents processes of white supremacy and settler colonization. Based on an analysis of National Historical Landmarks, Pulido found that 92% of all National Landmarks deny histories of white supremacy and settler colonization through a variety of means. 

In this talk, Dr. Dhanda argues that South Asian populations experience the relative intensity of racism and casteism in different ways and presents that from our position in the diaspora, the concurrence of anti-racism and anti-casteism lies in the realm of praxis.