Dr. Michael Eng, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Appalachian State University
Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2018
5:30-6:30 p.m.
Belk Library and Information Commons, Room 114
This talk is free and open to the public
Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and Religion
Confederate Monuments are just the beginning. It is clear that the university is not a place of equal opportunity, only that it is typically presented and imagined to be. Recently at Yale University, for example, a white student called the police on a student of color who was simply sleeping in the dorm where she lived. Though universities routinely use images of people of color to market themselves as spaces of inclusion and diversity, the lived experience of these individuals betray a different reality. They are simultaneously not recognized as persons with legitimate access to campus spaces, while also serving as ornaments of the institution’s so-called commitment to diversity.
In this talk, Dr. Michael Eng will discuss the relationship between race and university spaces from a philosophical standpoint. He will address specifically the problem of how the design and organization of space determines the ways individuals appear as raced and therefore as not belonging within certain environments. He will then identify how these same spaces allow others to appear as “not raced” and therefore as the “proper” bodies to occupy those places. This dynamic, Eng will argue, demonstrates that appearing as a racialized person can often constitute an experience of disappearance or invisibility. His talk will detail how the history of settler colonialism in the United States made possible the founding of universities in this country, and how campus architectures inherit, monumentalize and perpetuate this racist legacy to this day.
Eng teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religion, in the College of Arts and Sciences at Appalachian State University and is a visiting faculty member in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. He specializes in philosophies of race, gender and disability, and contemporary European philosophy. This talk appears as part of a book manuscript in progress titled “Amnesias of Place.”
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About the Department of Philosophy and Religion
The Department of Philosophy and Religion invites students to explore the world, examine beliefs, understand a diversity of worldviews, and challenge the ideas and values that instruct our lives. The department offers a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and a Bachelor of Arts in religious studies, as well as a minor in both of these areas. Learn more at https://philrel.appstate.edu.
Dr. Michael Eng, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Appalachian State University
Dr. Michael Eng, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Appalachian State University