Sara Safransky is an Assistant Professor of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University. On Friday, February 17th from 4:15 pm to 6 pm in the Rackham West Conference Room (4th floor), Safransky will share insights from two forthcoming book projects. The first focuses on the racial and environmental politics involved in redeveloping Detroit, arguing that the city’s landscape has been shaped in profound ways by racial state building and struggles for Black self-determination. The second, Detroit: A People’s Atlas (expected out 2017), offers counter-narratives of Detroit’s past, present, and future from collected oral histories, interviews, critical essays, poems, and maps that document the voices and experiences of some of the many Detroiters sidelined in discussions of the city’s future.
The Detroit School series seeks to stimulate an interdisciplinary conversation on how research on Detroit—a city often seen as an extreme outlier of decline—can produce knowledge that is original and relevant to urban studies globally. This year, we are considering two guiding questions: "What topics can’t we understand without grappling with Detroit?” and “What must we know in order to understand Detroit itself?” Please save the dates for the following Winter 2017 events.
MISSED OUR FALL EVENTS?
Last semester we hosted a panel discussion of distinguished faculty on what it means to teach Detroit, heard Marcus Hunter (UCLA) discuss his book Chocolate Cities, and enjoyed a discussion on the role of racialized mythology in Detroit's past, present, and future with Rebecca Kinney (Bowling Green State University). You can learn more about these events and hear recordings of the discussion on our website http://www.umich.edu/~detsch/.