Care in the Era of COVID-19

The Ethics of Now with Adriane Lentz-Smith continues from home with a series of brief, thoughtful and timely conversations about the ethical dilemmas of this historic moment. This week, join Professor Lentz-Smith and the Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies Jocelyn Olcott for the conversation “Care in the Era of COVID-19.” After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

Thursday, May 21, 2020, 7pm

Register Now on Zoom

Jocelyn Olcott is Professor of History; International Comparative Studies; and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her first book, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico, explores questions of gender and citizenship in the 1930s. Her second book, International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History considers the history and legacies of the United Nation’s first world conference on women in 1975 in Mexico City (Oxford University Press, 2017). Her current project, a biography of the activist and folksinger Concha Michel, a one-time Communist who became an icon of maternalist feminism and a vocal advocate for recognizing the economic importance of subsistence labors, is under contract with Duke University Press. The book follows Michel’s life story from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth to examine the ways that the concept, labor, and policies surrounding “motherhood” articulated with major shifts in political-economic thought. She has also embarked on an international, interdisciplinary project centered on rethinking the value of care labors broadly speaking, including not only dependent and household care but also, for example, environmental, community, cultural, and sexual care.

Adriane Lentz-Smith is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Duke University. Her interests lie in African American history, twentieth-century United States history, and the history of the U.S. and the world. Her 2009 book Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I looks at the black freedom struggle in the World War I years, with a particular focus on manhood, citizenship, and global encounters. More recently, she has been at work on a book tentatively entitled Afterlives: Sagon Penn, State Violence, and the Twilight of Civil Rights. The book looks at dramatic moments of violent encounters between African Americans and the police to explore the role of violence in sustaining and opposing white supremacy in the two decades following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. She is also interested in how African Americans engaged the world in the age of Cold War civil rights, and how their participation in the project of U.S. state and empire set the horizons of their freedom struggles.

The Ethics of Now is a series of conversations between Duke historian Adriane Lentz Smith and a range of artists, advocates, and authors that explore the ethical challenges facing the Durham and Duke communities.”