Organizing Stories: Making|Future|Making with Ni’Ja Whitson

Organizing Stories is a student-focused project founded and directed by Professors Autumn M. Womack (English; African American Studies) and Monica Huerta (English; American Studies). The project connects students with veteran organizers to investigate the long histories of anti-racist activism, racial justice organizing, and coalition-building as they relate to questions of storytelling and humanistic study more broadly.

In this student-faculty activist workshop, Ni’Ja Whitson will lead an exploration of the myriad bonds between embodiment and politics. How do our liberation-making practices engage in futurity technologics? How do Black Queer and Trans embodiedness archive ancient and future intelligences? And what will you do with all the mess? All the mass?

Ni’Ja Whitson is a Creative Capital and Bessie Award winning nonbinary interdisciplinary artist, performer, and writer who has been referred to as “majestic” and “powerful” by The New York Times. They are currently an assistant professor of experimental choreography at UC Riverside as well as the founder/artistic director of The NWA Project, an initiative which creates interdisciplinary and site specific performances that speak to space making and shape shifting in the lives of Queer people of color and the African Diaspora. Whitson has been a student and practitioner of indigenous African ritual and resistance forms for over ten years, creating work that reflects the sacred in street, conceptual, and interdisciplinary performance. They engage a nexus of postmodern and African Diasporic performance practices, through a critical intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and spirituality.

This workshop is open to undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and all other individuals interested in the intersections between scholarly and activist work.

All interested participants will receive an event invitation after completing the RSVP form.

Organizing Stories is supported by an Exploratory Grant in Collaborative Humanities from the Humanities Council, as well as the Dean of the Faculty, the University Center for Human Values, the Department of African American Studies, and the Princeton African Humanities Colloquium.