Interseminars 3 Culminating Event

Collisions Across Color Lines: Reconsidering Racism, Movements, and Epistemes in the Americas

Interseminars Culminating Event

In 2023, we, the third Interseminars cohort, accepted HRI’s invitation to collide across color lines with the objective of critically exploring how activists, artists, and other intellectuals reckon with regional epistemes and (re)making of race and racism. Although the practice of collision eludes any rigid recipe, especially when the lines waver between bold and fine, we came to understand that to collide is to resist. To collide is to refuse. To collide is to re-exist.

In this culminating event, we extend to you the invitation we once accepted. We invite you to engage with thematic definitions that shape, reshape, and unshape our interpretations of color lines: the urgency of resistance, the resolve of refusal, and the radical possibilities of re-existence.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2025

Presentation by Mariana Mora

“When witnessing isn’t enough: reflections on justice and the transformative potential of research”

VIDEO: University of Illinois Net ID-holders can watch a video of the lecture by logging in.

Lecture presented by Mariana Mora (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología, Mexico).

4:00 P.M. | Lincoln Hall, Room 1092

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This talk brings together a series of critical reflections on how socially committed research contributes to transformative expressions of justice under conditions of extreme violence and state impunity. Dr. Mora will draw from recent research projects in the state of Guerrero, Mexico—including one that involves accompanying the family members of the 43 teacher college students from Ayotzinapa, victims of forced disappearance in 2014 and another that is multi-racial collaborative research project on the racialized effects of gendered violences in Indigenous and Afro-Mexican regions.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2025

Film Screening and Discussion

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Join us for a screening of In Search of Bengali Harlem followed by remarks and a Q & A with Vivek Bald (director, producer, writer).

2:00 P.M. | Plym Auditorium, Temple Hoyne Buell Hall

About the Film

A New York actor and playwright investigates the pasts of his Bangladeshi immigrant parents, unearthing a lost history in which South Asian Muslims, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans forged an extraordinary multiracial community in the tenements of mid- 20th century Harlem. 

“In Search of Bengali Harlem is remarkable in the way it tells the decades-long story of the Bengali community’s integration in Harlem, and the way Black and Brown people found each other, peeling back layer after deeply personal layer of one subject’s life. With a charismatic lead and beautiful musical accompaniment, this film provides a unique perspective of the immigrant experience and honors the singular place New York City has held throughout America’s history.”
– Juror’s Statement, DOC NYC 2022, Metropolis Competition

Anti-Panel Conversations: Vessel(s)

We, the third Interseminars cohort, materialized our collisions (across color lines) in a vessel, or three. And what is a vessel, but… a boat, slipping towards spaces of contestation and intersection—
a vessel is poetry, moving through borders that breathe, fight, and sometimes bleed.
A vessel is a life conduit, where community matters,
where blood’s quiet tides carry both communion and fracture,
of shared gasp, of dangerous crossings.
It contains, it shoulders, it moves, it sustains,
it transports like arteries:
life-giving, life-bearing, life-stealing,
cradling “resistance, refusal, and re-existence.”

Please join us in our anti-panel conversations about our vessel works. During this segment of the culminating event, we will interact and think through the concepts of resistance, refusal, and re-existence across color lines.

5:00-6:15 P.M. | Temple Hoyne Buell Hall - Auditorium
Vessel interaction and reception to follow.