Wild Futures: Taking Flight - Harriet Tubman Day Commemoration 2025
Wild Futures: Taking Flight - Harriet Tubman Day Commemoration 2025
Wild Futures: Taking Flight offers a chance to reflect on how knowledge of the environment and ecology played crucial roles in the ways that freedom seekers pursued their escape from enslavement.
In narratives of freedom, we find an extensive engagement with bondage (“The Plantation”) and, on the other hand, arrival (“The North”). That said, the middle, that space in between, can sometimes be either obscured or ignored. What, then, in a practical sense, did seeking freedom require? How did freedom seekers deploy their knowledge of their natural environment to escape bondage? How were these knowledges acquired? And what kinds of responsibilities do we have to seek out and understand this knowledge as expertise?
This year, we in WGSS invite you into a conversation about what it means to make yourself ready to take flight, the kinds of knowledge integral to taking flight, and how these knowledges were deployed in seeking freedom. How was the wild/wilderness both an accomplice and constraint in these processes?
Wild Futures: Taking Flight, then, builds on multiple iterations of wild - metaphoric, literal, ontological – to consider why and how liberation calls us to wrestle with the wild and to be wild as integral to what it means to be free; and, to invoke Mariame Kaba, we want to reflect on the ways that these historical antecedents can function as a kind of technology that holds clues for contemporary modes of activism.
REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdRrFo6-VMw3XDhPBZYyo2WKtLCS-xMDBGNy46uxnR5pPKW2Q/viewform
Schedule
1:00 PM WGSS Welcome
Neda Atanasoski, Chair, Harriet Tubman Dept of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Ernestine "Tina" Wyatt, Great Great Great Grandniece of Harriet Tubman
1:20 PM Moderated Discussion: "Preparing, Provisioning, Pursuing Flight"
Dr. Leni Sorenson, Culinary Historian and Chef; Journey-Cake: Food on the Freedom Road
Dr. Samuel W. Black, Director of the African American Program/ Museum of African American History, Senator John Heinz History Center; De would go to de woods an get herbs an roots: African American Survival Techniques in Slavery
Moderator: Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, Department of American Studies
2:45 PM Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid
Dr. Edda Fields-Black, Carnegie Mellon University, Director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center
COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War
4:30 PM Artist Talk: Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make Landscapes
Zoë Charlton , Artist and Director, College of Visual and Performing Arts, School of Art, George Mason University
Speaker Bios Information Click Here
Student Workshop
While at UMD, Zoë Charlton will hold a working session for student artists and activists. Students, if interested in participating in this conversation, please send inquiries to mrowley1@umd.edu.
Sponsors
This program is brought to your with the generous support of our co-sponsors Arts for All and the College of Arts and Humanities
