Karla Slocum

“The Long Movement for Black Towns”

Saturday, April 15th at 4:45 pm in the Summit Grand Ballroom

Karla Slocum is the Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Chair of Public Policy, Professor of Anthropology, and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is the recent past director of the Institute of African American Research, a role she held for over eight years. Slocum’s scholarship is devoted to ethnographic studies of place, race, history, and Black rurality. Her work has been supported by awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the School for Advanced Research, and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. She is the author of Free Trade and Freedom: Neoliberalism, Place and Nation in the Caribbean (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West (UNC Press, 2019). Her published articles and book chapters have appeared in such journals and edited volumes as American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Transforming Anthropology, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, and the Routledge Companion on Inter-American Studies. Slocum is the co-creator of #TulsaSyllabus, a digital resource guide centering interdisciplinary and multi-genre sources on and relevant to the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. She is also co-founder and co-chair of Black Communities: A Conference for Collaboration, an event that facilitated global community-engaged research partnerships and exchanges. Currently, Slocum is pursuing a collaborative, interdisciplinary project, Mapping Black Towns, to digitally visualize the story of U.S. Black settlements in their social, geographical, political, and material contexts.