Friday, April 4, 2025

4:00 – 6:00PM

Royce Hall 314

RSVP HERE

Join MAP at UCLA on April 4, 2025 for a colloquium with Alisa Bierria, UCLA Gender Studies. The talk will take place from 4:00 – 6:00 PM in Royce Hall 314.

All are welcome to attend. Dinner will be served at a reception following the talk in Royce 314.

Structural Racism Within Reason

This talk examines the politics of intention through an analysis of structural racism. Alisa Bierria will discuss two key black feminist critiques of reason — Patricia Hill Collins’ discussion of “controlling images” (2000) and Michelle Cliff’s concept of the “mythic mind” (1982) — to propose “controlling intentions” as a framework to explore how structural racism produces fictive intentions. She argues that these intentions are constructed to rationalize the criminalization of survival and then justify that outcome as common sense. As an example, she analyzes how Marissa Alexander’s intentions and intentional actions were replaced by controlling intentions in her 2011 Stand Your Ground hearing to illustrate how reason provides a vehicle through which structural violence becomes naturalized within the law.

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