What is Liberal Arts?

The Aydelotte Foundation is pleased to host a conversation with Tao Leigh Goffe (Cornell) and Krystal Tsosie (Vanderbilt) on developing projects and programs that address historic and present violence with respect to race, indigeneity, and science and technology. Krystal Tsosie will be talking about her work with IndigiData, while Tao Leigh Goffe will discuss Dark Laboratory. Both of these projects challenge long-standing academic management of data and storytelling by foregrounding the knowledge, training, and education of Black and indigenous people.

The event is open to all in the Swarthmore community and to the public. Registration information will be made available approximately one month before the date of the event.

This event is part of the Aydelotte Foundation’s project on “Race, Racism, and the Liberal Arts.” This project assembles work on underrepresented histories of how Black people, institutions, and ideas have existed outside of, pushed against, or reshaped from within the ideas and institutions of the liberal arts. It also investigates and recounts curricular, epistemological, and institutional genealogies that challenge how or whether the term liberal arts has silenced histories and ways of knowing developed by Black people, indigenous people, and people of color.

More information about the featured speakers can be found below. Please visit our website for updates on this research initiative, including additional events and publications.

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Tao Leigh Goffe is an assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history. She has a joint appointment between the Department of Africana Studies and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is also a writer and a DJ specializing in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization. At the intersections of the environmental humanities and science and technology studies, her interdisciplinary research and practice examines the unfolding relationship between technology, the senses, memory, and nature. DJ’ing is an important part of her pedagogy and research. Film production, sound editing, digital cartography, and oral history are also integral to her praxis. Her writing has been published in Small Axe, Amerasia Journal, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. She is the founder of Dark Laboratory, an engine for collaboration, design, and study of race, ecology, and creative technology.

Krystal Tsosie (Diné/Navajo) is an indigenous geneticist-bioethicist, co-founder of the Native BioData Consortium in Phoenix, Arizona, and a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University. She has provided commentary on issues related to DNA, politics, and identity in her articles published in The Atlantic and others worldwide. Her work has also been featured in a number of articles on data sovereignty and indigeneity in The New York Times, Forbes, and NPR. She co-leads a genetics study investigating genetic determinants of pre-eclampsia in American Indian women, constituting one of the few community-based genetics studies including Tribal communities. As one of few Native American geneticists, she also continues work from her Masters in Applied Ethics from Arizona State University, which examines medical ethics in the context of indigenous beliefs and genetic rights. After devoting several years to developing a technique to target small drugs to cancer cells, her newest endeavor is to ameliorate the health disparities gap in genetics through community-based participatory research.