April 17-18, 2009 
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
The symposium is organized in anticipation of the upcoming 25th anniversary of the first publication of Omi and Winant’s landmark book Racial Formation in the United States.
Omi and Winant's work—influential to a generation of scholars across the social sciences and humanities—will serve as the point of departure for a series of panels and presentations exploring the past, present and future of racial formation.
The panels will examine a diverse set of locations and times: from the plantations of Colonial Virginia to the Rastafarian communities of Western Jamaica in the 1990s to the prisons of Abu Ghraib today. Speakers will explore the ways race is constructed, inhabited, and transformed and will discuss contemporary policy questions; such as conceptions of race in biomedical research. The panels will offer fresh perspectives on social movements, such as the diverse origins and membership of the United Farm Workers in the 1960s. And they will consider a range of provocative theoretical frameworks—Native studies, feminist theories, critical race studies--to depict the various ways that struggles over land, identity, bodies and nationhood articulate racial meaning and power.
The symposium is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.
Featuring: Michael Omi, UC Berkeley and Howard Winant, UC Santa Barbara
The symposium is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.
Featuring: Michael Omi, UC Berkeley and Howard Winant, UC Santa Barbara
Keynote Speakers: Devon Carbado, UCLA and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University
Confirmed panelists:
Catherine Lee, Rutgers University
Sherene Razack, University of Toronto
Martin Summers, Boston College
John L. Jackson, Jr., University of Pennsylvania
Matt Garcia, Brown University
Neil Gotanda, Western State University
Michelle McKinley, University of Oregon
Gary Delgado, Applied Research Center
Laura Gomez, University of New Mexico
Priya Kandaswamy, Portland State University
Nikhil Singh, New York University & University of Washington
Tomas Almaguer, San Francisco State University
Denise Ferreira da Silva, University of California, San Diego
Andrea Smith, University of California, Riverside
Deborah A. Thomas, University of Pennsylvania
