Thursday, February 19, 2015 4:30 PM to 6:30 PM EST
Student Union I, Room 3A
The second CSC of the semester will feature Carlos Decena. In his talk, Decena revisits the Samuel Delany/Joan Scott engagement around questions of what Scott famously called "the evidence of experience." Decena draws on ongoing transnational fieldwork (in Dominican Republic, Havana and New York/New Jersey) on Yoruba religious practice and transnational kinship building to revisit critically, and in the inverse, the relationship between evidence and experience. While the Delany/Scott debate largely pivoted on the possibility of accurate and empirically-valid knowledge drawn from personal experience and interpretations of the past, Decena asks us to ponder what is at stake in projects that demand that we "experience evidence" to even begin to grasp what is at stake in undertaking them. What knowledges become available, and what possibilities for the decolonization of knowledge practices might become available, precisely from surrender to experience?
Dr. Carlos Decena is Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-‐Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men (Duke University Press, 2011) as well as articles in Social Text, Papeles de Población, and GLQ, among others.
As always, refreshments and coffee will be served so feel free to come early and stay after to have a snack and converse! 
