At Length with Steve Scher
At Length with Ralina Joseph
Prior to her Equity & Difference lecture, What’s the difference with “difference”?, UW Department of Communication associate professor Ralina Joseph sat down for a conversation with At Length host Steve Scher, ’87.
Recorded on Jan 13, 2016.
Poster from the Winter 2016 Equity & Difference lecture series. Click to enlarge.
Dr. Ralina Joseph is interested in the mediated communication of difference, or how race, gender, class, and sexuality structure our understandings of the world. She is currently working on her second book project, “Screening Strategic Ambiguity: Black Women, Television Culture and the PostIdentity Dance,” an examination of African American women’s negotiation of the ostensibly “after” moment of racism and sexism. She is also co-editing and contributing to collections of essays on women of color in higher education and on African American “respectability politics.” Dr. Joseph participates in a wide variety of diversity-related campus issues, including initiating the Department of Communication’s Communication and Difference Course arc, and co-founding WIRED (Women Investigating Race, Ethnicity, and Difference), a group for UW tenure-track faculty working in the areas of difference.
In this conversation with Steve Scher, Dr. Joseph discusses the trappings of identity politics, the fallacy that “white people don’t have race,” and how achieving true equity will take more than diversity alone.
