Northern Arizona University’s Summer Seminar Series, “An Open Door: Diversity in 2021” explores diversity and inclusion through multiple lenses and features engaging and timely topics presented by university faculty, diversity professionals and visiting scholars.

Spend an evening with Dr. Phoebe Godfrey, associate professor-in-residence in the Department of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, as she explores how the social intersections of race, class and gender shape the cultural constructions of one’s body, and thus of nature. She will unpack how in Western culture bodies that are deemed inferior as a result of the intersections of racism, sexism and classism are the same bodies that are deemed to be ‘closer to nature’, ‘wild’ and / or ‘savage’. As such, addressing our societies’ ongoing violence towards BIPOC / women / LGBTQ+ peoples (and the consequential traumatic internalization of these experiences of violence), must be juxtapositioned with the on-going global environmental destruction and, ultimately, with climate change. Finally, Godfrey will propose that to heal these inseparable crises requires that we deconstruct our collective illusionary social identities, in order to engage in the ‘embodiment of the Self’ – bringing us as individuals and as a society back to a more accurate construction of nature, and therefore of our collective / selves.

Q & A to follow. For event information and Zoom webinar link, visit https://nau.edu/SummerSeminarSeries