Claremont, Calif. (November 3, 2017)— Pitzer College’s Munroe Center for Social Inquiry (MCSI) speakers series on conspiracy theory hosts University of Pennsylvania Professor and author John L. Jackson on Tuesday, November 7, in Benson Auditorium at Pitzer College. Jackson’s talk, “What’s Love Got to Do with It? Race, Conspiracy Theories, and Contemporary Hip-Hop Culture,” is this year’s MCSI Atherton Lecture, named in honor of Pitzer’s first president, John Atherton, and his wife, Virginia Atherton.
Jackson, the co-author of Impolite Conversations: On Race, Politics, Sex, Money and Religion, will explore “some of hip-hop culture’s fascination with conspiracy theories linked to world global domination and racial hatred.” He will also discuss the role of love—“especially a weaponized and self-destructive form of loving’’—in contemporary popular culture.
John L. Jackson is the Richard Perry University Professor and dean of University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice. His research examines racial and class-based differences in contemporary urban environments, focusing on how urbanites theorize and deploy those differences in everyday interactions. He is also an expert in the impact of mass media on urban life and media-making as a form of community-building. In addition to Impolite Conversations, he is the author of Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, published by Harvard University Press and co-author of Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment from New York University Press.
About the Munroe Center for Social Inquiry (MCSI)
The Ruth and Lee Munroe Center for Social Inquiry continues the pursuit of interdisciplinary learning and public inquiry embodied by the lives and service of two of Pitzer’s most distinguished and beloved professors Robert “Lee” Munroe, research professor of anthropology, and the late Ruth Hagberg Munroe. Each year, MCSI sponsors a themed series of events including lectures, seminars and panel discussions.
