Michigan/Mellon Project on Egalitarianism and the Metropolis Research Colloquium

Michigan/Mellon Project on Egalitarianism and the Metropolis Research Colloquium

Presentations by the Michigan / Mellon Humanities Fellows:

​“The 1967 Rebellion and Visions of an Independent Black Detroit”
Austin McCoy, Michigan/Mellon Humanities Fellow

and

“Domesticating Detroit: Art Houses and the Political Economy of the Optics of Care”
Julia Yezbick, Michigan/Mellon Humanities Fellow

Refreshments will be served.

About the Michigan/Mellon Project:
The project is made possible by a $1.3 million grant from the A. W. Mellon Foundation to allow design theory and practice to inform and be informed by questions of social justice, social movements and transformative creative arts movements – both past and present. The emphasis on cities will focus humanists on linking theories of human interaction and collective life with the physical space of a city and its histories. The increased expertise in urbanism allows for humanists to better understand the market forces and economic constraints that inform design decisions that directly affect human life.

Austin McCoy is a historian whose research explores the relationship between transformations in political economy and the evolution of city- and state-based social movements. His broader research and teaching interests include African American History, social movements, and policing. Austin’s work has appeared in journals such as Social History and New Labor Forum and blogs like Nursing Clio and Black Perspectives. He is currently working on a book that analyzes activists’ social movement responses to urban uprisings, police brutality, war and empire, and plant closure in the Midwest during the 1970s and 1980s.

Julia Yezbick is a Detroit-based filmmaker, artist, and anthropologist who received her PhD in Media Anthropology and Critical Media Practice from Harvard University in 2016. Her work has been shown at international festivals and venues including the Berlinale–Forum Expanded, MOMA PS1’s print shop, the New York Library for Performing Arts, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Mostra Internacional do Filme Etnográfico (Rio de Janeiro), the Montreal Ethnographic Film Festival, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit. She is the founding editor of Sensate, an online journal for experiments in critical media practice, and co-directs Mothlight Microcinema in Detroit. She recently completed a lectureship in the anthropology department at Harvard University where she taught courses on ethnographic film, video production, deindustrializing US cities, and the intersections of art and anthropology.