Dr. Maryam Aziz (Penn State University) will be presenting “’Sports are for everyone, Sports are for the people’: Socialism, Black Power, and Sport within the Black Panther Party” for the Iowa Colloquium on Sport and Culture this Friday, October 22nd from 4:00-5:00 CST [for other time zones, click here]. The online and zoomified event is free and open to the public. There will be lots of time for discussion after the talk, and we are looking forward to sharing some ideas.
Zoom link: https://uiowa.zoom.us/j/93729307583
Please show up so we can continue to convince our university to give us money to host these exciting speakers.
About Maryam Aziz
Dr. Maryam Aziz, pronouns: they/them, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Richards Center and the Africana Research Center at Pennsylvania State University. Aziz received a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 2020. Aziz also holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in African American Studies from Columbia University. Aziz’s first book asks how folks who practiced unarmed self-defense contributed to Black Power organizing and shifting ideas about liberation, abolition, and gender norms. It also traces how the learning of martial arts was facilitated by U.S. militarism during the Cold War. Aziz’s work was showcased in the 2017-2018 exhibit Black Power! at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, for which Aziz was a contributing writer and a curator for the sections on popular culture and blaxploitation film. Aziz currently serves as an Assistant Coordinator for the American Studies Association’s Sports Studies Caucus as well as the Assistant Director for the Schomburg Mellon Humanities Summer-Institute. As a scholar activist, Aziz regularly teaches radically inclusive self-defense classes in person and now virtually. They have been published in the Journal of African American history. Additionally, they have written about the history of police chokeholds for the Washington Post’s “Made by History” column. Further insight into their work can be seen in publications such as Teen Vogue and Mic or heard in Podcasts such as Burn It All Down. You can view some of their martial arts instruction at the Self Defense Starter Kit and follow them on twitter @BlackBeltPhD. More here.
