After the abrupt interruption to last year's Mellon Sawyer Seminar, two days of talks will bring the Imagining Latinidades seminar to a close. On March 26 and 27, seven scholars will share their research on topics including "essential" versus "disposable" workers, queer Chicana performance, Afrofuturism as applied to a post-undocumented world, and relationships between U.S. Latinx musicians and British post-punk. The Seminar co-directors, Rene Rocha (Political Science), Ariana Ruiz (Literature, University of California San Diego), and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano (Communications, Texas A & M) have also returned to their podcast, with a new episode released on March 17 and more to come.

As it became clear that the 2019-20 school year would include various kinds of online learning and other disruptions to schooling as usual, a group of community leaders joined forces to create a program to support K12 students. Less than a year later, there are seven NESTS in Johnson County supporting 100+ students, especially vulnerable and at-risk youth whose academic skills and social-emotional well-being have been strongly impacted by changes to schooling. Two of the creators of NESTS, Missie Forbes and Megan Alter, along with Obermann-Spelman Rockefeller Community Fellow Peggy Schwab, a graduate student in the College of Education, will share how the NESTS evolved this year, and what they've learned about the state of education in our community.

Writer, activist, and audio journalist Rebecca Nagle, citizen of the Cherokee Nation based in Oklahoma, and creator-host of the podcast This Land is the final guest of the Podcasting With Purpose Series. She will be in conversation with Mellon HPG Postdoctoral Fellow Laura Perry on April 1 at 4:00 pm. Nagle's podcast focuses on a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision that resulted in the largest restoration of tribal land in U.S. history, nearly half the land in Oklahoma. In the first season, she traced how two crimes collide--an 1839 assassination of a Cherokee leader and a 1999 small town murder--in an investigation into the treaty rights of five Native American tribes that led all the way to the Supreme Court. Recordings of the full podcasting series are available online.