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SEATTLE, WA – On July 27, Louie Gong will host a workshop titled “Art and Identity” for visiting Iraqi high school students at the Jones Soda Company headquarters in Seattle.  Gong, a Nooksack tribal member known for launching a custom shoe line featuring Coast Salish art, has been featured in numerous media and even showcased during the 2010 Winter Olympics. He will share his experiences as someone who is “walking in two worlds” and teach the Iraqi youth to create a custom shoe that reflects their cultural identity. Vans, who have supported Louie’s work in the past, is providing the Iraqi youth with shoes for the workshop.

“It must be a dynamic time for Iraqi youth,” Gong said.  “I can’t wait to see their designs because a picture really is worth a thousand words.”

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This is a huge honor for me. Here are the details.

“Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies,” the first annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, will be held at DePaul University in Chicago on November 5-6, 2010.

The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have reached a watershed moment, the 2010 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.”

Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.