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‘First Friday’ series highlighting innovative faculty research returns for spring
photos of Emory University professors Chandra Ford, Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk and Javier Villa-Flores

The spring semester “First Fridays” lecture series will feature Emory College professors (l-r) Chandra Ford, Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk and Javier Villa-Flores. Programs will be held Feb. 7, March 7 and April 4.

Chandra Ford, whose scholarly work focuses on the impacts of racism and other inequities on public health, will share her latest research this week as the kickoff to the spring “First Fridays” lecture series.

Ford, a professor in both African American studies at Emory College of Arts and Sciences and the Rollins School of Public Health, will discuss strategies for moving beyond identifying racism as a public health concern toward enacting substantive institutional change.

The lecture and two additional talks this spring are part of a collaboration that Emory College of Arts and Sciences and Emory’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Differences (JWJI) launched in 2020, to highlight groundbreaking faculty scholarship on a wide array of topics related to race, ethnicity and social justice.

“I have been really pleased with the growth of First Fridays in the past year,” says JWJI director Andra Gillespie. “This event is attracting greater interest from faculty presenters and attendees, demonstrating the value of providing a platform for Emory faculty to present their latest research on these important questions.”

The series continues in March with assistant professor of music Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk, whose research focuses on Indigenous music of Arctic regions, and concludes in April with Javier Villa-Flores, an associate professor of religion who studies colonialism and religion in Mexico.

Ford’s talk will be held in the Jones Room on the third floor of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. The lectures are free, but reservations are required.

Learn more and RSVP to each of the lectures.


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