Layli Phillips, "What's Up on Planet Earth??: A New Age Ecowomanist Statement"

Friday, April 4, 5pm

Center for the Arts Screening Room, North Campus 

We live in times of accelerating crisis, transition, and transformation on environmental, social, and spiritual fronts.  Mainline accounts of these situations, inside and outside academia, strain to maintain "business as usual" by forcing accumulating anomalies into comfortable yet obsolescent explanatory frames.  What if we took a dramatically different approach, embracing the radical possibility latent within these deeply unsettling conditions of our own creation? Utilizing womanist, ecological, and new age perspectives on humanity's current crossroads and drawing from thinkers as diverse as Gloria Anzaldua, AnaLouise Keating, Alice Walker, M. Jacqui Alexander, Paul Hawken, David R. Hawkins, Masaru Emoto, and others, this presentation will ultimately offer its suggestions for social change within the emerging framework of spiritual activism.

Layli Phillips is Associate Professor of Women's Studies and a faculty associate of the African American Studies department at Georgia State University in Atlanta.  She recently published The Womanist Reader (Routledge, 2006), an interdisciplinary anthology of the first quarter century of womanist thought.

Her work has also been published in journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Journal of African American Studies, The Journal of African American History, History of Psychology, and Sexuality & Culture, as well as a number of edited volumes.  She teaches courses and conducts research on womanism, Black feminism, Africana sexuality studies, and women and hip hop.

She also conducts historical research on early Black psychologists Mamie P. and Kenneth B. Clark and writes on the liberation psychology of Ignacio Martín-Baró.  Emerging interests include applied womanism and spiritual activism.  She holds a bachelor's degree from Spelman College (where she majored in philosophy), a master's degree in psychology from Penn State, and a Ph.D. in psychology (with an emphasis on lifespan human development) from Temple University.  She is the proud mother of two grown children, a son and a daughter, who live and thrive on opposite coasts.