The Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture brings together faculty researchers from across USC, Southern California and beyond, to explore and contextualize shifts in representations of gender, race and sexuality in public culture, while translating that research to the public square.
Our shared sense of public culture encompasses the sites of collaboration and engagement that extend outside the discrete, specialized worlds of academia, the arts, entertainment and activist organizations, bringing them together through conversations and practices that address intersectional concerns.
We not only speak to each other, but also with the publics we serve – our neighbors and local communities, as well as those who engage with our cultural and scholarly production – while forging practices in research, communication, skill-sharing and mutual aid.
Right: (left to right) Consortium Director Karen Tongson joins Jeopardy! Super Champions Mattea Roach and Amy Schneider, and comedian/former Jeopardy! contestant Louis Virtel for our “Queer Knowledges” event.
We draw together scholars across disciplines to create and expand our modes of scholarly discourse, using podcasts as well as other alternate forms of collaborative media and publication.
We aim not to solve problems that might seem complex and remote to the public, but that are instead accessible to all of us, rooted in the cultures and languages of our everyday lives.
Left: Evelyn Alsultany, host of Muslims As Seen on TV, interviewed by Alex Cohen for “Why Muslim Representation in Hollywood Matters”, Inside the Issues with Alex Cohen, Spectrum News 1, Television, July 6, 2021
At the centerpiece of our Consortium is an in-house podcast network that was created by necessity at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Podcasting and creating informative audio stories in multiple genres have since evolved into our key practices and forms of public engagement. As we expand the CGSRPC beyond USC to collaborate with other institutions in the region, we aim to strengthen not only our podcast network, but also an intellectual digital “network” in multiple senses of the term.
ACFC buddies and season ticket holders, Karen Tongson & Jennifer Doyle, process the FIFA WWC from opposite ends of the globe.
Produced in Los Angeles, Air/Light Podcast brings you literature from a Southern California perspective. We feature conversations and interviews with the best of contemporary literature in California and beyond.
This is the official podcast of Air/Light, an online literary journal published by the English Department at the University of Southern California. We showcase both traditional and innovative works. We are firmly of the West Coast, but also national, international. We mean to look out expansively from this place rather than to gaze narrowly back at it, to express a West Coast aesthetic, a West Coast sensibility, and direct that lens onto the world.
The Art of Grief, a new show featuring conversations with artists, creators, mental health professionals, spiritual guides and everyday people exploring the many forms of loss and grief, and the different ways we all try to cope – or can’t. This show delves into how art is made and forged through grief, as well as how art transforms and ameliorates our experiences of grief and loss. Premiering Monday, September 16, episodes will be released weekly.
Co-hosted by podcast veteran, author and the chair of USC’s Gender & Sexuality Studies department, Dr. Karen Tongson, and Dr. Megan Auster-Rosen, a clinical psychologist and former Associate Medical Director of Behavioral Health at Cedars Sinai, the show is led by two queer voices who are not only experts in their fields, but also close-friends whose bond was formed by processing their histories of grief.
The Arts of Racial Reckoning is executive produced by Dorinne Kondo.
In the aftermath of the 1992 LA Uprisings, Anna Deavere Smith crafted TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES 1992, a play based on Smith’s interviews with over 200 Los Angeles residents.
30 years later, through the lens of TWILIGHT, we ask: how can the arts advance social justice? Can they help us understand structural racism, as more than individual prejudice? Can they provide models for working through conflict? Can they show us both possibilities and limits to our strategies for social change?
For the first episode of Critical Conversations, Playwright and Vida showrunner Tanya Saracho joins USC professor Elda María Román to talk about how Latinx representation on the stage, page and screen (both big and small) are never an easy task. Instead they invite writers to think and work through all sorts of nuance, “messiness,” and breadth. Their discussion affirms how and why our identities can never be seen as monolithic.
<p><em>Dance Hubs</em> is an audio series about global spaces of creative movement where dancers assemble and connect, exchange and get down, and then pass through. It is hosted by Edwin Hill, Associate Professor at the University of Southern California with joint appointments in the Department of French & Italian and the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity.</p>
<p><strong>Season one</strong> in this audio series features “the Loft,” a temporary residence for dancers from around the world. In this series, we will hear the story of the Loft as told by the dancers who created it and made it special. And we’ll listen to them explain why the Loft made such a meaningful impact in their lives as dancers and, quite simply, as human beings.</p>
Feminist Keywords Instagram
Feminist Keywords brings the words and concepts that currently energize feminist and queer studies to your kitchen table, classroom, discussion group, or anywhere you want to engage in these conversations. Feminist Keywords is a companion to the 2021 book Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, where 77 leading thinkers were asked to write on 70 terms ranging from hashtag to intersectionality, reproduction to woman, terms that are hot topics in the news and in our communities. In each episode, a member of the editorial collective interviews an author from the book talking about the significance of their keyword.
The Gaymazing Race is a limited podcast series on The Amazing Race from an LGBTQ point-of-view, hosted by authors, profs & professional queers Nicole J. Georges & Karen Tongson.
Muslims as Seen on TV is a podcast that explores representations of Muslims in US popular culture. It is hosted by Evelyn Alsultany, Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC and author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11.
You Shouldn’t Let Poets Lie to You is a podcast in which hosts Amelia Ada and Alexandria Hall interview poets and invite them to tell you beautiful lies about a random assortment of subjects.
Contact Us
Gender & Sexuality Studies
University of Southern California
Mark Taper Hall of Humanities, 422
3501 Trousdale Parkway
Los Angeles, California 90089-4352
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The Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture is generously funded by USC Dornsife and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.