![]() ![]() Because I had nothing else to do at the moment because we were stuck inside in quarantine, I saw comment after comment commenting on this situation. I spent most of the day going and watching TV shows on Netflix and Hulu and YouTube and such, and then one day I woke up in May and I was alerted through different Facebook alerts and Instagram alerts that a murder had taken place of a black man who was knelt upon and was suffocated to death as a result. So, last year in May as I was stuck sitting in my apartment in Woodlawn, Chicago, I felt trapped as due to COVID and quarantine. ![]() Just for the sake of just explaining my progress through this I'm gonna do a big effort to both go through Baldwin's thoughts, but I'm also gonna go and contextualize the ideas by going and offering testimonies from my own life, especially from Swarthmore just to show you the ways in which Baldwin really illustrated a philosophy of love that's meant to go and be practiced in the real world. So I wanna thank the alumni council, Lisa Shafer, Dina, and I also wanna give a special shout-out and thank you to my partner Asia, who in the past several months has helped me contextualize a lot of these ideas and has served as a great conversant on these topics. I'm so excited to go and share my research with all of you, especially since so much of it actually began back at Swarthmore in various classes I took. Paul Cato '14 Thank you, Dina, and thank you to all of you for showing up tonight. So, with that I'm gonna pass it over to Paul. And I will ask those questions of Paul during the question-and-answer period. We love seeing what class years you guys are from. Please use the chat feature and please do include your name and year. Paul will present for the first half hour followed by our usual 30-minute question and answers. For those of you who are new to SwatTalks or for our regulars who just need a reminder, tonight will go like this. He's a founding member of an international epilepsy awareness organization and is an active alumnus of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and diversity program. In addition to Paul's scholarly endeavors, he's heavily involved in fights against racism and ableism. His work also extends into the more practical field of human sociality, such as race relations, disability studies, and social justice. Paul's dissertation proposal was the first to focus on members of the African diaspora in the Committee on Social Thought's history. He dissertation outlines the discourse of active love, which is a decades-long conversation on political love comprised of explicit or implicit discussions between several 20th century African American intellectuals. In addition to studying Baldwin, he has investigated discussions of love in the work of Audre Lorde, Dostoevsky, Emmanuel Levinas, and Plato. Much of his research focuses on conceptions of love found in cultural works and those that speak to the world's social and political realities. ![]() He studies philosophies of love and intersubjectivity, particularly those developed by American author James Baldwin. So, Paul is currently pursuing a PhD from the University of Chicago, the University of Chicago's John Nef Committee on Social Thought. So, I'm just so thrilled that Paul is here with us this evening. I think it was the love and religion seminar, and I can remember it like it was yesterday, and I remember Paul's deep insights and his presence in class was characterized by a kindness, a deep listening, an open-mindedness, and a humility. Paul and I were actually in the same class together, Professor Steven Hopkins. He majored in religion and minored in black studies. So, tonight, I am thrilled to be joined by Paul Cato, a graduate of the class of 2014. If you're interested in watching previous talks, you can also find those on our SwatTalks page, including our first SwatTalk from September with NASA scientist John Mather from the class of 1968. So, tonight's session will be recorded so you will be able to find it on the SwatTalks recording webpage on the Swarthmore College site within two or three weeks. ![]() So, again, thank you all for coming tonight. I'm a member of the Swarthmore Alumni Council, and I also help to run SwatTalks. As many of you know, SwatTalks is a speaker series brought to you by the Swarthmore Alumni Council. ![]()
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