S1E10: Dr. Vilna Treitler on Trauma, Resilience, Memoir and Artistic Vision

At the American Sociological Meeting 2019, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Vilna Treitler. In this conversation, she discusses her experiences with trauma and resilience, mentorship, her work as a visual artist and her newest project: her memoir. [*Cover Photo: Vilna Treitler Self Portrait] Vilna Bashi Treitler is Professor of Black Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, a sociologist, and an artist. Her scholarship theorizes about international migration, race and ethnicity and the dynamics of hierarchical socioeconomic structures, and she has earned distinctions for expertise in qualitative methods. Bashi Treitler is the author of The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions, a comparative historical analysis of US ethnic groups’ racialization and the antiblackness it produces, and Survival of the Knitted: Immigrant Social Networks in a Stratified World, a study of the help immigrants get from the transnational aid networks they create for themselves. She is also editor of the book Race in Transnational and Transracial Adoption, on the racialization of children made available domestically and internationally by displacement and misfortune, and a monograph issue of Current Sociology entitled Dynamics of Inequality in a Global Perspective. She has served as Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society, and as Vice Chair of the UN NGO Committee on the Elimination of Racism, Afrophobia, and Colorism. Her art centers on oil painting and glasswork, and she cares deeply about social justice and human rights, so she moves in and out of activism as much as her other obligations allow.

Om Podcasten

The Cite Black Women podcast is a periodic program with a simple message: Cite Black Women. We have been producing knowledge since we blessed this earth. We theorize, we innovate, we revolutionize the world. We do not need mediators. We do not need interpreters. It's time to disrupt the canon. It's time to upturn the erasures of history. It's time to give credit where credit is due. This bi-weekly podcast features reflections and conversations about the politics and praxis of acknowledging and centering Black women’s ideas and intellectual contributions inside and outside of the academy through citation. Episodes feature conversations with Black women inside and outside of the academy who are actively engaged in radical citation as praxis, quotes and reflections on Black women's writing, conversations on weathering the storm of citational politics in the academy, decolonizing syllabi and more. For more information about our project follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @citeblackwomen and access our website at citeblackwomencollective.org #CiteBlackWomen Producer and Host: Christen Smith Co-producer: Michaela Machicote Audio Engineer: Lydia Fortuna