Social Cohesion Dialogue

Our Social Cohesion Dialogue puts acclaimed authors and their inspiring books in conversation with ASU and audiences across and beyond Arizona. 

Since the spring of 2019, Social Cohesion Dialogues have created memorable dialogues and calls to action with accomplished writers and readers from diverse communities.  

Social Cohesion Dialogue 2023

Jonathan Daniel Wells, author of The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of Children of the Land will be in conversation with communities in and beyond ASU. 

Join us as we reflect on vulnerability, borders, resistance, history, love, advocacy and justice. 
 

Public Dialogue

Join Center Director Lois Brown, PhD and Social Cohesion Dialogue 2023 authors Jonathan Daniel Wells and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo for an engaging public dialogue about the compelling issues and revelatory themes that emerge in The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War.  Attendees can develop questions in book groups prior to the dialogue and also submit questions for the authors in advance when they register for the in-person and livestreamed dialogue.   

Free | In-Person and Livestreamed | Open to the Public

Jonathan Daniel Wells

Jonathan Daniel Wells is an award-winning professor of social, cultural and intellectual History and the Dean of the Residential College at the University of Michigan.  Wells, who earned his B.A from the University of Florida and his PhD in American History from the University of Michigan, has written extensively about race, gender, class and the Civil War.  The Kidnapping Club, which won the 2020 New York City Book Award, “persuasively demonstrates that the inhumanity of slavery was neither restricted by geography nor restrained by law” and that it “poisoned all of American culture.”  

Marcelo Hernadez Castillo

Marcelo Hernadez Castillo is an award-winning writer and a professor of creative writing. Currently on the faculty at St. Mary’s University of California  and the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program in Ohio, he has held fellowships including a distinguished fellow position for the Marshall Project’s Art for Justice initiative–which advocates for prison reform– at the University of Arizona.  The first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan, Castillo is the author of Cenzontle, a  prize-winning volume of poetry and of Children of the Land, a stirring memoir that has  earned critical acclaim.  Castillo efforts as a founding member of the Undocupoets campaign–which sought to eliminate citizenship requirements from all major American book poetry prizes–saw him honored with the Writers for Writers award.