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A virtual event with Andre E. Johnson author of 'The Struggle Over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter'

Thursday, November 5, 2020 7:00 PM-8:30 PM

Virtual Lecture and Q&A: "Rhetoric, Race and the Spirituality of Black Lives Matter"

Dr. Andre Johnson speaking

Dr. Andre E. Johnson, associate professor at the University of Memphis and scholar-in-residence at the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, will present a virtual lecture exploring issues discussed in his 2018 book The Struggle Over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter, co-authored by Amanda Nell Edgar. The lecture is hosted by Lipscomb's College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

In their book, the authors examined the complex relationship between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter as it unfolded on social media and in offline interpersonal relationships. Exploring cultural influences like family history, fear, religion, postracialism, and workplace pressure, they traced the meanings of these movements from the perspectives of ordinary participants. The book ties together online and offline, national and local, and personal and political to understand one of the defining social justice struggles of our time. 

The Struggle won the 2018 National Communication Association African American Communication and Culture Division Outstanding Book Award.

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About Dr. Andre E. Johnson

Johnson is an associate professor of rhetoric and media studies in the Department of Communication and Film at the University of Memphis and is scholar-in-residence at the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change. He teaches classes in African American public address; rhetoric, race and religion; media studies; interracial communication; rhetoric and popular culture; and hip hop studies.

He is the editor of the Lexington Book series on Race, Religion and Rhetoric, and is currently collecting and editing the works of AME Church Bishop Henry McNeal Turner under the title “The Literary Archive of Henry McNeal Turner.” 

Additionally, along with his academic titles, he currently serves as Senior Pastor of Gifts of Life Ministries, an inner-city church built upon the servant leadership philosophy in Memphis, Tennessee.

He is also the author of The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition, Urban God Talk: Constructing a Hip Hop Spirituality and No Future in this Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (to be releases in 2020). 

Ongoing research projects explore the nexus between rhetoric, theology and the Bible; religion and politics; the rhetoric of President Barack Obama; religion and media; the prophetic rhetoric of W.E.B. Du Boi; Donald Trump; and more recently, the rhetoric of Tyler Perry.