About this Event
Please join us for an event with Sarah J. Jackson in conversation with Moya Bailey to celebrate the release of A Second Sight: How the Wonder and Vision of Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom on Wednesday, July 8th at 7pm CT. This event is free to attend and registration is requested.
Since the nation’s founding, Black Americans have had a unique perspective on the U.S. experience—a “second sight”—that reveals the truth about the nation to itself. As renowned media scholar Sarah J. Jackson charts in this bold and daring masterwork, at the center of this effort has been an extraordinary cast of Black journalists, photographers, filmmakers, radio hosts, podcasters and other mediamakers who have drawn on the visionary tradition of second sight to advance democracy and broaden our most fundamental American values.
When Black mediamakers raise their voices and speak uncomfortable truths about America, they shape memories of the nation and push us toward a future more closely aligned with our espoused values. For two centuries, this “second sight” has been an overlooked engine of American democracy.
Drawing from W.E.B. Du Bois’s philosophical work, along with deep historical analysis and dozens of interviews with today’s most active Black mediamakers, A Second Sight shows these visionaries positioned at the margins of their industries and navigating fraught relationships to power. They’ve warned of the greatest dangers to democracy—from slavery to Nazism, and mass incarceration to misinformation. Their work is central to our culture and politics. Yet it is devalued, met with violent censure, or achieved only via ingenious work-arounds. This tension has sharpened their commitments to truth.
Now one of our nation’s foremost scholars of American media, Sarah J. Jackson, presents an appraisal that situates Black mediamakers at the vanguard of telling the American story. Brilliant, urgent and illuminating, A Second Sight is an authentic and candid grappling with a discordant thread in the American fabric and, in tracing a bolder vision for the nation, presents a way forward.
Sarah J. Jackson is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and co-director of the Media, Inequality and Change Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Her previous books, Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press and #HashtagActivism, examine the relationship between media, race and social change. Research for A Second Sight was supported by an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and a New America Fellowship.
Moya Bailey is a Professor at Northwestern University and is the founder of the Digital Apothecary and co-founder of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever-growing network of activists and organizers. She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021). She is an award winning documentarian after completing the short documentary You Just Watch & See (2025) featuring her late Cousin Dollie, and is completing a docuseries, Misogynoir in Medicine.
Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are strongly encouraged. We have one industrial air purifier, two smaller air purifiers, and four ceiling fans installed in our space. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. If you need a seat reserved for you for accessibility, please email [email protected] To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For scholarship tickets or other access needs please email .
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Women & Children First, 5233 North Clark Street, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00
