Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/14/2022
6:00 pm - 7:15 pm
Categories
Join the PublicsLab and Transformative Learning in the Humanities (TLH) for a conversation with Professor Lorgia García Peña, Mellon Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, on her groundbreaking new book, Community as Rebellion: A syllabus for surviving academia as a woman of color (2022, Haymarket Press). In conversation with PublicsLab Faculty Lead and Associate Professor of Anthropology Professor Bianca Williams, Professor García Peña will offer practices for creating liberatory spaces within institutions that are historically and perhaps inherently violent, colonialist, exclusionary, and inequitable. The conversation will consider how we –– as teachers, activists, and scholars –– can resist the academy’s extractive and exploitative practices, and how we might transform existing institutional spaces in ways that create more liberation and cultivate community for students and faculty of color.
Registration & Event Details
This event will be held via Zoom. Please RSVP for the virtual conversation by registering here! If you have any accessibility needs for this event, please email us at publicslab@gc.cuny.edu.
Currently-enrolled graduate students at the CUNY Graduate Center are also invited to a follow-up, in-person workshop with Dr. García Peña, “Unmasking Academia: An Honest Conversation About the Challenges Ahead,” on Friday, 16 September 2022 from 12-1:30pm ET. We will have 30 spots for GC students available for this workshop, so reserve your space as soon as possible.
The PublicsLab thanks Shibanee Sivanayagam and Joseph Torres-Gonzalez for their work in organizing this event.
Dr. Lorgia García Peña is a first-generation Black Latina scholar from Trenton, New Jersey. Her work emphasizes social justice, women of color feminism and Afro-Latinx episteme. She is the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, a school that provides college instruction to undocumented students and the co-director of Archives of Justice a transnational digital archive project that centers the life of people who identify as Black, queer and migrant. She is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, Fall 2016), Community as Rebellion (Haymarket, May 2022), and the forthcoming Translating Blackness: The Vaivén and Detours of Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke, Fall 2022).
Dr. García Peña is one of the 2021 Freedom Scholars, the 2018 Martin Luther King, Jr. fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the recipient of the 2017 Disobedience Award, Ford Foundations Postdoctoral Fellowship (2016). She received her PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Currently she serves as the Mellon Associate Professor in the Department of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora Studies at Tufts University.
Bianca C. Williams (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Lead of the PublicsLab at CUNY Graduate Center. Williams is an ethnographer of race, gender, and emotion in higher education and organizing communities, with a focus on Black women’s affective lives. The investigative thread that binds Williams’ organizing, teaching, and research is the question “How do Black people develop strategies for enduring and resisting the effects of racism and sexism, while attempting to maintain emotional wellness?” She has written about Black women, travel, and happiness; radical honesty as pedagogy; white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and emotional labor in higher ed; and anxious writing. Williams is the author of the award-winning book The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (Duke U 2018), and co-editor of the book Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education (SUNY 2021). Williams received the 2016 AAA & Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology, and the Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship Award in 2021. She is currently the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at Well-Read Black Girl.
