Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/10/2023
6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Categories
Join us on Wednesday, May 10th, 2023 at 6pm for “Study, Rebel, Repair, Liberate: Collective Book Launch” for a community dinner and generative discussion with four standout scholars about their recently-published work! This special event will celebrate four recent books that show how the university is not only a battleground of ideas, but a strategic hearth for people to construct a new liberatory world. The authors will bridge across the realms of Black, Puerto Rican, anticolonial, and feminist studies and movements to offer lessons for our struggles in CUNY and far beyond.
This collective book launch will host presentations by Ariana González Stokas, author of Reparative Universities: Why Diversity Alone Won’t Solve Racism in Higher Ed (Johns Hopkins University Press 2023), Joshua Myers, author of Of Black Study (Pluto Press 2023), Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed, author of New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University (Common Notions 2023), and Bianca C. Williams, co-editor of Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education (State University of New York Press 2021).
Registration & Event Details
This event will be held in-person, in the Reclaimed Commons on the 8th floor of the Graduate Center.
- 6-7pm: community dinner
- 7-9pm: authors panel and community dialogue
Participants must register on Eventbrite here. Please reach out to the PublicsLab with any logistical questions or accessibility needs at conortomasreed@gmail.com.
Ariana González Stokas has spent the last two decades working in institutions as a faculty member and senior-level DEI administrator–including at Barnard College, Bard College, and Guttman Community College–committed to co-inventing what is possible in learning environments. González Stokas is the author of Reparative Universities: Why Diversity Alone Won’t Solve Racism in Higher Ed (Johns Hopkins, 2023).
Joshua M. Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He is the author of Of Black Study (Pluto, 2023), Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition (Polity, 2021), and We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 (NYU Press, 2019), as well as the editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal.
Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed (all) is a Puerto Rican/Irish gender-fluid scholar-organizer of radical cultural movements at the City University of New York, and the 2022-2023 Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Justice in Higher Education in the PublicsLab at the CUNY Graduate Center. Conor’s forthcoming book New York Liberation School chronicles the rise of Black, Puerto Rican, and Women’s Studies and movements at the City College of New York and in New York City, as well as CUNY’s post-9/11 oppositional relationship to US imperialism. Conor is also developing the quadrilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean with co-editors Diarenis Calderón Tartabull, Makeba Lavan, Tito Mitjans Alayón, Violeta Orozco Barrera, and Layla Zami. Conor is the current co-managing editor of LÁPIZ Journal and a contributing editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, as well as a co-founding participant in Free CUNY and Rank and File Action (RAFA). Conor’s work can be found in print and online via AK Press, ASAP/Journal, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Distributaries, El Centro Press, The New Inquiry, Verso Books, Viewpoint Magazine, Wendy’s Subway, and elsewhere.
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.
