Living Justice: Reflections on Scholar Activism

• In Event: Pedagogies of the Interior: Building Bridges From the Inside Out

Abstract

My work over the last decade has focused on building bridges between the university, community, and schools. My professional focus has been systems change towards social justice. For this symposium, I will use Palmer’s (1998) four stages of educational reform to map various narratives of transformation that have pushed me as a scholar-activist.
Today is not for the faint of heart; it is not business as usual. A large part of my work and research contends with moving ecosystems of oppression towards ecosystems of equity. As an academic administrator, founder of a youth empowerment organization, and a scholar of racial justice, I traverse between drastically different environments. I am wrestling with the institutional barricades and borderless possibilities that bring people, policies, and programs together in service of social change.
Only 25 miles from campus, Stephon Clark was murdered by the police in his backyard in Meadowview. This neighborhood is a beautiful community, yet remains a disenfranchised pocket of Sacramento. Although UC Davis is not too far away from Meadowview physically, the gaps between these two neighborhoods (95832 and 95616) are ideological, racial, and economic.
In the aftermath of Clark’s killing and with the release of the video footage, I felt a collision of conscience. I expected this local atrocity to precipitate all conversations on campus, but for most of my colleagues, they hadn’t even heard what had happened. Later, in a somewhat serendipitous moment, I opened one of my student’s dissertation proposals. Inside the storm of Stephon Clark’s murder, I began reading the work of Jennifer DeBarros, a doctoral candidate. Her research analyzes the culture of memory, police shootings, and public pedagogy. She also shared, at length, about her former student who was murdered by the police in New Bedford in 2012. As I read these words, my eyes became wet with tears. This is Sacramento—right now.
Scholarship is vital to our lives. As a case in point, I did not just read her work out of a professional responsibility, I devoured her emerging scholarship because of its relevancy. The killing of Clark substantiated that low-income African-Americans are not safe in Sacramento—not even in their own backyard. This is no longer about what we think as scholars, it is about how we engage as human beings.
Words without work is like theory without practice. So we are practicing how to be more purposeful from the inside out. But in a world full of injustice, there is much to do. Slowing down might even feel selfish amidst the immediacy of inequities, police brutalities, and constant emergencies. Yet justice—literally and figuratively—means balance. Thus a transformative praxis does not just live in our heads, but also in our hearts—and most definitely in our hands and feet. In other words, it is not merely what is conceived that is revolutionary, but what is achieved, daily, in how we are living justice. Along this journey, we are striving to create intellectually, study differently, and live more holistically.

Author

• Vajra M. Watson, California State University - Sacramento