#WeWillRest: Dismantling Racial and Gender Injustice Through Personal and Professional Possibilities of Stillness in the Midst of Grind Culture

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

Guided by Tricia Hersey's groundbreaking manifesto, Rest is Resistance, this panel of Black scholars/educators/activists presents interpretive and actualized frameworks for stillness, silence, dreaming, breathing, and being within the manic pace of academia. Noting Hersey's idea that rest is a politics of opposition in a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society, the panelists share their inquiries into automated resistances to rest in addition to their evolutionary embracings of rest. Using critical/creative autobiographical and narrative stances to explore relationships to rest and invocations to share communal commitments to rest, panelists share a vision for a restful Black future and possibilities for peaceful productivity and unproductivity.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Examination of Race, Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Education

Chairs

• LaWanda W. Ward, Pennsylvania State University

• Janice A. Byrd, Pennsylvania State University

Participants

• Dorothy E. Hines, University of Kansas

• Marsha E. Simon, Valdosta State University

• Kevin McGowan, Bridgewater State University

• Christopher C. Jett, Georgia State University

• Jeanine M. Staples-Dixon, Pennsylvania State University

• Jesse Onyango-Opiyo, Pennsylvania State University

Papers

• #WeWillRest: Dismantling Racial and Gender Injustice Through Personal and Professional Possibilities of Stillness in the Midst of Grind Culture - Janice A. Byrd, Pennsylvania State University