Transgressing to Teach? Practicing Radical Pedagogy in & Beyond the Classroom

Session Submission Type: Skills- and Resource-Sharing Session

Abstract

Widely regarded as a foundational text for radical pedagogy, bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress issued a searing challenge to university educators to engage “teaching as the practice of freedom” (1994, 3). However, in the generation since its publication, the material conditions we face have changed drastically. The global War on Terror, the adjunctification of the university, attacks on DEI and CRT, and the international rise of the far right all have served to upturn the tenuous 20th century social contract that undergirds hooks’ text. What, then, does it mean to “teach to transgress” when radical movement concepts have been co-opted by the university, while radical professors are suspended and denied tenure? Given the visionary student organizing of the Gaza solidarity encampments and authoritarian faculty surveillance, does the classroom indeed “remain the most radical space of possibility in the academy?” (1994:12) Further, while hooks focused much of her writing on the university classroom, much of the most transformative teaching and learning happens in activist meetings, prisoner study groups, and other autonomous spaces outside the university. How does hooks’ imperative to transgress “against and beyond boundaries” (1994:13) resonate beyond the academy?

Guided by the intention to gather educators who work in between the academy and liberation movements to break isolation and build relationships, we have taken up these questions over the last two years as the Teaching To Transgress Collective, an intentionally multiracial formation rooted in the Black Radical Tradition and including comrades from a wide range of anti-imperial organizing traditions from Vietnam to Palestine. Convened by veteran organizer, filmmaker and graduate student Charlene A. Carruthers, we gathered for two intensive retreats at the Highlander Center, the rural Tennessee training ground for the last century of radical Southern political movements. Anchored by a close critical reading of Teaching to Transgress and informed by the powerful legacy of Highlander, we used the retreats to discuss common challenges and contradictions as we shared and debated our approaches to pedagogy inside and outside of the academy.

In this skills- and resource-sharing session, we seek to transgress the conventional conference session structure by creating a space to not only discuss, but to practice the pedagogical interventions that animate our project. We will begin by orienting participants to the collective’s work, and then invite attendees to participate in our process through an experiential “spectrogram” activity that has been foundational in our work together. Based on a spectral approach to consensus building, participants will be offered a set of pedagogical provocations, some emerging from the hooks text and others from our political moment. We will then amplify both the discords and harmonies that emerge as a way to experiment with principled struggle as an antidote to liberal conflict avoidance. We will close the session with an opportunity to build connections across institutions and field questions from session attendees. By creating a container for productively engaging political contradictions, we hope to offer our colleagues practical tools for co-creating “radical spaces of possibility” in their classrooms, organizations & communities.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Qui D Alexander, University of Toronto

Panelists

• Savannah Shange, University of California-Santa Cruz

• Reelaviolette Botts-Ward, University of California, San Francisco

• Charlene A. Carruthers, Northwestern University

• Jaden MB Janak, St Olaf College

• Qrescent Mali Mason, Haverford College

• Patricia Nguyen, University of Virginia

• Tiffany R Smith, Louisiana State University

• David C Turner, University of California-Los Angeles

Comment

• Dylan Rodriguez, University of California-Riverside

Biographical Information

Qui Alexander, (they/them) is a queer, trans, Black Puerto Rican scholar, educator and organizer currently based in Tkaronto. They are an Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Trans Studies in Curriculum and Pedagogy at OISE, University of Toronto. Their current research focus is on mobilizing Black trans ways of knowing outside of formal school contexts. s. Grounded in their experiences as a community organizer, Qui views their scholarship as a place to articulate the cultural work they do in relation to their communities. Believing education is a practice of freedom, they aim to center transformation and healing in every educational space they have the honor to hold and co-create.

reelaviolette botts-ward (she/her) is a homegirl, artist, and community curator from Philadelphia, PA. ree is currently a Poet in Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora, and a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Reparations and Anti-Institutional Racism Project at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical School, where she brings Black Feminist Healing Arts to medical science spaces. ree is also the founder of blackwomxnhealing, an intergenerational wellness collective that curates healing circles, exhibits, courses, and publications for and by Black women. She received her PhD in African Diaspora Studies from UC Berkeley, her MA in African American studies from UCLA, and her BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College. She has also taught courses in the African American Studies department at Merritt College, and a course called #BlackFeministHealingArts in UCSF’s Medical Anthropology program. For more on ree’s work, visit blackwomxnhealing.com / @blackwomxnhealing / @dr.reelaviolette on instagram.

Charlene A. Carruthers (she/her) is a writer, filmmaker, community organizer, and Black Studies PhD Candidate at Northwestern University. Her work spans more than 20 years of community organizing across racial, gender and economic justice movements. A practitioner of telling more complete stories, her work honors ancestors across the diaspora and interrogates ongoing work towards collective liberation. Charlene wrote and directed The Funnel, a short film, which received the Queer Black Voices Award at the 35th Annual aGLIFF Prism Film Festival. She is the current Highlander Research and Education Fellow, an inaugural Marguerite Casey Presidential Freedom Scholar, 2024 Northwestern University Presidential Fellow, and 2024 Center for Racial Justice Fellow at the University of Michigan. In addition to being a highly sought-after speaker, educator, and facilitator, Charlene is author of the bestselling book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (Beacon Press). She is an enthusiastic global traveler and believes that food is the best way to learn about people and culture.

Jaden Janak (they/he) is an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College. Their research interests include critical carceral studies, LGBTQ+ radical politics, and popular culture. His current book project, Experiments in Freedom: Present Histories of an Abolitionist Future, explores U.S. prison abolitionist organizing from the 1990s to the present. Their scholarship can be found in GLQ, Behemoth, Social Education, and Communication/Critical Cultural Studies. Outside of their research, Jaden organizes with local and national abolitionist collectives, working directly with people on the inside.

Qrescent Mali Mason (she/her) is Associate Professor of philosophy and Coordinator of African and Africana Studies at Haverford College, 2020-2022 President of the International Simone de Beauvoir Society, and Co-Associate Editor of Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy. In 2021, she won a Leeway Foundation Grant for her multimedia art installation, The Self-Translation Cycle at the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance/Paul Robeson House and Museum, where she currently serves as a member of the board . Her writings include “Swimming in Moonlight: On Viewing Black Masculinity Differently with bell hooks,” “Uses of Ambiguity as Tool: A Black Feminist Phenomenologist Reflects on the Year 2020 (and Ambiguous Futures),” and she is currently working on two books: On Ambiguity and Seducing Simone, which imagines a third bell hooks memoir as a conversation amongst hooks, Beauvoir, and herself.

Patricia Nguyen (she/they) is an artist, educator, and scholar born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. She earned her Ph.D. in performance studies at Northwestern University and currently an assistant professor in American studies at the University of Virginia. Starting as a youth organizer, Patricia has over 20 years experience working in arts education, community development, racial justice, and human rights in the United States and Vietnam. She has facilitated trainings and workshops with Chicago Torture Justice Center, #LetUsBreathe Collective, Kuumba Lynx, The Fulbright Program, American Center at the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam, Jane Addams Hull House, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Social Workers Association in Vietnam, Vietnamese American Young Leadership Association in New Orleans, Asian Human Services, and 96 Acres. She is co-founder and executive director of Axis Lab, a community centered arts and architecture organization based in Uptown, Chicago that focuses on ethical development. In recent news, she is an award-winning designer for the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Project, part of a historic reparations ordinance that addresses racism and policing. Community engagement is a fundamental ethos of her practice as an artist committed to liberation.

Roc Rochon, PhD (they/them) is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Connecticut and Lecturer in Women & Gender Studies at Eastern Connecticut State University. They are also the founder of Rooted Resistance, a grassroots practice reimagining physical activity for queer and trans people in the United States. Their work is both qualitative and interdisciplinary, exploring the intersections of sport, race, gender, sexuality, and place. Rochon’s orientation toward Black queer, trans, and nonbinary liberatory bodywork is borne out of necessity. Rochon is committed to exploring questions that tend to the Black queer diaspora, liberation, rupture, the body and movement cultures.

Dylan Rodríguez (he/him) is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a day job at the University of California-Riverside since 2001. He is Distinguished Professor in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. Dylan believes in the right—in fact, the obligation—of occupied, colonized, and incarcerated peoples to fight for their liberation against external oppressors as well as internal reactionaries, and the parallel responsibility of those who profess solidarity to take all necessary measures to protect, defend, and advance liberation struggle, whatever forms it may take.

Savannah Shange (she/her) is associate professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz where she also serves as principal faculty in Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. She serves as research lead for the Abolishing Patriarchal Violence table of the Movement for Black Lives and conspires for a police free Oakland with the Black Organizing Project. She earned a PhD in Africana Studies and Education from the University of Pennsylvania, a MAT from Tufts University, and a BFA in Experimental Theater from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Her first book, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness and Schooling in San Francisco (Duke 2019) is an ethnography of the afterlife of slavery as lived in the Bay Area. She is a proud alumni of BYP100 and is currently working in collaboration with organizers to document and amplify the practice of abolition in everyday life.

Tiffany R. Smith is a doctoral student in Media and Public Affairs at Manship School of Mass Communication. Her research interests are intersectionality, race, gender and sexuality, media representation, and the African diaspora. Before attending LSU, Tiffany was a higher education professional focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion. She received her B.A. in communication at Bowling Green State University and M.A. in Global Communication at Kennesaw State University. Beyond her social justice activism within academia, she has worked for Amnesty International, The Walter Rodney Foundation, Atlanta Jobs with Justice, and is a trainer of Nonviolence365 at the King Center in Atlanta, GA. She is a Founding Member at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.

Dr. David C. Turner III (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Black Life and Racial Justice in the Department of Social Welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA. He is also a faculty affiliate with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, and the faculty director of the Million Dollar Hoods Project - a community-driven research project to map the fiscal and human cost of incarceration. As an activist scholar from Inglewood, California, his research broadly focuses on social movements, political identity, and resistance to the prison regime. As a community organizer, Dr. Turner brings over a decade of movement-building experience to the classroom, having worked to negotiate and win demands for racial justice, secure funding, divest resources from carceral and harmful institutions, and coordinate actions across the state of California and the nation.