The Empire Been Falling: Creating collective care communities, maintaining pedagogies of resistance with safety pods

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

The empire has always been in a process of disintegration for us, requiring various imagining and planning for a different world. We, Black, queer, immigrant folk, who have faced the most violence, dispossession, and silencing at the hands of that empire; have been dreaming, adapting, and enacting. While the dominant society has just begun to lament the fall of the American Empire; we, who stand at the margins of traditional American society, have begun to rebuild our own centers. We, The Undercommons: SADE Collective (The Undercommons), have begun to build youth-centered safety pods. The Undercommons recognize and fights to dismantle the ways American Studies within the academy mimics the American empire. We operate outside, around, and under the institutions of traditional education in this country and seek to ensure students of Afro-Caribbean descent thrive. We divest from siloed learning in order to emphasize multidisciplinary and experiential learning modalities. The academy is manufactured by all that makes up the empire; specifically the continued theft and ransom (holding) of indigenous lands and widespread violence implemented on Black, queer, immigrant youth.
The world has witnessed this more apparently in US universities’ recent reaction to student protests for Palestine. We saw an unlimited invitation to police and the use of police tactics in response to students enacting their rights as a citizen to free speech. Liberated study cannot exist in such a place. The Undercommons has laid the groundwork alongside first-generation immigrants and Afro-Caribbean youth in reimagining ways to investigate, grapple, refuse, resist, tear down, and heal communally. Black Radical Imagining calls for something new, e invest in our safety pods as spaces of liberated learning as a means of survival and a deference of our ancestral practice of collective care.

Violent eruptions like the implementation of a police state on college campuses characterize this stage of imperial transformation and in the moments to come, we must continue to lean more into community rather than individualism. The Undercommons have learned from Freire’s and Jarramillo’s pedagogies of resistance. We are practicing how to hold, record, and generate knowledge outside of the current structures that are rooted in the empire. This panel will explore what empire means for the Afro-Caribbean youth we serve alongside. We will dream, adapt, and work to enact the conclusion pulled from The Undercommons youth participatory action research process. This data, this new American Study, was collected through virtually recorded interviews, written surveys, and circle conversations. These safety pods serve as geographies of self-reliance and black queer freedom. With our future comrades (members of the academy) and our current comrades gathered, we will explore how activists and survivors can engage creative methods to build multi-gendered, multigenerational, and multiracial safety even while our communities are under constant, brutal assault. From academics to community leaders and activists, the main question remains: how do we critically engage our current geopolitical conjuncture in this, the late, stage of the American empire?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Daisy E Guzman

Panelists

• Sasha Miller

• Abigail Bryant, University At Albany

• Damala Denny

Biographical Information

Sasha Miller (she/they) is an experienced educator, accomplished writer, and dedicated youth worker who is deeply passionate about creating empowering learning spaces and fostering authentic community engagement. Sasha has created versatile lesson plan templates and the orchestration of curriculum writing training workshops, catering to clients across the realms of education, youth development, and community organizing. Sasha's expertise extends to the conception and implementation of tailored teaching and learning programs, with a strong emphasis on social justice, community engagement, and skill development for middle school, high school, and college students.

In addition to her curriculum development capacity, Sasha brings a wealth of experience in program management, staff supervision, grant writing, and data analysis. Currently, Sasha is the Deputy Director of The Legacy Network, an integral part of the Beginning with Children Foundation in Brooklyn, NY. In this capacity, she spearheads the design and testing of immersive college and career readiness curriculum, oversees various academic and experiential learning programs, and collaborates intergenerationally to ideate and fulfill community relief projects. She has demonstrated her prowess in developing a developmental leadership model that empowers program participants to co-create and lead youth programming. Her track record is further adorned with grant acquisition achievements, adept program staff management, and the establishment of productive partnerships with higher education institutions and community-based organizations.

Sasha is most proud of her year-long community-engaged research programs that engage both college and high school participants. Witnessing young people realize and step into their agency is a true honor for her.

Damala Denny (she/her) is a Black queer feminist who works to center the needs of Black cis- and trans- girls, gender nonconforming and gender expansive young people. As the program lead for a youth group (aged 14 -26) , Damala supports participants in their own local organizing as well as political advocacy. Youth give speeches and write testimony for local and state electeds to make their demands heard, sit on panels and interviews to uplift youth voice on social justice issues and the culture. Through the curricula and onboarding to leadership skills, Damala builds community and power with youth across the nation.
Damala works in coalition spaces fighting for Police-Free Schools and co-authoring a toolkit for schools, families, and organizers. She is currently supporting the rollout of a Know Your Rights training series for youth in schools.Damala has delivered a speech for #StopCopCity’s Week of Action in NYC, as a part of her ongoing commitment to the Police-Free Schools movement to defund police and to invest in true community safety. She spoke to the severely skewed impact of policing on youth of color, particularly girls, in schools. Damala continuously works to link the fights of all our communities because once those most marginalized are centered, everyone else is held as well.

Dr. Daisy E. Guzman Nunez, PhD (she/her) is a Garifuna American scholar. She is an Assistant Professor of Global Black Studies at the W.E.B Du Bois Department at the University of Massachusetts- Amherst. Guzman Nunez's research interests revolve around Black Indigeneity, Black feminist ethnography, and Afro-Latinx spaces. She recently received the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship 2024-2025. She is working on her book manuscript centers on the migratory experience from Guatemala to New York during the height of the Guatemalan Civil War. Pushing the voices of Garifuna women to the forefront of the Garifuna migration narrative is an important shift in the ways that we think of Garifuna Studies and Black Central American Studies.

Abigail Bryant (she/her) is a Brooklyn native with a master’s degree in Sociology with a concentration on Race, Class & Gender. Abby, as she likes to go by, has over 10 years of experience in Higher Education. She specializes in student success which she defines as the fulfillment of a student’s talents and potential to be successful while engaging in deep learning using an anti-deficit approach. At the core of Abby’s work and education is to be an agent of social change, influencing students to strive towards excellence. She possesses extensive experience in promoting opportunity and access to students who are from historically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Abby is fueled by first-hand experience of the inequities and pitfalls that exist in our current education system. She is also grateful for the handful of individuals who sought to support her on the journey. She pledged her career to be the change agent that will advance diversity, equity, and social justice for underrepresented and historically disadvantaged groups. Education is liberation. Abby continues to have radical hope for an intersectional future. She has presented at The Global Disruptive Summit 2023, on the “Intersection of Global Learning and Student Empowerment; Decolonizing International Education, Re-centering Thriving”.