A Potluck for Late-Stage American Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Professional Development Format

Abstract

Who and what are you bringing to the potluck? Across cultures, the potluck is a metaphor for community building, a space of co-creation and family that can also serve as a radical and ethical space that challenges insider/outsider binaries in service of promoting knowledge from under the eaves, where non-hierarchical ways of knowing flourish. This year, the Race, Indigeneity, and Scholar Support Committee (RAISS) invites everyone to a potluck where scholars and learners will “dish” with us from their work on abolition, black and indigenous education, queer feminist world building, and support for students developing critical standpoints of the University. We asked, what are the critical ingredients to sustain us and to keep building in this late stage of American Empire as its oligarchy and imperialism boldly uncloaks itself and threatens our lives–both our academic and physical freedom? What new kinds of pedagogies are necessary to survive this moment? We have gathered panelists to share the resources, fugitive strategies, and secret practices we need to nourish one another in this next stage of neocolonial empire. One panelist has promised to bring the “neck bones, the grits, and the greens,” which is to say, that this roundtable will be seasoned with the richness of our participants’ experiences and critical organizing and theory. We consider this panel skill-building and professionalization because we seek to share practical strategies for our respective spaces. We plan to engage attendees in interactive dialogue and community, so that we all leave with plates full!

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Crystal S Rudds, University of Utah

Panelists

• Anna Almore, University of Michigan Ann Arbor

• Theresa Burruel Stone, Sonoma State University

• Marina Magloire, Emory University

• Eli L Meyerhoff, Duke University

• Carmin Wong, Pennsylvania State University

• Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, University of California-Irvine

Biographical Information

Anna Almore is a relative and learner in Anishinaabek lands at the University of Michigan’s Joint Program in English and Education. After a decade of walking alongside QTBIPOC K-12 educators in NYC, the US-Mexico border, and Lakota homelands of South Dakota in and outside of schools, Anna now studies the carceral geographies of schools and the nature of Black women educators caretaking practices. Grounded in Black queer feminisms, Anna’s current work explores both the materiality of settler colonial technologies in schools and the capaciousness of Black and Native carework. Specifically, she collages together Black and Native teachers’ theorization of their experiences navigating their own schooling as well as their teaching with autoethnography, history, Geography Studies, Black Studies, Native Studies, Black Feminisms, and Political Theory. Previously, she worked for over ten years in K-12 schools in New York City, Texas, and South Dakota. She is the recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Rackham Merit Fellowship, Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship, Rackham Dissertation Fellowship, Arts & Resistance at the University of Michigan Fellowship, and Institute for the Humanities Fellowship. She was awarded the Marsal Family School of Education Diversity, Inclusion, Justice, and Equity Award and the Isidore and Helen Sacks Senior Thesis Memorial Prize. She’s presented at the American Studies Association, Native American Studies Association, American Educational Research, National Council for Teachers of English as well as organized the Captive Maternal Roundtable, the Black Queer Kinship Histories conference, and the Black Queer Studies Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop. Her work can be found in Scalawag and Urban Education.

Dr. Theresa Burruel Stone is Assistant Professor of English at Sonoma State University. Her scholarship draws from the fields of education, ethnic studies, and linguistic anthropology to examine the varied roles of schooling and education within racialized peoples’ desires for and efforts towards dignified lives. Their ethnographic work analyzes processes and structures of racialization, whiteness, and settler colonialism, particularly within places of schooling. Her recent writings examine the intersection between schooling, ideologies of educational uplift, Latine racialization and vulnerability to racialized violence, settler colonialism, and landscapes of violence in the United States.

Marina Magloire is an Assistant Professor of English at Emory University. She is a Black feminist literary scholar who uses archives to explore questions of spirituality, memory, and community in African diasporic literature. Her areas of scholarly interest include global Black studies, Black modernisms, Third World Feminist solidarities, and archival methodologies. Her first book, We Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism (UNC Press 2023), explores the influence of African diasporic spiritualities on the work of Black American feminists. Dr. Magloire is also co-founder of Third World Feminist School (3WFS), a collaboration with (f)empower and the Miami Workers’ Center, which served as a radical learning space for local workers from 2022-23 as part of the ACLS Sustaining Public Engagement grant program.

Eli Meyerhoff is a visiting scholar and program coordinator in the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. His research and organizing focus on abolitionist, decolonial approaches to education institutions and alternative modes of studying. He is the author of a book, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (published with University of Minnesota Press, 2019). He also co-wrote “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation.”

Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is ASA’s 2024 Richard A. Yarborough award recipient. She is Associate Professor of Global and International Studies and a Faculty affiliate of Gender and Sexual Studies as well as Queer Studies. During her time at UCI, she has received the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research through her contribution in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and Division of Undergraduate Education. Willoughby-Herard works on comparative racialization in the South African and North American contexts, Black political thought, and African feminisms. A global reputation and extensive publishing record, Dr. Willoughby-Herard is one of the few junior scholars to preside as President over the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) from 2021-23. Her book, Waste of a White Skin: Carnegie and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability, she uses black feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical tradition, to explore the effect of politics of white poverty on black people’s life, work, and political resistance. In 2024, Professor Willoughby-Herard made national headlines when she was forcefully arrested along with other protestors for their support of a pro-Palestine encampment on UC Irvine’s campus. Since then, she and 48 others have been criminally charged for exercising their constitutional rights and calling democracy to account. See these letters of support for more information and links to offer solidarity to Tiffany.

Carmin Wong is a playwright, poet-organizer, and dual-title ph.d student in english Lit•orature and African American and Diaspora Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Her research explores intersections of spoken and written transnational Black literature, focusing on African American and Afro-Caribbean poets’ contributions to Black liberation movements. A proud Howard University graduate, Carmin has received artist grants from Scholastic, Poets & Writers, Jeremy O. Harris and The Bushwick Starr, as well as fellowships from The Watering Hole, Furious Flower Poetry Center, the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers (IRT), and Wild Seeds Writers Retreat. She has performed at Lincoln Center, The Apollo Theater, and The Nuyorican Poets Café, and her work is featured in several publications. Carmin is the 2024-2025 Shirley Graham Du Bois Creative-in-Residence with Castle of Our Skins and Teaching Artist with Girls Write Now NYC. She also teaches creative writing in centre county correctional facilities and leads K-12 workshops. Learn more at theCarminWong.com